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History of electricity

by Chris Woodford . Last updated: December 3, 2021.

I f the future's electric, why isn't the past? Think a little bit about that simple-sounding question and you'll understand what science is all about and why it matters so much to humankind. Consider this: the ancient Greeks knew some basic things about electricity over 2500 years ago, yet they didn't have electric cookers or fridges , computers or vacuum cleaners . How come? Electricity is just the same as it was back then: it works in exactly the same way. What's changed is that we understand how it works now and we've figured out effective ways to use it for our own ends. In other words, science (how we understand the world) has gradually helped us to produce effective technology (how we harness scientific ideas for human benefit). The steadily advancing science of electricity has led to all kinds of electrical technologies that we can no longer live without. It's been an incredible achievement, but where and how did it begin? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: A statue of Thales of Miletus gripping the discovery for which he's best known: electricity. Photo of a statue by Louis St. Gaudens at Union Station, Washington, DC. Credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, courtesy of Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

Ancient sparks

Way back in 600BCE, a Greek mathematician and philosopher named Thales (c.624–546BCE), who lived in the city of Miletus (now in Turkey), kicked off our story when he discovered the basic principle of static electricity (electricity that builds up in one place). As he rubbed a rod made of amber (a fossilized tree resin), he found he could use it to pick up other light objects, such as bits of feathers. (You've probably done a similar experiment rubbing a ruler or a balloon and using it to pick up pieces of paper.)

Before Thales came along, people might well have explained something like this as magic: ancient people didn't reason things out scientifically the way we do today. Their explanations were often a muddled mixture of magic, superstition, folklore (stories), and religion. [3] Thales is often called the world's first scientist, because he was one of the very first people who tried to find sensible, rational explanations for things. His explanations weren't always correct (he thought everything in the Universe was ultimately made of water and believed Earth was a flat disc), but they were the best logical deductions he could make from his observations of the world—and, in that sense, they were scientific. [4]

Photo: "Aristotle" pictured at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. Credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, courtesy of Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

The logical, scientific ways of doing things we rely on today were developed by later Greeks such as Aristotle (348–322BCE) and Archimedes (287–212BCE), who built on Thales' work, and Islamic scholars such as Alhazen (965–1040CE), who gave us the scientific method : coming up with a tentative explanation for something (a hypothesis), which is then tested through experiments to make a more robust explanation (a theory). Important though these people were, electricity (as we know it today) didn't figure in their thinking. They had little conception of how useful it could be—or what it would eventually lead to. They were more concerned with astronomy, mathematics, matter, and optics (how light works). Science might have been in its advent, but electricity was still just a "magical" curiosity—of very little practical use.

Positive and negative

Artwork: William Gilbert gave us our word for "electricity." Photograph courtesy of the Wellcome Collection published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Incredibly, the scientific study of electricity didn't really advance any further for a full 2000 years after Thales' original discovery. But around 1600CE, Englishman William Gilbert (1544–1603), a physician to the English Queen Elizabeth I, started to probe it further. Gilbert was the person who coined the Latin term "electricus" (a word meaning "like amber," reflecting Thales' original discovery) and he believed electricity was caused by a fluid called "effluvium" that could move from place to place. This was an important insight because it was the first real suggestion that electricity could form what we now call a current, as well as remain static (in one place). Although Gilbert is much better known for his work on magnetism (he made the important deduction that Earth behaves like a giant magnet), and compared it with electricity, he didn't unite the two things in a single theory. If he'd done so, he probably would have gone down in history as one of the greatest physicists of all time. (As we'll see later, the person who finally achieved that, James Clerk Maxwell, is celebrated in exactly that way.)

Artwork: "Experiments and Observations Tending to Illustrate the Nature and Properties of Electricity": The cover of William Watson's book of electrical research.

It was now becoming clear that there was much more to electricity than the ancients had realized. In 1733/4, almost 150 years after Gilbert's death, a French physicist named Charles du Fay (1698–1739) made the next important breakthrough when his experiments revealed that static electricity could come in two different (opposite) flavors, which he named "vitreous" and "resinous." If you rubbed some objects, they gained one kind of electricity; if you rubbed others, they gained the opposite kind. Just as two "like" magnets (two north poles or two south poles) will repel, so two objects with "like charges" of electricity will also repel, while objects with unlike charges (like magnets of opposite poles) will attract. Although we now know this idea is correct, back in the 18th century, such a convoluted explanation sounded wrong to some people. Why should there be two kinds of electricity? Didn't it flout a basic scientific principle called Occam's razor —the idea that explanations should be as simple as possible? Englishman Sir William Watson (1715–1787) thought there was just one kind of electricity, with an ingenious explanation much more like our modern view: if we have too much electric charge, it seems like one kind of electricity; if too little, the other kind. Watson gave us the concept of electric circuits (closed paths around which charge flows) and made an important distinction between conductors and insulators. He was also one of the first to show that electricity could zip down very long wires, and his other experiments included passing electricity through lines of several people to give them surprising electric shocks.

Photo: A museum exhibit at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, illustrating Benjamin Franklin's highly dangerous attempt to catch electricity in a thunderstorm. Credit: Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, courtesy of Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

Two decades later, the question of how many kinds of electricity there were was effectively settled by Watson's contemporary, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). Printer, journalist, inventor, statesman, scientist and more, he made all sorts of contributions to 18th-century American life. One of his most important achievements was confirming that there was a single "electric fluid," giving rise to the two "kinds" of electricity, which he named (as we still do today) "positive" and "negative." Like Watson, Franklin helped to tease out the mystery between static and current electricity. In his most famous (and indeed most dangerous) experiment, he flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a metal key attached to it by a long string. The basic idea was to catch electrical energy in the clouds (static electricity) from a lightning strike (current electricity), which he hoped would travel down the string to the key (more current electricity). Fortunately, lightning didn't strike the kite, which might well have killed Franklin, but he was able to detect charges and sparks, so confirming his ideas. DON'T try anything like this at home! [5]

“ And when the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. ” Benjamin Franklin, 1752 [12]

Franklin's electrical research marked a new milestone and hinted of much more to come, because it suggested electricity could be captured and stored as a form of energy. But electricity turned out to be even more useful when people discovered how it could exert a force. That was demonstrated by Frenchman Charles Augustin de Coulomb (1736–1806), who charged up two small spheres with positive electricity and then measured the (repulsive) force as they pushed away from one another (repelling the same way as two magnets with like charges). Coulomb found that the force between charges depended not just on their size but also on the distance between them—something now known as Coulomb's law. (The basic unit of electric charge is also named the Coulomb in his honor.)

Electrical experiments were still hampered by the sheer difficulty of making and storing electricity, which, at this time, essentially relied on rubbing things to build up a good static charge. The study of electricity really advanced when a group of European scientists devised ways of storing electrical charges in glass jars with separate pieces of metal attached to the inside and outside surfaces—devices known as Leyden jars, which were the first effective capacitors (charge-storing devices). Developed independently in the 1740s by German Ewald Georg von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek (of the city of Leyden, hence the name), they offered a much more convenient way of studying electricity.

Photo: Electrical research as it was in the early 18th century: A pair of glass Leyden jars (center) with their electrical connections to an electricity generating machine (right). Oil painting by Paul Lelong c.1820 courtesy of the Wellcome Collection published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Animal magic

Ever since Thales' original discovery, scientists knew that static electricity could be made by rubbing things, but no-one knew exactly why this was so or where the electricity ultimately came from. In the late 18th century, Italian biologist Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) found he could make electricity in a completely different—and totally unexpected—way: using the legs of a dead frog. In his most famous experiment of all, when he pushed brass hooks into a frog's legs and hung them from an iron post, he saw the legs twitch from time to time as electricity flowed through them. That led him to think that living things like frogs contained something he called "animal electricity," which the metals were somehow releasing.

Artwork: Luigi Galvani believed he'd discovered "animal electricity" when he hung a frog's legs from a metal hook (left) and watched them twitching. Illustration courtesy of US Library of Congress .

In fact, as another Italian, physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) soon discovered, Galvani had leaped to the wrong conclusion. The twitching frog was merely the current detector, not the source of the current. The important thing, as Volta discovered when he experimented with all sorts of different materials, was "the difference in the metals." What was really happening was that the two different metals, connected through the moist, fleshy, froggy tissue, were producing electricity chemically. Volta managed to recreate this effect with discs of two different metals, silver and zinc, separated by pieces of cardboard soaked in saltwater, and that was how he came to invent the world's first proper battery —an invention that revolutionized the history of electricity. It was a perfect example of how a scientific discovery can be rapidly turned into a practical technology—and one that allowed science to advance even further by making experiments easier. Even in Volta's time, the discovery was considered so impressive that the inventor was asked to demonstrate it before the great French emperor Napoleon I, who set up the Galvanism Prize in his honor. (His nephew, Napoleon III, set up a Volta Prize to reward great scientific discoveries some years later.)

Volta's invention also led to the development of a new branch of science called electrochemistry. One of its founding fathers, Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), used a kind of electrochemistry known as electrolysis (effectively, making a battery work in reverse) to discover a number of chemical elements, including sodium and potassium, and later barium, calcium, magnesium, and strontium. Fittingly, he was awarded a Galvanism Prize for his work in 1807.

Magnetic attractions

There's electricity—and there's magnetism. That's how people like William Gilbert saw the world and it's still how we study it in schools to this day. The idea is not wrong, but it's a little bit misleading, because electricity and magnetism are essentially two different ways of looking at the same, bigger phenomenon. They're like two sides of the same coin or the front and back of a house. There had been various clues about the links between electricity and magnetism over the years. (In 1735, for example, the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London had carried "An account of an extraordinary effect of lightning in communicating magnetism" : according to a doctor in Yorkshire, a lightning bolt had struck the corner of a house where a large box of metal knives and forks were stored, scattering them around and, curiously, magnetizing them in the process.) But the definitive connection between electricity and magnetism was really first established by a series of revolutionary experiments that European scientists carried out in the 19th century.

The person who gets the credit for discovering what we now know as electromagnetism was Danishman Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851), a physics professor in Copenhagen who had been inspired by Volta's invention of the battery. [6] Around 1820, during a student lecture, he just happened to place a compass near an electric wire and switched on the current. Incredibly, he noticed that the sudden current made the compass needle move, while reversing the current made the needle move the opposite way, suggesting the electricity flowing through the wire was making magnetism (because that's what a compass detects). [7] Though this was a major discovery, it wasn't the first proof of electromagnetism. About 20 years earlier, an Italian philosopher named Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835) had done a similar experiment, but few remember him today. [8]

Animation: Oersted's experiment: When he placed a compass near a wire and switched on the current, the compass needle moved one way; when he reversed the current in the wire, the needle moved the opposite way.

“ ...the magnetical effects are produced by the same powers as the electrical... all phenomena are produced by the same original power ” Hans Christian Oersted [9]

After learning of Oersted's work, Frenchman Andre-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) carried out another groundbreaking experiment with two wires placed side by side. When he switched on the current, he found the wires could push apart or pull together. One of his important conclusions was that a current-carrying wire makes a magnetic field at right angles, in concentric circles around the wire—rather like the ripples on a pond when you drop a stone into it.

This was all very interesting, but what use could it possibly be? Step forward English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867), originally an assistant to Sir Humphry Davy, who took "Ampère's beautiful theory" (as he called it) a stage further. [10] Ingeniously, he found he could make a wire rotate by passing electricity through it, because the flowing current created a magnetic field around it that would push against the field of a nearby magnet—and so invented a very primitive and not very practical electric motor . A few years later, he realized this invention would also work in reverse: if he moved a wire through a magnetic field, he could make electricity surge through it. That marked the invention of the electricity generator —a simple but revolutionary device that now provides virtually all the electricity we use to this day. Faraday, though he stood on the shoulders of Oersted, Ampère, and those who came before, arguably made the greatest contribution to our modern age of electric power.

Photo: Joseph Henry, America's answer to Michael Faraday, is honored by this statue at the US Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Credit: Library of Congress Series in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, courtesy of Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division.

Faraday wasn't the only pioneer of electromagnetism, however. Elsewhere in the UK, William Sturgeon (1783–1850), a brilliant but undeservedly forgotten inventor, was carrying out very similar experiments. In 1825, between Faraday's inventions of the electric motor and generator, Sturgeon built the first powerful electromagnet by coiling wire around an iron bar and sending a current through it. Over in the United States, in 1831, physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1879) made far bigger and better electromagnets (reputedly boosting the strength of the magnetic field by using wire insulated with cloth torn from his wife's undergarments) until he'd built a huge electromagnet that could lift a ton in weight. [11] Powerful electromagnets like this are still used in junkyards to this day to heave metal car bodies from one place to another. The following year, Sturgeon built the first practical, modern electric motor , using an ingenious device called a commutator that keeps the motor's axle rotating in the same direction.

A powerful force

Motors and generators—two parts of Faraday's very impressive legacy—are the twin bedrocks of our modern electric world. Generators make electric power, motors take that power and do useful things, from pushing electric cars down the road to sucking up dirt in your vacuum. But electrical energy doesn't come from thin air; as Volta showed, it doesn't even come magically from dead animals. If we want a certain amount of electrical energy, we have to produce it from at least as much of another kind of energy. That's a basic law of physics known as the law of conservation of energy , largely figured out by Scottish physicist James Prescott Joule (1818–1889) in the 1830s. Joule showed how different kinds of energy—including ordinary movement (mechanical energy), heat , and electricity—could be converted into one another. [13] What Joule's work means, essentially, is that if you want to run a huge city like New York or Sao Paulo off electricity, you'll need to harness huge amounts of some other kind of energy to do it. So, for example, you'll need a giant power station burning huge amounts of coal, hundreds of wind turbines, or a vast area of solar cells .

Photo: Power pioneer: Thomas Edison built the first practical power plants, which made electricity from coal using dynamos like this evolved by Michael Faraday's generator. Photo by H.C. White Co., courtesy of US Library of Congress .

Making enough energy to supply towns and cities with electricity became possible when a Belgian engineer named Zénobe Gramme (1826–1901) built the first large-scale, practical direct-current (DC) generators in the 1870s. In 1881, the world's first power plant opened in the small town of Godalming, England. The following year, Thomas Edison (1846–1931) built the first full-scale power plant at 257 Pearl Street in Manhattan, New York City. While Edison opted for plants that produced DC electricity, his former employee turned bitter rival Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) thought alternating current would work much better, since, among other things, it could be used to transmit power efficiently over very long distances. Tesla teamed up with engineer George Westinghouse (1846–1914), and the two launched a bitter battle with Edison—now known as the War of the Currents —until they'd firmly established AC as the victor. Today, though AC remains the heart of the electricity "grid" systems that provide much of the world's power, DC has again grown in importance thanks, in particular, to things like solar cells, which generate direct (rather than alternating) current. [14]

Waving hello

Photo: James Clerk Maxwell. Public domain photo by courtesy of Wikimedia Commons .

By the end of the 19th century, electricity and magnetism were happily married in motors and generators, but what was the real connection between them? Why did one produce the other? The mystery was largely solved in the second half of the 19th century by a brilliant Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). In 1873, building on Michael Faraday's work, Maxwell published a complete theory of electromagnetism, neatly summarizing everything that was then known about electricity and magnetism in four apparently simple mathematical equations . Maxwell's theory explained how static or moving electric charges create electric fields around them, while magnetic poles (the ends of magnets) make magnetic fields. It also showed how electric fields can create magnetism and magnetic fields can make electricity, and tied electromagnetism together with light. This was one of the most fundamental and far-reaching theories of physics advanced so far—as radically important as Newton's work on gravity . Of course, electricity and magnetism were just the same as they had always been. What was different, following the work of James Clerk Maxwell, was a bold new understanding of how they worked together: a revolutionary new piece of science. And as the 19th century rolled on, technology advanced too: with the work of Edison, Tesla, and others, there was a growing understanding of how electromagnetism could put to good use as a practical way of storing and transmitting energy. All that was remarkable enough, but thanks to Maxwell's insights, linking electricity and magnetism to light waves, electromagnetism would soon change the world in another very important way: as a form of communication.

Photo: Champion of radio: Guglielmo Marconi didn't discover the basic science behind radio, but his amazing demonstrations of its usefulness transformed it into a winning technology. Color lithograph charicature of Marconi by Sir L. Ward (Spy), 1905. courtesy of the Wellcome Collection published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

The first inkling of an exciting new form of electromagnetism came the decade after Maxwell had died. Maxwell had realized that electromagnetism could travel in waves. In 1888, a German physicist named Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) found he could make some of these waves, in which electrical and magnetic energy tangoed through the air at the speed of light. [15] Apart from confirming Maxwell's ideas, this scientific advance opened up another new bit of technology: a practical way for sending information wirelessly from one place to another. English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), who had been carrying out similar research to Hertz, and Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), a brilliant showman with a gift for popularizing science, were among those who developed this technology. Originally called "ether waves," and now much better known to us as radio , it evolved into radar , television , satellite communication, remote control , Wi-Fi , and a whole variety of other things.

The source of electricity

Electricity has always been magical. Imagine how enthralled Thales must have been when he first saw static over 2500 years ago. Or what Heinrich Hertz felt like as he made the first radio waves in his laboratory in Karlsruhe in 1888. At the dawn of the 20th century, electricity seemed magical in all sorts of ways. Thomas Edison was building bold power plants and switching the world to the wonders of incandescent electric light . Marconi, meanwhile, was bouncing radio waves around the world. And there was a new kind of electrical magic as well: the dawning realization that electricity and magnetism originated from tiny particles inside atoms.

The idea that there must be a kind of "particle of electricity" had originally been put forward in 1874 by Irishman George Johnstone Stoney (1826–1911), who had previously studied the kinetic theory (how gas particles carried heat ). [16] Similar ideas were advanced in 1881 by German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and Dutchman named Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928); together, these three developed the modern "particle" theory of electricity, in which static charges are seen as a build up of electric particles, while electric currents involve a flow of these particles from place to place. But what were the particles? The growing understanding of atoms and the world inside them, by Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) and his colleagues, offered up a possible candidate in the shape of the electron, a particle Stoney named in 1891. Electrons were finally discovered in 1897 by British physicist J.J. Thomson (1856–1940), while he was playing around with a gadget called a cathode-ray tube, rather like an old-fashioned TV set. [17]

Animation: Solid-state physics explains that electric current is carried by electrons (blue) moving through materials.

During the 20th century, scientists came to understand not just how electrons power electricity and magnetism, but how they're involved in all kinds of other physical phenomena, including heat and light . Known as solid-state physics, these scientific ideas have led to some revolutionary electronic technologies, including the transistor , integrated circuits for computers, solar cells , and superconductors (materials with little or no electrical resistance).

Today, as the world grapples with pressing problems like air pollution and climate change , the need to switch from dirty fuels to cleaner forms of power has made electricity more important to us than ever. Back in Thales' time, electricity was just a take-it-or-leave-it, magical curiosity; today, it's central to our world and everything we do. The story of electricity runs, like a current, right through our past. Thanks to the brilliant work of these scientists and inventors, it also points to a bright and hopeful future.

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Find out more, on this website.

Static electricity

For younger readers

The Attractive Story of Magnetism with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Andrea Gianopoulos. Capstone Press, 2008/2019. A graphic book with a companion app.
Scientific Pathways: Electricity by Chris Woodford. Rosen, 2013: My quick introduction to electrical history. Previously published by Blackbirch in 2004 under the series title Routes of Science.
Charged Up: The Story of Electricity by Jackie Bailey and Matthew Lilly. Picture Window Books/A & C Black, 2004. A graphic-style history that will appeal to reluctant readers.
DK Biographies: Thomas Edison by Jan Adkins. DK, 2009. A well-illustrated, curriculum linked, short biography for younger readers aged 9–12.

For older readers

The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America by Ernest Freeberg. Penguin, 2013.
The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross. Crown Publishing Group, 2008.

Scholarly articles

Bibliographical History Of Electricity And Magnetism by Paul Fleury Mottelay. Charles Griffin, 1922.
Origin of the Electrical Fluid Theories by Fernando Sanford, The Scientific Monthly, Vol 13, No 5, Nov 1921, pp.448–459.

Primary sources

Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein by Morris H. Shamos. Dover, 1959/1987. A wonderful collection of original papers, including groundbreaking electromagnetic experiments by Hans Christian Oersted, Michael Faraday, James Joule, J.J. Thomson, and Robert Millikan.
Experiments and Observations on Electricity by Benjamin Franklin, The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1769.
On the Production of Currents and Sparks of Electricity from Magnetism by Joseph Henry, The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1832.
↑ Origin of the Electrical Fluid Theories by Fernando Sanford, The Scientific Monthly, Vol 13, No 5, Nov 1921, pp.448–459.
↑ Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electromagnetism by Robert C. Stauffer, Isis, Vol 48 No 1, March 1957, pp.33–50.
↑ "Chapter 9: Hans Christian Oersted: Electromagnetism" in Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein by Morris H. Shamos. Dover, 1959/1987, p.121.
↑ Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Discovery of Electromagnetism by Robert C. Stauffer, Isis, Vol 48 No 1, March 1957, p.33.
↑ "Beautiful theory": "Chapter 10: Michael Faraday: Electromagnetic Induction and Laws of Electrolysis" in Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein by Morris H. Shamos. Dover, 1959/1987, p.131.
↑ Henry discusses this in On the Production of Currents and Sparks of Electricity from Magnetism by Joseph Henry, The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1832.
↑ Franklin describes the kite experiment in "Letter XI," Experiments and Observations on Electricity by Benjamin Franklin, The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1769, p.111.
↑ "Chapter 12: James Joule: The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat" in Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein by Morris H. Shamos. Dover, 1959/1987, p.166.
↑ Some reasons for DC's resurgence are set out in Edison's Final Revenge: The system of DC power generation and local distribution that the great inventor championed is set for a comeback by David Schneider, American Scientist, Vol 96 No 2, March–April 2008, pp.107–108.
↑ "Chapter 13: Heinrich Hertz: Electromagnetic waves" in Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein by Morris H. Shamos. Dover, 1959/1987, p.184.
↑ " George Johnstone Stoney, F.R.S., and the Concept of the Electron by J. G. O'Hara, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol 29, No 2, March 1975, pp.265–276.
↑ "Chapter 16: J.J. Thomson: The Electron" in Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein by Morris H. Shamos. Dover, 1959/1987, p.216.

