The Big Smart Grid Challenges

Smarter meter: Possible strategies for reducing energy consumption rely on devices that can send and receive information from utilities and communicate wirelessly with appliances.  Credit: Kevin Bullis, Technology Review

A smarter electricity grid could fundamentally change the way people pay for and manage their electricity use. In theory, the technology could help reduce demand, save money, and improve reliability and efficiency. But implementing the necessary changes will be difficult, according to experts attending a symposium on the smart grid at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY, this week. They expect resistance from regulators and consumers alike, citing the complexity of the proposed system as well as concerns about privacy and security.

The smart grid will incorporate new networking technology, including sensors and controls that make it possible to monitor electricity use in real time and make automatic changes that reduce energy waste. Furthermore, grid operators should be able to instantly detect problems that could lead to cascading outages, like the ones that cut power to the northeastern United States in 2003. And the technology ought to allow energy companies to incorporate more intermittent, renewable sources of electricity, such as wind turbines, by keeping the grid stable in the face of minute-by-minute changes in output.

For consumers, the smart grid could also mean radical changes in the way they pay for electricity. Instead of a flat rate, they could be charged much more at times of high demand, encouraging them to reduce their energy use during these periods. Companies such as GE are developing refrigerators, dryers, and other appliances that can automatically respond to signals from the utility, shutting off or reducing energy consumption to allow consumers to avoid paying the peak prices. Such strategies could allow utilities to put off building new transmission lines and generators to meet peak demand–savings that could be important as proposed regulations on carbon dioxide emissions force them to switch to more expensive sources of electricity.

But the necessary changes could prove difficult for consumers to adjust to, says Garry Brown, chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission, a utility regulator. Industrial and commercial electricity customers already have variable electricity rates that change with the time of day, but “they have the ability and expertise and wherewithal to figure out what to do with this,” Brown says. “They have a manager that spends their life trying to react to it.” Ordinary consumers don’t have that advantage. Indeed, in the 1990s the New York state legislature blocked mandatory variable pricing amid concerns about the impact it could have on customers who couldn’t avoid peak prices, such as people who must use electric-powered medical equipment around the clock. We have to be “slow and cautious,” about introducing the technology, Brown says.

The grid upgrade may also face resistance from regulators because some of the benefits are difficult to measure. Regulators are responsible for ensuring that utilities make wise investments that restrain the price of electricity. But improved efficiency and reliability can’t easily be quantified, says Bryan Olnick, a senior director at the major utility Florida Power and Light. He says that regulators need to start considering long-term societal benefits in addition to electricity costs. Ultimately, regulators will need proof that the systems can deliver the promised benefits, which is why there are now smart-grid demonstration projects in places including Boulder, CO; Maui; and Miami.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23015/

Are the deserts getting greener?

It has been assumed that global warming would cause an expansion of the world’s deserts, but now some scientists are predicting a contrary scenario in which water and life slowly reclaim these arid places.

They think vast, dry regions like the Sahara might soon begin shrinking.

The evidence is limited and definitive conclusions are impossible to reach but recent satellite pictures of North Africa seem to show areas of the Sahara in retreat.

It could be that an increase in rainfall has caused this effect.

Farouk el-Baz, director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University, believes the Sahara is experiencing a shift from dryer to wetter conditions.

“It’s not greening yet. But the desert expands and shrinks in relation to the amount of energy that is received by the Earth from the Sun, and this over many thousands of years,” Mr el-Baz told the BBC World Service.

“The heating of the Earth would result in more evaporation of the oceans, in turn resulting in more rainfall.”

But it might be hard to reconcile the view from satellites with the view from the ground.

While experts debate how global warming will affect the poorest continent, people are reacting in their own ways.

Droughts over the preceding decades have had the effect of driving nomadic people and rural farmers into the towns and cities. Such movement of people suggests weather patterns are becoming dryer and harsher.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned recently that rising global temperatures could cut West African agricultural production by up to 50% by the year 2020.

But satellite images from the last 15 years do seem to show a recovery of vegetation in the Southern Sahara, although the Sahel Belt, the semi-arid tropical savannah to the south of the desert, remains fragile.

