Search Results for: "smart grid"

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Cisco’s John Chambers talks Green

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This is a video of Cisco CEO, John Chambers giving a superb presentation at MIT last year.

In the talk, John talks up the rise of video as a tool for collaboration in the enterprise, mentions some of Cisco’s work in China after the earthquake there, and talks up Smart Grids (“Smart Grids are $billion opportunities”).

42 minutes into the video, in answer to one of questions in the q&a John talks about some of Cisco’s Green initiatives including the Connected Urban Development program.

Well worth taking time out to watch.

via the Alianzo blog.

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GreenMonk news roundup 01/06/2009

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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REALLY Smart Meters!

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Smart meter

Photo Credit yewenyi

Smart electricity meter projects are being rolled out all over the globe at this stage (here’s a map of the Smart Meter projects in the US), and with the Smart Meters, come Smart Grids and Demand Response programs whereby the utilities implement peak shaving programs (and in certain cases demand stimulation) to match demand and supply curves. This will lead to a more stable grid and therefore increase the amount of variable generators (i.e. weather based renewables) it is possible to add to the grid. Great.

However, this is not nearly ambitious enough as far as I am concerned. First off, as I have said previously, cheaper electricity typically has a higher % of renewables in the generation mix. Therefore, if I am getting a smart meter, I want it to be a very smart meter. I want my meter to be going out across the grid, checking the realtime price from all utilities and dynamically sourcing the energy from the cheapest supplier at any given time. Nothing too new there, I have written about that concept previously.

Taking that idea to the next level. Imagine if utilities were mandated to publish, not only the price of electricity in realtime, but also the generation mix. I could then have a Smart Meter which would actively chose the greenest electricity for me at any time. Or the one with the best price/renewables mix.

And if we had a SuperGrid in place, then that Green electricity might be coming from Danish windfarms, Icelandic geothermal generation or North African solar farms.

Now that would be a Really Smart Meter!

UPDATE – I have been asked the relevance of the photo above – it is subtle, anyone care to guess?

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GreenMonk news roundup 12/09/2008

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Utilities are too top-down, command and control

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Top-Down

Photo Credit Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan

Utilities are top-down.

Whenever I talk to utilities about Smart Grids and Smart Meters they always trot out the same speech. They want to use Demand Response for peak shaving and they want to implement it by having a mechanism whereby they can come in to their customer’s houses at times of maximum demand and turn down the settings on the aircon, immersion heater, etc.

Unfortunately this kind of traditional top-down, command and control attitude is more likely to turn people off Demand Response programs than to sell it to them.

I know that as a consumer I want to be able to program my appliances myself so that I decide when they turn on/off in response to price signals from the grid. The same is true for fridges/freezers and water immersions – I want them to change thermostat settings to take in electricity at times when energy is cheap and not when it is expensive by MY definitions of cheap and expensive.

I want control of my appliances. I do not want the utility deciding to come in and adjust or turn them on/off for me because it suits them.

Demand Response programs will be hugely beneficial to the utilities and consumers alike but they are complex to explain. If you couple that with the utility having control of your appliances they suddenly become a far harder sell.

Give customers more control of their electricity bill. Allow them reduce costs without reducing usage, by owner controlled, programmatic, time-shifting of consumption and suddenly Demand Response programs becomes an easy sell.

And when you couple that with how Demand Response will stabilise the grid facilitating greater penetration of variable supplies (i.e. weather-based renewables like wind and solar) and you have a win, win, win!

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GreenMonk news roundup 11/22/2008

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  • Energy Outlook

    The US Geological Survey released a report estimating that 85 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of technically recoverable gas hydrates are accessible on the Alaskan North Slope. If produced over 20 years and combined with the conventional gas supply from the North Slope, which has been waiting for a pipeline south for many years, this deposit could supply up to a third of total US natural gas consumption. But that barely scratches the surface of the overall potential of gas hydrates.

    The reason this announcement is so significant lies in the words “technically recoverable.” Geologists have known about gas hydrates for a long time, and estimates of global hydrate deposits have been refined to a range of between 100,000 and a million TCF, with the best estimate of US hydrate deposits currently at 200,000 TCF. To put that in perspective, one TCF of natural gas represents about 1% of US annual total energy consumption and contains the same energy as 180 million barrels of oil or 10 billion gallons of ethanol. In other words, that 200,000 TCF estimate is the equivalent of a 2,000-year energy supply for the US, at current consumption levels, of a fuel with half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal.

    tags: methane hydrates, fossil fuel

  • A high-tech network cuts down on electricity use – Nov. 19, 2008

    Reliant operates in a competitive, deregulated electricity market. If homeowners get cool technology that helps them avoid the unpleasant surprise of a big electric bill, Jacobs believes Reliant will retain more customers. And then there’s the green angle. “We as an industry are the single largest emitter of greenhouse gas, and our goal is to help our customers use less, spend less, and emit less,” says Jacobs

    tags: smart grid, smart meter, reliant

  • Applications | Whalepower

    Tubercle Technology and wind turbines were made for each other. Tubercles allow turbines to overcome the three major limitations of wind power:

