Can a dummy load be switched on to overload the outside power lines, raise their temperature and melt the accumulated ice away?
Asked by: Patrick MacKinnon
Answer
I suspect that the energies involved are just too large to be practical. Consider
this 'table napkin' estimation:
The heat of fusion of ice is 333.6 j/gm. Consider an ice jacket 1 cm in radius
around a wire of negligible radius. This ice jacket weighs 314 gm/meter of length,
and would require ~100 watt/meter to melt. That's about a 100 watt light bulb for
every meter of power line.
This ignores any redeposition of fresh ice. All heat losses due to convection and a
lot of other things.
In short, Mother Nature can supply more ice to a power line than Man can melt from
the same power line. And the race isn't even close.
Answered by: Vince Calder, Ph.D., Physical Chemist, retired
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '