Wired: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

An easy to read article that gives a good overview over current situation, in the US atleast, and pointer to the road ahead.
... regulators in dozens of states began to implement decoupling, a policy that rewards utilities for coming in below generation targets. Suddenly, companies could profit by promoting efficiency.

This quote from the article suggests the benefits of changing the behaviour of power generators from max production to max efficiency. Schemes like that would have a great impact if realised all over the world.

Kommentarer

Legg inn en kommentar

Populære innlegg fra denne bloggen

The SunCat Batteries - DIY prototypes

Bilde
Rechargeable Batteries with Solar Cells Project by Knut Karlsen At home i always have some batteries lying around, either rechargeable or normal ones. Usually they are empty, but i'd like them to be always fully charged. I could use a normal charger and there is a lot of solar devices that charge rechargeable batteries. I wanted it simpler; why hasn't anyone made a battery with integrated solar cells? The idea of the "SunCat" batteries where born. The batteries should just bask in the sun like a cat and left for a while, in a sunny window, they would slowly recharge. Prototypes During my research for my diploma i was in touch with scientists at IFE that experimented with the production of flexible solar cells. They where kind enough to send me some samples in the right dimensions that i could use for the prototypes (full set at flickr ): I had some older NiMH rechargeable batteries that i glued the flexible Photo Voltaic (PV) cells onto. The PV cells are rated at
Les mer

Energy Dashboards in the Wild

Bilde
Energy Monitoring The more I dig into this material, the more I find people and companies that are developing ideas on energy managment. Living in Norway and looking into this field has some disadvantages: Awareness to energy consumption and systems to increase awareness are almost non existing. Utilities stopped charging for over use and peak consumption a long time ago and since then people have had few incentives for tracking those parameters. Regulations, such as mandatory smart meter installations, are very important for change on a big scale in energy infrastructure at the moment. The previous post targeted independent initiatives to enable people to track their energy consumption and the reduce bill or carbon footprint. Barack Obama throwing money at energy initiatives these days could account for some of google's interest. I conducted a search mission for the energy companies endeavours in the home monitoring market: Energy Dashboards The utilities that either have automat
Les mer

Connection Proxy on Windows 7 x64

This is how I got the Connection Proxy from the Sony Ericsson Java ME SDK to work on Windows 7 64-bit version: Install your phones PC Suite to get all phone networking drivers Get & Install 32-bit JDK Get & Install semc_java_me_cldc_sdk.2-5-0-5.exe (Place it in default location C:\) Get the eclipse SDK for win 64 as we need one file from this zip. Get RXTX library as we need additional files from this zip. Find "org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_64_3.5.1.v3555a.jar" in eclipse SDK & place it in the folder "C:\SonyEricsson\JavaME_SDK_CLDC\OnDeviceDebug\lib\devexp\plugins" Edit "connectionproxy.cmd" so that "org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.4.0.v3448f.jar" becomes "org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_64_3.5.1.v3555a.jar". Find "RXTXcomm.jar" in the rxtx package & place it in the "C:\SonyEricsson\JavaME_SDK_CLDC\OnDeviceDebug\bin" folder Place "rxtxSerial.dll" in the "C:\SonyEricsson\Java
Les mer