    * poor reliability when winds fall or fail
    * noise – especially tip chatter caused by tip stalling
    * poor performance in unsteady or turbulent air

    tags: wind turbine, tubercle technology

  • The Auto Execs didn’t walk!!! But don’t ask about their pay…

    The chief executives of General Motors Corp. (GM) and Ford Motor Co. (F) said Wednesday they wouldn’t accept a $1 salary in exchange for government aid to their imperiled companies, as the head of the former Chrysler Corp. did a generation ago.

    During a hearing Wednesday, a member of the House Financial Services Committee told Rick Wagoner of GM and Alan Mulally of Ford that reducing their annual salaries to $1 would be an important symbolic gesture as they lobby for $25 billion in loans funded by tax dollars. Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca worked for that wage when his company was bailed out by the government in the 1980s.

    tags: gm, ford, chrysler, bailout

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 11/21/2008

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  • Save Energy Star before it becomes a Black Hole

    The U.S. government’s Energy Star program is in trouble. Despite all the media references it garners, the program is failing the American public and, without serious intervention, will collapse in on itself to become a black hole of irrelevance and wasted resources.

    tags: energy star, epa, doe, energy efficiency

  • The Energy Roadmap – Moving Toward Zero Energy Homes

    The vision of ‘zero energy homes’ is to transform the residential built environment from a major consumer of energy, to a neutral, or net zero energy environment where the annual amount of energy produced and consumed is equal. More forward looking architects and energy system designers envision homes that are (annually) net producers of energy and able to push energy back into the grid, or fuel vehicles

    tags: zero energy home, energy, home

  • Nanotechnology Now – Press Release: “Today’s Broken Power Grid to be Replaced by a Smarter Power Web”

    The power grid today is wasteful, costly, inefficient and dumb – and ill-equipped to address many pressing energy issues, from the need to focus on climate change and carbon cost, to the demand for high reliability. However, the advent of distributed generation, distributed storage, and distributed intelligence will change power infrastructure into an intelligent and more nimble power web.

    “Smart grid technologies, like advanced metering infrastructure and demand response services, will enable the transformation of the current grid to a more reliable and intelligent power web,” said Ying Wu, Senior Analyst at Lux Research.

    Looks like he has been reading GreenMonk.net!!!

    tags: electricity 2.0, electranet, grid 2.0, smart grid, demand response

  • Coming Soon: Improved Lithium Ion Batteries?

    A team led by Jaephil Cho at Hanyang University in Korea has now developed a new material for anodes, which could clear a path for a new generation of rechargeable batteries. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, their new material involves three-dimensional, highly porous silicon structures.

    tags: batteries, lithium, lithium ion, rapid charge

  • EcoGeek – Clean Technology

    Solfocus, whose technology focuses 500x the normal strength of sunlight onto tiny bits of ultra-efficient (ultra-expensive) solar material has just released a new solar unit that it promises has “the highest energy density and energy yield of any photovoltaic system available today.”

    tags: solfocus, solar concentrating, photovoltaic, photovoltaic solar, solar power

  • Micro Fuel Cells Get Closer to Replacing Batteries

    In a recent study, a team of researchers has developed micro-sized direct methanol fuel cells (microDMFC) that achieve significantly improved fuel efficiency and maintain a good power density while operating at room temperature. The energy density (measured in watt-hours per liter) of the new fuel cells is 385 Wh/L, which is superior to lithium ions batteries’ value of 270 Wh/L.

    The research, led by Dr. Steve Arscott at the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN) in France, working in collaboration with SHARP Corporation in Nara, Japan, is published in a recent issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, and a second study has been accepted to the Journal of Power Sources.

    tags: methanol, batteries, fuel cell, methanol fuel cell, lithium ion

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

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Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2expoeu08 w2eb)

I spoke today at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin and the title of my talk was:
Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks

The talk was about demand response, smart grids, renewables etc. and it received extremely positive feedback so I thought I’d share the slide deck here for anyone who may be interested.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/03/2008

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  • The future of electricity: A guide to the Smart Grid

    “Our lights may be on, but systemically, the risks associated with relying on an often overtaxed grid grow in size, scale and complexity every day.”

    What if our greatest energy dependency challenge was not related to the global flow of oil, but the one way flow of electricity coming from distant power plants to our wall sockets?

    Realizing the ‘Smart Grid’ Vision
    The conversation about electricity infrastructure is likely to change very soon as governments and the private sector build out the vision of a smarter, electricity web that is infinitely more reliable, robust and profitable.

    tags: smart grid, doe, electricity 2.0