INFRASTRUCTURE: Water reservoirs and Power plants

Here is my comment which was posted to an Indianeconomy.org post on Democracy and Infrastructure, but it has not shown up yet even after 24 hrs or so.

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Nitin,

I will try to address your original question. I have been trying to figure out for a while if huge projects like water reservoirs or power plants make economic sense. IMHO, they don't and for lots of reasons.

1) Distribution losses. If you have enormous amounts of losses per km, why not limit your distribution so total losses in the system are kept in check? This applies to power and water. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal for power and water harvesting in dams or lakes. Water and Power transport from one end of the state to another just doesn’t make sense, yet that is what we have in a power or water grid. In the power lines we have lots of losses, which can be imagined, including theft. In the water lines, the losses are almost the same. I have seen water lines about 2-8 meters diameter, they are almost always being ruptured at their joints.

2) Generation and storage losses. You just have to allocate huge and insane amounts of resources: land, water etc to have a centralized infrastructure, which is not inherently scalable. It is a horrible one-time investment. If you build a 10,000 MW power plant it is almost always obsolete as soon it gets out of planning stage. How will you add another 1,000 MW? How will you efficiently store the energy during night time when there is very less demand? Do you all realize the insane amount of water lost to evaporation in open water lakes?

3) Very less points of failure: self-explanatory… Infrastructure should be resilient.

4) Building/response time. To operate a water/power project you have to plan 10 years ahead. Not economically feasible, what if economic conditions change drastically?

We are in the network age, and why doesn’t anybody think of an analogy to the computer network? Currently nearer nodes are not prioritized, all the nodes on the network are probably equally weighted.

Instead a 100-500-1000 MW power plant delivering dedicated electricity to a certain area, with regional electricity transfer possible only to the physically connected grids.

1) You cut down on corruption. Mega projects have lots of opportunities for easy money.
2) Fast response times, can be done inside 6 months to a year from planning to operation.
3) Hopefully more accountable, not much stealing i.e. distribution losses
4) Cheaper to build because very less displacement unlike Narmada Valley project etc.

We have a classic problem of Monolithic vs. microkernel operating systems. Most of the operating systems are now hybrid, but right now most of the power plants and water reservoirs are monolithic. There are efforts in the West and China to go to micropower and micro-water, we should look to them.