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History of Electricity

Affordable, reliable electricity is fundamental to modern life. Electricity provides clean, safe light around the clock, it cools our homes on hot summer days (and heats many of them in winter), and it quietly breathes life into the digital world we tap into with our smartphones and computers. Although hundreds of millions of Americans plug into the electric grid every day, most of us don’t give the history of electricity a second thought. Where does it come from? What’s its story?

When we take a fresh look at electricity, we see that keeping America powered up is actually an amazing feat—an everyday miracle. Here’s the Story of Electricity.

Revolutionary Power

Although people have known about electricity since ancient times, they’ve only been harnessing its power for about 250 years. Benjamin Franklin’s electricity experiments – including his famous kite experiment in 1752 – showed just how little we knew about electricity in the era of the American revolution and the first industrial revolution.[1] In the time since Franklin’s experiments, our grasp of electricity has grown tremendously, and we are constantly finding new ways to use it to improve our lives.

Kite getting struck by a bolt of lightning

Ben Franklin’s famous kite experiment

One of the first major breakthroughs in electricity occurred in 1831, when British scientist Michael Faraday discovered the basic principles of electricity generation.[2] Building on the experiments of Franklin and others, he observed that he could create or “induce” electric current by moving magnets inside coils of copper wire. The discovery of electromagnetic induction revolutionized how we use energy. In fact, Faraday’s process is used in modern power production, although today’s power plants produce much stronger currents on a much larger scale than Faraday’s hand-held device.

In the era of modern power plants, coal has always generated more electricity in the U.S. than any other fuel source. In recent decades, we have seen other sources compete for second place: first hydroelectricity, then natural gas, nuclear power, and natural gas again.

Electricity generation mix by fuel type, 1949-2011

We also use electricity to power an increasing number of devices. Our modern electric world began with applications like the telegraph, light bulb, and telephone, and continued with radio, television, and many household appliances. Most recently, electrons have powered the digital age to create what energy expert Vaclav Smil calls our “instantaneously interconnected global civilization.”[3] Technology expert Mark Mills points out that electricity powers an increasing portion of our economy. The always-on data centers that support the internet and “cloud computing” will continue to increase demand for electricity, overwhelming the modest decreases in electricity use in other parts of the economy, such as manufacturing processes.[4][5]

The ever-growing applications of electricity explain the increasing use of fuels like natural gas, oil, and coal in power generation as opposed to direct uses such as heating or transportation. In 1900, for example, less than two percent of natural gas, oil, and coal were used to make electricity. A century later, 30 percent of our use of natural gas, oil, and coal was devoted to electric power.[6] Smil explains electricity’s appeal: “Electricity is the preferred form of energy because of its high efficiency, instant and effortless access, perfect and easily adjustable flow, cleanliness, and silence at the point of use.”[7]

Increased electricity access has lit corners of the world that were once dark. As international development groups and economists point out, access to electricity is a hallmark of advanced societies and a basic requirement for economic progress.[8] “Next to the increasing importance of hydrocarbons as sources of energy,” economist Erich Zimmermann wrote in 1951, “the rise of electricity is the most characteristic feature of the so-called second industrial revolution.”[9] In recent years, people in countries from China to Kenya have experienced rising living standards, as more people are able to use electricity to keep their homes and schools cool during torrid summers, to refrigerate food that would have otherwise spoiled, and to purify water that would have otherwise been unsafe to drink.

There is, of course, still much more to be done. In 2009, the International Energy Agency estimated that nearly 70 percent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa lacked access to electricity. That means 585.2 million people remain in the dark.[10]

Many parts of the world remain in the dark.

The Dawn of Electric Light in the U.S.

One of the greatest pioneers in electricity was Thomas Edison, who saw electricity as his “field of fields” to “reorganize the life of the world.” Working tirelessly on electricity from his laboratory in New Jersey in the 1870s, America’s greatest inventor brought the incandescent electric light bulb into practical use by the end of that decade and patented the incandescent light bulb in 1880.[11] “When Edison…snatched up the spark of Prometheus in his little pear-shaped glass bulb, ”German historian Emil Ludwig observed, “it meant that fire had been discovered for the second time, that mankind had been delivered again from the curse of night.”[12] Yet Edison’s electric light was even better than fire—it was brighter, more consistent, and safer than the flame of candles or lamps.

Edison’s light bulb was one of the first applications of electricity to modern life. He initially worked with J. P. Morgan and a few privileged customers in New York City in the 1880s to light their homes, pairing his new incandescent bulbs with small generators. Edison’s electric lighting systems were basic by today’s standards but bold at the time—they not only threatened the existing gas lighting industry but radically challenged the status quo by introducing people to an entirely new type of energy. In a few short years, Edison transformed electricity from a science experiment into an exciting, safe, and coveted luxury.

The light bulb—a symbol of innovation and the invention that sparked the electricity revolution.

The Rise of an Industry

In order for the magic of electricity to truly take hold in American life, new industries were needed to build the generators to supply electric power, as well as the new appliances and electric lights that used it. In 1882, with J.P. Morgan funding his efforts, Edison launched the businesses that would later be known as General Electric. In September of that year, he opened the United States’ first central power plant in lower Manhattan—the Pearl Street Station.

Pearl Street was a stroke of genius. Edison connected a large bank of generators to homes and businesses (including the New York Times) in the immediate area through a network of buried copper wires. At that time, there was no “electric grid.” Before Pearl Street, customers who wanted power for electric lights or motors relied on generators located on-site, typically in the basement. Pearl Street’s “central” power plant design was an important shift from small-scale, on-site generation to industrial-scale power, and soon became the model for the entire power generation industry.[13]

The Dynamo Room at the Pearl Street Station, the first power plant in the U.S.

Enter Samuel Insull

Although Edison was a brilliant inventor, he was a disorganized businessman. His inventions came to him faster than the financial capital necessary to carry them out, and Edison preferred to focus on the inventions themselves rather than the paperwork they created. The inventor needed a managerial counterpart. That counterpart arrived in 1881, in the form of a promising 21-year-old from England. Samuel Insull, who began his career in the U.S. as a personal assistant to Edison, astounded the inventor with his business prowess—so much so that Edison soon granted Insull power of attorney over his businesses.[14] But the work with Edison would be just the beginning for Insull—over the next four decades, he built an electricity business that made him the Henry Ford of the modern electricity industry.

Electricity required a different business model because it was different than virtually every other commodity. Electricity had to be consumed the moment it was produced. (Storage was very costly and limited—and still is.) In order for electricity to become accessible and affordable, someone needed to bring together mass efficiencies in production and consumption. Insull saw the opportunities in front of him. Whoever mastered the engineering and the economics of the power grid could take the reins of the rising electricity industry—an industry that was already toppling the stocks of gas light companies and attracting big investors like J.P. Morgan. In 1892, Insull left his job as an executive at the lighting company Edison started (General Electric near New York City) for Chicago Edison (an electricity generation/distribution company, later known as Commonwealth Edison).[15] It was a move that would indelibly change the industry.

Early transmission lines in rural America. Photo Credit: Towers

Insull Builds the Modern Power Grid

Insull was able to achieve what economists call “economies of scale” (cost savings from large-scale operations) by consolidating the mom-and-pop electricity providers and closing small generators in favor of larger, more efficient units manufactured by General Electric. He also found efficiencies in customer sales—the more customers he had, the more efficiently he could run his generators, and the cheaper it was to provide power. As Insull’s business grew, he was able to find better ways of providing electricity to more and more people.

Interior of the 1903 Powerhouse showing Unit 18

1903 turbine hall at Fisk Street Station

Insull became a master salesman for all things electric. In order to use his generators more efficiently (i.e., run them at full capacity for more hours of the day), he offered to power elevators and streetcars during the daytime when there was less demand for electric lighting.

Insull also used high-voltage transmission lines to spread electricity to the suburbs and then to the countryside. Because customers inside and outside cities used power at different times, Insull was able to provide power to both types of customers more efficiently than if he had served them independently. Such diversification, served by ever-larger and more efficient generators, brought the price of a kilowatt-hour down. Electricity prices fell year after year as the young industry grew between 1902 to 1930.

Grid-Graphic-Avg.-Price-for-Electrical-Energy

To be able to provide power for “peaky” customers, Insull implemented a demand charge (a fixed fee) in addition to the typical usage charge. That way, the customer paid for the privilege to use a lot of electricity in a little time. In this way, Insull could profitably expand his business to include all types of customers.

Lastly, Insull found efficiencies by interconnecting or “networking” power grids for backup and reliability, eliminating the need to build (redundant) generation in the same service area.

Consolidation. Mass production. Mass consumption. Rural electrification. Two-part pricing. Networked power. Samuel Insull did for electricity what Henry Ford did for the automobile—he turned a luxury product into an affordable part of everyday life for millions of Americans. Where Edison provided the novelty of electric light to Manhattan’s upper class, Insull’s innovations made electricity accessible to all.

Electricity Becomes Politicized

The electricity industry in the U.S. was intertwined with politics from the beginning. Before Pearl Street ever opened, Edison had to bribe New York politicians just to begin laying the foundations of his work. As Time magazine recounts, Edison “obtained with great difficulty the consent of New York’s famously corrupt city government to build his proposed network on the southern tip of Manhattan. (He got their approval in part by plying them with a lavish champagne dinner at Menlo Park catered by Delmonico’s, then New York’s finest restaurant.)”[17] As the early electricity industry grew, it became more involved with city politics over lighting contracts. Electricity providers had to receive franchise rights from city officials in order to serve local areas, opening the door for those officials to extort power companies for campaign contributions or personal bribes.

Insull’s solution was new legislation that would replace local regulation with statewide regulation of power companies by public utility commissions (modeled after state railroad commissions). In this arrangement, the state commissions would establish a maximum rate for the power company to charge its customers based on the company’s cost of providing electric service (plus a reasonable rate of return).

In exchange for such rate regulation, the state commissions gave the power company an exclusive franchise to serve a given geographical area (a legal monopoly). The early electricity industry was a natural monopoly (according to many economists and regulators, and Insull himself) which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: state regulators assumed power companies were bound to be monopolies, so they regulated them accordingly and gave them legal monopoly status. The prospect of a true, laissez-faire electricity market was never on the table.

Insull needed time and a huge public relations effort to convince the industry that statewide public utility regulation was the best way to provide low-cost power and dodge harsh local regulation or takeover. Wisconsin and New York were the first states to extend state-level rate regulation to the electricity industry in 1907. By 1914, forty-three other states had followed suit and created state-level commissions to oversee electric utilities.[19]

These state public utility commissions, formed in the early 20 th century, still regulate utilities. In theory, their rate regulation is supposed to protect the consumer, but in practice it often benefits other interest groups—or the utilities themselves—at the expense of consumers. Despite these regulations, Insull continued to provide inexpensive power to a greater number of customers through the first three decades of the 20 th century.

Tragically, the Great Depression financially ruined Insull’s expanding enterprises. His indebted holding company collapsed and legal battles ensued. Facing trial in 1934, he was quoted in newspapers as saying “I am fighting not only for freedom but for complete vindication. I have erred, but my greatest error was in underestimating the effects of the financial panic on American securities, and particularly on the companies I was trying to build. I worked with all my energy to save those companies.”[20]

Insull was acquitted but lost his companies and wealth, and fell into disrepute and obscurity. Public knowledge of his contributions as a pioneer of the modern power grid seems to have died along with him in 1938. As Forrest McDonald wrote of the acquittal in Insull’s biography, “For his fifty-three years of labor to make electric power universally cheap and abundant, Insull had his reward from a grateful people: He was allowed to die outside prison.”[21]

State regulation and Insull’s tragic fall ultimately led to federal intervention into electricity beyond hydroelectric licensing, the founding job of the Federal Power Commission (est. 1920.) In 1935, the Federal Power Act authorized the Federal Power Commission—now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)—to apply “just and reasonable” cost-based rate regulation to the wholesale power market (along the same lines as state-level regulation of retail rates). Another law, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, required multi-state companies to divest properties to operate in only one state.[22]

Federal intervention grew again in the energy-troubled 1970s. The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 required electric utilities to buy power from independent generators, successfully creating a new industry segment but also opening the door for intermittent generation from renewable sources to enter—and even destabilize—the growing grid. 23] In fear of using up limited energy and natural resources, Congress also passed new legislation designed to curb electricity use and promote environmental goals. New agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and the Department of Energy (1977) were created to regulate different aspects of electricity, including generation from coal-burning power plants.

In the 1990s, federal regulation of electricity shifted towards a market-based approach.[24] Deregulation had proven beneficial in reducing the cost and improving the quality of tightly regulated areas like the airline industry, and regulators were interested in bringing the same benefits to the electricity industry.

In 1996, FERC attempted to restructure the industry by imposing an “open access” model[25] on utilities.[26] FERC’s intent was to “remove impediments to competition in the wholesale bulk power marketplace.” Despite FERC’s focus on competition, electricity transmission remains heavily regulated. Hence, the “deregulation” of electricity in the 1990s was in fact “re-regulation.” Wholesale electricity markets continue to evolve, with market forces and federal regulations colliding at each step.

Currently, the electric power sector faces an unprecedented amount of federal intervention from several different agencies. Some of the most active are the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), FERC, and the Department of Energy.[27]

The EPA proposed a new rule in 2014 to limit carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. The rule threatens to close a large portion of the reliable coal-fired electricity supply in the U.S. As a result, the rule will undercut power companies’ ability to meet electricity demand safely and reliably.[28] The EPA rule also comes at huge cost to American families and businesses that use electricity every day—by 2030, the rule is estimated to increase electricity bills by a combined $290 billion.[29]

FERC, with its mandate to ensure just and reasonable wholesale rates, has long been involved in every aspect of wholesale electricity markets. In 2005, it received increased authority from Congress to further regulate the reliability of the power grid, and to oversee wholesale electricity markets. Recent FERC rules favoring renewable sources of electricity have made the agency more political than ever before and raised its profile. Conflicts over FERC leadership—between Congress, the White House, and policy and industry groups—reached a fever pitch in 2013 and 2014 with two nominees to chair the agency being denied the job by Congress.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has also encouraged renewable sources of electricity through its national laboratories and essentially banned the use of certain technologies—such as the familiar incandescent light bulb—by establishing energy efficiency mandates. In short, nearly every aspect of electricity is now heavily regulated by multiple federal agencies.

A Powerful Vision

Electricity remains a growth industry today, in spite of political meddling at the local, state, and federal level. New vistas for electricity will always be there for people to discover, but that discovery will require the freedom to inspire new inventions. Let the next generation of electricity entrepreneurs be driven—like Edison and Insull—by the productive forces of human ingenuity and healthy competition.

Electricity is modern life. Without access to reliable power, our lives would be much more like they were before the industrial revolution (to quote Thomas Hobbes): “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[30] Nearly every feature of modern civilization depends on affordable, reliable electricity and the things it powers—lamps and heaters to safely keep our homes well-lit and comfortable, smart phones to stay in touch with loved ones, and always-on data centers to give us a reliable Internet—among countless others. It is so crucial to modern life, in fact, that the history of electricity is really the history of the modern world.

2010_skyline_at_night_of_charlotte_north_carolina

Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons

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[1] Carl Van Doren, An Account of the Kite Experiment , UShistory.org, http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/info/kite.htm

[2] engineering timelines, faraday’s work- the electrical generation, http://www.engineering-timelines.com/how/electricity/generator.asp, [3]vaclav smil, the energy question, again , current history, december 2000, p. 408., [4] mark p. mills, the cloud begins with coal, august 2013, http://www.tech-pundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/cloud_begins_with_coal.pdfc761ac, [5] energy information administration, manufacturing energy consumption data show large reductions in both manufacturing energy use and the energy intensity of manufacturing activity between 2002 and 2010 , march 19, 2013, http://www.eia.gov/consumption/manufacturing/reports/2010/decrease_use.cfm, [6]vaclav smil, “the energy question, again,” current history , december 2000, p. 409., [7]vaclav smil, “the energy question, again,” current history , december 2000, p. 409., [8] international energy agency, access to electricity, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopment/accesstoelectricity/, [9] erich zimmermann, world resources and industries (new york: harper & brothers, 1951), p. 596., [10] international energy agency, access to electricity, http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources/energydevelopment/accesstoelectricity/, [11] national archives and records administration, thomas edison’s patent drawing for an improvement in electric lamps, patented january 27, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals_iv/images/thomas_edison/patent_drawing.html, [12] these quotations are taken from robert bradley, edison to enron: energy markets and political strategies (hoboken, nj: scrivener publishing and john wiley & sons, 2011), p. 30., [13] robert l. bradley, edison to enron: energy markets and political strategies . (hoboken, nj: scrivener publishing and john wiley & sons, 2011), p. 42., [14] conot, robert. thomas a. edison: a streak of luck. new york: da capo, 1979. (p. 273), [15] comed, carrying on a history of innovation and service , https://www.comed.com/about-us/company-information/pages/history.aspx, [16] australian department of industry, energy efficiency exchange, http://eex.gov.au/energy-management/energy-procurement/procuring-and-managing-energy/understanding-your-energy-requirements/#why_are_demand_profiles_important, [17] thomas edison: his electrifying life, time magazine special edition, 2013., [18] r. richard geddes, a historical perspective on electric utility regulation, winter 1992 http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/1992/1/v15n1-8.pdf, [19] emergence of electric utilities in america: state regulation , http://americanhistory.si.edu/powering/past/h1main.htm, [20] forrest mcdonald, insull (university of chicago, 1962)., [21] ibid., p. 333., [22] robert l. bradley, edison to enron: energy markets and political strategies . (hoboken, nj: scrivener publishing and john wiley & sons, 2011), p. 219, 513., [23] travis fisher, purpa: another subsidy for intermittent energies, january 22, 2013, http://www.masterresource.org/2013/01/purpa-renewable-energy-subsidies/, [24] market economics: the push for deregulation, http://americanhistory.si.edu/powering/past/h5main.htm, [25] clyde wayne crews, rethinking electricity deregulation: does open access have it wired- or tangled, june 24, 1999, http://cei.org/outreach-regulatory-comments-and-testimony/rethinking-electricity-deregulation-does-open-access-have, [26] federal energy regulatory commission, history of ferc, http://www.ferc.gov/students/ferc/history.asp, [27] institute for energy research, epa’s power plant carbon dioxide reduction mandate, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/studies/111d-emissions-map, [28] institute for 21 st century energy, assessing the impact of proposed new carbon regulations in the united states, http://www.energyxxi.org/epa-regs#, [29] institute for 21 st century energy, assessing the impact of proposed new carbon regulations in the united states, http://www.energyxxi.org/sites/default/files/file-tool/assessing_the_impact_of_potential_new_carbon_regulations_in_the_united_states.pdf, [30] thomas hobbes, of man, being the first part of leviathan. chapter xiii of the natural condition of mankind as concerning their felicity and misery , the harvard classics 1909-14, http://www.bartleby.com/34/5/13.html.

Chapter 12 – Early Electrification

Karen garvin.

The modern world runs on electricity. From lighting and heat, to computers and cell phones, almost all technology relies on a steady supply of electrical current for power. Yet despite people being aware of electricity for more than two millennia it has only been within the last 200 years that the study of electricity was formalized, leading to the development of a complete system of electrical power distribution and the invention of numerous electrically powered appliances and machines.

The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus (circa 626–623 BCE) was one of the first to investigate the phenomenon of electricity. He observed that rubbing a lump of amber with fabric would cause small objects, such as feathers, to cling to it. [1] There was little progress in understanding this strange effect until the English physician and philosopher William Gilbert (1544–1603) began experimenting with various materials to see whether they were magnetic or displayed an electric effect, which he thought was due to “electrical effluvia” that behaved much like flowing water. [2]

Gilbert’s legacy of experimentation was taken up by other natural philosophers, and gradually there emerged a small body of knowledge about electricity. The English dyer and astronomer Stephen Gray (1666–1736) worked out how to transmit electricity over a distance but was hampered by the small amounts of electricity he could generate, and so his efforts led nowhere. [3]

There was no way to store electricity until the Leyden jar was developed in the mid-eighteenth century. It was independently discovered by the German cleric Ewald Georg von Kleist (1700–1748) and Dutch mathematician Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692–1761), who generally gets the credit for the invention. [4] This device was a glass jar partially coated with a thin metal foil on both the inside and outside. A metal rod was inserted through the jar’s cork, making contact with both the inner and outer foil plates. [5] The Leyden jar was capable of delivering a very high voltage of around 10,000 volts (fig. 1). [6]

Figure 1. Illustrations of a Leyden jar being discharged. One method produces a quick discharge (and possible shock to the user), while the second method produces a slow trickle of current. From Adolphe Ganot and Edmund Atkinson, Elementary Treatise on Physics, Experimental and Applied (New York: W. Wood and Co., 1868). Public domain; book held by the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/17008559/.

