There must be a strict OSHA rule to how long anyone can be around all of this awesome but dangerous equipment. The EMF's are what can be very harmful or is that a myth???
@@craigroberts1670 They don't emit ionizing radiation. EMFs only danger is, if the exposure is high enough, you are basically in a microwave. The thing is, most things don't produce that much EMF. You'd need to climb a really high power radio-transmitting pole and hug the dish on top to maybe get a chance to get burned.
@@craigroberts1670 RF fields are dangerous in high intensities (large UHF radio transmitter for instance). Low frequency electric and magnetic fields are harmless
It's more dangerous what you do. This stuff is so well looked after and protected it rarely goes wrong. I work with this stuff as well as 230/415v, this EHV is way safer, no deaths in 38 years on EHV, 4 on LV..... take care 👍
Thank you for the very interesting tour with commentary of a place most people would not have the opportunity to see close up like you have shown. It's appreciated.
@@BearsTrains Walking round on that thing. Yikes. Hope your co-workers are conscientious about lock out tag out procedures. What causes the harmonics? I thought harmonics only occurred when one deviated from a sine wave. How is it that they are damped out?
@@Anon54387 The transformer retains residual magnetism and when powered up the residual magnetism adds to the induced magnetism which causes the core to saturate. When the core saturates, the inductance drops down causing an increase in current at the voltage peaks. This causes the input current sine wave to have sharp peaks and associated harmonics. When the current changes direction so that the induced magnetism is the reverse of the residual magnetism, the residual magnetism is reduced. After some time the residual magnetism is reduced down to zero and the input current becomes a lot cleaner. If the current is at a peak when the transformer breaker is opened, the residual magnetism can be quite high. Ideally the transformer should be switched off when the current is zero, but this is difficult to do when mechanical switches are used. Transformers are run as close to magnetic saturation as possible to keep the cost of the steel core down. Even a small amount of residual magnetism will push the core into saturation. This is expected and breaker won't trip even though the current is substantially higher than the normal operating current. allaboutrozan.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/transformer-inrush-current/
Terrifying amount of power! I once had the opportunity to stand partially inside of a 400 Megawatt alternator located in a major dam on the Columbia river in the US, while it was in full operation. I could see the massive rotating armature and the turbine water control system at work only a meter away the sound and vibrations were A very humbling experience.
Now that is bragging rights. My only claim to fame is that the local drivers would let me at the regulator of our electric trains. 16 motors in a six car set, a touch under 3,000 horsepower all up. I was only a kid. Awesome stuff.
Nice, I had a similar experience in a hydro power station (not a dam), we were on a tour and they let us go inside a room where you could see the turbine shaft rotating, the turbine was below the floor and the alternator above the ceiling. It was 60°C in there, we couldn't even touch the railings or you'd get burns, it felt like walking inside an oven
I always loved the sound of the inrush current when a transformer is energized. It's about the only outward indication of the massive amounts of energy moving through the conductors. Retired electrician
I wonder what kind of oil they put inside the transformer. It surely must be oil only for this equipment. I've seen youtubes on what happens when a transformer explodes and all that oil comes pouring out and adds fire to fire like a nuke explosion. YeeeeHahhhhhhhh!!!!
@@craigroberts1670 It’s usually mineral oil as it has high dielectric strength. Transformer oil used to contain PCB’s (Polychlorinated biphenyl) which is carcinogenic, hence it was relaxed with mineral oil. Even vegetable oil can be used.
The sound at 1:51 is exactly the sound I used to hear on foggy mornings cycling past the power lines on my paper round. 6am and no one around just me and those crackling conductors. 1973. Quite scary when I first heard it but next time it happened I realised this was normal. Ahh memories🙂
Being retired from the industry, I enjoy watching these videos of a job I enjoyed and miss. One point I want to make even if it is a small point is lets call it what it is, an Autotransformer. Still enjoyed it.
This is awesome, I've always loved electricity from microcurrent electronics to "Low side is 132KV..." this is always amazing and so interesting... more, need more!!!
Ya! If I had a heavy metal rock band I would sample that sound and use it for an intro to the rawest instrumental piece I could play. I had to listen to it several times it has a wonderful quality to it.
