This interactive map shows the Utility Service Territories in New York State, including that of National Grid, Rochester Gas and Electric, NYS Electric and Gas, Central Hudson Gas and Electric, Orange and Rockland Utilities, Long Island Power Authority, Consolidated Edison and municipal utilities.
Data Source: NYS Department of Public Service. https://data.ny.gov/Energy-Environment/NYS-Electric-Utility-Service-Territories/q5m9-rahr
Untangling the various equipment you might see in an electrical substation.
This is a very interesting video. Substations do a lot more then just stepping down the voltage from high-voltage transmission lines. They carefully control the output voltage and frequency, bring together often multiple power lines feeding into the system, they can disconnect and connect lines for servicing and repair. In many ways, substations really are the brains of the local power grid.
The other day driving past the hunting camps and rural homes up on the dirt roads around Gas Springs NY, I was a bit surprised how far the electric lines extended into this area to very remote farms and camps on dirt roads. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised – rural electricifican has extended to nearly all corners of our country – but it seems like in an era of solar power, batteries and inverters, to be incredibly expensive and wasteful to have run lines all that way out there.
While rural electricifican efforts got underway in the 1930s, many of the more remote farms and homes didn’t get electricity until the 1950s or even 1960s. It seems hard to imagine a modern dairy without electricity to run the pumps or coolers but many other farms certainly did. They had all kinds of belt driven equipment that often ran off of Blackstone and other primitive motors. The modern tractor PTO had yet to be standardized.
This interactive map shows the high-voltage lines in New York State. It is a different presentation of the map shown in EIA State Energy Profile. Data Source: Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) and Energy Information Agency. Electric Substations: https://hifld-geoplatform.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/electric-substations Electric Transmission Lines: https://hifld-geoplatform.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/electric-power-transmission-lines
This interactive map shows all of the operable power plants in New York State. Not all of them ran in 2016 or some only ran occasionally, but they could be brought online at least part of the year to generate electricity.
Data Source: EIA Form 860. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
How line workers break a transformer connection safely without a lot of arching.
Typically a tree limb will hit a power line, which causes a short and a surge at substation which causes an auto resetting breaker to trip. If it’s a small enough limb , the voltage will burn up the limb or the force of the electricity will repel the limb.
Back at the substation auto resetting breaker will reclose and try again a few times to test if the momentary fault is corrected before finally shutting down the line until a technician can clear the fault.