In 1800, Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) developed the first chemical storage battery, called a “pile,” which consisted of a stack of alternating copper and zinc discs separated by pasteboard. [7] Instead of delivering a high-voltage spark like a Leyden jar, the battery produced a steady electrical current. [8] The English scientists William Nicholson (1753–1815) and Anthony Carlisle (1768–1840) used electricity to separate chemical compounds into elements; this process was named electrolysis and it soon led to other discoveries, including electroplating. [9]

Sir Humphrey Davy (1778–1829) also experimented with electrolysis, building a large battery that he used for the process. Davy also experimented with lighting. In 1801 he demonstrated incandescent lighting, using his battery to heat platinum strips until they glowed. Perhaps Davy’s most impressive electrical work was the construction of an arc lamp, which consisted of two carbon rods placed close together but not touching; when electrical current was sent through the rods a spark jumped the gap and gave off a brilliant white light. Sometime between 1802 and 1809, Davy demonstrated the arc light at the Royal Society in London but otherwise did nothing to put the arc lamp to productive use. [10]

Electrical lighting remained impractical until sufficiently powerful electrical generators were developed. During the mid-nineteenth century, most power stations were isolated affairs, with customers building and using their own power sources. [11] The expense of building generators meant that electricity was reserved for large projects, such as lighthouses, or homes of the rich, such as financier J. P. Morgan. [12] A few central power stations existed and by the late 1870s they were providing power for arc street lights in major American and European cities, including New York, London, and Paris. [13]

Arc lamps produced a strong white light that provided ample lighting for streets and cities, and they were increasingly used to replace gas lighting. Early arc lamps were fraught with problems: they tended to flicker, and they produced a harsh light that distorted colors and gave off an annoying hum that rendered them unsuitable for indoor use. [14] Russian military engineer Pavel (Paul) Jablochkoff (1847–1894) developed a commercial version of an arc lamp that produced a milder light, which became known as the Jablochkoff candle. [15]

Inventors such as J. W. Starr (1822–1846) and Heinrich Goebel (1818–1893) turned their attentions to incandescent lighting for indoor use, with Goebel producing a successful vacuum incandescent lamp two decades before Thomas Edison (1847–1931). [16] Alexander de Lodyguine (1847–1923) of Russia created a nitrogen-filled bulb and used them to light St. Petersburg harbor. Joseph Swan (1828–1914) of England began experimenting with carbon filaments for incandescent bulbs and become one of the first commercially successful electrical inventors after he patented his incandescent light bulb in 1880. [17]

By the late 1870s, Edison began experimenting with arc and incandescent bulbs (fig. 2). Sensing the possibility of a commercial market for a more pleasing light, he looked to create safe lighting that included long-lasting bulbs and an inexpensive power source. Edison’s concept was not just to make one component, but to create an entire electrical utility system. By 1879 he had a successful light bulb and for the next two years focused on installing a lighting system at his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. In 1882 Edison opened London’s Holborn Viaduct electrical station and then turned his attention on New York City. [18]

After purchasing a large building in Manhattan, Edison sought and received permission from the city to dig up the streets in order to lay electrical conduits for his central power station. At the heart of the Pearl Street Power Station were six 27-ton, coal-fueled electrical generators, each capable of producing 100 kilowatts of power. The generators produced an alternating current (AC) that was converted into a safe, low-voltage direct current (DC). The plant went into operation on September 4, 1882. It originally provided service for 85 customers, and within a year the number of customers had increased to 500. [19]

There had been an international lighting system for some time, with companies such as the Société Générale d’Électricté in France, which, after installing lighting systems in Paris, Le Havre, and London, established a Russian subsidiary. [20] By the early 1880s, lighting systems existed in many parts of Europe as well as Asia and South America. But it was Edison’s much-publicized success with Pearl Street that helped fuel the further demand for electrical utility systems. [21]

By the late 1800s, two competing electrical transmission systems were in place: AC and DC. Proponents of DC, including Edison, argued that the low voltages required by DC systems made them safer than AC systems, which used very high voltages to distribute power. A number of people had been killed after coming into contact with AC power lines and there was widespread belief that power companies had little interest in public safety. [22]

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) and George Westinghouse (1846–1914) were proponents of AC, as were many European companies. [23] One solid argument in favor of AC was that it was more efficient at transmitting power over long distances than DC. It also was more versatile because DC systems required separate supply lines for lights and motors, which required different voltages to operate properly. By contrast, a single AC power line could be used with transformers to provide a range of voltages for different electrical equipment.

The ensuing “War of the Currents” evolved into an ugly rivalry over what form the national power distribution system should take. Edison, who had a large monetary stake in his existing DC power systems, attempted to prove how dangerous AC was by electrocuting animals. On August 6, 1890, the dangers of AC were made abundantly clear when convicted murderer William Kemmler (1860–1890) was electrocuted to death in the first electric chair (fig. 3). [24] In turn, Westinghouse and Tesla denounced Edison’s system, noting its limitations and promoting their own AC system.

Figure 3. The execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler by electrocution made front-page news. It was the first use of the electric chair, which was powered by alternating current. The Evening World (New York), August 6, 1890. Public domain; newspaper image is from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83030193/1890-08-06/ed-6/.

William Stanley Jr. (1858–1916) produced the first commercially successful AC transformer, which was based on earlier designs. Stanley made changes to improve the efficiency of transformers, which he incorporated into a working high-voltage AC power system in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. On March 20, 1886, Stanley successfully electrified the town using a 500-volt generator to provide power. The “Great Barrington Electrification” relied on Stanley’s transformers, which stepped up the generator’s output to 3,000 volts for transmission and then safely stepped it back down to 500 volts again at the destination. The success of the installation proved that an AC system could safely provide electricity for a large number of customers. [25] Stanley’s success was another early win for AC in the War of the Currents.

Alternating current was showing itself to be better suited for electrical distribution: in 1891, Electrical World magazine reported about 200 Edison DC power stations in use nationwide, whereas there were about 1,000 AC power stations in operation. [26] Another win for alternating current was the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition). The fair’s organizers took bids for lighting the fairgrounds, which sprawled over 600 acres. They awarded the contract for electrifying the fair to George Westinghouse, who was able to underbid the rival company, General Electric, because his cost-effective AC system required less wiring than the competing DC system. [27] Westinghouse’s system relied on Tesla’s polyphase generator, which could hand high voltages and heavy loads, making it ideal for large-scale applications.

The exposition included a two-story Electricity Pavilion that showcased electrical inventions; the second floor had a display for domestic products, while the main floor showcased companies and inventors, including Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse, as well as a number of European companies. Many technical breakthroughs were on display at the fair, such as the first fluorescent light bulbs. Tesla gave demonstrations using high voltages to show that it could be used safely; Edison displayed his phonograph; a German company, Allegemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft, brought alternating current equipment. [28]

Lighting was not the only use for electricity. Small, yet powerful, electric motors were developed in order to replace steam power for city trams, although it took years to develop a reliable battery. In 1879, the German firm of Siemens & Halske unveiled a narrow-gauge electric train at the Berlin Industrial Exhibition, and in 1881 the company constructed an experimental tram line that used the train’s rails as an external power source. Electrified rails were a shock hazard, though, and later tram lines used an overhead power source. Subway systems and railways also increasing used electric motors for propulsion. [29]

With powerful electrical generators to make electricity and a capable delivery system came an increased demand for electric power. Lighting and transportation were important uses for electricity, but new inventions arrived quickly, including domestic appliances such as the electric bread toaster, which was created in 1893 by Scottish inventor Alan MacMasters. [30] In 1889, Singer introduced the first electric sewing machine. [31]

The new electrical utility industry was unlike any other industry. Electricity could not be easily stored and so it needed to be used as soon as it was generated. The equipment required constant upkeep by skilled technicians, and the industry required huge outlays of capital. [32] For this reason, dense urban areas were the first to be electrified because it was unfeasible and uneconomical for individual companies to run miles of transmission lines to rural areas. The increasingly widespread availability of electricity in cities also meant that modern electrical conveniences, including the toaster, were first adopted in the highly populated urban centers. Due to the high costs of building transmission lines, electricity remained a utility primarily for the cities for the remainder of the nineteenth century, although there were exceptions. (fig. 4). [33]

Figure 4. This action-packed poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show boasts that its two electric plants can produce illumination that is “lighter than day.” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World in the Grandest of Illuminated Arenas, 2 Electric Plants, 250,000 Candle Power (New York: Springer Litho. Co., 1895). No known restrictions on publication; poster held by the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002719218/ .

In 1881, Edison employed Samuel Insull (1859–1938) as his secretary. Insull, who emigrated from England to work with Edison, was given the task of handling finances and helping to reduce Edison’s chronic money shortage. [34] Insull was adept at the electricity business and proved to be instrumental in creating the modern electric power grid. By consolidating small electricity providers into larger companies, he was able to leverage the economies of scale, which in turn helped to bring the price of electricity down so that it was no longer a luxury item. With more consumer demand, Insull also expanded electrical utilities out into rural areas, although much of the United States was not electrified until after 1930 (fig. 5). [35]

Figure 5: The Allis-Chalmers five-thousand horsepower electrical generator that was on display in the Palace of Machinery at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Official Photographic Company, and Louisiana Purchase Exposition, The World’s Fair in Colortypes and Monotones: Official Publication (St. Louis: Official Photographic Co, 1904). Public domain; book held by the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/89101355/.

[1] . Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light (New York: Random House, 2003), 17.

[2] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 18–19.

[3] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 21–22,

[4] . “E. Georg von Kleist,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/biography/E-Georg-von-Kleist ; and “Pieter van Musschenbroek,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pieter-van-Musschenbroek.

[5] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 23–26.

[6] . Michael Littman, “Leyden Jar,” Joseph Henry Project, Princeton University, https://commons.princeton.edu/josephhenry/leyden-jar/.

[7] . Ernest Freeburg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: Penguin, 2013), 15; Jonnes, Empires of Light , 31–32.

[8] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 33.

[9] . William J. Hausman, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins, Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.

[10] . Freeberg, The Age of Edison , 15–17; Hausman, Global Electrification , 8.

[11] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 9.

[12] . Freeberg, The Age of Edison , 17; Hausman, Global Electrification , 9; Jonnes, Empires of Light , 13.

[13] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 9.

[14] . Freeberg, The Age of Edison , 18, 28; Hausman, Global Electrification , 11.

[15] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 45.

[16] . Freeberg, The Age of Edison , 28–29; Hausman, Global Electrification , 11.

[17] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 11; “Edison’s Incandescent Lamp,” Engineering and Technology History Wiki, August 25, 2020.

[18] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 321n37; Jonnes, Empires of Light , 81.

[19] . Carl Sulzberger, “Thomas Edison’s 1882 Pearl Street Generating Station,” Engineering and Technology History Wiki, November 23, 2017; and Carl Sulzberger, “Milestones: Pearl Street Station, 1882,” Engineering and Technology History Wiki, January 27, 2016.

[20] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 75.

[21] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 75–76.

[22] . Freeburg, The Age of Edison , 181.

[23] . “Initial Tesla Polyphase/‘Three-Phase’ Alternating-Current Systems and Metering Development,” Engineering and Technology History Wiki, July 10, 2015.

[24] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 185–213.

[25] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 133.

[26] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 287.

[27] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 248–56.

[28] . Richard Munsen, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 108–10; and “Electrical Building,” Chicagology.com, https://chicagology.com/columbiaexpo/fair033/.

[29] . Hausman, Global Electrification , 15–17.

[30] . Linda Gross, “The History of Making Toast,” Hagley Museum, June 19, 2017, https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/history-making-toast.

[31] . “History,” Singer, https://www.singer.com/history.

[32] . “History of Electricity: Enter Samuel Insull,” Institute for Energy Research, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/history-electricity/#Rise ; and Hausman, Global Electrification , 19.

[33] . Harold D. Wallace Jr., “Power from the People: Rural Electrification Brought More than Lights,” National Museum of American History, Behring Center, February 12, 2016, https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/rural-electrification.

[34] . John F. Wasik, The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Tho mas Edison, and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 5–14.

[35] . “History of Electricity: Insull Builds the Modern Power Grid,” Institute for Energy Research, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/history-electricity/#Insull ; and Wallace, “Power from the People.”

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Ongoing collaborative research project on the history of electricity

Dr Chiara Ambrosio explains how this unique and innovative course works, and why it’s so beneficial for students.

20 October 2013

Each year, a new cohort of students take an existing body of work that has been built up by previous years' students and, through individual projects, they develop it in a bid to create a publishable piece of collaborative research.

Students 'inherit' research projects and bring them to publication

‘Topics in the History of the Physical Sciences’ continues, and hopes to bring to completion, an ambitious didactic experiment originally developed by Professor Hasok Chang.

In the course, students undertake original research projects, which they inherit from students who took the course in previous years. Through this inheritance mechanism, results of original research can accumulate from year to year.

All students in the course work on related projects so that the class, and the group of students that take this course over the years, form a real community of researchers.

The first phase of this project, which succeeded beyond expectation, resulted in the publication of a research monograph:

Hasok Chang and Catherine Jackson, eds., An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War (British Society for the History of Science, 2007).

This was an extraordinary achievement: a scholarly book containing original research, all carried out by undergraduates.

Researching innovations in domestic electricity

The project has been in its second phase since the academic year 2007-08. Students are investigating the history of electricity from a variety of angles:

philosophical
sociological

The common theme is innovation through ‘domestication’.

Electricity has been instrumental in shaping the modern world as we know it, and we now take for granted its presence in our daily life.

The dizzying array of electrical innovations that have changed our lives range from the humble light bulb to the electric chair, from the invention of the electrical battery to the discovery of the electron.

Students’ research projects get behind these innovations and ask a variety of questions:

how they were possible;
why anyone bothered with them;
which factors helped or hindered their acceptance;
who promoted or resisted them and why;
what their impacts were, and so on.

Although the course is billed as one in the History of the Physical Sciences, students investigate broadly in all areas of science, technology and medicine and their relations with society.

The benefits of building common research projects year after year

There is much to be gained from doing a series of interconnected studies that deal with various aspects of one material object or substance: each study will enrich others, often prompting unexpected insights for them.

In order to give the project coherence students have a focus on innovation: how does something new arise and become accepted?

The path of progress may look easy and straightforward in retrospect, but a closer look at the history of science often reveals great challenges and obstacles in the creation and dissemination of novelty even if it is considered obviously true or beneficial later.

Since its early phases, the key to the success of this course has been an unconditioned trust in the academic potential of undergraduate students.

Having faith in undergraduate students as researchers

And if I have decided to bring this project to completion, it is because I strongly believe that undergraduate students have the ability and enthusiasm necessary to make the experiment work.

The course requires a lot of hard work, though, so realistically I recommend it only to students who are able to work independently and who have a strong background in the history and philosophy of science or a related Science and Technology Studies (STS) field.

This is only a half-unit course, but those who get captured by the spirit of it tend to do a lot more work than would be normally expected in a half-unit course.

The course is open to second- and third-year students in the STS department, or students who have previously done some other STS courses (or equivalent) to prepare them to do research in this area.

Due to the nature of the work involved, only a relatively small number of students can be accommodated each year.

Enrolment is by tutor’s agreement and preference is given to students who present a reasonable plan to move the existing work forward or open up a worthwhile new avenue of inquiry. Other things being equal, students are enrolled on a first-come first-served basis.

Outputs and assessment

At the end of the course, students submit an extended essay containing a summary of their findings.

They are also asked to submit all useful materials generated by their research (this constitutes the ‘second essay’) in a form that will allow another researcher to use them.

In the middle of the term students also submit a preliminary report of roughly 2,000 words which is not assessed but on which they receive feedback that helps determine the direction of their final essay and exam.

At the end of the term students are asked whether they are willing to have their work incorporated into any collective publications that might result, and those who consent will be made co-authors in any publications resulting from their work.

Aims of the course

To produce knowledge: the most fundamental premise of this course is that undergraduate students are capable of creating knowledge, not merely absorbing it. Of course, students do create knowledge routinely, in writing dissertations or any serious essays; however, the fruits of their labour usually end up hidden in piles of papers, assessed but never looked at again. In this course work is pulled together into a recognisable product. Passive learning of existing knowledge is not our main goal here (though pushing the boundaries of knowledge does of course require first finding out where those boundaries lie).
To learn, by doing, how to produce knowledge : the process of doing active research will also serve the purpose of training students for similar future work. The skills they acquire include: searching for relevant materials; understanding primary sources; collaborating with others who are pursuing related projects; using other people's previous works (secondary sources); preserving and presenting the results of their work so that others (including themselves at a later time) can build on them effectively.

Mode of working

In this course we try to become a real community of scholars. Students build on the works done by their predecessors, crafting particular research projects in close consultation with me and relevant colleagues (depending on the projects they take up, I direct them towards experts in STS and other related academic fields).

Very soon in the process the students are likely to know far more about their topic than I do. This is a sign that their work is heading in the right direction – however, at that point they have to prove that they are capable of independent inquiry into their topic, just like a proper researcher. This does not mean that I stop following their progress – on the contrary, it is my responsibility to keep pace with their work and suggest points for further improvement.

In the initial sessions, I make a brief introduction to the subject and coordinate people's choices of individual projects.

Once each student has chosen a project, we spend part of the whole-group sessions hearing a brief report on the most significant things that each of them has learned since the previous session. The remaining part of the session is devoted to mini-lectures to refresh their research skills. We occasionally have guest speakers and visits to museums and displays.

In addition to the whole-group sessions, there are individual or small-group meetings to discuss the progress of individual projects closely and focus on specific issues arising from individual projects. Outside the formal meetings, I am available to meet individuals. I also read and comment on notes or short drafts. Students are strongly encouraged to meet with each other to exchange information and discuss areas of overlap in their projects.

Further information

Connected Curriculum : research-based education at UCL

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Electricity History

Electricity Explained Channels

A Timeline Of History Of Electricity

By R.W. Hurst, Editor

Electricity development and history are very interesting. However, humankind's knowledge of magnetism and static electricity began more than 2,000 years before they were first recognized to be separate (though interrelated) phenomena. Once that intellectual threshold was crossed - in 1551 - scientists took more bold steps forward (and more than a few steps back) toward better understanding and harnessing these forces. The next 400 years would see a succession of discoveries that advanced our knowledge of magnetism, electricity and the interplay between them, leading to ever more powerful insights and revolutionary inventions.

This Timeline Of History Of Electricity highlights important events and developments in these fields from prehistory to the beginning of the 21st century.

600 BC - Thales of Miletus writes about amber becoming charged by rubbing - he was describing what we now call static electricity.

900 BC - Magnus, a Greek shepherd, walks across a field of black stones which pull the iron nails out of his sandals and the iron tip from his shepherd's staff (authenticity not guaranteed). This region becomes known as Magnesia.

600 BC - Thales of Miletos rubs amber ( elektron in Greek) with cat fur and picks up bits of feathers.

1269 - Petrus Peregrinus of Picardy, Italy, discovers that natural spherical magnets (lodestones) align needles with lines of longitude pointing between two pole positions on the stone.

1600 - William Gilbert, court physician to Queen Elizabeth, first coined the term "electricity" from the Greek word for amber. Gilbert wrote about the electrification of many substances in his "De magnete, magneticisique corporibus". He also first used the terms electric force, magnetic pole, and electric attraction. He also discusses static electricity and invents an electric fluid which is liberated by rubbing.

ca. 1620 - Niccolo Cabeo discovers that electricity can be repulsive as well as attractive.

1630 - Vincenzo Cascariolo, a Bolognese shoemaker, discovers fluorescence.

1638 - Rene Descartes theorizes that light is a pressure wave through the second of his three types of matter of which the universe is made. He invents properties of this fluid that make it possible to calculate the reflection and refraction of light. The ``modern'' notion of the aether is born.

1638 - Galileo attempts to measure the speed of light by a lantern relay between distant hilltops. He gets a very large answer.

1644 - Rene Descartes theorizes that the magnetic poles are on the central axis of a spinning vortex of one of his fluids. This vortex theory remains popular for a long time, enabling Leonhard Euler and two of the Bernoullis to share a prize of the French Academy as late as 1743.

1657 - Pierre de Fermat shows that the principle of least time is capable of explaining refraction and reflection of light. Fighting with the Cartesians begins. (This principle for reflected light had been anticipated anciently by Hero of Alexandria.)

1660 - Otto von Guericke invented a machine that produced static electricity.

1665 - Francesco Maria Grimaldi, in a posthumous report, discovers and gives the name of diffraction to the bending of light around opaque bodies.

1667 - Robert Hooke reports in his Micrographia the discovery of the rings of light formed by a layer of air between two glass plates. These were actually first observed by Robert Boyle, which explains why they are now called Newton's rings. In the same work he gives the matching-wave-front derivation of reflection and refraction that is still found in most introductory physics texts. These waves travel through the aether. He also develops a theory of color in which white light is a simple disturbance and colors are complex distortions of the basic simple white form.

1671 - Isaac Newton destroys Hooke's theory of color by experimenting with prisms to show that white light is a mixture of all the colors and that once a pure color is obtained it can never be changed into another color. Newton argues against light being a vibration of the ether, preferring that it be something else that is capable of traveling through the aether. He doesn't insist that this something else consist of particles, but allows that it may be some other kind of emanation or impulse. In Newton's own words, ``...let every man here take his fancy.''

1675 - Olaf Roemer repeats Galileo's experiment using the moons of Jupiter as the distant hilltop. He measures m/s.

1678 - Christiaan Huygens introduces his famous construction and principle, thinks about translating his manuscript into Latin, then publishes it in the original French in 1690. He uses his theory to discuss the double refraction of Iceland Spar. His is a theory of pulses, however, not of periodic waves.

1717 - Newton shows that the ``two-ness'' of double refraction clearly rules out light being aether waves. (All aether wave theories were sound-like, so Newton was right; longitudinal waves can't be polarized.)

1728 - James Bradley shows that the orbital motion of the earth changes the apparent motions of the stars in a way that is consistent with light having a finite speed of travel.

1729 - Stephen Gray shows that electricity doesn't have to be made in place by rubbing but can also be transferred from place to place with conducting wires. He also shows that the charge on electrified objects resides on their surfaces.

1733 - Charles Francois du Fay discovers that electricity comes in two kinds which he called resinous (-) and vitreous (+).

1742 - Thomas Le Seur and Francis Jacquier, in a note to the edition of Newton's Principia that they publish, show that the force law between two magnets is inverse cube.

1745 - Georg Von Kleist discovered that electricity was controllable. Dutch physicist, Pieter van Musschenbroek invented the "Leyden Jar" the first electrical capacitor. Leyden jars store static electricity.

1745 - Pieter van Musschenbroek invents the Leyden jar, or capacitor, and nearly kills his friend Cunaeus.

1747 - Benjamin Franklin invents the theory of one-fluid electricity in which one of Nollet's fluids exists and the other is just the absence of the first. He proposes the principle of conservation of charge and calls the fluid that exists and flows ``positive''. This educated guess ensures that undergraduates will always be confused about the direction of current flow. He also discovers that electricity can act at a distance in situations where fluid flow makes no sense.

1748 - Sir William Watson uses an electrostatic machine and a vacuum pump to make the first glow discharge. His glass vessel is three feet long and three inches in diameter: the first fluorescent light bulb.

1749 - Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet invents the two-fluid theory electricity.

1750 - John Michell discovers that the two poles of a magnet are equal in strength and that the force law for individual poles is inverse square.

1752 - Johann Sulzer puts lead and silver together in his mouth, performing the first recorded ``tongue test'' of a battery.

1759 - Francis Ulrich Theodore Aepinus shows that electrical effects are a combination of fluid flow confined to matter and action at a distance. He also discovers charging by induction.

1762 - Canton reports that a red hot poker placed close to a small electrified body destroys its electrification.

1764 - Joseph Louis Lagrange discovers the divergence theorem in connection with the study of gravitation. It later becomes known as Gauss's law. (See 1813).

