With the threat of act of terrorism and utmost weather perennially perched on the horizon , Chicago ’s get under one’s skin creative with its infrastructure upgrades . The city ’s main power company , Commercial Edison , is planning to install superconducting cablesto prevent outage in the urban center center . Why does n’t every urban center do this ?
The line go fairly childlike . ComEd will lay superconducting cable alongside the existing copper cable underground . Both are about the same size , but the superconducting cable can carry about ten fourth dimension as much power as the even cable . This makes it like to the cable that come directly out of power stations , and means that the grid can reroute power in the result of a cataclysm to forbid a service of process interruption . At first , the superconducting cable will only serve the Loop area of business district Chicago .
It ’s a small scrap unclear how well the superconducting cables will in reality work , since this is the first commercial covering of the technology . And the upgrade wo n’t be cheap either . The Department of Homeland Security has already intrust $ 60 million to the task , and ComEd say it ’ll be much more than that when all is say and done . However , when you consider that power outages cost the commonwealth $ 18 billion to $ 33 a twelvemonth on median , the investment vocalise like it could pay for itself .
Again , ComEd is still in the preparation stages , though it ’s expected to make an proclamation about the task on Wednesday . The decision to move forward with such a design comes a small over a year aftersome hoodlums attacked a world power station in Californiaand just a few months afterhackers broke into a public utility way by guess a word . So at the very least , it ’s nice to see that cities are responding to these kinds of threats . [ Tribune ]
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