The irony of wind power is that.....

..... when you finally get sufficient wind to make some real energy (as with hurricane Sandy) you have to shut your windmill generators down and lock them out to keep them from self destructing.

And a Prius for everyone .....

This has got to be the GAYEST commercial I have EVER seen in my life ...

I have always hoped that someday solar panels, especially solar shingles, would become so efficient that they would be adopted by nearly every household. The excess power would then be back-fed into the power grid supplying power for those without or for getting paid a dividend from the power company. My hopes were dashed when a friend of mine, who's a lineman, said that idea is impossible because a linemans life would be endangered by back-fed electricity powering the power line they "might" be working on. Oh well!

PLUS, did you happen to look into the financial impact that would have on the individual home owner?

EarthWindandFire wrote:that idea is impossible because a linemans life would be endangered by back-fed electricity powering the power line they "might" be working on.

Nooooo.... solar panel array systems do not back feed when the power is off. If the grid is "up" then yes, extra power goes out to the grid and the owner of the panels is usually given credit or paid, but if the grid is "down" the inverters instantly stop making AC power. When I installed my system it's the one thing the power company actually tested.

I see where I was wrong mixing subjects together, my friend was also talking about gas generators, when installed improperly by a homeowner, backfeeding and possibly injuring or killing a linesman.

EarthWindandFire wrote:possibly injuring or killing a linesman

That can and sadly does happen. I always wondered how it could happen. If you don't turn off your main breaker your generator just won't run.... immediately you will be trying to power the entire neighborhood and the generator will stall or come close to it. I never understood how it could kill a lineman. Well, the instant you run your generator to the lines, your 220 volts goes through the transformer on the phone pole and turns to around 3500 volts. THAT's what hit's the lineman. It only takes an instant.

I would think that safety from electrocution is utmost priority with a lineman and he wouldn't handle the line without the proper equipment, such as well insulated clothing and gloves. I would think the possibility of a back feed is pretty good given the home owners error or by a malfunction or even crossed lines. I'm not saying we shouldn't neglect the idea that we could accidentally charge the line but if I was a lineman, I would never touch a line with bare hands or put myself in a position where there is potential for getting shocked. Seems like while working on lines, they would have some kind of instrument in place to notify them if a line is charged..

Lightning wrote:I would think that safety from electrocution is utmost priority with a lineman and he wouldn't handle the line without the proper equipment, such as well insulated clothing and gloves. I would think the possibility of a back feed is pretty good given the home owners error or by a malfunction or even crossed lines. I'm not saying we shouldn't neglect the idea that we could accidentally charge the line but if I was a lineman, I would never touch a line with bare hands or put myself in a position where there is potential for getting shocked. Seems like while working on lines, they would have some kind of instrument in place to notify them if a line is charged..

Probably the linemen are safe. They would normally use ground clusters on the lines if working without hot work equipment, so in that case your generator would take the punishment. Its more dangerous for the pedestrian and tree workers who are ignorant of the risks. The transformer will work as a step up just as well as a step down so if your line is 21kv feeding your 220v panel then back feeding will produce close to 21000v on the other side. Either way its not the volts that kill ya its the amps. It takes less than 1 amp and you are gone.

Here the linesman do not trust people to do the right thing, when they are working on a line, they use a grounding wire on each side of them to keep from getting lit. If I was a linesman, this is the habit I would get into unless I had a death wish. (Some days I do, I am married after all).

We have never had a good working relationship with linesman though. Back in the 1950's, right where my house now sits, there was a rock that my Grandfather had to farm around. He already had, but one day, him and his Brother decided to do something about said rock. Now typically when they came up with these plans it was when they had partaken in the Cider Barrel quite deeply, and this was a typical day. Another thing they were prone do do when partaking in said Hard Cider Barrel, was to get into the box of dynamite. It was only natural to use a little dynamite to remove the rock.

Of course there are a few ingredients you can use to fortify the dynamite and while we know what those ingredients are, they will not be discussed at this time for fear of falling into the wrong hands. Let's just say a farm has plenty on hand to make a big boom.

Well since they put a little dynamite under the rock, recalculated...added a bit more copper sulfate...then added a wee bit more. Then they touched her off.

What they did not know was that the rock was not a boulder, but a flab slab type of rock. It took the blast like a fat kid doing a belly flop off a high dive, and launched that rock skyward into a perfect arc. The rock was only 70 feet from the road, so you can imagine at that proximity, the rock fell back to earth and landed right on the power lines snapping the wires in half. Naturally they had to call the CMP linesman who showed up to see two drunk guys and a smouldering rock in the ditch. "Damn meteor" was all they said.

In 1954 a farmer down the road got electricity because he was a dairy farmer, but our farm still did not have it because we were potato farmers at the time. The same Grandfather and his brother, decided that if they put up the power poles, they would get power quicker, so the went about and cut all the poles needed, and at this time this was done with a cross cut saw, and axe and hand post hole digger. They cut, hauled and dug the poles for over a mile of power line right of way...

But it was not until 2 years later that the power company brought in electricity...in 1956. To add insult to injury, they still ended up using the poles my Grandfather and Great Uncle had put in!

Back in 1984 we were cutting wood on part of our farm in Belfast. We were on Route One right beside the sub-station, and if anyone knows Route One in Belfast,Maine...it is the main highway!

Anyway, me and my Uncle were cutting a big pine and it leaned back from the direction we wanted it to fall. No big deal we thought, we will just grab the bulldozer and push it over, but the bulldozer snapped the tree off the stump and the giant pine toppled backwards across Route One. When it did, it took out the power lines out too...only three poles down from the substation.

The police department went on emergency power
The county dispatch center went on emergency power
The Hospital went on emergency power

Well to make a long story short, the entire city of Belfast was without power.

Now Central Maine Power (CMP) has its local branch office just a mile down the road and I can verify that they were not long in showing up...along with the police and fire department. Anyway they started screaming at us which tends to be loud when you have 5 miles of traffic backed up and no electricity in a city of 15,000 people. My Uncle was calm though even as they started yaking about how much it was going to cost him.

After they got done, my Uncle looked at the sub-staion and calmly said,"You know when you guys built onto that sub-station, you went over the property line and never paid us for the land you took. I don't care how much this costs me because its going to cost you even more."

The Supervisor looked at the rockwall they had pushed out of the way and just said, "We all make mistakes now don't we Mr. NoSmoke."

Back in 1994 I was doing some logging when a tropical storm blew through and knocked a lot of trees over on the lines. Knowing we would be without power for a long time, my Grandfather suggested we could help ourselves if we just took the skidder and went up the road and pushed trees off the power lines, figuring every one we did, would be one less CMP would have to do.

The strategy worked quite well and I pushed dozens of trees off the line because with the skidder, I could go anywhere without getting stuck. I was going deep into the woods to get them trees off the line, chunks of trees hitting the cab and everything. It was fun, but it was crazy too.

Then this woman supervisor came along with her flashing orange light and while we kind of expected her to buy us a coffee and thank us for all the hard work we were saving her crew, she did not do that. She started yelling at us about being unsafe and all that, but we figured they would not power up the line until they checked the entire thing. In the end we did stop, but not before we accused her of ripping off the Maine people since the only real reason she was getting after us was because we were stealing her overtime money.

As I said, our family and the linesman around here do not get along very good.