It's About Time: A Power Line That Sheds Heavy Ice

Tired of Jack Frost knocking out your power? Victor Petrenko, an engineering professor at Dartmouth College, has developed de-icing technology that could save power lines from ice storms. Until now, the only answer to frozen lines has been to hope that they don’t break or pull down poles under the weight of the ice. A single ice storm in early December left more than 1.25 million people in Pennsylvania, New England and New York shivering in the dark after ice storms snapped power lines. Petrenko’s trick is to increase the electrical resistance in cables, something engineers usually avoid because it causes lines to lose energy as heat. Attached to each end of a line, his device switches the wires inside from a standard parallel layout to a series circuit. In normal conditions, the cable works like a standard power line, but flipping the line to series increases...

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