1766 - Joseph Priestly, acting on a suggestion in a letter from Benjamin Franklin, shows that hollow charged vessels contain no charge on the inside and based on his knowledge that hollow shells of mass have no gravity inside correctly deduces that the electric force law is inverse square.

ca 1775 - Henry Cavendish invents the idea of capacitance and resistance (the latter without any way of measuring current other than the level of personal discomfort). But being indifferent to fame he is content to wait for his work to be published by Lord Kelvin in 1879.

1777 - Joseph Louis Lagrange invents the concept of the scalar potential for gravitational fields.

1780 - Luigi Galvani causes dead frog legs to twitch with static electricity, then also discovers that the same twitching can be caused by contact with dissimilar metals. His followers invent another invisible fluid, that of ``animal electricity'', to describe this effect.

1782 - Pierre Simon Laplace shows that Lagrange's potential satisfies.

1785 - Charles Augustin Coulomb uses a torsion balance to verify that the electric force law is inverse square. He also proposes a combined fluid/action-at-a-distance theory like that of Aepinus but with two conducting fluids instead of one. Fighting breaks out between single and double fluid partisans. He also discovers that the electric force near a conductor is proportional to its surface charge density and makes contributions to the two-fluid theory of magnetism.

1786 - Italian physician, Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine.

1793 - Alessandro Volta makes the first batteries and argues that animal electricity is just ordinary electricity flowing through the frog legs under the impetus of the force produced by the contact of dissimilar metals. He discovers the importance of ``completing the circuit.'' In 1800 he discovers the Voltaic pile (dissimilar metals separated by wet cardboard) which greatly increases the magnitude of the effect.

1800 - William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle discover that water may be separated into hydrogen and oxygen by the action of Volta's pile.

1801 - Thomas Young gives a theory of Newton's rings based on constructive and destructive interference of waves. He explains the dark spot in the middle by proposing that there is a phase shift on reflection between a less dense and more dense medium, then uses essence of sassafras (whose index of refraction is intermediate between those of crown and flint glass) to get a light spot at the center.

1803 - Thomas Young explains the fringes at the edges of shadows by means of the wave theory of light. The wave theory begins its ascendance, but has one important difficulty: light is thought of as a longitudinal wave, which makes it difficult to explain double refraction effects in certain crystals.

1807 - Humphrey Davy shows that the essential element of Volta's pile is chemical action since pure water gives no effect. He argues that chemical effects are electrical in nature.

1808 - Laplace gives an explanation of double refraction using the particle theory, which Young attacks as improbable.

1808 - Etienne Louis Malus, a military engineer, enters a prize competition sponsored by the French Academy ``To furnish a mathematical theory of double refraction, and to confirm it by experiment.'' He discovers that light reflected at certain angles from transparent substances as well as the separate rays from a double-refracting crystal have the same property of polarization . In 1810 he receives the prize and emboldens the proponents of the particle theory of light because no one sees how a wave theory can make waves of different polarizations.

1811 - Arago shows that some crystals alter the polarization of light passing through them.

1812 - Biot shows that Arago's crystals rotate the plane of polarization about the propagation direction.

1812 - Simeon Denis Poisson further develops the two-fluid theory of electricity, showing that the charge on conductors must reside on their surfaces and be so distributed that the electric force within the conductor vanishes. This surface charge density calculation is carried out in detail for ellipsoids. He also shows that the potential within a distribution of electricity satisfies the equation.

1812 - Michael Faraday, a bookbinders apprentice, writes to Sir Humphrey Davy asking for a job as a scientific assistant. Davy interviews Faraday and finds that he has educated himself by reading the books he was supposed to be binding. He gets the job.

ca. 1813 - Laplace shows that at the surface of a conductor the electric force is perpendicular to the surface.

1813 - Karl Friedrich Gauss rediscovers the divergence theorem of Lagrange. It will later become known as Gauss's law.

1815 - David Brewster establishes his law of complete polarization upon reflection at a special angle now known as Brewster's angle. He also discovers that in addition of uniaxial cystals there are also biaxial ones. For uniaxial crystals there is the faint possibility of a wave theory of longitudinal-type, but this appears to be impossible for biaxial ones.

1816 - David Brewster invents the kaleidoscope. First energy utility in US founded.

1816 - Francois Arago, an associate of Augustin Fresnel, visits Thomas Young and describes to him a series of experiments performed by Fresnel and himself which shows that light of differing polarizations cannot interfere. Reflecting later on this curious effect Young sees that it can be explained if light is transverse instead of longitudinal. This idea is communicated to Fresnel in 1818 and he immediately sees how it clears up many of the remaining difficulties of the wave theory. Six years later the particle theory is dead.

1817 - Augustin Fresnel annoys the French Academy. The Academy, hoping to destroy the wave theory once and for all, proposes diffraction as the prize subject for 1818. To the chagrin of the particle-theory partisans in the Academy the winning memoir in 1818 is that of Augustin Fresnel who explains diffraction as the mutual interference of the secondary waves emitted by the unblocked portions of the incident wave, in the style of Huygens. One of the judges from the particle camp of the Academy is Poisson, who points out that if Fresnel's theory were to be indeed correct, then there should be a bright spot at the center of the shadow of a circular disc. This, he suggests to Fresnel, must be tested experimentally. The experiment doesn't go as Poisson hopes, however, and the spot becomes known as ``Poisson's spot.''

1820 - Hans Christian Oersted discovers that electric current in a wire causes a compass needle to orient itself perpendicular to the wire.

1820 - Andre Marie Ampere, one week after hearing of Oersted's discovery, shows that parallel currents attract each other and that opposite currents attract.

1820 - Jean-Baptiste Biot and Felix Savart show that the magnetic force exerted on a magnetic pole by a wire falls off like 1/ r and is oriented perpendicular to the wire. Whittaker then says that ``This result was soon further analyzed,'' to obtain

1820 - John Herschel shows that quartz samples that rotate the plane of polarization of light in opposite directions have different crystalline forms. This difference is helical in nature.

1821 - Faraday begins electrical work by repeating Oersted's experiments. First electric motor (Faraday).

1821 - Humphrey Davy shows that direct current is carried throughout the volume of a conductor and establishes that for long wires. He also discovers that resistance is increased as the temperature rises.

1822 - Thomas Johann Seebeck discovers the thermoelectric effect by showing that a current will flow in a circuit made of dissimilar metals if there is a temperature difference between the metals.

1824 - Poisson invents the concept of the magnetic scalar potential and of surface and volume pole densities described by the formulas. He also finds the magnetic field inside a spherical cavity within magnetized material.

1825 - Ampere publishes his collected results on magnetism. His expression for the magnetic field produced by a small segment of current is different from that which follows naturally from the Biot-Savart law by an additive term which integrates to zero around closed circuit. It is unfortunate that electrodynamics and relativity decide in favor of Biot and Savart rather than for the much more sophisticated Ampere, whose memoir contains both mathematical analysis and experimentation, artfully blended together. In this memoir are given some special instances of the result we now call Stokes theorem or as we usually write it. Maxwell describes this work as ``one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole, theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full-grown and full-armed, from the brain of the `Newton of electricity'. It is perfect in form and unassailable in accuracy; and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electrodynamics.''

1825 - Fresnel shows that combinations of waves of opposite circular polarization traveling at different speeds can account for the rotation of the plane of polarization.

1826 - Georg Simon Ohm establishes the result now known as Ohm's law. V = IR seems a pretty simple law to name after someone, but the importance of Ohm's work does not lie in this simple proportionality. What Ohm did was develop the idea of voltage as the driver of electric current. He reasoned by making an analogy between Fourier's theory of heat flow and electricity. In his scheme temperature and voltage correspond as do heat flow and electrical current. It was not until some years later that Ohm's electroscopic force ( V in his law) and Poisson's electrostatic potential were shown to be identical.

1827 - Augustin Fresnel publishes a decade of research in the wave theory of light. Included in these collected papers are explanations of diffraction effects, polarization effects, double refraction, and Fresnel's sine and tangent laws for reflection at the interface between two transparent media.

1827 - Claude Louis Marie Henri Navier publishes the correct equations for vibratory motions in one type of elastic solid. This begins the quest for a detailed mathematical theory of the aether based on the equations of continuum mechanics.

1827 - F. Savery, after noticing that the current from a Leyden jar magnetizes needles in alternating layers, conjectures that the electric motion during the discharge consists of a series of oscillations.

1828 - George Green generalizes and extends the work of Lagrange, Laplace, and Poisson and attaches the name potential to their scalar function. Green's theorems are given, as well as the divergence theorem (Gauss's law), but Green doesn't know of the work of Lagrange and Gauss and only references Priestly's deduction of the inverse square law from Franklin's experimental work on the charging of hollow vessels.

1828 - Augustine Louis Cauchy presents a theory similar to Navier's, but based on a direct study of elastic properties rather than using a molecular hypothesis. These equations are more general than Navier's. In Cauchy's theory, and in much of what follows, the aether is supposed to have the same inertia in each medium, but different elastic properties.

1828 - Poisson shows that the equations of Navier and Cauchy have wave solutions of two types: transverse and longitudinal. Mathematical physicists spend the next 50 years trying to invent an elastic aether for which the longitudinal waves are absent.

1831 - Faraday shows that changing currents in one circuit induce currents in a neighboring circuit. Over the next several years he performs hundreds of experments and shows that they can all be explained by the idea of changing magnetic flux. No mathematics is involved, just picture thinking using his field-lines.

1831 - Ostrogradsky rediscovers the divergence theorem of Lagrange, Gauss, and Green. Principles of electromagnetism induction, generation and transmission discovered (Michael Faraday).

1832 - Joseph Henry independently discovers induced currents.

1833 - Faraday begins work on the relation of electricity to chemistry. In one of his notebooks he concludes after a series of experiments, ``...there is a certain absolute quantity of the electric power associated with each atom of matter.''

1834 - Faraday discovers self inductance.

1834 - Jean Charles Peltier discovers the flip side of Seebeck's thermoelectric effect. He finds that current driven in a circuit made of dissimilar metals causes the different metals to be at different temperatures.

1834 - Emil Lenz formulates his rule for determining the direction of Faraday's induced currents. In its original form it was a force law rather than an induced emf law: ``Induced currents flow in such a direction as to produce magnetic forces that try to keep the magnetic flux the same.'' So Lenz would predict that if you try to push a conductor into a strong magnetic field, it will be repelled. He would also predict that if you try to pull a conductor out of a strong magnetic field that the magnetic forces on the induced currents will oppose the pull.

1835 - James MacCullagh and Franz Neumann extend Cauchy's theory to crystalline media

1837 - Faraday discovers the idea of the dielectric constant.

1837 - George Green attacks the elastic aether problem from a new angle. Instead of deriving boundary conditions between different media by finding which ones give agreement with the experimental laws of optics, he derives the correct boundary conditions from general dynamical principles. This advance makes the elastic theories not quite fit with light.

1838 - Faraday shows that the effects of induced electricity in insulators are analogous to induced magnetism in magnetic materials. Those more mathematically inclined immediately appropriate Poisson's theory of induced magnetism

1838 - Faraday discovers Faraday's dark space , a dark region in a glow discharge near the negative electrode.

1839 - James MacCullagh invents an elastic aether in which there are no longitudinal waves. In this aether the potential energy of deformation depends only on the rotation of the volume elements and not on their compression or general distortion. This theory gives the same wave equation as that satisfied by in Maxwell's theory.

1839 - William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) removes some of the objections to MacCullagh's rotation theory by inventing a mechanical model which satisfies MacCullagh's energy of rotation hypothesis. It has spheres, rigid bars, sliding contacts, and flywheels. First fuel cell.

1839 - Cauchy and Green present more refined elastic aether theories, Cauchy's removing the longitudinal waves by postulating a negative compressibility, and Green's using an involved description of crystalline solids.

1841 - Michael Faraday is completely exhausted by his efforts of the previous 2 decades, so he rests for 4 years.

1841 - James Prescott Joule shows that energy is conserved in electrical circuits involving current flow, thermal heating, and chemical transformations.

1842 - F. Neumann and Matthew O'Brien suggest that optical properties in materials arise from differences in the amount of force that the particles of matter exert on the aether as it flows around and between them.

1842 - Julius Robert Mayer asserts that heat and work are equivalent. His paper is rejected by Annalen der Physik .

1842 - Joseph Henry rediscovers the result of F. Savery about the oscillation of the electric current in a capacitive discharge and states, ``The phenomena require us to admit the existence of a principal discharge in one direction, and then several reflex actions backward and forward, each more feeble than the preceding, until equilibrium is restored.''

1842 - Christian Doppler gives the theory of the Doppler effect.

1845 - Faraday quits resting and discovers that the plane of polarization of light is rotated when it travels in glass along the direction of the magnetic lines of force produced by an electromagnet (Faraday rotation).

1845 - Franz Neumann uses (i) Lenz's law, (ii) the assumption that the induced emf is proportional to the magnetic force on a current element, and (iii) Ampere's analysis to deduce Faraday's law. In the process he finds a potential function from which the induced electric field can be obtained, namely the vector potential (in the Coulomb gauge), thus discovering the result which Maxwell wrote.

1846 - George Airy modifies MacCullagh's elastic aether theory to account for Faraday rotation.

1846 - Faraday, inspired by his discovery of the magnetic rotation of light, writes a short paper speculating that light might electro-magnetic in nature. He thinks it might be transverse vibrations of his beloved field lines.

1846 - Faraday discovers diamagnetism. He sees the effect in heavy glass, bismuth, and other materials.

1846 - Wilhelm Weber combines Ampere's analysis, Faraday's experiments, and the assumption of Fechner that currents consist of equal amounts of positive and negative electricity moving opposite to each other at the same speed to derive an electromagnetic theory based on forces between moving charged particles. This theory has a velocity-dependent potential energy and is wrong, but it stimulates much work on electromagnetic theory which eventually leads to the work of Maxwell and Lorenz. It also inspires a new look at gravitation by William Thomson to see if a velocity-dependent correction to the gravitational energy could account for the precession of Mercury's perihelion.

1846 - William Thomson shows that Neumann's electromagnetic potential is in fact the vector potential from which may be obtained.

1847 - Weber proposes that diamagnetism is just Faraday's law acting on molecular circuits. In answering the objection that this would mean that everything should be diamagnetic he correctly guesses that diamagnetism is masked in paramagnetic and ferromagnetic materials because they have relatively strong permanent molecular currents. This work rids the world of magnetic fluids.

1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz writes a memoir ``On the Conservation of Force'' which emphatically states the principle of conservation of energy: ``Conservation of energy is a universal principle of nature. Kinetic and potential energy of dynamical systems may be converted into heat according to definite quantitative laws as taught by Rumford, Mayer, and Joule. Any of these forms of energy may be converted into chemical, electrostatic, voltaic, and magnetic forms.'' He reads it before the Physical Society of Berlin whose older members regard it as too speculative and reject it for publication in Annalen der Physik .

1848-9 - Gustav Kirchoff extends Ohm's work to conduction in three dimensions, gives his laws for circuit networks, and finally shows that Ohm's ``electroscopic force'' which drives current through resistors and the old electrostatic potential of Lagrange, Laplace, and Poisson are the same. He also shows that in steady state electrical currents distribute themselves so as to minimize the amount of Joule heating.

1849 - A. Fizeau repeats Galileo's hilltop experiment (9 km separation distance) with a rapidly rotating toothed wheel and measures m/s.

1849 - George Gabriel Stokes studies diffraction around opaque bodies both theoretically and experimentally and shows that the vibration of aether particles are executed at right angles to the plane of polarization. Three years later he comes to the same conclusion by applying aether theory to light scattered from the sky. This result is, however, inconsistent with optics in crystals.

ca. 1850 - Stokes overcomes some of the difficulties with crystals by turning Cauchy's hypothesis around and letting the elastic properties of the aether be the same in all materials, but allowing the inertia to differ. This gives rise to the conceptual difficulty of having the inertia be different in different directions (in anisotropic crystals).

ca. 1850 - Jean Foucault improves on Fizeau's measurement and uses his apparatus to show that the speed of light is less in water than in air.

1850 - Stokes law is stated without proof by Lord Kelvin (William Thomson). Later Stokes assigns the proof of this theorem as part of the examination for the Smith's Prize. Presumably, he knows how to do the problem. Maxwell, who was a candidate for this prize, later remembers this problem, traces it back to Stokes and calls it Stokes theorem.

1850 - William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) invents the idea of magnetic permeability and susceptibility, along with the separate concepts.

1851 - Thomson gives a general theory of thermoelectric phenomena, describing the effects seen by Seebeck and Peltier.

1853 - Thomson uses Poisson's magnetic theory to derive the correct formula for magnetic energy: He also gives the formula and gives the world the powerful, but confusing, analysis where the forces on circuits are obtained by taking either the positive or negative gradient of the magnetic energy. Knowing which sign to use is, of course, the confusing part.

1853 - Thomson gives the theory of the RLC circuit providing a mathematical description for the observations of Henry and Savery.

1854 - Faraday clears up the problem of disagreements in the measured speeds of signals along transmission lines by showing that it is crucial to include the effect of capacitance.

1854 - Thomson, in a letter to Stokes, gives the equation of telegraphy ignoring the inductance: where R is the cable resistance and where C is the capacitance per unit length. Since this is the diffusion equation, the signal does not travel at a definite speed.

1855 - Faraday retires, living quietly in a house provided by the Queen until his death in 1867.

1855 - James Clerk Maxwell writes a memoir in which he attempts to marry Faraday's intuitive field line ideas with Thomson's mathematical analogies. In this memoir the physical importance of the divergence and curl operators for electromagnetism first become evident.

1857 - Gustav Kirchoff derives the equation of telegraphy for an aerial coaxial cable where the inductance is important and derives the full telegraphy equation: where L and C are the inductance per unit length and the capacitance per unit length. He recognizes that when the resistance is small, this is the wave equation with propagation speed, which for a coaxial cable turns out to be very close to the speed of light. Kirchoff notices the coincidence, and is thus the first to discover that electromagnetic signals can travel at the speed of light.

1861 - Bernhard Riemann develops a variant of Weber's electromagnetic theory which is also wrong.

1861 - Maxwell publishes a mechanical model of the electromagnetic field. Magnetic fields correspond to rotating vortices with idle wheels between them and electric fields correspond to elastic displacements, hence displacement currents. This addition completes Maxwell's equations and it is now easy for him to derive the wave equation exactly as done in our textbooks on electromagnetism and to note that the speed of wave propagation was close to the measured speed of light.

Maxwell writes, ``We can scarcely avoid the inference that light in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.

Thomson, on the other hand, says of the displacement current, ``(it is a) curious and ingenious, but not wholly tenable hypothesis.''

1864 - Maxwell reads a memoir before the Royal Society in which the mechanical model is stripped away and just the equations remain. He also discusses the vector and scalar potentials, using the Coulomb gauge. He attributes physical significance to both of these potentials. He wants to present the predictions of his theory on the subjects of reflection and refraction, but the requirements of his mechanical model keep him from finding the correct boundary conditions, so he never does this calculation.

1867 - Stokes performs experiments that kill his own anisotropic inertia theory.

1867 - Joseph Boussinesq suggests that instead of aether being different in different media, perhaps the aether is the same everywhere, but it interacts differently with different materials, similar to the modern electromagnetic wave theory.

1867 - Riemann proposes a simple electric theory of light in which Poisson's equation is replaced.

1867 - Ludwig Lorenz develops an electromagnetic theory of light in which the scalar and vector potentials, in retarded form, are the starting point. He shows that these retarded potentials each satisfy the wave equation and that Maxwell's equations for the field potentials. His vector potential does not obey the Coulomb gauge, however, but another relation now known as the Lorenz gauge. Although he is able to derive Maxwell's equations from his retarded potentials, he does not subscribe to Maxwell's view that light involves electromagnetic waves in the aether. He feels, rather, that the fundamental basis of all luminous vibrations is electric currents, arguing that space has enough matter in it to support the necessary currents.

1868 - Maxwell decides that giving physical significance to the scalar and vector potentials is a bad idea and bases his further work on light.

1869 - Maxwell presents the first calculation in which a dispersive medium is made up of atoms with natural frequencies. This makes possible detailed modeling of dispersion with refractive indices having resonant denominators.

1869 - Hittorf finds that cathode rays can cast a shadow.

1870 - Helmholtz derives the correct laws of reflection and refraction from Maxwell's equations by using the following boundary condition. Once these boundary conditions are taken Maxwell's theory is just a repeat of MacCullagh's theory. The details were not given by Helmholtz himself, but appear rather in the inaugural dissertation of H. A. Lorentz.

1870-1900 - The hunt is on for physical models of the aether which are natural and from which Maxwell's equations can be derived. The physicists who work on this problem include Maxwell, Thomson, Kirchoff, Bjerknes, Leahy, Fitz Gerald, Helmholtz, and Hicks.

1872 - E. Mascart looks for the motion of the earth through the aether by measuring the rotation of the plane of polarization of light propagated along the axis of a quartz crystal.

1873 - Maxwell publishes his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism , which discusses everything known at the time about electromagnetism from the viewpoint of Faraday. His own theory is not very thoroughly discussed, but he does introduce his electromagnetic stress tensor in this work, including the accompanying idea of electromagnetic momentum.

1875 - John Kerr shows that ordinary dielectrics subjected to strong electric fields become double refracting, showing directly that electric fields and light are closely related.

1876 - Henry Rowland performs an experiment inspired by Helmholtz which shows for the first time that moving electric charge is the same thing as an electric current.

1876 - A. Bartoli infers the necessity of light pressure from thermal arguments, thus beginnning the exploration of the connection between electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

1878 - Edison Electric Light Co. (US) and American Electric and Illuminating (Canada) founded.

1879 - J. Stefan discovers the Stefan-Boltzmann law, i.e., that radiant emission is proportional.

1879 - Edwin Hall performs an experiment that had been suggested by Henry Rowland and discovers the Hall effect, including its theoretical description by means of the Hall term in Ohm's law.

1879 - Sir William Crookes invents the radiometer and studies the interaction of beams of cathode ray particles in vacuum tubes. First commercial power station opens in San Francisco, uses Charles Brush generator and arc lights. First commercial arc lighting system installed, Cleveland, Ohio. Thomas Edison demonstrates his incandescent lamp, Menlo Park, New Jersey.

1879 - Ludwig Boltzmann uses Hall's result to estimate the speed of charge carriers (assuming that charge carriers are only of one sign.)

