World's Biggest Battery Switched On in Alaska

windowpain writes "An article in the London Telegraph describes a 2,000 square meter 13,730 cell NiCad UPS that will provide backup power for the entire city of Fairbanks for up to seven minutes. 'This is enough time, according to ABB, to start up diesel generators to restore power, an important safeguard since at such low temperatures, water pipes can freeze entirely in two hours.' Now if they can just remember to keep it plugged in." Update: 08/28 14:58 GMT by M : A reader notes that the battery has enough juice for 12,000 people for seven minutes, and the city of Fairbanks has a population of over 80,000, so they couldn't keep the whole city powered up for even a minute.

hehe

[miruku]

i wonder how long my mp3 player would last on that thing..

Whoa, sweet.

[torpor]

I wonder if they've got a broadcast service for it, so that computers can get automated details about the power system switching to City-UPS, and consequently deal with it?

7 minutes of warning before switching to backup power ... lessee ... a couple of sync's, put transaction queues in wait-state, hold tight on all processing ... *blink* ... back in business.

Of course, this'd give the average Windows user just about (but not quite) enough time to watch their taskbar-status control-pane/app thingies shut down, too ...

Imagine...

[kinnell]

The giant energiser bunny of the apocalypse.

That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

The really impressive item is the huge 9-pin serial connector between the UPS and the city. Pins the size of manholes!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:12 stones!

[Cy Guy]

Slugs are worse then stones.... Slugs are used somewhere in physics to make rocket science as hard as it is.

Well, thanks to Google calculator that should no longer be a problem: 1 stone = 0.435133302 slugs [google.com] .

1 slug = 32.1740486 pounds [google.com] or 14.5939029 kilograms

A little math - what's the maglite equivalent?

[morcheeba]

40MW for 7 minutes = 4.6 MWattHours. A D-cell is 12 AmpHours [umsystem.edu] * 1.5 = 18 WattHours, so this battery pack is equivalent to 260,000 D-cells. A D-cell is 60 mm long [batterieswholesale.com], so this is would be a Mag Light 9.6 Miles Long!. Here's an artist's rendering [maglite.com]

The important question

[the darn]

Does it emit a heart-stopping, ear-splitting banshee wail when it kicks in? Because the lights going off just isn't sufficent notice that the power is out...

Re:12 stones!

[slug359]

Pounds are the strangest imperial unit, you insensitive clod.

No problem...

[seanmeister]

Once Fairbanks is hooked up to the Matrix, the other 68,000 people will serve as backup power when the NiCads punk out.

Re:It's a start. Personally I prefer my own.

[ralico]

Sign me up, I hate resetting my clocks!