pierced

Today I visited the Energie Museum Berlin. It is only open on the last Saturday of a month for a few hours unless you arrange a tour. It is housed in what once was the largest electric power battery storage in the world. The collection includes lots of cables, connectors, transformers, mercury rectifiers (see extra, apparently one is still in use in Pankow), electric devices, communication and power station technology. It was founded by retired employees of the Bewag, the municipal heat and electricity provider. There were quite a lot of the volunteers there and I had lots of interesting chats about power stations, renewables, smart meters. 

The volunteers are great, they clearly know their stuff through decades of working in that field. They are also very enthusiastic and switched various things on, including one of the mercury rectifiers (it glows beautifully) and a  teleprinter which one of the other visitors got to type in messages.

One of the volunteers told the story that maintenance of the Berlin electricity grid was to be outsourced. Bewag invited engineers from the bidders to demonstrate their skills at joining ancient cables that are still in use in Berlin. They couldn't. 

The blip shows a section of oil cooled high voltage cable that was shortly after installation pierced. 800l of oil leaked, nobody was hurt as the system switched off transmissions instantly. The tip of the peg is quite burnt though. The museum is fascinating and it is under threat. They have to move out in a few months because the building is required again. There are some plans for the future but nothing firm. It would be a great loss if it had to close permanently and the substantial collection would be lost.

It occurred to me that most people (including me) have no idea about how our infrastructure works. Clean water comes out of the tap and electricity out of a socket. We just go to a shop and buy an electric gadget and plug it in. This works because our infrastructure has evolved alongside available electrical consumers. Big industrial consumers have their own arrangements. However, we are no also getting big domestic consumers such as heat pumps and electric cars. Our infrastructure will struggle with the extra load if those become widespread. More infrastructure is expensive (not as expensive as dealing with the effects of climate change) and people don't like it being built near them. Electricity comes out of a socket, why shouldn't that work for electric cars either?

After having spent quite some time in the museum I went for a walk along the Teltow Canal and found out that at the beginning of the 20th century they used electric locomotives to tow the barges. My destination was the Power Station Licheterfelde that is being taken down (see 2nd extra). I also found out during my museum visit that unsurprisingly (West-)Berlin was an energy island from 1953 until 1995 and featured many small power stations. The idea was that no high tech could be stolen.

Some more pictures from the museum and the power station on flickr.