Paradise no more. TVA votes to close iconic coal-burning power plant in Kentucky.

In the end, not even a tweet from President Donald Trump could save an iconic coal-burning power plant in Western Kentucky.

The Tennessee Valley Authority board voted Thursday to close the final burner at the Paradise coal-fired plant in Muhlenberg County by the end of 2020.

Residents had warned that closing Unit 3 at the plant, which employs 131 people, would hurt the local economy and force people to move away for work, and Trump sent a tweet earlier this week urging TVA to consider all factors before voting to close viable power plants like Unit 3 at Paradise.

However, an analysis by the utility said the aging Unit 3 had deteriorated, had a relatively high rate of unplanned shutdowns, and would require significant costs for mechanical and environmental upgrades to keep it running.

Yep, Bull Run is being closed also, just a few years after TVA took lots of homes and properties near the plant via eminent domain, for future expansion of additional coal ash piles. Great planning, guys.

But not all the homes were taken; just the middle class single family dwellings. There is a large rundown trailer park in Claxton full of drug houses that is a blight on the community. Beside the trailer park was a large farm property that the owner was busy turning into a nice equestrian destination with a huge indoor riding arena. About a million dollar farm. I’ll let everyone guess which property TVA decided to take, and which one stayed.

BTW, the environment impact statement said that the huge piles of ash being planned wouldn’t be an eyesore or disrupt the scenery in the community. LOL

You asked “What’s a ‘subcritical design’?” Good question — get ready...here’s more than you wanted to know!

“Subcritical” refers to water and steam below the “supercritical pressure.” For water and steam, the supercritical pressure about 3,200 psi. You are familiar with a pot of boiling water on the stove. At one atmosphere pressure and 212 deg F, you have two material “phases,” liquid water and gaseous steam. Water turns into steam.

When you get above that 3,200 psi point (and 705 deg F), you no longer have distinct liquid and gas phases. Water directly becomes steam without boiling! Technically, the term “boiler” is not used for a supercritical pressure steam generator as no “boiling” actually occurs.

It’s all mystical, weird thermodynamics.

Why is it done? To improve the thermal efficiency of a power plant, i.e., get more electricity out for a given amount of fuel in. The efficiency of the Rankine cycle (i.e, steam turbine) depends on the temperature of the steam going into the turbine. Higher pressure and temperature increase the efficiency of the thermal cycle and power plant.

Higher thermal efficiency has been the goal of power engineering since Edison built the first generating plant, the “Pearl Street Station,” in 1882. The goal long predated the fetish with burning less fuel to curtail global warming.

I was just reading an interview with Thomas Edison in the September 9, 1922 issue of Electrical World magazine. This item caught my eye and made me laugh. It's about laying the underground pipes to carry the electrical wires to the customers...

This consideration of reliability is the chief reason why the winter of 1881 saw Mr. Edison supervising the laying of the underground system. He snatched about two hours’ sleep in the twenty-four, and this usually on top of a pile of gas pipes in some dark basement room. He was fought tooth and nail by the gas companies, and then to add to his worries the Commissioner of Public Works sent for him. “You are laying tubes down there and the city will have to furnish inspection,” said the Commissioner. “Five men will report to you Monday, and you will pay each of them $5 a day.”
Still more remarkable was the dry statement of Mr. Edison to the interviewer: “None of those inspectors ever appeared to inspect, but they all appeared, however, at the once each Saturday to get their pay.” So, in spite of all the troubles and the presence of the existing pipes of the gas companies, the tubes were installed.

Some things never change, do they? A no-show job in 1881 that paid a then-great wage ($5 a day in 1881 is about $123 a day in 2019). Edison had to pay $600 a day just to buy off the crooks.

What were your research cars studying?

5 coal cars (fast dump) were made available. The intent was to measure vibration and temperature effects on bearing and ride quality to predict when maintenance would be necessary. Maintenance in the owner's facility is much less expensive than a breakdown on the road. Each bearing had a vertical channel capable of 100 KHz @ +/- 80 g acceleration. A tachometer integral to a Timken bearing generator provided angular velocity information. Frequencies for cone, cup, cage and rollers were extracted from modulation around the 11 KHz audio range. From that data, over 55 distinct types of bearing defects can be extracted. I did the FFT and data analysis onboard the car, the uploaded to my server in Fairfax, VA via a Kyocera 1XRTT cellular modem to a mySQL database. I had an onboard Garmin GPS to provide time/position information with the data. Local to each train, a Wifi 802.11b radio running in adhoc mode was augmented with an OLSR mesh network allowing a 255 car train to route non-line of sight around a mountain to the monitoring console in the locomotive. My team members at WiTronix built the UI into their console and data traveled in a specialized openDDS publisher/subscriber to allow them to collect the vibration data, temperature data on each bearing (inner/outer) for hot bearing detection, brake piston position and GPS data.

Subsequent to that basic system, I created a network of PIC18F micro-controllers running a CANopen network to modularize the temperature and vibration sensors. Active actuators for handbrake, anglecock and cutlever were added. Sharma and Associates added auto-couplers, controllable anglecocks, handbrakes and cutlevers. WiTronix extended the interfaces to allow remote control of each car without need of human to couple/decouple and set handbrakes. The aim was to reduce injury to brakeman and switchman assigned to the train.

The project was going well. I added a special project with DHS to support tracking containers with full accountability as they traversed truck to train to storage yard.

The trains with all the new capability were ready to hit the road in December 2008. About 3 weeks into January 2009, I had to call all 46 team members in 7 partner companies an announce the program was over. What happened? Obama. We abandoned $1 million in research cars in a yard near Joliet, IL. Much of the project hardware sits in my basement. No money was allocated to return it. A very disappointing end to a fairly successful program.

I did the hardware, software and firmware design. My colleague did the analysis algorithms in Matlab that I implmented in C. Timken did the bearings. Wilcoxon Research built the specialized accelerometers as well as fabricating the hardware. Sharma and Associates in Countryside, IL did the specialized anglecock, cutlever, handbrake design/fabrication. WiTronix was a spin-off of GM Electromotive and became a very successful standalone business. BNSF provided a research caboose for us to use on the road. The 5 cars were made available by an interest coal car owner working out of Roanoke, VA at BNSF. The program was sponsored by the Federal Railroad Administration.

I miss the program. My colleague died from melanoma in January 2010. He did the business development. I did the design/implementation. Lots of hard work with excellent results. Sadly, thrown out by the Obama administration. They didn't like the coal industry.

My publish/subscribe vendor was RTI. NDDS

Shortly after Arduino was introduced, my project manager from another effort (2003) asked if I could help a friend with a project. It was a museum display with a coal bucket traversing between two points with specialized lighting and under the external control of an Apple laptop running stage lighting software. I wrote the controller code for him. It was installed in the diorama for the exhibit. Oddly, I never physically touched the Arduino hardware. I just designed the schematic to hookup the devices and e-mailed him the code. It really wasn't that hard. I coded in in C for that application. Good stuff. Dirt cheap.

Two years ago, I had a 3 week project doing block chain smart contracts for a healthcare application (Australian Government). The ethereum nodes were implemented on a cluster of PI boards to improve speed and robustness. I did the UI in Django (python) with the local database implemented with NodeJs and SQLite for the database. All of that code was in JavaScript to implement a REST API network database. It was a nice opportunity to spin up on blockchain capability. The project was delivered and demonstrated to the customer and lead to a follow-on contract for the group I assisted.

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