For what it is worth, Australia has 5 minute generator dispatch, but 30 minute settlement. The market operator is presently implementing a project to bring settlement to 5 minute as well.
A few comments are saying that the author is too harsh on Samsung, but I get the impression that he actually admires Samsung's unscrupulous, unethical though ultimately canny business practices - in a similar way that one would admire a drug dealer's ultra-efficient distribution system.
After all, the Samsung presented in this article enters into new markets via wholesale IP theft. It then uses a suite of legal instruments to stall for time in order to build internal technical capabilities and intellectual capital. Samsung could stop here, but chooses instead to actually innovate and improve on the products using the knowledge and experience base it has accrued copying the product in the first place. It's a pretty shrewd, albeit completely unethical business strategy.
There is a third way, one in which research is not a full-time endeavour, but is still a part of your life. It's certainly not for everyone, and is not "pure" in the sense that you still need to make a living doing something with market value. I generally work 3 days in industry and do research the other 2 days in a university setting (a PhD program).
My work is in the broad area of my research (e.g. power systems), and while there's no direct overlap, they aren't entirely different spheres. I quite like my work and I find the industry contact important, so while I could easily live on 1-2 days of work, I've chosen a work/research split that is more biased towards work. Having said that, as a freelancer, I have a fairly flexible arrangement and some weeks I don't work at all.
The key advantage of this approach is that I am not at all bonded to the university. I don't have to participate in the politics of academia, grant funding, the pressure to publish, progress reporting etc, which I see the other grad students struggling with. I suppose I still have to massage the egos of tenured professors, but I can live with that (as a consultant, I'm always massaging peoples' egos anyway). The bottom line is that having independent funding insulates me from most of the pain of being a PhD student and gives me the freedom to pursue ideas that may lead to dead ends.
A few years ago, I volunteered in SE Asia for 18 months using my electrical engineering skills to help rural villages get access to electricity. At the time, I'd been working professionally for around 7 years and was just becoming competent at working independently. Although I'd gotten my PE status a year earlier, I can't say that I was at a senior engineering / consultant level.
So it was a surprise for me to find that I was one of the most experienced and skilled engineers in my organization (and in many other energy-related organizations for that matter). I concur with the OP and have met quite a few western volunteers that were well-intentioned, but generally had no technical skills.
Of those who had qualifications, they were usually in the social sciences, development studies, media / communications, public relations, etc. Useful skills no doubt, but I felt that the country could have benefited more with direct assistance from the hard sciences and engineering, e.g. hydrology, agriculture, civil engineers, etc - those skills were always in demand. In the end, there's a reason why development is often done so badly - they practically let anyone do it.
This guy built a classic run-of-the-river scheme, i.e. the main stream is not dammed. He built an intake channel off the main stream that flows into a forebay, where the penstock and piping system is installed. He also talks about putting a trash filter in the forebay, again a pretty standard thing to do.
Run-of-the-river schemes probably have the lowest impact on the local environment. I'd imagine very few fish would go into the intake channel.
As a grid engineer, I find the Danish case to be somewhat unique because of their strong AC and DC interconnections to Germany and Sweden. Basically, they can free-ride on the large european grid (UCTE), which stretches from Portgual to Russia, to maintain network stability while increasing domestic wind penetrations above 50%.
I think a more interesting case study is Ireland, which has far weaker interconnectors to the UK and operate mainly as an island network. Like Denmark, they are also trying to integrate large amounts of wind (a goal of 40% by 2020, which is equivalent to over 6GW peak), but unlike Denmark, Ireland also have to deal with the resulting stability issues.
An EirGrid engineer I spoke to recently mentioned that frequency stability is already a big issue for them. The main solution proposed in a 2010 study [1] amounted to maintaining a sufficient operating inertial reserve, which would potentially mean curtailing wind generation at times. In the future, I would look to Ireland rather than Denmark for solutions to integrating more wind into the grid, because they are already at the pointy end of it.
If you look at the major blackouts around the world over the last 10 years, a large chunk of them were caused by a variation on a similar theme:
- The network is heavily loaded pre-blackout (most large networks are these days)
- A major interconnect trips out (e.g. from a tree strike or protection maloperation)
- The other line is out of service (e.g. for maintenance) or is taken out by the same event (e.g. by storms)
- Power flow is redirected through other weaker interconnects causing voltage instability
- Cascading voltage collapses take out the network
Examples: India 2012, European blackout of 2006, Indonesia 2005, northeast blackout of 2003, Italy 2003 (a bit different because the operators cocked this one up as well).
The point is that you can target one or two major transmission lines (usually in the middle of nowhere) and bring down the system. A coordinated attack on several major interconnects could really cause some damage.
I'm one of the many guest workers in Germany. I'm not an EU citizen and I didn't speak a lick of german when I got here. I'd say over half the other engineers in my company are non-german, and most of them couldn't string a single german sentence together when they started either (some still can't!).
The company has had an open engineering position for a german national (or at least native speaker) since before I started almost 2 years ago... and still haven't filled it, even after half a dozen foreigners have joined.
So I can sympathise with the idea that Germany is struggling to find skilled technical workers. It's telling that a company has to resort to hiring a bunch of non-german speaking foreigners and sponsor their visas and so on. I'd find it hard to imagine a French or Italian firm doing the same thing.
The article alludes to the fact that the Mittelstand firms are spread out across the countryside and many are headquartered in small villages. This is true and could perhaps be a big factor in why they find it hard to attract people - I mean, how many skilled engineers are willing to live in the middle of nowhere? I chose to work to here because the company is one of the leaders in a niche specialist field, and I certainly don't regret the decision given the amount I've learned so far. But frankly, I'd rather live in a bigger city.
By virtue of their tight bundling, all composite multi-core cables have high capacitances. However, onshore AC transmission is typically run on overhead lines, with large line spacings and thus capacitance isn't as much of a problem.