1880 - Rowland shows that Faraday rotation can be obtained by combining Maxwell's equations and the Hall term in Ohm's law, assuming that displacement currents are affected in the same way as conduction currents.

1881 - J. J. Thomson attempts to verify the existence of the displacement current by looking for magnetic effects produced by the changing electric field made by a moving charged sphere.

1881 - George Fitz Gerald points out that J. J. Thomson's analysis is incorrect because he left out the effects of the conduction current of the moving sphere. Including both currents makes the separate effect of the displacement current disappear.

1881 - Helmholtz, in a lecture in London, points out that the idea of charged particles in atoms can be consistent with Maxwell's and Faraday's ideas, helping to pave the way for our modern picture of particles and fields interacting instead of thinking about everything as a disturbance of the aether, as was popular after Maxwell.

1881 - Albert Michelson and Edwin Morley attempt to measure the motion of the earth through the aether by using interferometry. They find no relative velocity. Michelson interprets this result as supporting Stokes hypothesis in which the aether in the neighborhood of the earth moves at the earth's velocity.

1883 - Fitz Gerald proposes testing Maxwell's theory by using oscillating currents in what we would now call a magnetic dipole antenna (loop of wire). He performs the analysis and discovers that very high frequencies are required to make the test. Later that year he proposes obtaining the required high frequencies by discharging a capacitor into a circuit.

1883-5 - Horace Lamb and Oliver Heaviside analyze the interaction of oscillating electromagnetic fields with conductors and discover the effect of skin depth.

1884 - John Poynting shows that Maxwell's equations predict that energy flows through empty space with the energy flux. He also investigates energy flow in Faraday fashion by assigning energy to moving tubes of electric and magnetic flux.

1884 - Heinrich Hertz asserts that made by charges and made by a changing magnetic field are identical. Working from dynamical ideas based on this assumption and some of Maxwell's equations, Hertz is able to derive the rest of them.

1887 - Svante Arrhenius deduces that in dilute solutions electrolytes are completely dissociated into positive and negative ions.

1887 - Hertz finds that ultraviolet light falling on the negative electrode in a spark gap facilitates conduction by the gas in the gap.

1888 - R. T. Glazebrook revives one of Cauchy's wave theories and combines it with Stokes anisotropic aether inertia theory to get agreement with the experiments of Stokes in 1867.

1888 - Hertz discovers that oscillating sparks can be produced in an open secondary circuit if the frequency of the primary is resonant with the secondary. He uses this radiator to show that electrical signals are propagated along wires and through the air at about the same speed, both about the speed of light. He also shows that his electric radiations, when passed through a slit in a screen, exhibit diffraction effects. Polarization effects using a grating of parallel metal wires are also observed.

1888 - Roentgen shows that when an uncharged dielectric is moved at right angles to a magnetic field is produced.

1889 - Hertz gives the theory of radiation from his oscillating spark gap.

1889 - Oliver Heaviside finds the correct form for the electric and magnetic fields of a moving charged particle, valid for all speeds v < c .

1889 - J. J. Thomson shows that Canton's effect (1762) in which a red hot poker can neutralize the electrification of a small charged body is due to electron emission causing the air between the poker and the body to become conducting.

1890 - Fitz Gerald uses the retarded potentials of L. Lorenz to calculate electric dipole radiation from Hertz's radiator.

1892 - Oliver Lodge performs experiments on the propagation of light near rapidly moving steel disks to test Stokes hypothesis that moving matter drags the aether with it. No such effect is observed.

1892 - Hendrik Anton Lorentz presents his electron theory of electrified matter and the aether. This theory combines Maxwell's equations, with the source terms and with the Lorentz force law for the acceleration of charged particles: Lorentz's aether is simply space endowed with certain dynamical properties. Lorentz gives the modern theory of dielectrics involving and also includes the effect of magnetized matter.

He also gives what we now call the Drude-Lorentz harmonic oscillator model of the index of refraction. But Lorentz's theory has a ``stationary aether'', which conflicts with the negative Michelson-Morley result.

1892 - George Fitz Gerald proposes length contraction as a way to reconcile Lorentz's theory and the null results on the motion of the earth through the aether. At the end of this year Lorentz endorses this idea.

1894 - J. J. Thomson measures the speed of cathode rays and shows that they travel much more slowly than the speed of light. The aether model of cathode rays begins to die.

1894 - Philip Lenard studies the penetration of cathode rays through matter.

1895 - Pierre Curie experimentally discovers Curie's law for paramagnetism and also shows that there is no temperature effect for diamagnetism.

1895 - Lorentz, in his ``Search for a theory of electrical and optical effects in moving bodies'' gives the Lorentz transformation to first order in v / c . The transformed time variable he calls ``local time''.

1895 - Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays produced by bremsstrahlung in cathode ray tubes.

1896 - Arthur Shuster, Emil Wiechert, and George Stokes propose that X-rays are aether waves of exceedingly small wavelength.

1896 - J. J. Thomson discovers that materials through which X-rays pass are rendered conducting.

1896 - Henri Becquerel discovers that some sort of natural radiation from uranium salts can expose a photographic plate wrapped in thick black paper.

1896 - P. Zeeman discovers the splitting of atomic line spectra by a magnetic field.

1896 - Lorentz gives an electron theory of the Zeeman effect.

1897 - J. J. Thomson argues that cathode rays must be charged particles smaller in size than atoms (Emil Wiechert made the same suggestion independently in this same year). In response Fitz Gerald suggests that ``we are dealing with free electrons in these cathode rays.''

1897 - W. Wien discovers that positively-charged moving particles can also be made (the so-called canal rays of E. Goldstein) and that they have a much smaller q / m ratio than cathode rays.

1897 - J. J. Thomson deflects cathode rays by crossed electric and magnetic fields and measures e / m .

1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie separate from pitchblende two highly radioactive elements which they name polonium and radium.

1899 - Ernest Rutherford discovers that the rays from uranium come in two types, which he calls alpha and beta radiation.

1900 - Marie and Pierre Curie show that beta rays and cathode rays are identical.

1900 - Emil Wiechert shows that simply replacing the distributed charge from Lorentz's theory with the charge of a moving point particle gives incorrect results. Instead the Lienard-Wiechert retarded potentials must be used.

1900 - Joseph Larmor obtains the second order corrections to the Lorentz Transformation.

1901 - R. Blondlot performs experiments that show that Lorentz's theory in which there is no moving aether gives the correct result in cases where the hypothesis of a moving aether gives the wrong result.

1902 - Lord Rayleigh performs experiments to test whether the Fitz Gerald contraction is capable of causing double refraction in moving transparent substances. No such effect is found.

1903 - The Hagen-Rubens connections between the conductivity of metals and their optical properties are experimentally established.

1903 - Lorentz gives the famous square root formulas for the Lorentz transformation giving the effect to all orders in v / c .

1904 - Lorentz gives his electron-collision theory of electrical conduction

1905 - H. A. Wilson performs experiments similar to those of Blondlot; again, Lorentz's theory is found to give the correct result.

1905 - Albert Einstein completes Lorentz's work on space-time transformations and relativity is born.

1906 - Ilchester, Maryland; Fully submerged hydroelectric plant built inside Ambursen Dam.

1907 - Lee De Forest invented the electric amplifier.

1909 - First pumped storage plant (Switzerland).

1910 - Ernest R. Rutherford measured the distribution of an electric charge within the atom.

1911 - Air conditioning. R. D. Johnson invents differential surge tank and Johnson hydrostatic penstock valve.

1913 - Electric refrigerator. Robert Millikan measured the electric charge on a single electron.

1920 - First U.S. station to only burn pulverized coal. Federal Power Commission (FPC).

1922 - Connecticut Valley Power Exchange (CONVEX) starts, pioneering interconnection between utilities.

1928 - Construction of Boulder Dam begins. Federal Trade Commission begins investigation of holding companies.

1933 - Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) established.

1935 - Public Utility Holding Company Act. Federal Power Act. Securities and Exchange Commission. Bonneville Power Administration. First night baseball game in major leagues.

1936 - Highest steam temperature reaches 900 degrees Fahrenheit vs. 600 degrees Fahrenheit in early 1920s. 287 Kilovolt line runs 266 miles to Boulder (Hoover) Dam. Rural Electrification Act.

1947 - Transistor invented.

1953 - First 345 Kilovolt transmission line. First nuclear power station ordered.

1954 - First high voltage direct current (HVDC) line (20 megawatts/1900 Kilovolts, 96 Km). Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allows private ownership of nuclear reactors.

1963 - Clean Air Act.

1965 - Northeast Blackout.

1968 - North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) formed.

1969 - National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

1970 - Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formed. Water and Environmental Quality Act. Clean Air Act of 1970.

1972 - Clean Water Act of 1972.

1975 - Brown's Ferry nuclear accident.

1977 - New York City blackout. Department of Energy (DOE) formed.

1978 - Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) passed, ends utility monopoly over generation. Power Plant and Industrial Fuel Use Act limits use of natural gas in electric generation (repealed 1987).

1979 - Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

1980 - First U.S. windfarm. Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act establishes regional regulation and planning.

1981 - PURPA ruled unconstitutional by Federal judge.

1982 - U.S. Supreme Court upholds legality of PURPA in FERC v. Mississippi (456 US 742).

1984 - Annapolis, N.S., tidal power plant-first of its kind in North America (Canada).

1985 - Citizens Power, first power marketer, goes into business.

1986 - Chernobyl nuclear accident (USSR).

1990 - Clean Air Act amendments mandate additional pollution controls.

1992 - National Energy Policy Act.

1997 - ISO New England begins operation (first ISO). New England Electric sells power plants (first major plant divestiture).

1998 - California opens market and ISO. Scottish Power (UK) to buy Pacificorp, first foreign takeover of US utility. National (UK) Grid then announces purchase of New England Electric System.

1999 - Electricity marketed on Internet. FERC issues Order 2000, promoting regional transmission.

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1 Choose The Right Conductor of Electricity
2 Electricity and Magnetism - Power Explained
3 Tidal Electricity From Wave Action
4 Electricity Windmill Explained
5 Three Phase Electricity Explained
6 Transformer Grounding Explained
7 Voltage Drop Calculator
8 Kirchhoff's Law
9 Electrical Energy Explained
10 Resistances in Parallel
11 Sources of Electricity
12 Impedance Definition
13 What is a Resistor?
14 Electricity Generation Power Production
15 Resistance in Series Explained

TRAINING EF COURSES

Analytic Research Foundations for the Next-Generation Electric Grid (2016)

Chapter: 7 case studies, 7 case studies, introduction.

This chapter presents several case studies, each of which connects power grid problems to mathematical and computational challenges. The chapter’s overall goal is to illustrate some current mathematical and computational techniques in greater detail than could be captured in earlier chapters. The first section provides an overview of some of the key optimization software used at one of the electricity markets mentioned in Chapter 2 (PJM) and discusses how solving the mathematical challenges would improve its capabilities. That is followed by a case study addressing how to predict and handle high-impact, low-frequency events that could threaten our critical infrastructure. The section “Case Study in Data-Centered Asset Maintenance: Predicting Failures in Underground Power Distribution Networks” discusses the prediction of failures that occur more commonly in which a single piece of equipment fails. This ties into the problem of data-driven asset maintenance, where each asset is a physical component of the grid (e.g., a cable or a transformer) that needs to be maintained before it fails. The section “Case Study in Synchrophasors” discusses synchrophasors, which utilize sensors that can determine both the magnitude and phase angles of power system voltages at rates of 30 to 60 samples per second. The final section presents a case study on real-time, inverter-based control, where potential problems are not only detected, but fast calculations and controls also are utilized to push signals back toward their reference settings.

CASE STUDY IN OPTIMIZATION: PJM’S DAILY OPERATIONS

PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Acting as a neutral and independent party, PJM operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the high-voltage electricity grid to ensure reliability for more than 61 million people. PJM Market Operations coordinates the continuous buying, selling, and delivery of wholesale electricity through the energy market. In its role as market operator, PJM balances the needs of suppliers, wholesale customers, and other market participants, and monitors market activities to ensure open, fair, and equitable access. The operation of PJM’s various markets requires the use of many software applications, which vary in purpose and complexity. The next subsection contains a high-level description of applications that are used to support the operation of PJM, which show how important optimization tools are to the power grid in general.

Day-Ahead Market

As covered in Chapter 2 , the purpose of the day-ahead market is to make the generator commitment decisions a day ahead of time so the generators have sufficient time to start up or shut down. This market utilizes several different key applications, which are discussed in this subsection.

The Resource Scheduling and Commitment application is a mixed-integer program responsible for committing the bulk—more than 90 percent—of the resource commitments for the PJM system. The following equation presents a simplified version of the unit commitment problem that PJM solves every day to commit resources in the day-ahead market. The objective function of day-ahead unit commitment is to minimize the total production cost of the system while adhering to the enforced transmission limitations. That is,

Subject to the following constraints:

1. Power balance constraint

2. Ancillary reserve constraint

3. Capacity constraints

For simplicity, neither the objective function nor the constraints are shown in the above unit commitment problem formulation, but they are included in the actual day-ahead market clearing software. Some elements that are in the actual formulation but omitted here for simplicity are transmission limitations enforced in the day-ahead market; temporal constraints of units such as start-up times and minimum run times; and the pumped storage hydro-optimization model that PJM currently uses.

A second piece of software used in the day-ahead market is the scheduling, pricing, and dispatch (SPD) application, a linear program that dispatches physical generation and demand resources already committed by resource scheduling and commitment. It can also dispatch virtual bids, including increment offers, decrement bids, and up-to-congestion transactions. Virtual bids are fundamental components of two-settlement markets in every independent system operator (ISO) /regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States. They are financial instruments bid in by market participants to arbitrage differences between the day-ahead markets and real-time markets. The main benefits of virtual bids are mitigating the unbalance in supply and demand of market power and facilitating the convergence of price and unit commitment.

The third package is known as the simultaneous feasibility test (SFT), which is a contingency analysis program that performs a security analysis of the day-ahead market (details on contingency analysis are covered in Chapters 1 and 3 ). The SFT screens each dispatch hour for N – 1 overloads. If one is encountered, the SFT application passes information back to the SPD application regarding the N – 1 overload, and the SPD application enforces a specific transmission constraint to mitigate the overload and dispatches resources and calculated prices to appropriately reflect this limitation.

Real-Time Markets

The set of applications described in this section is part of the suite of applications that works simultaneously to control and price the PJM system in real time. The suite of applications includes tools that procure the ancillary services discussed in Chapter 2 and that provide resource commitment and dispatch functionality and, ultimately, the calculation of 5-minute locational marginal costs (LMPs) across the system (LMPs are also discussed in Chapter 2 ). In the real-time market tools there is no equivalent of the SFT application that exists in the day-ahead market. This is because N – 1 security constraints are identified by the security analysis package in PJM’s Energy Management System and are passed right into the dispatch tools listed below. A block diagram of these applications is given in Figure 7.1 , with each briefly discussed.

The Ancillary Services Optimizer is software that solves a mixed-integer program to optimize PJM’s hour-ahead ancillary services. This application jointly optimizes energy and reserves.

The Intermediate Term Security Constrained Economic Dispatch is a mixed-integer program that provides a time-coupled 2-hour forecast and unit commitment. This application uses forecast data and generator offer parameters to create a dispatch trajectory and unit commitment plans for the next 2 hours. The generator dispatch points calculated by this application are not used for system control. The main purpose of this application is to provide intraday unit commitment information to the system operator.

The Real Time Security Constrained Economic Dispatch (RT SCED) is a 10-min forward linear program that produces the economic dispatch points for all resources on the PJM system. PJM uses this application to dispatch all online generation resources from their current operating point to their most economic operating point based on a 10-min-ahead forecast of system conditions. For example, an RT SCED solution that is executed at 7:45 a.m. uses the current operating state of the system provided by the state estimator as a set of initial conditions. The application then uses load and constraint forecast information for 7:55 a.m., in addition to generator offer information such as ramp rates and the real power minimum/maximum limits, to dispatch the set of online generation resources of PJM in a least-cost fashion to meet system expectations 10 min into the future. This application runs every 5 min or on command by the PJM system operator.

The Locational Pricing Calculator is an application that is identical to the RT SCED application except that the market prices calculated in this application are for the entire network model as opposed to just for generation buses.

Capacity Market—Reliability Pricing Model Optimization

This is the market-clearing engine that clears the PJM capacity markets’ base residual and incremental capacity auctions. This application is a mixed-integer program that is used to clear PJM’s 3-year forward capacity auction. The main capacity auction, the Base Residual Auction, is run annually 3 years before the actual year for which the capacity is committed. This application uses demand curves to express the willingness to pay for capacity and supply offers to clear the market.

Financial Transmission Rights

Financial transmission rights (FTRs) provide a mechanism by which market participants can hedge against potential losses in the LMP market by providing a stream of revenue when there are price differences in the LMPs between different locations in the system, along what is known as an energy path. FTRs are acquired through auctions. Associated with FTR auctions is the SPD application, which is a linear program that dispatches FTR bids up to cleared quantities. The clearing of an FTR auction is similar to the clearing of point-to-point transactions like up-to-congestion transactions in the day-ahead market. These bid types are described by source and sink locations, as well as a maximum willingness to pay for the price spread between the locations. If the transaction clears, it imposes a flow on the transmission system that is based on the source and sink location and the topology of the system.

Challenges for the Day-Ahead Unit Commitment Formulation

The day-ahead market unit commitment problem is the most complex problem solved by most ISO/RTOs that operate power markets. Building on what was presented in the section “Day-Ahead Markets,” the problem could also be formulated using a Lagrangian relaxation where commitment decisions are approximated. The section on Day-Ahead Markets presents a mixed-integer program (MIP) formulation, where binary variables are used to more precisely model discrete decisions. While the MIP provides a more precise solution, it also takes longer to solve than the approximated Lagrangian relaxation solution. The MIP formulation that PJM utilizes to solve the day-ahead market unit commitment problem produces an efficient, reliable unit commitment that is the basis for the next operating day. Like anything else, however, it can be improved with the proper direction and investment.

ISOs and RTOs solve many other optimization problems to schedule and dispatch the system and clear power markets, but all can be derived by simplifying the day-ahead market unit commitment problem. Therefore, typically any challenges encountered in the solution process will be evident somewhere in the day-ahead market. Below is a brief summary of some of the common challenges PJM encounters:

Significant increases in bid and offer volumes will increase the MIP solution time because of an increased number of binary and continuous variables.
Large numbers of transmission constraints combined with continuous variables can cause a very dense matrix, which limits the ability to use more efficient sparse matrix solution techniques. Additionally, large numbers of continuous variables increase the time to solve each linear program (LP) in the search tree during the MIP searching process.
Increasing the MIP gap to improve convergence tolerance and consistency between the LP and MIP solutions degrades performance exponentially. Decreasing the MIP gap to improve performance may result in nonunique MIP solutions.

The above challenges are in some way related to the size and scalability of the general unit commitment problem that exists today. The challenges in solution time presented by these issues typically have been addressed by increasing computer processing capability. If Moore’s law continues to hold true, the increases in computer capability may be able to meet the needs of the current unit commitment problem PJM solves. This does not change the need for mathematical work in the short term, however, nor does it change the fact that the problem is likely to become substantially larger as the power grid changes.

In order to make a step change in the size and complexity of the unit commitment problem being solved, there likely needs to be a significant increase in processing capability or a reformulation of the problem. For example, the ability to solve an ac unit commitment problem would be a significant breakthrough for ISO/RTOs in terms of unit commitment accuracy and efficiency. In today’s dc models, voltage and reactive constraints are linearized into dc approximations that attempt to model voltage restrictions that are real power flow limitations. This practice has been in place since the inception of power markets in the United States in the late 1990s; however, the practice still results in some unit commitment and market inefficiencies that a better model of ac constraints during the commitment, dispatch, and pricing process could improve.

An example of a simplification that is widely used is the modeling of a reactive limit in a dc model. Currently, reactive limits are an input into the dc problem based on offline studies and a predefined local area unit commitment, as opposed to being optimized as part of the unit commitment problem itself. In reality, the level of the reactive limit will vary based not only on the actual units committed but also on where they are dispatched, because of the relationship between active power and reactive power on generators. Currently, this level of granularity cannot be modeled efficiently enough to solve the problem within the time frame of the day-ahead market; therefore, the outcome of that market may be less efficient than it could have been. The general result is less transparent market prices and out-of-market uplift payments.

Approximated voltage constraints can also be problematic. From a market efficiency perspective, dispatching to a dc approximation of a voltage constraint can create some undesirable outcomes. For example, suppose 100 MW of FTR are sold on an energy path based on the thermal limit of the facility. If that path is then constrained in the day-ahead market or in real time to a flow less than the 100 MW of the FTRs sold because it is being used as a thermal proxy for a voltage constraint, the result will be underfunded FTRs on that path. The level of underfunding will vary depending on the difference between the FTR and day-ahead market and real-time market flows, as well as the shadow price to control the thermal surrogate.

In the dc-only solution in use today, voltage constraints are linearized so that they can be enforced in a linear program. This solution has its shortcomings; however, it is likely that there is a point of diminishing returns with the full ac model such that expansion of the problem beyond a certain point would yield little or no discernable benefit. The most efficient solution might be a blend of the two; the efforts focused on improving the model should consider the benefits and drawbacks of each.

For example, the breakpoint for gaining accuracy by implementing additional ac constraints in the model may stop at a certain voltage level (or in a certain geographic area surrounding a reactive or voltage constraint), such that those constraints would only need to be implemented selectively. This would cut down on the complexity added to the model, while adding the information needed to resolve these types of constraints more efficiently.

CASE STUDY IN MATHEMATICAL NEEDS FOR THE MODELING AND MITIGATION OF HIGH-IMPACT, LOW-FREQUENCY EVENTS

Worldwide, the bulk power system is one of the most critical infrastructures, vital to society in many ways, but it is not immune to severe disruptions that could threaten the health, safety, or economic well-being of the citizens it serves. The electric power industry has well-established planning and operating procedures in place to address “normal” emergency events (such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms) that occur from time to time and disrupt the supply of electricity. However, the industry has much less experience with planning for, and responding to, what the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) calls high-impact, low-frequency (HILF) events ( NERC, 2010 ).

The events that fall into this category must meet two criteria. First, they need to be extremely rare or they may never have actually occurred but are plausible. Second, their impact must be potentially catastrophic across a broad portion of the power system. These are events that if they occurred, could bring prolonged blackouts on a large scale, have an adverse economic impact reaching into the trillions of dollars, and kill millions of people. Our modern, just-in-time economy is becoming increasing fragile with respect to disruptions to critical infrastructures in which even short-time, localized blackouts are quite disruptive. Imagine if the power went out for many millions of people and would not be coming back on for weeks or months!

NERC identified several events that fall into the HILF category, including (1) coordinated physical attacks or cyberattacks, (2) pandemics, (3) high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs), and (4) large-scale geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs). One such disturbance, a solar corona mass ejection, is shown in Figure 7.2 . The identification of these risks was not new with the 2010 report ( NERC, 2010 ), and some work has been done over the years to try to mitigate their impacts. One example is the recently published Electric Grid Protection (E-Pro) Handbook ( Stockton, 2014 ). Yet, collectively, HILF events present an interesting case study on the mathematical and computational challenges needed for the next-generation electric grid.

The existing power grid is certainly resilient, often able to operate reliably with a number of devices unexpectedly out of service. While blackouts are not rare, most are small in scale and short term, caused by local weather (e.g., thunderstorms), animals, vegetation, and equipment failures. Regional blackouts, affecting up to several million people for potentially a week or two, occur less frequently. Such events are usually due to ice storms, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, severe storms, and, occasionally, equipment failure.

As an example, the derecho that happened in late June 2012 in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Midwest was one of the most destructive and deadly, fast-moving, and severe thunderstorm complexes in North American history. It was 200 miles wide, 600 miles long and registered winds as high as 100 mph as it tracked across the region. The morning after the event approximately 4.2 million customers were without electricity across 11 states and the District of Columbia, and restoration took 7 to 10 days ( DOE, 2012 ). A second example that same year was Superstorm Sandy, which caused 8.5 million customer power outages across 24 states, causing damage estimated at $65 billion ( Abi-Samra et al., 2014 ).

While tragic for those affected, aid from unaffected utilities helps to speed the recovery, and electric utility control centers have long experience in dealing with weather-related events. For example, during Superstorm Sandy utilities conducted the largest movement of restoration crews in history, with more than 70,000 utility personnel from across the United States and Canada deploying to support power restoration, and power restoration was an overriding priority for all U.S. federal departments, including the Department of Defense ( Stockton, 2014 ).

HILF events are in another, almost unthinkable category in which outages could affect tens of millions for potentially months. But ignoring these threats will not make them go away. HILF events are a category where fundamental research in the mathematical sciences could yield good dividends. The event types in this category are different and they require unique solutions. However, they also have commonalities that the committee describes here in presenting some of the relevant mathematical and computational research challenges.

Interdisciplinary Modeling

The HILF events are all interdisciplinary and hence cannot be solved by experts from any single domain. GMDs start at the Sun, travel through space, interact with Earth’s magnetic fields to induce electric fields at the surface that are dependent on the conductivity of Earth’s crust going down hundreds of kilometers and that ultimately cause quasi-dc currents to flow in the high-voltage transmission grid, saturating the transformers, causing increased power system harmonics, heating in the transformers, and higher reactive power loss and resulting in a potential voltage collapse ( NERC, 2012 ). In March 1989 a GMD estimated to have a magnetic field variation of up to 500 nT/min caused the collapse of Hydro-Québec’s electricity transmission system and damaged equipment, including a generator step-up transformer at the Salem Nuclear Plant in New Jersey. More concerning is the potential for much larger GMDs, such as the ones that occurred in 1921 and 1859, before the development of large-scale grids, with magnetic field variations estimated to have been as much as 5,000 nT/min; such GMDs could cause catastrophic damage to different infrastructures, including the electric grid ( Kappenman, 2012 ).

HEMPs have time scales ranging from nanoseconds to minutes. On the longer time scale of minutes, HEMP E3 1 is similar to an extremely large GMD, except with a faster rise time, requiring power system transient stability (TS) and TS-level modeling. Hence HEMPs would involve not only the disciplines surrounding GMD but also those surrounding the dynamics of nuclear explosions. A pandemic could affect a huge number of people, simultaneously impacting a large number of coupled infrastructures, including health, water, natural gas, and police and fire services. To defend against coordinated physical attacks would require a combination of power system knowledge and knowledge associated with the protection of physical assets, whereas defense against coordinated cyberattacks would need a combination of power system and cybersecurity domain knowledge. In modeling across different domains, each with its own assumptions and biases, mathematicians would be well positioned to help bridge the gaps between disciplines.

Rare Event Modeling

There is a need for research associated with HILFs in the area of rare event modeling. HILF events can be thought of as extreme manifestations of often more common occurrences. For example, while extreme GMDs are quite rare, more modest GMDs occur regularly, resulting in increasing quantities of data associated with their impacts on the grid. The same could be said for pandemics, while a large-scale attack on the grid would be a more severe manifestation of the disturbances (either deliberate or weather-induced) that occur regularly. The research challenge is extrapolation from the data sets associated with the more benign events.

Resilience Control Center Design

HILFs will stress the power system’s cyberinfrastructure. This could come about as a result of either a direct cyberattack or the stressing of computational infrastructure and algorithms in ways not envisioned by their design specifications. As an example, one impact of a GMD (or a HEMP E3) would be increased reactive power consumption on the high-voltage transformers. However, existing state estimator (SE) models do not provide for these reactive losses. Hence it is likely that during a moderate to severe GMD the SE would not converge, leaving the

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1 The E3 component (a designation of the International Electrotechnical Commission, or IEC) of the pulse is a very slow pulse, lasting tens to hundreds of seconds, that is caused by the nuclear detonation heaving the Earth’s magnetic field out of the way, followed by the restoration of the magnetic field to its natural place.

control center without the benefit of the other advanced network analysis tools. Another issue is the potential inundation of data in either the communication infrastructure or in the application software. For example, during the blackout of August 14, 2003, operators in FirstEnergy Corp.’s control center were overwhelmed with phone calls, whereas the Midcontinent ISO real-time contingency analysis experienced hundreds of violations ( U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, 2004 ). Resilient control center software design and testing is a key area for future research. Effective visualization of stressed system conditions is also an important area for computational research.

Resilience Power System Design

Ultimately the goal of HILF research is to either eliminate the risk or reduce its consequences. As such, there are a number of interesting research areas to pursue depending on the type of HILF. Of course, a starting point for this work is the ability to have reasonable models of the events, and the economic impacts of all mitigations need to be considered. One promising area is the extent to which the impact of GMDs and HEMP E3s can be mitigated through modified operating procedures, improved protection systems, or GMD blocking devices on transformer neutrals. Algorithms for GMD blocking device placement could leverage advances in mixed-integer programming algorithms. The impacts of cyberattacks or physical attacks could be mitigated by adaptive system islanding. The deployment of more distributed energy resources, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), could make the grid more resilient if they were enhanced by storage capabilities or coupled with other, less intermittent resources to allow more of the load to be satisfied by potentially autonomous microgrids.

CASE STUDY IN DATA-CENTERED ASSET MAINTENANCE: PREDICTING FAILURES IN UNDERGROUND POWER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

Figure 7.3 illustrates the genesis of a manhole fire and its results. The oldest and largest underground power distribution network in the world is that of New York City. A power failure in New York can be a catastrophic event, where several blocks of the city lose power simultaneously. In the low-voltage distribution network that traverses a whole city underground, these events are caused by the breakdown of insulation for the electrical cables. This causes a short circuit and burning of the insulation, a possible buildup of pressure, and an explosion of a manhole cover leading down to the electrical cables, with fire and/or smoke emanating from the manhole. The power company

would like to predict in advance which manholes are likely to have such an event and to prevent it. There can be problems beyond the low-voltage network, for instance in the feeder cables of the primary distribution network, or in the transformers that step down the power between high and low voltage, in the transmission system, or in any other part of the system. If reliability-centered asset maintenance can be effectively performed, the number of outages and failures that occur in the city could be substantially reduced.

In each borough of New York City, the power company, Consolidated Edison (ConEdison), has been collecting data about the power network since the power grid started, at the time of Thomas Edison. Back then, these data were collected for accounting purposes, but now ConEdison records data from many different sources so the data can be harnessed for better power grid operations. Some of the types of data sets that ConEdison collects are as follows:

Company assets . Data tables of all electrical cables, cable sections, transformers, connectors, manholes, and service boxes (access points to the energy grid), including their connectivity and physical locations, physical properties (e.g., manufacturer of the copper cable), installation dates, and other relevant information.
Trouble tickets. Records of past failures or outages, sometimes in the form of text documents.
Supervisory control and acquisition (SCADA). Real-time measurements of the performance of equipment from monitors.
Inspection reports. Records of each equipment inspection and the inspection results.
Programs. Records of other preemptive maintenance programs, such as the vented cover replacement program, where solid manhole covers are replaced with vented covers that mitigate explosions, and the stray voltage detection program, where a mobile device mounted on a truck drives around the city and records stray voltage from already electrified equipment.

Discussed briefly below are some of the serious challenges in harnessing data from the past to prevent power failures in the future. See Rudin et al. (2010 , 2012 , 2014 ) for more details.

Data Integration

Data integration is a pervasive and dangerous problem that haunts almost all business intelligence. This is the problem of matching data records from one table to data records from another table when the identifiers do not exactly match. For instance, if the aim is to determine which electrical cables enter into which access points (manholes, service boxes) in Manhattan, a raw match without additional processing would miss over half of the cable records. Given that there is enough electrical cable within Manhattan to go almost all the way around the world, this data integration problem could lead to severe misrepresentation of the state of the power system. Data integration can be severely problematic generally. For one thing, companies need to locate records that provide a full view of each entity. They would like to know, for instance, that inspection reports detailing a particular faulty cable in a particular manhole are connected to customer complaints in a particular building, but there are many ways that this can go wrong: A cable identifier, manhole identifier, or street address that is mistyped in any of the tables could cause this connection to be missed.

One way to handle this problem is to create a machine learning classification model for predicting high-quality matches between two records from different tables. Let x be a vector of a pair of entities, one from each of the two tables to be joined. For example, consider cables and manholes where the three manhole identifiers are (1) type (manhole or service box), (2) number (e.g., 1,624), and (3) mains and service plate (M&S) for a three-block region of New York City. Let x i1 = 1 if there is an exact match between all three identifier fields, let x i2 = 1 if there is an exact match between the manhole types and numbers and the M&S plates are physically close to each other, etc. Given a sample of labeled pairs, where y i = 1 when the match is correct and y i = 0 otherwise, a classification problem can be formed as described in Chapter 4 .

Handling Unstructured Text

Much of the data generated by power companies is in the form of unstructured text. The data could include trouble tickets, inspection reports, and transcribed phone conversations with customers. The field of natural language processing involves using sophisticated clustering techniques, classification techniques, and language models to put unstructured text into structured tables that can be used for business intelligence applications. ConEdison, for instance, has generated over 140,000 free text documents describing power grid events over the last decade within Manhattan. These text documents contain the main descriptions of power grid failures on the low-voltage network and thus are a key source of data for power failure predictions. If these text documents can be translated into structured tables that can be used within a database, these text documents can become extremely valuable sources of data for studying and predicting power failures.

Rare Event Prediction

Many classification techniques (such as logistic regression) can fail badly when the data are severely imbalanced, meaning there are very few observations of one class. Power failures are rare events, so it can be difficult to characterize the class of rare events if very few (or none) have been observed. If failures happen only 1 percent of the time, a classification method that always predicts no failure is right 99 percent of the time, but it is completely useless in practice. This problem of imbalanced classification is discussed next.

Causal Inference

Many power companies are starting to take preemptive actions to reduce the risks of failure. These actions could include, for instance, equipment inspections or preemptive repairs. To justify the expenses of these programs, one must estimate the benefits they provide. Without such estimates, it is unclear how much benefit each program creates or indeed whether there is a benefit. For instance, on the New York City power grid, a study ( Rudin et al., 2012 ) called into question the practice of high potential (hipot) testing on live primary distribution cables. Hipot testing is where a live cable is given a much-higher-than-usual voltage, under the assumption that if the cable is weak it is more likely to fail during the test and can thus be replaced before it fails during normal operation. The problem is that the test itself can damage the cable. Other examples are manhole inspection programs and vented manhole cover replacement programs: To justify the costs of these programs, one needs to estimate their effectiveness. In this case, where the test itself does damage, predicting failures does not suffice; one needs to predict what would have happened to untreated cases had they been treated, and one needs to predict what would have happened to treated cases had they not been treated (the counterfactual).

Visualization and Interpretation of Results

Visualization of data is a key aspect of the knowledge discovery process. With ever more complex information arising from the power system, new ways of making sense of it are needed. For instance, for data from a distribution network such as New York’s, it is useful to visualize aspects of the electrical cables, manholes, geocoded locations of trouble tickets where problems arise, inspections, and more. Modern visualization tools can be interactive: One can probe data about local areas of the power grid or explore data surrounding the most vulnerable parts of the grid. One particular type of tool designed for New York City is called the “report card” tool ( Radeva et al., 2009 ). With this tool, an engineer can type in the identifier for a manhole and retrieve an automated report containing everything that must be known to judge the vulnerability of the manhole to future fires and explosions.

Machine-Learning Methods Comprehensible to Human Experts

Most of the top 10 algorithms in data mining ( Wu et al., 2008 ) produce black-box models that are highly complicated transformations of the input variables. Despite the high prediction quality of these methods, they are

often not useful for knowledge discovery because of their complexity, which can be a deal breaker for power grid engineers who will not trust a model they cannot understand.

It is possible that very interpretable yet accurate predictive models do exist (see Holt, 1993 , for instance). However, interpretable models are often necessarily sparse, so finding them is computationally hard. There is a fundamental trade-off between accuracy, interpretability, and computation; current machine-learning methods are very accurate and computationally tractable, but with tractability trade-offs or statistical approximations to reduce computation, it may be possible to attain models that are more interpretable and even more accurate.

The challenges above are not specific to New York; they are grand challenges that almost every power company for a major city faces. Solutions to the problems discussed here can be abstracted and used in many different settings.

CASE STUDY IN SYNCHROPHASORS

Hurricane Gustav made landfall near Cocodrie, Louisiana, at 9:30 a.m. CDT on September 1, 2008, as a strong category 2 storm (based on 110 mph sustained winds) and a central pressure of 955 millibars. 2 As usually happens with these types of events, there was significant damage to both electric transmission and distribution infrastructure. An example of the devastation is shown in Figure 7.4 .

For Entergy, the electric utility company operating in this area, Hurricane Gustav caused the second largest number of outages in company history, behind only Hurricane Katrina. Gustav restoration rivals the scale and difficulty of Hurricane Katrina restoration. 3 Unlike for previous storms, however, Entergy was able to utilize cutting-edge measurement technology to facilitate the restoration of its system. As the storm disrupted individual circuits, an electrical island was formed within Entergy’s service territory. What this means is that some generators were serving load using infrastructure that was electrically separated from the remainder of the interconnected power grid. Historically, this situation would have been difficult to manage in the control room, and it would likely have required de-energizing the loads, connecting the generators to the remainder of the grid, then reconnecting the load in the restoration sequence of events. However, because Entergy had previously deployed synchrophasor technology in its control room, the system operators were able to better observe the operation of the electrical island and utilize this information to facilitate its reconnection with the remainder of the grid as an intact electrical island.

Overview of Synchrophasors

As discussed in earlier chapters, a synchrophasor is a time-synchronized measurement of an electrical quantity, such as voltage or current. In addition to measuring the magnitude of the quantity being measured, the accurate time reference also measures the phase angle of that quantity. The enabling technology underlying this measurement approach is an accurate time reference. One common and ubiquitous time reference is the Global Positioning System, which provides microsecond-class timing accuracy. This is sufficient to measure phase angles with better than 1° accuracy. (For example, if the user desires to measure the angle with 1° accuracy on a 60-Hz system, the time error must be less than 4.6 μsec.)

The phasor measurement unit (PMU) can also calculate derived parameters associated with other electrical quantities, including frequency, rate of change of frequency, power, reactive power, and symmetrical components, by processing the raw voltage and current information that is measured by the instrument. Widely adopted standards, such as IEEE C37.118.1, govern the definition of these measurements. There are also different classes of PMUs that have been defined based on whether speed or accuracy is the primary consideration, given different assumptions that can be made by the equipment vendor for sampling and filtering algorithms. The M-class, for measurement, emphasizes accuracy, while the P-class, for protection, emphasizes speed of detection, which may sacrifice steady-state accuracy. Future modifications to these standards are defining dynamic performance requirements.

2 National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, “Hurricane Gustav,” last modified September 1, 2010, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lch/?n=gustavmain .

3 Entergy, “Hurricane Gustav,” http://entergy.com/2008_hurricanes/gustav_video_2.aspx . Accessed December 15, 2015.

There are other benefits of synchrophasors beyond those achievable from traditional measurements that are provided by SCADA telemetry. Because PMUs provide data with multiple frames per second (a modern PMU is capable of measuring at least 30 samples per second), dynamic characteristics of the power system can be measured. This is a valuable data source to calibrate dynamic power system models. Furthermore, accurately time-stamping the measurements can aid in the investigation of system disturbances (blackouts).

Internationally, the use of synchrophasors has been increasing dramatically in the past several years. After the technology was adopted and proven by early adopters over the past few decades, and with the cost of the technology steadily decreasing, more and more operational entities have adopted the technology. Some applications are given next.

Application of Synchrophasors

One of the first applications of this technology was to support planning engineers. Having high-speed, timestamped data was helpful for calibrating and validating dynamic models of the power system. New insights were gleaned concerning the dynamic behavior of the grid. Additionally, blackout investigations made extensive use of these measurements whenever they were available. The key attributes of the measurements sought for these applications were that they were high speed and time stamped.

One of the early applications in the power system control room was visualization to provide operators enhanced wide-area situational awareness. Because the relative phase angles between different regions of the power grid are directly proportional to the real power flowing across the network, displaying the phase angles across a wide-area power system depicts the power flowing across the network in a comprehensive and intuitive manner.

Also, because it is also affected by the net impedance between different points in the network, the phase angle can also serve as a proxy for system stress across critical boundaries. For example, given a constant power transfer across a corridor, if one of the lines is removed from service, the angle across the corridor will increase. Some utilities have adopted alarms and alerts for their operators based on measured phase angles.

Bringing synchrophasors directly into the state-estimation process can also improve the accuracy of those tools. Some utilities have deployed hybrid state estimation, where synchrophasor data are added to SCADA data in the state estimation, where others are evolving toward linear state estimators that are fed solely from PMUs. The linear state-estimation process can reduce measurement error by fitting the measured data to a real-time model of the power system.

More advanced applications are investigating the use of synchrophasors as inputs to Special Protection Systems. These schemes trigger automated responses based on real-time changes to system conditions. The synchrophasor data can arm the system and can also be used to trigger an automated response if that is appropriate.

Today PMUs are deployed primarily on the transmission system, but the industry is beginning to explore their use at the distribution level for power quality, demand response, microgrid operation, distributed generation integration, and enhanced distribution system visibility.

Mathematical Challenges to Improve Synchrophasor Measurements

Today’s synchrophasor measurement systems are governed by industry standards that define their accuracy requirements. 4 , 5 However, these accuracy requirements are only defined for steady-state measurements. In an attempt to reconcile the different applications of the measurements and how different vendors would make trade-offs in their sampling and filtering algorithms associated with speed and accuracy of the measurements, different classes of synchrophasor measurements have been defined. The so-called M-class (measurement) provides a more accurate estimate of the measurement but is allowed to take longer to converge on the measured value. The P-class (protection) is designed to operate faster and is primarily intended to quickly assess the new state of the system after a change in conditions, such as would occur during a fault or other system change. However, neither aforementioned class of measurements will necessarily provide consistent results between different vendor products for continuously time-variant conditions, such as a persistent dynamic instability, or in the presence of other imperfections in the measured signal, such as harmonics. Part of the challenge is that the entire premise of defining what a synchrophasor is applies only to a steady-state representation of the power system, and the changes are neither consistently nor comprehensively well defined. For example, the relationship between phase angle and frequency is not clearly defined whenever either of these parameters is changing. In much the same way that advanced mathematical algorithms are used to extract weak signals from a noisy environment in the communications domain, there is an opportunity for algorithmic advancement to provide a better foundation for extracting meaningful signals from power system measurements, particularly those associated with dynamical systems.

4 IEEE C37.118.1-2011 (IEEE Standard for Synchrophasor Measurements for Power Systems) and C37.118.1a-2014 (IEEE Standard for Synchrophasor Measurements for Power Systems—Amendment 1: Modification of Selected Performance Requirements).

5 International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) IEC 67850-90-5.

CASE STUDY IN INVERTER-BASED CONTROL FOR STABILIZING THE POWER SYSTEM

The committee considered two cases of power grid instability that could have been avoided with better analytical and mathematical tools. The first example is in Texas, where wind power farms in northwest Texas were producing power that is carried by weak transmission lines to the large load centers in east Texas (Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and others). The turbines and the cables both have built-in controls to help dampen oscillations, in particular, in (1) the thyristor-controlled series capacitor (TCSC) transmission lines, which means that their line power flow can be directly controlled, and in (2) the doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) of wind farms whose voltage is electronically, rather than mechanically, controlled. If any electrical signals vary from the control center’s reference settings, this needs to be remedied very quickly. The cables and the wind farms are equipped with fast electronic inverter-based controls, which change the stored energy in the equipment whose power is electronically controlled to push the signal back toward its reference settings. However, the controls on the Texas equipment did not work properly, and this led to oscillatory dynamics between the controllers of wind power farms and line flow controllers of weak transmission lines delivering wind power to the faraway loads such as Dallas. The new technical term for these instabilities is subsynchronous control instabilities, which had not been experienced by any power grid before the situation in Texas. For details of operational problems related to large wind power transfer in Texas, see ERCOT System Planning (2014) .

Similarly, in Germany, by government regulation, all of the wind power produced in the northwest of Germany must be delivered by the grid. However, the German power grid is not strong enough to handle this massive variability nor is it controlled online. Because of this, it is not always possible to deliver wind power to the major cities in the south of Germany (Munich in particular). Instead, power spills over to the Polish and Czech power systems, which complain about this and wish to build high-voltage dc tie links to block the German wind power from entering their grids. In addition, a serious problem of harmonic oscillations, similar to the problem observed in Texas, has been observed.

