Technology: February 2021 Archives
Texplainer: Why does Texas have its own power grid? | kvue.com
"The separation of the Texas grid from the rest of the country has its origins in the evolution of electric utilities early last century. In the decades after Thomas Edison turned on the country's first power plant in Manhattan in 1882, small generating plants sprouted across Texas, bringing electric light to cities. Later, particularly during the first world war, utilities began to link themselves together. These ties, and the accompanying transmission network, grew further during the second world war, when several Texas utilities joined together to form the Texas Interconnected System, which allowed them to link to the big dams along Texas rivers and also send extra electricity to support the ramped-up factories aiding the war effort.
"The Texas Interconnected System -- which for a long time was actually operated by two discrete entities, one for northern Texas and one for southern Texas -- had another priority: staying out of the reach of federal regulators. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with overseeing interstate electricity sales. By not crossing state lines, Texas utilities avoided being subjected to federal rules. "Freedom from federal regulation was a cherished goal -- more so because Texas had no regulation until the 1970s," writes Richard D. Cudahy in a 1995 article, "The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection." (Self-reliance was also made easier in Texas, especially in the early days, because the state has substantial coal, natural gas and oil resources of its own to fuel power plants.)"
8.01x - MIT freshman physics lectures by Walter Lewin
Walter Lewin was for many years the lecture for the freshman physics courses at MIT, and recordings of his entertaining and enlightening lectures were provided with the MIT Open Courseware version of 8.01: Classical Mechanics. MIT deleted Lewin's lectures from the OCW website, but they live on on his own YouTube channel, which also has supplemental help sessions for 8.01x. The 8.01 videos are also available on the Internet Archive. (NOTE: I did not have entertaining Prof. Lewin as my freshman physics lecturer. I had boring Prof. Kleppner for the advanced Physics with Calculus track, and we used Prof. Kleppner's boring and expensive textbook. I survived, drowsed through many of the lectures, but wised up second semester and had a much better experience in 8.02: Electricity and Magnetism.)
