Even if your not an electrician wiring large buildings with delta or wyes, 3 phase electricity is commonly used for large electric motors, including electric cars, small wind turbines, and even nowadays any appliances you buy that says “inverter driven” like washing machines.
Does time literally slow down if the grid frequency drop below 60.00 Hz in the era of quartz clocks ? 🕒
A peak summer day in past years, he noted, would result in a usage of about 13,000 megawatts of power in the five boroughs and Westchester. Demand for power during the current heat wave reached a peak of 11,730 megawatts on Monday afternoon.t
Still, residential demand has surged. A recent study by Columbia University’s Earth Institute reported “substantial increases” of around 23% of weekday New York City residential electricity consumption during the shutdown.
In May, Con Ed blamed a potential rate increase on increased residential demand as work-from-home becomes the norm. A typical city residential customer using 350 kilowatt hours per month could expect a 9.5% hike, from about $99 in 2019 to nearly $109 per month this summer, the utility said.
Some experts have warned about the heightened potential for brownouts or blackouts this summer, as more New Yorkers stay home due to COVID-19. While the city's commercial districts have power lines designed to carry a heavy summer load, the new remote work force cranking their at-home AC units could create a surge in demand that strains the city's grid.
This is an interesting video about power outages, and why it's always important to report power outages to the electric company, even if you think your neighbors have reported the outage. It turns out that electric companies aren't mind readers and if there isn't an a major fault at the substation, they may very much not be aware of any problems.
In North America, 60 Hz is the standard of alternating current. It was a rather nasty compromise between frequencies, chosen as a “sweet spot” between:
Airplanes traditionally use to 400 Hz power, as it saves quite a bit on weight for their electrical motors and transformers. Likewise, traditional automotive alternators generate power in the 400 Hz range, before going through a bridge rectifier to convert 3-phase AC output to direct current. But transferring 400 Hz power, or for that matter boosting and bucking high-current DC can be difficult and prone to electronic failure compared to traditional mains frequency transformers.
But increasingly, we are seeing more uses of high frequency alternating current and direct current, especially in consumer devices. Most modern electronics are powered by switch-mode power supplies, which use high-frequency transformers (as high as 1,000,000 Hz) to safely step down voltage in an isolated fashion. More motors today are driven using inverters, which similarly create a higher-frequency current to provide more power with loss copper and less losses. Controlling the frequency of the current, allows motors to be precisely controlled in their speed, it’s more efficient and accurate then simply chopping off part of the sine wave using thyristor as was done in the olden days to control motor speed.