The recent tsunami's in japan has created a mammoth problem and i will tell you why?
Tsunami has damaged many of power plants thereby cutting off power supply some section of japan,but the main problem is that some part of Japan has 50Hz frequency generation and other 60Hz generation.So,the power transfer is not possible due to difference in power frequency.
Bridging Japan's east-west frequency divide to stoke power flows will require real engineering hustle.
The earthquake and tsunami that destabilized Japan’s Fukushima Dai-1 nuclear power plant last month also blew a large hole in the country’s power supply. Eleven nuclear reactors in eastern Japan shut down, including three that were running at Fukushima Dai-1 and four at the nearby Fukushima Dai-2 plant. In all, more than 27 gigawatts of power generation were out of commission, forcing Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)—operator of the Fukushima reactors and power supplier to greater Tokyo—to ration power by instituting rolling blackouts.
TEPCO’s supply situation would look less grim were it not for a quirky split that divides Japan’s power grids in half: While Tokyo and the rest of eastern Japan run on 50-hertz electricity, the big cities southwest of Tokyo and the rest of the country run on alternating current that cycles at 60 Hz. It’s a historical accident from the 19th century, when Tokyo’s electrical entrepreneurs installed 50-Hz generators mainly from Germany, while their counterparts in Osaka selected 60-Hz equipment from the United States. The result is a national grid whose two halves cannot directly exchange AC power, which limits TEPCO’s ability to seek help from the 56 percent of Japan’s power-generating capacity that lies to the west.
"It’s a shame. The western grids can supply a lot. I think they could cover [TEPCO’s] peak demand," says Kent Hora, executive vice president for Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, the U.S. arm of Japanese power-engineering giant Mitsubishi Electric.
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| VOLTAGE AND FREQUENCY GENERATION |
As it stands, just three small installations can squeeze power across Japan’s AC frequency frontier. These are converter stations that use high-voltage electronics to pull alternating current off one grid, convert the power to high-voltage direct current (HVDC), and then synthesize a novel AC wave to add the power to the other grid. Together these three facilities can push up to 1.2 GW of power east or west. TEPCO is using them at full capacity, says Junichi Ogasawara, a senior researcher at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ), a Tokyo-based think tank.
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