Situations like those in Texas and Germany could be avoided in the future if analytical capability in inverter-based control could be advanced—that is, the fast calculations performed in response to signals deviating from their reference settings. A lot of technology currently being developed will require inverter-based control. Mature versions of power inverter control are the automatic voltage regulators and power system stabilizers, both controls for exciters, of conventional power plants. More recent inverter control is being deployed for storage control of intermittent power plants, such as DFIGs and flywheels placed on wind power plants; for real and/or reactive power line flow and voltage control of series controllers, such as TCSCs and shunt capacitors (static var compensators); for control of storage placed on PVs; and for control of variable-speed drives ubiquitous to controllable loads, such as air conditioners, dryers, washers, and refrigerators. Recently there have been large investments in better switches, such as silicon nitride switches. For example, the National Science Foundation’s Energy Research Center for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) system works on designing such switches and using them to control substation voltages and frequencies ( http://www.freedm.ncsu.edu ), and there are several efforts to design more durable and compact switches with higher voltage levels (ARPA-E’s GENI program is one).

The basic role of inverter control is unique in the sense that it is capable of controlling very fast system dynamics; the cumulative effects of kilohertz rate switching are capable of stabilizing fast frequency and voltage dynamics that are not otherwise controllable by slower controllers, in particular power plant governors. EPRI has led the way to Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) design for several decades. Interestingly, the early work made the case for using FACTS to control line reactances, and, as such, being fundamental to increasing maximum power transfer possible by FACTS-equipped transmission lines. The decrease in line reactance directly increases power transfer by the line. More recently, there has been major research and development aimed at inverter-based control for microgrids, which is based on placing inverter controls on each PV and directly controlling reactive power-voltage (Q-V) and real power-angle (P-theta) transfer functions of closed-loop PVs (Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions-microgrid concept, http://certs.aeptechlab.com ). Similarly, when modeling inverter-based storage control (flywheels, DFIGs) it is assumed that voltage/reactive power and real power/energy can be controlled directly by inverters so that the closed-loop model is effectively a steady-state droop characteristic. An emerging idea is that

inverter-based control placed on direct-energy resources could be used to ensure stable response of power systems with massive deployment of intermittent resources; in effect, inverter-based control could replace inertial response of governor-controlled conventional power plants.

The approaches to stabilization in future power grids require careful new modeling and control design for guaranteed performance. As shown by the examples in Texas and Germany discussed above, at the lower distribution grid level, today’s inverter control practice of maintaining the PV power factor at unity has been known to result in unacceptable deviations of voltages close to the end users.

The problems in Texas and Germany are only early examples of the problems that could be caused by poor tuning of inverter control. They point to the need to model the dynamics relevant for inverter control to the level of detail necessary so that controllers are designed for provably stable response to each given range and type of disturbance. Some challenges are as follows:

Modeling realistic fast dynamics. Most models currently used in control centers do not even attempt to model the fast dynamics relevant for assessing the performance of power electronically switched automation embedded in different components throughout the complex power grids. This is a very difficult problem since it requires accurate modeling of fast nonlinear dynamics and control design, which are often close to bifurcation point conditions. Some recently reported theoretical results on this topic were derived under highly unrealistic assumptions, such as “real-reactive power decoupling”—that the grid is entirely inductive (which is not possible when one relies on capacitive storage for voltage/reactive power control)—and that the loads are simple constant impedance loads. Modeling the fast dynamics with realistic assumptions and in a computationally fast way would be a big step forward.
Aggregation of small inverter controllers. Another problem in power grids still to be studied concerns modeling dynamical effects of aggregate small inverter controllers on closed-loop dynamics in the grid. Modeling and designing switching control to avoid the real-world problems described above in using power electronics represents a grand challenge for modeling and computational methods. This challenge must be addressed if benefits from hardware improvements in power electronic switching are to be realized without excessive cost.

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Electricity is the lifeblood of modern society, and for the vast majority of people that electricity is obtained from large, interconnected power grids. However, the grid that was developed in the 20th century, and the incremental improvements made since then, including its underlying analytic foundations, is no longer adequate to completely meet the needs of the 21st century. The next-generation electric grid must be more flexible and resilient. While fossil fuels will have their place for decades to come, the grid of the future will need to accommodate a wider mix of more intermittent generating sources such as wind and distributed solar photovoltaics.

Achieving this grid of the future will require effort on several fronts. There is a need for continued shorter-term engineering research and development, building on the existing analytic foundations for the grid. But there is also a need for more fundamental research to expand these analytic foundations. Analytic Research Foundations for the Next-Generation Electric Grid provide guidance on the longer-term critical areas for research in mathematical and computational sciences that is needed for the next-generation grid. It offers recommendations that are designed to help direct future research as the grid evolves and to give the nation's research and development infrastructure the tools it needs to effectively develop, test, and use this research.

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Historical Cases for Contemporary Electricity Decisions

Julie A. Cohn

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Cohn, Julie A., PhD. "Historical Cases for Contemporary Electricity Decisions." Baker Institute for Public Policy Center for Energy Studies, February 2020. PDF (https://doi.org/10.25613/2DP6-6H47).

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Introduction

In the 21st century, Americans face the task of addressing human-made contributions to potentially disastrous climate change. Along with longstanding worries about resource depletion, ecosystem damage, pollution, and attendant human health effects, these concerns provide the impetus for integrating renewables into energy systems to displace hydrocarbons. Governments, activists, and even corporations have adopted various goals—all trending toward using more, and in some scenarios exclusively, renewable energy resources to generate electricity. The primary resources under consideration include wind, sunshine, geothermal energy, and hydro.

Today power systems experts offer multiple approaches to integrating renewables. Proponents argue for nanogrids, microgrids, smart grids, supergrids, macrogrids, and global grids as the models for introducing solar and wind power, energy storage, and advanced system controls. At one extreme, advocates call for complete disaggregation of large networks in favor of tiny, locally controlled systems and at the other they encourage intercontinental connection around the globe. Naysayers warn against excessive cost, excessive government intervention in the private sector, technological and physical shortcomings, environmental downsides, and threats to stability, reliability, and resilience. The characteristics of renewable energy resources—the intermittency of wind and solar in particular, and the scales of some new technologies both very large and very small—will introduce new challenges to power system stakeholders.

After nearly 150 years of expansion and increased integration of power networks in the United States, investors, generators, owners, operators, regulators, and customers have grown accustomed to aspects of electrification that are most certainly mutable over time. When the vast majority of customers turn on a wall switch in this country, they expect immediately available power to turn on lights that will not flicker and machines that run steadily for as long as desired, without interruption, and at a reasonable cost. Investors, generators, and transmission line owners alike expect a fair return—whether by regulation or market competition—for the cost of doing business. They expect regulators and operators to reasonably protect their infrastructure from sudden shutdowns, sudden excessive demand, and sudden changes in rules, costs, and revenues. Operators expect to be able to dispatch power to meet demand while maintaining system reliability. The processes by which all of this occurs developed piecemeal. New generating technologies, new ownership regimes, new storage opportunities, new scales of operations, and relatively new primary energy resources are already causing disruptions. The priorities of the past— for example, increasing integration into state and regional grids in order to realize economies of scale and also improve system reliability—may not apply in the future. Tomorrow’s homeowner may prefer the green credentials, local control, and resilience offered by rooftop solar panels with a battery wall setup. That same owner may or may not seek the reliability offered by a grid connection; and may or may not be willing to pay for the necessary infrastructure to keep the rest of the grid running. Or, a different customer may lobby for green power only, from a giant windfarm located several states away, regardless of the cost of transmission. That customer may or may not acknowledge the need for giant storage facilities and/or interconnection with other generating sources to assure reliability.

How will Americans navigate the decisions ahead? Herein lies an opportunity to consider historical trends and exceptions. Were there periods in the past when utilities (or others) debated the relative merits of independence and integration for power generation? If so, who made the decisions, what were they, and how did different factors influence the outcome? Can these experiences help us frame choices we face today as we try to bring more renewables into our systems?

In fact, these debates occurred regularly throughout the history of electrification in the United States. Often negotiations over more or less integration occurred outside matters of economy, technical feasibility, energy efficiency, and customer satisfaction. For example, in the early years, tension between government-owned power companies and privately owned utilities characterized American electrification and as a result, physical interconnection was often conflated with holding company, or private sector, expansion. Municipal utilities and rural cooperatives at times sought participation in networks to access power generated by larger and more efficient facilities; at other times, they resisted interconnection because it was seen as further domination by investor-owned utilities.

Over time, considerations evolved, as did technologies, political preferences, economic context, and questions of national defense and industrial development. This research paper offers three case studies that illustrate the array of issues framing movement toward increased interconnection over the course of the 20th century:

Case 1 . From “Fashion” to Wartime Necessity, 1900-1918. In the early 20th century, industrial manufacturers transitioned from a strong preference for operating their own in- house generating plants to acquiring (renting) power from central stations. In this first case study, the dominant issues included “fashion,” shifting and expanding operating costs, technical innovations, resource shortages, and, ultimately, the pressures of a world war. Today’s proposed nanogrids and microgrids resemble the early isolated plants, along with some of the attendant benefits and costs for owners and operators. Key technological differences, however, may lead to different choices and different outcomes in the future.

Case 2 . Defense Considerations, 1935-1945. Throughout the 1930s, utilities and federal authorities argued over war readiness and the need for central government control. Different planners called for both new installed generating capacity at the sites of defense manufacturing and increased integration of existing capacity. Once the United States joined World War II as a combatant, the focus shifted almost entirely to expanded interconnections. In this second case study, the compelling issues were time, resource availability, and defense necessity, and the process resulted in technical innovation. This case brings the focus to how significantly a major crisis can influence the direction of electrification, thwarting even the proposals that look most reasonable and logical in favor of strategies that can be adopted most quickly. It further illustrates the degree to which the American power industry, though compliant during wartime, resists central control.

Case 3 . The Biggest Interconnection, 1960-1975. In 1967 utilities and the US Bureau of Reclamation completed alternating-current (AC) links between the Eastern and Western Interconnected Systems, creating a nationwide grid. This took place against the backdrop of the 1965 Northeast blackout and public debate about the merits of interconnection. Within eight years, following unstable operations, the utilities abandoned the links. Between 1975 and 1987, however, utilities installed direct-current (DC) links that allowed for the scheduled exchange of power without requiring synchronized operation. The DC- linked interconnected systems no longer formed a nationwide grid. In this third case study, nationwide interconnection proceeded despite technical inadequacy and doubts about the efficacy of the project; it was followed by integration through new technologies. A return to DC connection sidestepped the trend of expanding AC interconnections over the prior 75 years. When contemplating macrogrids and large high voltage direct current (HVDC) connections, this case offers a reminder that what seems the logical next step of a synchronized nationwide grid may not be the feasible next step. Further, for the largest infrastructure projects proposed, buy-in across a very broad community of stakeholders will be crucial.

By revisiting these stories, we can examine historical tensions within American power systems and consider how they might affect 21st century decision-making. Trade journals, government reports and statistics, national archival materials, and secondary literature provide details and insights regarding the evolution of power networks throughout the 20th century. One striking issue emerges: different stakeholders pushed the decisions in particular directions at different times. This reflects the organic development of America’s power systems. No central government authority, no single private sector company, no comprehensive technical solution dominated the process at any time. As one researcher describes it, the American power system operates under “nodal governance,” that is, decision-making authority is dispersed. In assessing options for bringing more renewables into the system, it would be wise to keep this salient feature in mind. At any point in the process, particular stakeholders, unexpected concerns, major diplomatic or political events, or innovative technologies may influence the path forward in ways that are difficult to anticipate based on the choices of the past.

The sections of the paper are organized as follows:

Background —An overview of power systems today, focusing on the composition of generating sources, status of interconnections, ownership of elements, and governance structure in the United States.

Integrating Renewables —A short summary of past efforts to increase the contribution of renewable resources to power production, with particular focus on federal and state rule changes that incentivized development of wind and solar industries.

Visions of the Renewable Future —A brief description of the myriad approaches available for increasing the share of renewables in our power systems. It contrasts the “small is beautiful” approach of nanogrids and microgrids with the “bigger is better” approach of macrogrids, supergrids, and global grids.

The Case Studies

Conclusion —Observations about the historical cases and how they frame contemporary decisions about adding more renewables through greater or lesser integration.

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

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History of Physics as a Tool to Detect the Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Students: The Case of Simple Electric Circuits in Primary Education

Published: 14 January 2014
Volume 23 , pages 923–953, ( 2014 )

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Matteo Leone 1 , 2

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The present paper advocates the use of History of Science into the teaching of science in primary education through a case study in the field of electricity. In this study, which provides both historical and experimental evidence, a number of conceptual difficulties faced by early nineteenth century physicists are shown to be a useful tool to detect 5th grade pupils’ conceptions about the simple electric circuits. This result was obtained through the administration of schematics showing circuital situation inspired to early 1800s experiments on the effects of electric current on water electrolysis and on the behaviour of magnetic compasses. It is also shown that the detecting of pupils’ alternative ideas about electric current in a circuit is highly dependent on the survey methodology (open ended questions and drawings, multiple-choice item, connecting card work, and history of science tasks were considered in this study) and that the so-called “unipolar model” of electric circuit is more pervasive than previously acknowledged. Finally, a highly significant hybrid model of electric current is identified.

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The Conceptual Elements of Multiple Representations: A Study of Textbooks’ Representations of Electric Current

Effect of a STEM approach on students’ cognitive structures about electrical circuits

See for example: Dedes ( 2005 ); Driver and Easley ( 1978 ); de Hosson and Caillarec ( 2009 ); McDermott ( 1984 ); Romdhane ( 2007 ); Viennot ( 1979 ); Vosniadou and Brewer ( 1987 ).

For discussions about important differences between children’s thinking and historical development of scientific concepts see, for example, Gauld ( 1991 ); Vosniadou and Brewer ( 1987 ); Wandersee ( 1985 ); Wiser and Carey ( 1983 ).

Expositions of this idea can be found in, among others, Driver et al. ( 1985 ); McCloskey and Kargon ( 1988 ); Monk and Osborne ( 1997 ); Nersessian ( 1989 ); Seroglou et al. ( 1998 ).

Examples of studies addressing primary school pupils conceptions about simple electric circuits include Azaiza et al. ( 2006 ); Cepni and Keles ( 2006 ); Cosgrove et al. ( 1985 ); Driver et al. ( 1994 ); Galili et al. ( 2006 ); Grotzer and Sudbury ( 2000 ); Jabot and Henry ( 2007 ); Jaakkola and Nurmi ( 2008 ); Kallunki ( 2009 ); Kukkonen et al. ( 2009 ); Malamitsa et al. ( 2005 ); Summers et al. ( 1998 ); Tiberghien and Delacote ( 1976 ).

For example, Azaiza et al. ( 2006 ); Duit and von Rhöneck ( 1998 ); Fera and Michelini ( 2011 ); Psillos ( 1998 ).

A look at the 1820s and 1830s physics textbooks shows that the poles of the pile are often considered as “indefinite sources of contrary electricities” (Pouillet 1828 , 635; Benseghir and Closset 1993 , 39; see also Bayle 1836 , 541) or “inexhaustible sources of opposite electricities” (Webster 1837 , 413). In the conductors between the poles, “the accumulated electricities meet incessantly” (Lamé 1837 , 172; Benseghir and Closset 1993 , 39), or “will occasion a continual recomposition” (Webster 1837 , 413), or, again, “the opposite electricities tend to destroy one another and, if the intermediate liquid is a substance incapable of decomposition, the equilibrium would be restored and the motion of the electricities would cease altogether” (Barzellotti 1808 , 359–360).

As one chemistry dictionary explained, “if two metal wires, connected with the two ends or poles of the pile, are brought closer to each other, the two opposite electricities will meet at the point of contact of the two conductor. [After] the contact, the two electricities kept producing at the two sides of the pile, and at joining within the conductor to form a continuous current” (Pelletan 1824 , 372).

Interestingly, if one widens the search at the contemporary meteorology, discovers that the meeting of contrary electricities was thought to be the cause of lightning: “the lightning is certainly due to the meeting of two contrary electricities, accumulated within close portions of two different clouds” (Lamé 1837 , 81; see also Pouillet 1825 , 401), in accordance with the view that the clouds are “good conductors, while the air with which they are surrounded is a bad conductor”, that is “immense isolated conductors” (Olmsted 1832 , 164).

Ideas closer to the modern views about the battery in a closed circuit were developed at the same time as the above conceptions. A notable example can be found in the writings of Leopoldo Nobili, one of the main Italian physicists of early 1800s (Leone et al. 2011 ). In 1822, he explained that “once completed the voltian circuit, we should no longer believe that the zinc and copper ends are a permanent home of the contrary electricities as when they were isolated”. As soon as the circuit is closed, of the former equilibrium, nothing is left “out of direction and velocity of movement” (Nobili 1822 , 167). As the French physicist Jean Peltier said, in his 1836 address to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, “pile and conductor constitute a unique system where all the parts are interdependent so that the electromotor is no longer under the same conditions when, for example, the conductor is changed” (Peltier 1836 , 476).

In his review paper about Barlow ( 1825a ), J.-F. De Montferrand, professor of mathematics and physics at the Royal College of Versailles, observed that Barlow’s experiment did not support the view that the electric fluid dissipates along its course and reaches the minimum at the negative pole nor the one based on two electric fluids starting at both poles and producing the minimum magnitude of electric current at the middle of the circuit. However, the second view “is clearly incorrect since the intensity observed in each point is due to the sum of the actions of the two currents started at both poles. In order for this sum to be constant, it is required, as it was shown by Becquerel, that the intensity of each current is either constant or changing in an arithmetical progression” (De Montferrand 1825 , 284).

E.g., Cepni and Keles ( 2006 , p. 277) made use of open-ended questions containing keywords as “electricity”, “circuit”, “series connection”, “direction of current”, “pole of the battery”, and leading questions as “does the amount of current change?”.

I am grateful to one anonymous referee for calling attention to the possibility that an experiment with multiple bulbs could not yield the expected result. A tiny difference in the length of filaments in supposedly identical bulbs could indeed produce a noticeable change in brightness. To some extent, this effect could be reduced by an outstanding property of the human eye, that is the Weber–Fechner law as applied to the power of distinguish differences brightness of objects. Within a reasonable experimental error, when comparing the brightness of different sources of light, the effect of light may be considered indeed as proportional to the logarithm of its intensity (e.g. Hecht 1924 ).

Ampère, A. (1820). Mémoire présenté à l’Académie royale des Sciences, le 2 octobre 1820, où se trouve compris le résumé de ce qui avait été lu à la même Académie les 18 et 25 septembre 1820, sur les effets des courans électriques. Annales des Chimie et de Physique, 15 , 59–76.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Laura Bassino and Anna Paradiso for their help in setting up the research, and Venera Saida for participating to the collection of data as a part of her master’s thesis in Primary Education Sciences at the University of Turin. The author would also like to acknowledge the thorough and thoughtful comments of the anonymous referees who provided helpful suggestions for improving this paper.

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Matteo Leone

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Leone, M. History of Physics as a Tool to Detect the Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Students: The Case of Simple Electric Circuits in Primary Education. Sci & Educ 23 , 923–953 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-014-9676-z

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7 Electric Charge: A Case Study

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This chapter analyzes the nature of electric charge. The usual talk of electrical charge is really nothing more than a summary of certain law-governed dispositions—though it certainly gives the impression that it is digging deeper. Textbooks of physics speak as if it is because of charge, positive or negative, that interacting bodies move as they do—suggesting that they have a conception of charge that is independent of such motions. But to have a charge is understood simply as having the ability to induce certain motions in nearby objects—nothing further has been descriptively specified. Explaining electromagnetic motions by citing charges is basically a virtus dormitiva explanation, i.e., no explanation at all. At best it tells us that the motions are caused by the force we call “electricity” (i.e., amber-related) and not by the force we call “gravity.” If we want to know what the cause of electromagnetic motions is, we have not yet been enlightened.

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Case Study: California Blackouts

Learn how the U.S. state of California mitigated an energy crisis caused by a series of blackouts and developed an action plan to ensure the security of its energy future.

Earth Science, Geography, Social Studies, U.S. History

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California is on the western coast of the United States, bordering the Pacific Ocean. At 401.45 square kilometers (155,779 square miles), California is the third largest state by area in the United States. Over 37.5 million people live in California, making it the United States’ most populous state. More than 90 percent of California’s population lives in urban areas, primarily in the coastal regions where most of the state’s largest cities are located. Three California counties are among the 10 most populous U.S. counties. California’s main industries include entertainment, tourism, agriculture, fishing, computers, electronics, aerospace, and food packaging. Most the industry in the state is centered around the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.

California has a very diverse geography, including major mountain ranges, a long central valley region, a long coastline, and desert regions. California’s climate is diverse as well. Most the state experiences two seasons—the rainy season and the dry season—although the high mountain regions can experience four distinct seasons. The coastal region has a mild climate, with very little temperature difference throughout the seasons. The mountain regions have colder winters, while the central valley has hotter summers.

Over half of electricity consumption in California is fueled by natural gas. About 14 percent of electricity in the state comes from hydroelectric power, 11 percent comes from renewable resources other than hydroelectric, and a small percentage is generated using nuclear power. California generates more electricity from nonhydroelectric renewable energy resources than any other state in the country. California also has one of the lowest rates of per capita energy consumption in the nation, largely because of the mild climates and energy efficiency initiatives in the most populous areas. However, because of its large population, California still has the second highest total energy demand in the country. To satisfy its energy needs, California imports more electricity than any other state. Some of this imported electricity originates from hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. Other imported electricity comes from neighboring Southwestern states. The importation of electricity into California is largely dependent on a few main transmission lines, such as the Pacific Intertie, which runs from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California.

The Problem

In 2000 and 2001, California suffered a series of rolling blackouts . Electric utilities in the state had been deregulated in the 1990s. This led to higher wholesale energy costs and serious financial problems for many of the state’s electric utilities. By the time of the blackouts , California had not significantly invested in new power plants in a decade, and it had been forced to import a significant portion of its electricity from surrounding states. A drought in the Pacific Northwest significantly decreased the amount of electricity available for import from hydroelectric power plants in the region. This drove up the price for electricity in the market, making electric companies in the other states reluctant to sell to California. In addition, a hotter than usual summer led to spikes in demand that California’s system could not handle. Rolling blackouts hit the Bay area first, then hit cities throughout northern and central California, and, by March 2001, the entire state. The federal government intervened early to require electric companies to sell to California, but blackouts continued. Factors such as problems with major transmission lines and the rupture of a critical pipeline supplier of natural gas constrained supply during crucial times.