The fragility of the Sahel may have been exacerbated by the cutting of trees, poor land management and subsequent erosion of soil.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8150415.stm

After Sabotaging Own Oil Wells, Exxon Faces $1 Billion in Fines

The biggest US oil company, Exxon Mobil, has just got caught with its hand in the well–the oil well that it purposefully sabotaged so no other company could use, that is. The Texas General Land Office has just revealed that Exxon “maliciously” destroyed its own oil fields so that no one else would be able to tap them–and it’s getting slapped with a $1 billion fine for the crime. And wait till you hear what they did to the wells–and what that fine will go towards cleaning up.

It’s not pretty. In fact, it’s pretty disgusting. According to Bloomberg:

Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the land office that oversees oil leases that help fund Texas schools, asked the Texas Railroad Commission to conduct hearings into an alleged 1990s program at Exxon Mobil of plugging abandoned wells with trash, sludge, explosives and cement plugs. The barriers made it impossible for other producers to revive the wells, Patterson said in a statement he gave to Bloomberg News yesterday.

So that’s an environmentally offending twofer–it both further degrades the area around the wells, and wastes the ever more scarce natural resource that had already been drilled for exploitation. On the bright side, I guess it’s a bit of petrol that won’t get burned . . .

So why the spiteful rampage? It seems Exxon had a bit of a falling out with one of Texas’s most prominent oil families, the O’Connors.

From the 1950s to the late 1980s, the O’Connors earned more than $40 million in royalties on crude and gas pumped from 121 wells that Exxon Corp., as the company was then known, and a predecessor, Humble Oil & Refining Co., drilled on the family’s land near Corpus Christi, according to court filings. 

The relationship between Exxon and the family deteriorated in the late 1980s, when the company’s request for a reduction in the 50 percent royalty rate was rebuffed, court documents showed. Exxon said the field was no longer profitable and began shutting wells, a process that concluded in August 1991, the documents showed.

After Exxon packed up and left town, the O’Connors decided to tap the rest of the oil from the partially sapped fields.

Two years later, Emerald Oil . . . agreed to lease from the O’Connors one-third of the area formerly operated by Exxon. When Emerald drilled into the plugged wells to revive production, drill bits collided with cement, severed pipes and explosive charges normally used to perforate rock formations, Patterson said.

Bad form indeed.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/exxon-sabotage-oil-fields.php

43 New Coal Plants Grandfathered In By House Climate Bill – Efficiency Standards Won’t Apply

If you thought that the new efficiency standards for coal plants incorporated in the the American Clean Energy & Security Act would slow the construction of new carbon-spewing power plants, think again. Solve Climate points out that there are currently 43 new coal-fired power plants which are currently under construction or permitted to be built and won’t have to meet these future emissions controls:

New Plants Would Quadruple Recently Built Capacity
Though in the last eight years only 5,600 MW of new coal power-fired electric capacity was built in the United States, these new power plants will add collectively over 22,000 MW of capacity — and over their lifetimes will produced more than 150 million tons of CO2 emissions, author David Sassoon points out.

The House climate bill would require that new coal power plant capture and store at least half of their CO2 emissions by 2025.

It’s All Happened Before…
Sassoon goes much farther into how coal power plants have been grandfathered into US environmental legislation of previous occasions, so check it out: Solve Cliamte

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/43-new-coal-plants-grandfathered-in-house-climate-bill-without-emissions-standards.php

Air Force Plans for All-Drone Future

Is the day of the hot-shot fighter jock nearly done?

An Air Force study, released without much fanfare on Wednesday, suggests that tomorrow’s dogfighers might not have pilots in the cockpit. The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan. which sketches out possible drone development through the year 2047, comes with plenty of qualifiers. But it envisions a radical future. In an acronym-dense 82 pages, the Air Force explains how ever-larger and more sophisticated flying robots could eventually replace every type of manned aircraft in its inventory — everything from speedy, air-to-air fighters to lumbering bombers and tankers.

Emphasis on “might” and “could.” While revealing how robots can equal the capabilities of traditional planes, the Air Force is careful to emphasize that an all-bot air fleet is not inevitable. Rather, drones will represent “alternatives” to manned planes, in pretty much every mission category.

