IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2017 - 30

COMMENTARY

Antonio GómezExpósito

T

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2763446
Date of publication: 5 December 2017

30

The Unstoppable
Changing of the
Electricity Guard

NASA.

oday's structure and
organization of elec-
tric energy systems
obey a number of
cir cumstances and
technical milestones that took place
mostly between the last quarter of the
nineteenth century and the first quar-
ter of the twentieth (past) century. If
just two key actors of such a fascinat-
ing achievement had to be named,
those would surely be the power
transformer and the steam turbine,
invented almost simultaneously.
Indeed, power transformers play-
ed a crucial role in quickly settling
the fierce battle of currents between
Edison and Tesla, by allowing high-
voltage AC systems to transmit much
more energy and much farther away
than primitive DC low-voltage feed-
ers (ironically, one century later the
opposite is just happening). Less
well known is the fact that sustain-
ed efficiency improvements and
cost reduction of increasingly larg-
er steam turbines fostered the inter-
connection and fast expansion of
initially isolated and relatively small
power systems.
Then, the advent of nuclear sta-
tions in the 1970s and combined-
cycle gas turbines in the 1980s
reinforced the steady trend towards
a centralized and monopolistic pro-
duction of electricity. For several
decades, thermal stations ranging
from 400 to over 1000 MW, locat-
ed at strategic and usually distant

February 2017, Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in China, 850 MW of capacity. Image
acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. By January 5, 2017, solar
panels covered 27 square kilometers (10 square miles) of Qinghai province. According to
news reports, there were nearly 4 million solar panels at the site in 2017.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2017



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