Compressed

My Argentinian - Calgary friend is an engineer and he was telling me that he is working on a compressor station project. Here is a picture I found of one:


They are for natural gas pipelines; I assume oil pipelines also have them, but they would be pumps, not compressors. They basically keep the gas moving through the system (at about 30 km/h) and are located about every 70km or so. There are around 1,500 of them across the USA. Besides compressing the gas to maintain pressure and flow within the parameters required of the network, they also monitor its quality and clean it to some extent.

In a loosely similar way, the BC Hydros of the world have tons of "capacitor stations" all over the place:

If you were to look at BC Hydro capital projects, you would see many of these - there must be dozens across BC alone. They aren't, metaphorically, pumps or compressors; instead, they provide so called "voltage support". This is required to react to the constantly fluctuating demand which would otherwise cause voltage limits (around 118v-122v) to fall outside system-wide limits, and without which your appliances would periodically explode and/or stop working. Well, there are also circuit breakers all over the place to protect against this. You can see them on power poles all over the place.

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