By 2003, emergency measures had reduced the urgency of the situation in California. But the state has experienced other blackouts since that time, including a 2005 blackout caused by a transmission line failure. That blackout left approximately 500,000 customers without power.

In September 2011, a minor short circuit during a repair at a substation in Arizona initiated a cascading effect that resulted in blackouts for around 1.4 million people in the San Diego area. At the time, about a third of San Diego’s power was being supplied from Arizona, while another half of the supply was coming from the San Onofre nuclear plant. A surge resulting from the accident in Arizona caused all power to cut off along one of the main transmission lines from Arizona to California, cutting off about a third of the electric supply to the area. Electric load was redirected on to other lines, which eventually tripped off line due to the higher demand . In this surging environment, the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station (SONGS) was cut off from much of the grid for safety reasons and eventually shut down. A lack of real-time communication along the grid led to poor decision-making. The blackout also raised new questions about the fragility of California’s electric grid . A reliance on outside electricity traveling along a limited number of transmission lines leaves California vulnerable to such cascading effects.

Stakeholders

California ISO: The California ISO (Independent System Operator Corporation) is a non-profit public benefit corporation that manages the high-voltage lines that make up 80 percent of the California electric grid and oversees the market for electricity in the state. The ISO predicts energy needs, and electric companies buy and sell power based on these projections in an open market. The ISO then manages the flow of electricity through their high-voltage, long-distance lines. Because the ISO is impartial and has no financial interest, it keeps the lines open to many providers of electricity. If the available electricity drops too low, the ISO is responsible for notifying electric companies so they can reduce the load on the system, often through blackouts. The ISO is incorporating grid modernization technology into its control centers to help manage the supply and demand of electricity, to make it easier for smaller renewable energy inputs to be integrated into the system, and to increase the reliability and efficiency of the system.

Electric Companies: California electric utility companies produce and/ or buy electricity from a variety of sources both in state and out of state. This electricity often travels along the high-voltage lines run by the ISO, as well as lower-voltage lines run by the electric companies themselves. The electric companies serve as “middlemen,” producing or buying electricity from wholesalers and reselling it directly to consumers. When demand for electricity exceeds supply, the electric companies make the decision about when and where to interrupt power to reduce the load on the system. They often do this through rolling blackouts, whereby the electricity will be interrupted to one segment of their customers at a time for periods usually ranging from one to two hours. Electric companies have to deal directly with customers upset over any loss of power. Many California electric companies are integrating grid modernization into their systems to give them more control over the flow of electricity and a better ability to react quickly to spikes in demand.

Large Corporations: During unplanned or rolling blackouts, large corporations lose productivity time. This loss of productivity time can be greater than the actual blackout period for some industries, as large machinery takes time to come back online after a loss of power. This can be extremely costly for businesses and industry. Businesses and industry also have a vested interest in keeping overhead costs as low as possible, including the cost of electricity. On one hand, grid modernization technologies can be expensive to install, a cost that electric companies can pass on to their customers. They can also make it possible for the companies to charge higher rates for energy use at peak times. On the other hand, grid modernization technology contributes to system efficiency, which can lower the overall costs of electricity. Grid modernization technology also enables large corporations to work more closely with electric companies to better control what areas lose power and when they lose it in the case of an emergency.

Citizens: Blackouts can cause numerous problems for California citizens. Besides the inconvenience of electrical loss in the home, loss of electricity can also lead to traffic snarls, airport delays, problems with emergency services, and even difficulties with routine tasks such as grocery shopping. Planned, rolling blackouts can lessen the effects of some of these problems, but still cause serious inconveniences for many people. For at-risk populations, such as the elderly, children, and people with special needs, blackouts can be especially dangerous. Blackouts often occur during periods of extreme cold or heat, since extra heating and cooling needs place a higher demand on the system. Electrical loss can knock out heating and cooling systems, leaving at-risk populations vulnerable to extreme temperatures. Most California citizens want solutions that will minimize blackouts and the cost of electricity.

Government: Blackouts disrupt regular government business in much the same way they affect private businesses. The need to respond to emergency situations related to the blackouts can place additional burdens on bureaucrats in state and local governments. Significant problems can lead to an increase in legislation and oversight. Large-scale blackouts can also result in negative political fallout for politicians and elected officials, as citizens are upset over loss of services. Many analysts cite the energy crisis in the early 2000s as one of the reasons Californians voted Governor Gray Davis out of office in 2003. California’s state government has been studying the implications of grid modernization and awarding grants for research on the best ways to integrate the technology in California. The state government has advised an informed, collaborative approach among all stakeholders to improve the state’s electric grid.

Problem Mitigation

Following the 2000-2001 energy crisis in California, the state government created an Energy Action Plan to ensure the security of California’s energy future. The plan called for, among other things, measures such as increasing the state electricity output through new facilities, encouraging conservation, and upgrading the grid infrastructure. The state also imposed conservation and efficiency standards for government buildings. In 2006, the state enacted a requirement that 20 percent of California’s electricity come from renewable resources by 2010. In 2009, a new goal of 33 percent by 2020 was set.

In the wake of the 2011 blackout and subsequent problems with the San Onofre nuclear plant that caused it to shut down, analysts predicted rolling blackouts in the summer of 2012. To help prevent this, electric companies reached deals with the U.S. Navy to voluntarily reduce energy use on its nearby bases if emergency conditions arise. The utilities reached similar deals with large corporations in the area. These deals provide a way to reduce overall energy use in the system in emergency situations without conducting rolling blackouts. Participants receive reduced charges in exchange for their cooperation.

Electric companies, as well as the ISO, are also beginning to introduce grid modernization technologies into their systems. Electric companies are incorporating smart meters, which provide more specific, real-time data than traditional meters. Electric companies can use these data to charge more for energy during peak times and less during non-peak times, to alert customers to those peak times, and to more quickly identify problems. These measures can be costly up front but can save money over the long term by greatly increasing the efficiency of the electrical system . Efficiencies gained by grid modernization can also help California meet its strict environmental requirements by reducing the need for energy resources .

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Case Study Questions Class 10 Science Electricity

Case study questions class 10 science chapter 12 electricity.

At Case Study Questions there will given a Paragraph. In where some Important Questions will made on that respective Case Based Study. There will various types of marks will given 1 marks, 2 marks, 3 marks, 4 marks.

Case study: 1

We can see that, as the applied voltage is increased the current through the wire also increases. It means that, the potential difference across the terminals of the wire is directly proportional to the electric current passing through it at a given temperature.

Thus, V= IR

Where R is the proportionality constant called as resistance of the wire. Thus, we can say that the resistance of the wire is inversely proportional to the electric current. As the resistance increases current through the wire decreases. The resistance of the conductor is directly proportional to length of the conductor, inversely proportional to the area of cross section of the conductor and also depends on the nature of the material from which conductor is made. Thus R= qL/A, where q is the resistivity of the material of conductor. According resistivity of the material they are classified as conductors, insulators and semiconductors. It is observed that the resistance and resistivity of the material varies with temperature. And hence there are vast applications of these materials based on their resistivity.

The SI unit of resistance is ohm while the SI unit of electric current is ampere. The potential difference is measured in volt. Conductors are the materials which are having less resistivity or more conductivity and hence they are used for transmission of electricity. Alloys are having more resistivity than conductors and hence they are used in electric heating devices. While insulators are bad conductors of electricity.

1) What is SI unit of resistivity?

2) What is variable resistance?

3) Why tungsten is used in electric bulbs?

4) 1M ohm = ?

1) The SI unit of resistivity is ohm meter.

2) The electric component which is used to regulate the electric current without changing voltage source is called as variable resistance.

3) Tungsten filament are used in electric bulbs because the resistivity of Tungsten is more and it’s melting point is also high.

4) 1M ohm = 10 6 ohm

Case study: 2

Resistance is the opposition offered by the conductor to the flow of electric current. When two or more resistors are connected in series then electric current through each resistor is same but the electric potential across each resistor will be different. If R1, R2 and R3 are the resistance connected in series then current through each resistor will be I but potential difference across each resistor is V1, V2 and V3 respectively.

Thus, the total potential difference is equal to the sum of potential difference across each resistor. Hence, V= V1 + V2 + V3

Again, IR = IR1 + IR2 + IR3

Thus, R = R1 + R2 + R3

Hence in case of series combination of resistors, the total resistance is the sum of resistance of each resistor in a circuit.

Now, in case of parallel combination of resistors electric current through each resistor is different but the potential difference across each resistor is same. If resistors R1, R2 and R3 are connected in parallel combination then potential difference across each resistor will be V but current through each resistor is I1, I2 and I3 respectively.

Thus, total current through the circuit is the sum of current flowing through each resistor.

I = I1 + I2 + I3

Again, V/R= V/R1 + V/R2 + V/R3

Thus, 1/R = 1/R1 + 1/R2 + 1/R3

Hence, in case of parallel combination of resistors, the reciprocal of total resistance is the sum of reciprocal of each resistance connected in parallel.

Questions:

1) In which case the equivalent resistance is more and why?

2) In our home, which type of combination of electric devices is preferred? Why?

3) If n resistors of resistance R are connected in parallel then what is the equivalent resistance?

1) In case of parallel combination of resistors the equivalent resistance is less than the individual resistance connected in parallel.

Since, 1/R = 1/R1 + 1/R2 + 1/R3 +….

2) At our home, we are connecting electrical devices in parallel combination because in parallel combination equivalent resistance is less and also we can draw an electric current according to the need of electric devices.

3) If n resistors of resistance R are connected in parallel then equivalent resistance is given by,

1/Re = 1/R + 1/R + 1/R +….n times 1/R

Thus, 1/Re = n/R

Hence, Re= R/n is the required equivalent resistance of the given combination.

Case study:3

When electric current flows through the circuit this electrical energy is used in two ways, some part is used for doing work and remaining may be expended in the form of heat. We can see, in mixers after using it for long time it become more hot, fans also become hot after continuous use. This type of effect of electric current is called as heating effect of electric current. If I is the current flowing through the circuit then the amount of heat dissipated in that resistor will be H = VIt

This effect was discovered by Joule, hence it is called as Joule’s law of heating.

Also, we can write, H = I 2 Rt

Thus, heat produced is directly proportional to the square of the electric current, directly proportional to the resistance of the resistor and the time for which electric current flows through the circuit. This heating effect is used in many applications. The heating effect is also used for producing light. In case of electric bulb, the filament produces more heat energy which is emitted in the form of light. And hence filament are made from tungsten which is having high melting point.

In case of electric circuit, this heating effect is used to protect the electric circuit from damage.

The rate of doing work or rate of consumption of energy is called as power. Here, the rate at which electric energy dissipated or consumed in an electric circuit is called as electric power. And it is given by P= VI

The SI unit of electric power is watt.

1) What is the SI unit of electric energy?

2) How heating effect works to protect electric circuit?

3) 1KW h = ?

4) If a bulb is working at a voltage of 200V and the current is 1A then what is the power of the bulb?

1) The SI unit of electric energy is watt hour. And the commercial unit of electric energy is kW h.

2) In case of electric circuit fuse is connected in series with the circuit which protects the electric devices by stopping the extra current flowing through them. When a large amount of current is flowing through the circuit the temperature of the fuse wire increases and because of that fuse wire melts which breaks the circuit.

3) 1kW h = 3.6*10 6 joule

4) Given that,

V = 200V, I = 1A

Then, P = VI = 200*1 = 200 J/s = 200 W

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How India is emerging as an advanced energy superpower

As the world watches, India is progressing advanced energy solutions rapidly. Image: Unsplash/Milin John

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Debmalya sen, jeremy williams.

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

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India is setting ambitious targets for deploying advanced energy solutions such as clean hydrogen, energy storage and carbon capture. By 2030, it plans to invest over $35 billion annually in these areas.
India has surpassed its 2030 renewable energy goals; the government supports the energy transition through targeted policies, subsidies and incentives, such as production-linked incentives and tax credits.
Scaling up advanced energy solutions requires overcoming challenges related to business confidence, demand certainty and technology reliability.

India is emerging as a global powerhouse in advanced energy solutions. It is the largest country in the world by population and fifth by size of national economy. It is also the third largest in terms of carbon emissions. According to Jennifer Granholm, US Secretary of Energy, “In so many ways, the world’s energy future will depend on India’s energy future.”

In line with this, the country is adopting ambitious goals for deploying solutions such as clean hydrogen, energy storage, carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuels.

Based on announced pledges, India is expected to invest more than $35 billion annually across advanced energy solutions by 2030 (excluding any solar or wind investment). Investment in battery storage alone must reach $9-10 billion annually.

Fast renewable growth drives exponential demand growth for energy storage in India. The country intends to build 47 gigawatts (GW)/236 GW hours (GWh) of battery storage capacity by 2031-32. This ambitious scale-up is equivalent to installing nearly 80 of the largest battery storage facilities globally and 110 times larger than the capacity of India’s battery energy storage systems.

In clean hydrogen, India has set a target to achieve a production capacity of 5 million metric tonnes (MMT) by 2030 . The country aims to build an electrolyzer manufacturing capacity equal to 40GW by 2030 to achieve this goal. This will more than double the total global existing manufacturing capacity at the end of 2023.

More attention has been paid to energy storage and green hydrogen due to the country’s techno-commercial maturity and demand requirements. However, India’s ambitions and needs go further. By 2030, India aims to achieve 30 MMT capacity of carbon capture and storage and 2 MMT of sustainable aviation fuels from currently negligible levels.

Have you read?

Advanced energy solutions: the innovators scaling up clean power, why accelerating the deployment of advanced energy solutions is not a technology readiness challenge, how advanced energy technologies can hasten the energy transition in the developing world, advancing goals.

India has set bold ambitions and demonstrated remarkable progress on energy transition investment. For example, it surpassed its 2030 goal of achieving 40% of installed capacity from renewable energy sources nine years in advance.

To replicate this success and complement it with “made in India” goals, the central and state governments in India have implemented numerous policies and regulations. These include mandates via renewable purchase obligations, energy storage obligations and various subsidies and incentives.

The government offers production-linked incentive schemes that have proved effective in attracting strong industry interest. Other incentives include viability gap funding schemes and tax credits. Additionally, to lower the cost premium of advanced solutions, the government has initiated waivers on transmission, wheeling and banking charges.

In 2023, various tendering authorities in India released 25 tenders linked to energy storage and a viability gap funding scheme for batteries to facilitate better price discoveries. In green hydrogen, two tenders were issued aimed at facilitating 0.45 MT of green hydrogen production and 1,500 MW of electrolyzer manufacturing.

These tenders are supported by production incentives under the Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition programme, for which $2 billion has been allocated.

Made in India

Building strong industries and supply chains at home constitutes a central point of India’s strategy in advanced solutions.

Various central-level policies and regulations have been implemented over the last few years to promote domestic manufacturing of advanced energy technologies and components. The production-linked incentive scheme mentioned above is an example of such an intervention, which is a performance-linked incentive on incremental sales from products manufactured domestically.

Moreover, India is promoting domestic mining by identifying 30 critical minerals and auctioning 20 blocks in 2023, with plans for 20 more in 2024. The government also emphasizes innovative procurement, offtake agreements and research and development investment to bolster these sectors.

Overcoming barriers

Despite significant progress, scaling up advanced energy solutions at the intended level requires additional efforts.

In India, as globally, the primary challenge in deploying advanced solutions over the next decade does not lie so much in their fundamental technological feasibility. It is rather related to confidence in these solutions. The challenge can be broken down into low confidence related to the business case and demand certainty, public trust and confidence in technology.

Unclear business cases and uncertain demand hinder scaling up investments. These need to be increased rapidly to keep up with the need to achieve targets. This acceleration requires building viable business cases to bolster investor confidence, including addressing the cost premium of advanced energy solutions and developing innovative financing models for solutions.

Strategic partnering

Exponentially scaling the advanced energy solutions industries will require unprecedented levels of collaboration to build confidence in the business case and demand while taking a people-positive approach. Collaboration will be essential to driving scale, creating demand signals, unlocking investment, spreading risk and informing policymaking.

Given the constraints of limited resources and tightening timelines, India’s “growing with less” strategy emphasizes the importance of maximizing resource use through collaborations and partnerships. The government works very closely with the industry already and the country is forming strategic alliances with mineral-rich countries for long-term supply of key materials.

Advanced energy solutions community

While every region, country, industry and company will decide on its own approach, all stakeholders must cooperate with each other and the existing system. The World Economic Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community looks forward to supporting stakeholders in India and globally.

The Advanced Energy Solutions community aspires to accelerate, from decades to years, the deployment at industrial scale of advanced energy solutions such as clean fuels and hydrogen, advanced nuclear, storage and carbon removal.

The community engages industry leaders who drive frontier segments of the energy system to shape the advanced energy solutions industry vision and narrative, support partnerships among innovators, large energy companies, energy users and investors, and inform policymaking. The community helps increase public confidence in advanced energy solutions, technology readiness, demand, and business cases while enabling collaborations and informing policy.

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Electricity is a form of energy that occurs in nature and can be harnessed for various purposes. Learn about its history, science, and applications on Wikipedia.
A Timeline Of History Of Electricity
Electricity development and history are very interesting. However, humankind's knowledge of magnetism and static electricity began more than 2,000 years before they were first recognized to be separate (though interrelated) phenomena. Once that intellectual threshold was crossed - in 1551 - scientists took more bold steps forward (and more than a few steps back) toward better understanding and ...
[PDF] History of Electricity
History of Electricity. This paper was written in order to examine the order of discovery of significant developments in the history of electricity. The history of electricity reveals a series of discoveries with the simplest discoveries being made first and more complex discoveries being made later. Some discoveries could not be made without ...
Case Studies in Energy Transitions
This curation of Case Studies in the Environment articles brings together papers that cover the core concepts, keywords, debates, best practices, techniques, tools, skills, and observations needed to improve our understandings of energy transitions. This special issue collection invites papers that engage with ideas and themes about energy transitions or that are incorporated into pedagogical ...
Technological Developments: Electricity
The study of the link between motion and electricity began in the 1820s and 1830s, and the first patent was obtained by Thomas Davenport in 1837. The machines were based on theory rather than efficient practice and had little impact. The next few decades saw further developments in the principle of electrical movement.
History of Electricity
Electricity is a natural phenomenon that is always around us. Documents such as those reported by the ancient Greeks showed that human beings have been aware of electricity and magnetism since antiquity, based on their observations. These findings provided an important opportunity to advance the understanding of electricity's nature and paved ...
7 Case Studies
Read chapter 7 Case Studies: Electricity is the lifeblood of modern society, and for the vast majority of people that electricity is obtained from large, ...
Historical Cases for Contemporary Electricity Decisions
In this second case study, the compelling issues were time, resource availability, and defense necessity, and the process resulted in technical innovation. This case brings the focus to how significantly a major crisis can influence the direction of electrification, thwarting even the proposals that look most reasonable and logical in favor of ...
History of Physics as a Tool to Detect the Conceptual Difficulties
The present paper advocates the use of History of Science into the teaching of science in primary education through a case study in the field of electricity. In this study, which provides both historical and experimental evidence, a number of conceptual difficulties faced by early nineteenth century physicists are shown to be a useful tool to detect 5th grade pupils' conceptions about the ...
Powering a Generation of Change
The website Powering a Generation of Change launched in early 1998 to document and present the history of radical changes then taking place in the US electric power industry. From the days of Thomas Edison's Pearl Street power plant in New York City (as indicated by one of the plant's generators in the site's banner image), engineers and ...
Electric Charge: A Case Study
This chapter analyzes the nature of electric charge. The usual talk of electrical charge is really nothing more than a summary of certain law-governed dispositions—though it certainly gives the impression that it is digging deeper. Textbooks of physics speak as if it is because of charge, positive or negative, that interacting bodies move as they do—suggesting that they have a conception ...
Case Study: California Blackouts
The importation of electricity into California is largely dependent on a few main transmission lines, such as the Pacific Intertie, which runs from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California. The Problem. In 2000 and 2001, California suffered a series of rolling blackouts. Electric utilities in the state had been deregulated in the 1990s.
Case Study Questions Class 10 Science Electricity
CBSE Class 10 Case Study Questions Science Electricity. Important Case Study Questions for Class 10 Board Exam Students. Here we have arranged some Important Case Base Questions for students who are searching for Paragraph Based Questions Electricity.
1.15 Case Study: History of Electric Power
This ongoing case study generates 10 distinct web pages: Electric Power History, Lawrence Hydropower, Area Description, Microgrid ... Get Web Programming with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript now with the O'Reilly learning platform. O'Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O'Reilly and nearly ...
Electricity
Evaluating Preparedness and Overcoming Challenges in Electricity Trading: An In-Depth Analysis Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process and a Case Study Exploration
How NASA Tracked the Most Intense Solar Storm in Decades
During the first full week of May, a barrage of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) launched clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth, creating the strongest solar storm to reach Earth in two decades — and possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years.
FACT SHEET: Biden-
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing a temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to non-FTA countries until the Department of Energy can update ...
How India is emerging as an advanced energy superpower
India is becoming a global leader in advanced energy solutions, setting ambitious goals for clean hydrogen, energy storage and carbon capture.
Anisotropy and Energy Evolution Characteristics of Shales: A Case Study
To obtain the influence of anisotropy and energy evolution characteristics on wellbore stability, the acoustic and mechanical anisotropy characteristics of shales are studied through various experiments, including scanning electron microscopy, ultrasonic pulse transmission, and uniaxial compression experiments, with the Longmaxi Formation shale in the southern area of the Sichuan Basin as the ...
Techno-economic analysis to adopt a biogas plant for processing
The rising population has increased the demand for food, thus increasing the production of agricultural waste. However, the use of biogas offers clean energy through proper agricultural waste management. This study aimed to develop a sustainable framework for biogas production using agricultural waste in northern Iraq.
Heat Pump Water Heater Rebates I Residential I Mass Save
Heat pump water heaters are the most efficient way to heat water in a home—up to three times more efficient than conventional electric water heaters.