EoW May 2010

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EuroWire – May 2010 20
Transat lant ic Cable
Internet
‘Accident or not, Google was tweaked’
So declared Gady Epstein, Beijing bureau chief for Forbes, and in the
matter of Google vs China the incontrovertible fact stood out from
the surrounding murk. But not for long. Mr Epstein was reporting
on Google’s assertion that China’s Great Firewall had blocked the
Google search service. The California-based Internet search and
technologies developer thereby reversed an earlier statement that
a change in Google’s own search parameter had been responsible
for a nearly 10-hour blackout for users in China. Whether the block
was the unintended result of a tweaking of China’s rewall “remains
unclear,” wrote Mr Epstein. (“Google: China’s Firewall Caused the
Block,” 30th March)
Even if clarity has improved since the end of March, the prudent
person will wait until the geeks sort out the question of why, on
the afternoon of 30th March in China, searches of bland terms
returned error messages on Google.com.hk, in Hong Kong; Google.
com, in the USA; and other international Google sites. Users in
Beijing and many other major Chinese cities – including Shanghai,
Chongqing, Chengdu, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou – reported the
same problem. The episode, though serious enough to Google
users and libertarians, had its humorous aspects. During the phase
of blaming its own tinkering for the block, Google implicated a
search parameter that included the letters “rfa.”Thus might America’s
Google have beaten the Chinese gate-keepers to the punch by
inadvertently triggering the Great Firewall’s block of Radio Free Asia.
Energy
Developers are discovering that putting
new power lines under water can forestall
the objections of environmentalists
“The sh don’t vote,” said Edward M Stern, president of PowerBridge,
a company that built the 65-mile o shore Neptune Cable from
New Jersey to Long Island and is working on two more. One cable
would bring wind power south from Maine along the Atlantic
coast to Boston, and the other would connect wind farms under
consideration for the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Lanai to the
urban centre of the most populous island, Oahu. Even if sh did vote,
they might accept underwater power lines that draw virtually no
resistance from the larger public – a bloc with a very jaundiced view
of new high-voltage electrical lines of any kind. Matthew L Wald of
the New York Times reported that environmentalists are mounting
only token opposition to a string of projects that would bury power
lines in the river- and lakebeds of the Northeast, thereby preserving
trees and avoiding the necessity for huge towers. (“A Power Line
Runs Through It,” 16th March). What Mr Wald terms “a remarkably
simple answer” to a famously thorny political problem has even
elicited the cautious enthusiasm of some environmental groups, on
grounds that the underwater power lines will advance the goal of
getting the USA to use more renewable energy. Generating 20% of
America’s electricity from wind, as recommended by recent studies,
calls for up to 22,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines.
A Toronto-based company, Transmission Developers, is seeking
permits to lay one of the longest submarine power cables in the world.
The 370-mile line would run from Canada, along the bottom of Lake
Champlain, and down the bed of the Hudson River to New York City.
It would continue under Long Island Sound to Connecticut.
Mr Wald wrote, “If Transmission Developers succeeds with such an
ambitious project, others are likely to study the underwater strategy
to gure out just how far they can take it. Would power lines crossing
the Great Lakes make sense? Could underwater cables be used to
move renewable power from the windy Great Plains to cities like
Chicago?”
Addressing the cost of submarine power lines, Mr Wald noted ❈
that it can be lower than for land burial because the cables
can be laid from giant reels, allowing stretches of more than
a mile with no splices. Of course, he wrote, “The strategy is
limited by the availability of rivers and lakes [that] do not go
everywhere power developers would like to run new lines. Many
of the country’s rivers run north or south, whereas much of the
country’s power must move east or west.” But underwater lines
are more expensive than lines strung on transmission towers.
Mr Wald said that the PowerBridge cable cost about $600 million.
Much of that – as with a $505 million, 53-mile cable under
San Francisco Bay – went toward transforming the electricity
from alternating to direct current. By comparison, standard
lines hung on towers run from $1 million to $4 million a mile,
depending on the terrain.
The ❈ Times observed that nearly all submarine cables use direct
current, the form of transmission widely rejected in the late
1800s in favour of alternating current. But AC lines are hard to
bury because interaction between the current and the cable
casing drives up the voltage.