@@BearsTrains I turned the sound all the way up on my computer, and RU-vid cause I couldn't hear anything. Gave me a big start when it came on though. I believe my exact words were "F Me". lol
We buy and sell transformers of this size and larger on the secondary market around the World. These are amazingly engineered devices. We have a station close to us that is 765,000 volts to 345,000 volts at 60HZ. We purchased and sold an 870 MVA that had a stripped and drained shipping weight of nearly 880,000 lb. Great video - thanks for sharing.
Actually, no. The entire image warps at the start because the camera moves. There isn't a plausible way for magnetic interference to do this. There is a very plausible way for image stabilisation sensors to detect the vibrations passing through the meshed grating floor which it is mounted on and apply stabilisation processing to the image very briefly, before averaging it out and realising that the camera is not actually moving.
The engineers that design this stuff are top notch. No room for error at all. One stupid design fault could cause a huge problem. I've seen high tension wires touch in the wind. It is an awesome sight. You cannot face it. You have to hide. The heat is intense. It's like welding without goggles but much worse. Hats off to those who are brave enough to work around such dangerous equipment. I hope they pay them well.
Great video...High voltages have always fascinated me from my school days.I have always wanted to get close to these monsters..never got the chance..This I guess it the closest I can get
Wow.. this was a great video. Funny when I saw the video of the transformer being energized, I said to my room mate, "I wouldn't want to be standing there". Later in the video I found out you didn't want to stand there either.
Beautiful, this is an absolutly beast, the big transformers of electric arc furnaces are about 150Mwats, and you can see with your own eyes how much power is this when melts the steel, and this transformer has triple of power. Amazing.
@01:04 weight 306 tons, that is amazing. I owned a 30 foot by 50 foot by 5-foot ocean-going self propelled steel barge with a 35-ton crane and that only weighed 188 tons.... Thank you for the upload
Seeing other videos of when things go wrong in your workplace, and the arcs that can jump, it would scare me being near that thing. I live in The Dalles Oregon, and we have The Dam holding back the Columbia River, In the paper it said than the dam sends a million volts about 5 miles away up a hill to the Celilo Converter Station where it's turned into DC to start it's trip to California. They have all kinds of your gizmos around the insulators hooked up to the lines headed south. Keith L.
Great video, thanks! Takes me back to Uni days. We studied an awful lot of heavy electrical theory. 4.44 and all that. Few practicals, unfortunately. But I did a summer internship at an electromagnet factory, which made up for it. Yeah: don't take your wallet down to the shop floor, your bank cards will be wiped! Again, big stuff, lifting up to 30T.
3:45 that made me jump, but great video, i always loved the humming of electricity from a substation as a kid and i still often take a walk up to the one up the street from me
For info for corona . Air can handle 3KV/mm before it get ionized and in this case, it will be a conductor instead of an insulation, the electrons can move. nothing is always an insulation or dielectric, it is till the max electric stress that can handle , for example high voltage cables are made from XLPE insulation that can handle 23kv/mm
You don't get a corona unless you have moisture in the air. Very dusty maybe a little one, the tracking a cross the insulators is much more common, that's what the crackling noise was,
Awesome! Years ago, I was lucky enough to be allowed to take pictures inside the converter station in Kent, where 270kV DC comes in from France. The guys there said I could go anywhere I liked within the compound except up... wise words! That place crackled and hummed and I kept getting little zaps off the tripod I was using - there was so much energy in the air ⚡️😀
@@mykolapliashechnykov8701 As far as I can remember, they use massive banks of solid state components (maybe thyristors?) and I mean massive! Several big towers of them in a large hall.
@@TupmaniaTurning I think there's a picture of that hall somewhere on the internet, the insulators were so stupidly massive due to how DC behaves different at the same voltages... It was like a gymnastics hall sized up 3 times in all dimensions, full of massive bushings and bus bars...
apparently, the loud initial sound of the transformer has to do with the fact that the sudden inrush magnetizes the core, which causes the transformer to become magnetically saturated until the alternating current has a chance to demagnetize it.
