Just take note that ABB is not Allen Bradley. ABB is an European
company. I know that one of the HVDC system is in California. 

Still the major market is not in USA since the states has enough 
electrical power generation capacity (do not know why President Bush 
wants to build more nuke power stations). The problem is in the 
distribution/transmission systems which is quite backwards. It is
also not so easy to integrate this to the national grids.

The whole idea of distributed power generation (using wind power,
fuel cell, ...) is not so easy with the conservative power
companies.

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: Denny Esterline [mailto:firmware@tds.net]
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2005 2:26 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE] Voltage drops

Just in case you wanted some references to the subject of DC electrical grid
interconnections...

A decent overview, a little history and some good links can be found on the
Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_voltage_direct_current

Allen Bradley supplies most of the hardware for these systems (at least here
in the USA), they have some decent material at:
http://www.abb.com/global/abbzh/abbzh251.nsf!OpenDatabase&db=/global/gad/gad
02181.nsf&v=17EA&e=us&m=100A&c=D7779A6F38FCBDC0C1256F9D0046D2B0

Basically they're used anywhere they can be financially justified. Install
can be cheaper because the conductors are sized smaller. (AC conductors must
be sized for peak current, but only deliver RMS power - DC doesn't) And long
term can be cheaper due to capacitive losses in AC lines. (think of long
underground runs...) And of coarse what could be the biggest benefit, the
ability to interconnect unsynchronized electrical grids.

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