Some of the missions tapped for possible, future drones are currently considered sacrosanct for human pilots. Namely: dogfighting and nuclear bombing. Drones “are unlikely to replace the manned aircraft for air combat missions in the policy-relevant future,” Manjeet Singh Pardesi wrote in Air & Space Power Journal, just four years ago. Dogfighting was considered too fluid, too fast, for a drone’s narrow “situational awareness.” As for nuclear bombing: “Many aviators, in particular, believe that a ‘man in the loop’ should remain an integral part of the nuclear mission because of the psychological perception that there is a higher degree of accountability and moral certainty with a manned bomber,” Adam Lowther explained in Armed Forces Journal, in June.

Despite this, the Air Force identifies a future “MQ-Mc” Unmanned Aerial System for dogfighting, sometime after 2020. The MQ-Mc will also handle “strategic attack,” a.k.a nuke bombing. Less controversial is the conjectural MQ-L, a huge drone that could fill in for today’s tankers and transports.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/air-force-plans-for-all-drone-future/

Classifying ‘Clicks’ In African Languages To Clear Up 100-year-old Mystery

A new way to classify sounds in some human languages may solve a problem that has plagued linguists for nearly 100 years–how to accurately describe click sounds distinct to certain African languages.

Cornell University professor Amanda Miller and her colleagues recently used new high-speed, ultrasound imaging of the human tongue to precisely categorize sounds produced by the N|uu language speakers of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert. The research potentially could change how linguists describe “click languages” and help speech scientists understand the physics of speech production.

The African languages studied by Miller use a series of consonants called “clicks” which are unlike most consonants in that they are produced with air going into the mouth rather than out. The N|uu clicks, produced using both the front and back of the tongue, are difficult to characterize.

“When we say ‘k’ or ‘t,’ the sound is produced by air breathing out of our lungs,” said Miller. “But click sounds are produced by breathing in and creating suction within a cavity formed between the front and back parts of the tongue. While linguists knew this, most didn’t want to accept it was something people controlled.” So they loosely classified these click consonants using imprecise groupings.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090715131551.htm

Microsoft releases Dryad concurrent-programming code to academics

It’s been two years since Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked up Dryad, Microsoft’s concurrent-programming competitor to Google’s MapReduce and Apache Hadoop. But this week, Dryad was back on the radar screen, with Microsoft’s release of the Dryad code to academics and researchers.

The goal of Dryad is to enable programmers to develop and run applications on Windows computer clusters. The Dryad software is designed to allow systems to automatically parallelize at a low level complex applications across multiple machines.  Unlike existing high-performance computing and grid platforms, which are more focused on compute-intensive workloads, Dryad is more geared toward data-intensive computing scenarios where scale and fault-tolerance are of the essence.

Microsoft and a very few select partners have been using the Dryad code to develop a variety of sample and real-world apps — everything from bio-informatics to astronomy-focused programs.

At Microsoft’s Faculty Summit 2009 conference this week, company officials announced the availability of Dryad and the DryadLINQ programming tools. (The Dryad code is in binary form and DryadLINQ in source form). DryadLinq makes the Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to the C# programming language available to .Net developers writing Dryad apps. Researchers and academics can download both Dryad and DryadLINQ after signing Microsoft’s MS-Research licensing agreement.

At the conference, Microsoft execs also acknowleged that Dryad is not available on top of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, but that the plan is to make it available there. Officials didn’t offer Factulty Summit attendees a timetable for the Azure move, however.

(Check out the slide below from a March 2009 Dryad presentation by Microsoft Researcher Mihai Budiu. The Azure pieces are grayed out, but it’s possible to see how Microsoft envisions Dryad working with Azure.)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3385

Sailing On the Ground, at 126 MPH

Running Like the Wind: The Greenbird uses an airplane-wing-like sail to obtain ground speeds of 126.2 mph  Colin Leonhardt (See the Greenbird up close!)

California Zephyr: The 1,323-pound, carbon-fiber Greenbird races across Ivanpah Lake in the Mojave Dessert. It is 32.8 feet long, with an equally tall sail

The wind may be restless, but the fastest air-powered ground vehicle is surprisingly steady as it sails over the dusty ground. Called Greenbird, it was developed by English engineer Richard Jenkins and the U.K.’s largest private green electricity supplier, Ecotricity.