The engineering behind all the equipment is mind boggling. I'm more of a residential 120/240 guy and play with 12v DC circuitry a lot so I giggle when I see "low voltage at 132,000V" lol
The phone network operators and technicians in my country (The Netherlands) used to have 48V soldering irons with a plug that differed ever so slightly from a normal mains plug (it didn't fit no matter how hard you tried) because those types of sockets used to be everywhere on the phone frames in the old days. Everything above 48V was considered high voltage by them, even though the 48V in the frames could already be deadly (DC, and carrying lots of current). My brother is an electrician now servicing aircraft equipment and teaches me some of the 240V stuff (which is our normal mains voltage) and is glad seeing me treat open connections by measuring them first out of the idea "You can never be sure" (in the case he saw me doing it my dad, who also used to be an electrician had disconnected a particular connection but I still felt a bit iffy about just touching the open ends...). So it differs from profession to profession. We had a fairly recent high voltage grid malfunction in which multiple safety systems that had been bridged for maintenance refused to work as a result and when an arc-flash situation occurred caused a substation to start drawing so much current on a 150 kV distribution line it started to smoke and sag (as if you were looking at a home electronics project going bad due to a short) up to the point that the lines were nearly touching the ground at some points. These sagging lines while still carrying that 150kV sagged down onto the overhead wiring system of our train system, which uses 1500VDC, and even though it disrupted train traffic massively for months on the route affected by the accident, engineers from both sides were keen on learning the problems associated with their field of work. Since they now had to work together because of how the accident had occurred the high voltage grid people were able to see and learn about the destruction it had caused in a 1500VDC system, and the train electricians were asked to join in watching the repairs on the high voltage side and learn about all the things that the massive fault had caused there. If you are interested, this is one of the video's from the arc-flash situation happening, filmed from quite a distance, but you can see the smoking lines. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9JKgGESux94.html Due to all kinds of stray currents that happened due to downed wires in the substation not getting shut down, in several cities the mains voltage in homes shot up to massive peaks way above what's normally allowed (the maximum is 254V I think), seeing voltages over 300V... When the remaining safety system that was operational failed to work when the arc flash happened (it lasted for about 4 minutes) it was the lower voltage substations that were detecting serious problems and cut themselves out to shut things down upstream... Luckily no one got injured and no wildfires started either, even though the train system had seen security system's cabling set on fire along several kilometers, air-gap disconnectors for the train's overhead wires exploded due to arc-over situations to the mast they were mounted on, rail joints to divide rail sections smoked or got on fire...it was absolutely massive and saw a regional disaster alert with the police urging everyone to stay away from the province this happened in.
I used to haul gravel for repairs into the switchyard of an atomic power plant and it stood the hair up all over me when I dumped a load out of the trailer. We always stockpiled in the same place but it still scared me. Thanks for this and I'd leave the phone there too!
Fabulous video. What an amazing job you have! I love the noise from the corona. We have some 200kV lines near us. Walking under them on a foggy / wet day is amazing!
I am 64 and for as long as I can remember I’ve been terrified of those places, I can’t physically drive a car past one because of the terror. I was fascinated but freaking out watching that. The electrical humming made me start to panic. I blame my Father (who was an Electrician) telling horror stories he’d seen in his career and the public information films shown in the UK that were graphic and shows what happens when kids play on electrical equipment 🤯 Oh, and guess what my Maiden name was? CABLE!! 😂
My brother was taught this in his training to become an electrician whenever someone brought up being scared to switch on an electrical system he or she had just built, along with being scared to touch the wires: "Good, you need to be afraid, it means you respect the power electricity has. The day you stop paying electricity the respect it deserves is the day it'll kill you." As for some of those public safety campaigns, I didn't live in the UK so I never saw them except for RU-vid, but oof, government campaigns regarding that did not fool around being right on the nose with conveying the message...
I switched schools back in 1999 when I witnessed a guy vaporized into fine dust by the business end of one of those 400kV secondaries in a power plant. I can still smell the ozone scent mixed with burnt pork after all this time. 12V DC is highest voltage I can cope with after being through that.
Imagine having created the first of this kind of size transformer like 50 to 100 years ago and energising it, not knowing yet what to expect. I would be like 100m away with fingers in my ears, and after its live i wouldn’t dare to get near lol 😂
My scientific director once told me a story from his own postdoc years. Guys were testing a large transformer they have built and wanted to see what happens if the secondary winding is shorted. The power source was a ~6 MW ship diesel generator. Transformer survived just fine, however, some perfectionist decided to coil the generator cable neatly before the experiment. The moment transformer was shorted, the cable uncoiled and lashed the people nearby, resulting in bruised ribs and one broken leg. That was in early 50s, soviet union.