What Is "Induced Atmospheric Vibration"?

Summary

Anyone who’s had to build a power system rapidly learns that electricity is not as simple as “electrons move, work gets done”. Real electrical systems have to deal with issues of reactance and other exciting math-heavy constructs designed to drive you into some other field of study. Power Grids experience this on an epic scale. They have to concern themselves with a few needs simultaneously: ensuring electrical potential doesn’t sag under load (maintaining voltage) ensuring the integrity of the AC waveform (maintaining frequency) ensuring the system doesn’t lose too much energy to fighting its own electromagnetic behavior (controlling the power factor) That last one is the part that is profoundly nonintuitive. Capacitance and inductance inherent to the system create a sort of inertia in the system that must be fought to provide those other two guarantees. Together they work to create what’s called “reactance”. Long range lines and the equipment they connect to can have a lot of reactance. High voltages make it even weirder. One of the strange things that you don’t experience at lower voltages is “corona discharge”. Very high electrical potentials cause the air around the conductors to become ionized. When sufficiently ionized, this creates discharges. You can see static examples of this natural phenomenon in the form of “Saint Elmo’s Fire”. This often precedes a lightning strike if the potential difference is extreme enough. But power transmission systems are not static. They fluctuate dynamically with the AC waveform. This causes situations where discharges or perturbation in fields that create them act as a new component of the reactance of the system. Modeling this is very complicated and very important. Real power transmission systems have active components that work to provide the above guarantees. Most of the time, they are modeled well and tune things to keep the voltage and frequency where it should be with a minimum of losses due to reactance. But these cor...