 On March 26 in a dry lakebed in California, the craft broke the world land-speed record for wind-powered vehicles by more than 10 miles an hour, setting the new record at 126.2 mph. Greenbird uses a solid, vertical sail—shaped like an aircraft wing—to capture the wind. The craft’s unique low-drag design, coupled with the power of “apparent wind” (a combination of true wind and the wind force created by forward motion), allows it to travel at up to five times the true wind speed.

Next For Touchscreens: Temporary Pop-Up Buttons?

Touchscreens allow for endlessly adjustable interfaces—well, nearly endless. You can’t operate a touchscreen by feel alone, although engineers working in the field of haptics have used vibrating virtual buttons to provide limited tactile feedback. Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have gone a bit further, designing a screen with hidden latex air bubbles. When buttons are needed, an air pump pops the bubbles up into physical keys. The team tested the technology in a driving simulator, a situation where users don’t—and shouldn’t—devote full attention to electronic displays on GPS and audio systems. “There were only a quarter as many glances away from the road as there were with the touchscreen,” Chris Harrison, a graduate student at CMU who worked on the project, says. Volkswagen is interested in the buttons, according to the researchers. And the technology could eventually find its way into Braille-enabled gadgets.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4324960.html

Canning can be for you

Canning foods is something our mothers and grandmothers did. Not us.

But this homemade art is making a comeback. Ball Corp., the maker of those ubiquitous Mason jars and other canning equipment, saw a 30 percent increase in retail sales last year, and sales continue to rise in 2009.

Ball hired a market research company to find out who is causing this upswing. The answer: men and women ages 35 to 50. Their traditional customer had been a rural woman who was older than 50.

Maybe it’s the recession. Maybe it’s the focus on eating local foods and eating in season: To do so in winter, you have to put up summer’s bounty. Whatever the reason, I’m here to tell you: It’s not as hard as you think.

I canned for the first time last year. I canned peach preserves, fig jam, whole figs and strawberry jam. Last weekend, I did dill pickles. It’s not a lot of work, but it does take time and patience. I consider it early Christmas shopping because I’m making presents for people.

One note: These are instructions for water bath canning, which can be used to make jams, jellies, pickles and preserves and to can tomatoes. For low-acid vegetables, such as green beans or vegetables that you are not pickling, you’ll need to use a pressure canner to prevent bacterial growth. Otherwise, you could make your family or friends sick. That’s no present.

What you need

• Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today,” edited by Judi Kingry and Lauren Devine. This is the ultimate go-to guide for the canning beginner. It will answer all your questions. It is the book to which I defer on canning questions and techniques.
• Jars with screw bands and lids. You can reuse the jars and screw bands but not the lids. Always check the jars to make sure they don’t have nicks or cracks. Check the screw bands for rust. Check the lids to make sure the rubber seal is not deformed.
• A water-bath canner. It is a large, deep pot with a metal rack inside to keep the jars off the bottom of the pot and to prevent them from touching one another.
• Canning utensils. Not necessary but helpful. A jar lifter is a large set of tongs coated with soft plastic that is used to lift the jars in and out of hot water. A canning funnel has a wider mouth to make filling the jars easier and less messy. A magnetic wand, a magnet on the end of a plastic stick, helps lift the lids out of the simmering water.

Canning basics

• Wash jars, lids and screw bands in warm, soapy water. Rinse. Set aside.
• Place rack in the bottom of the canner. Place jars on top of rack. Fill canner with water until the jars are covered by about 1 inch. Bring water to a simmer.
• Place lids in a small saucepan filled with water. Bring to a simmer over medium heat. Keep lids hot until ready to use them.
• Prepare recipe per instructions. Remove jars from canner. Fill jars, leaving either a 1/4-inch or 1/2-inch head space, as the recipe dictates. Insert a small spatula or similar slender nonmetallic object into the jar two or three times to help release air bubbles. Wipe the jar’s rim with a damp, clean cloth or paper towel.
• Center lid on top of jar. Place screwband on the jar. Twist screwband until fingertip-tight.
• Place jars back into canner, place lid on canner and bring water to a full rolling boil over high heat. Let jars process for 15 minutes. Then turn heat off, remove lid and let jars stand in the water for 5 minutes. Then remove jars from canner. Let jars sit upright on a towel. Let cool, undisturbed, for 24 hours.

Source: “Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today,” Edited by Judi Kingry and Lauren Devine.

http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/1607388.html