Here's an intriguing idea: smaller nuclear plants distributed around the U.S. and the world. This post on the WSJ energy section has interesting blog discussion attached: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/07/17/proliferate-are-many-small-nuclear-plants-the-energy-answer/#comment-19711.
In terms of efficiency, smaller nuclear located closer to customers would cut down on line losses. The security concerns could be addressed by placing the reactors on military bases, kind of like having land-based aircraft carriers or subs, and we know there's plenty of folks who know how to run those. The Navy in that case would be natural technicians-pipeline.
An idea for the international front would be to combine efforts with EU, Russians and Chinese on a standardized mini-nuke power plant that could be placed in U.N. peace-keeping outposts around the developing world, the globe's poorest, and then send the power out into those countries to speed economic development (and reduce the increasing risks of resource wars). But of course this would require vision and cooperation.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
EESTOR news: will lithium ion batteries be obsolete?
This just in, an amazing post about the company EESTOR, which is subjecting its "ultracapacitor" storage technology to outside scrutiny in expectation of a big announcement on next steps. EESTOR could turn the energy industry upside down by producing an alternative to batteries - this would be huge for plug-in vehicles that could charge and discharge without worrying about battery degredation. Also an ultracapacitor can do a deep discharge, unlike batteries, and therefore can apply more energy to applications. This could replace lithium batteries as the energy storage medium of choice for electric cars. It would also allow storage for solar panels and other distributed generation throughout the grid: it would give the smart grid power to draw on as needed, something that could change everything when paired with the real-time grid management provided by smart grids. Best of all, for plug-in cars, EESTOR's ultracapacitor can fully charge in a few minutes - allowing it to be more of a substitute for gasoline than batteries that need 8 hours (the EESTOR unit could also charge the same way, 8 hours overnight). As a smart friend of mine put it, EESTOR would be like "flash memory for the grid." Lockheed Martin has apparently locked up all options for military/homeland, and a Canadian car company, Zenn Motors has rights for vehicle sales. The Lockheed interest is not surprising since this would be huge for RPVs, extended range and time on target energy. Also, Kleiner Perkins is also deep into this, as the post from BariumTitanate blog notes: http://bariumtitanate.blogspot.com/2008/07/eestor-beyond-permittivity.html. If EESTOR's technology turns out to be true, it will be simply amazing. We'll see.
Friday, July 11, 2008
data centers, Aug 2006 post on KnowledgeProblem
Data Centers & Power Use: another reason for Smart Grid
Here is an old but interesting post about data centers and smart grid: that is in the Knowledge Problem archives: http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/2007_08.html
The August 28, 2007 post is called Data Center Power Use, Storage, and Smart Grid, by Lynne Kiesling, and underscores how the increase in computing and Internet usage has had an impact on power consumption. The post has a link to an even older eWeek article from August 2006 that notes that IT administrators are becoming energy managers and are deeply involved in efforts to align data-center power demands with "green" movement goals. "
The post states that, "as the typical server unit has shrunk from a stand-alone pedestal the size of a filing cabinet to 2U (3.5-inch) stackables, 1U (1.75-inch) pizza boxes and even blades, both power and heat cause problems," and quotes one expert: "The whole industry has gotten hotter and more power-hungry. Within the last five years, servers went from using around 30 watts per processor to now more like 135 watts per processor ... You used to be able to put in up to six servers per rack; now it's up to 42."
It quotes a Berkeley National Labs source: "Every kilowatt burned by those servers requires another 1 to 1.5 kW to cool and support them." (Jon Koomey, a staff scientist and consulting professor at Stanford University).
Here's more from the same post:
In early 2007 Congress authorized the EPA to evaluate data center power use and cooling, and a separate industry report found that data center power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005. Yes, doubled.
Meanwhile, a data center power outage in July 2007 disrupted Internet activity at such popular sites as LiveJournal, Craigslist, Technorati, and TypePad. This very interesting analysis from O'Reilly discusses the continuous power system (CPS) flywheel backup system that the data center had in place:
The advantage of a CPS over a battery-based system is that the power going to the datacenter is decoupled from the utility power. This eliminates the complex electrical switching required from most battery-based systems, making many CPS systems simpler and sometimes more reliable.
In this incident, latent defects caused three generators to fail during start-up. No customers were affected until a fourth generator failed 30 seconds later, which overloaded the surviving backup system and caused power failures to 3 of 8 customer areas.
That failure was an interesting example of a cascading failure occurring in the backup system (but cascading failures are a subject for another post!). The large power use of data centers necessitates more sophisticated, or more complex, backup systems, so reducing datacenter power use could take some strain off of the redundant backup systems as well as reducing overall resource use.
More recently, this SmartCool blog discusses IBM's efforts to "green" their data centers, and this post makes a hugely important point:
The other aspect of the greening of datacenters is going to be green building techniques themselves. Intelligent management solutions like a SmartCool system or smart grid technology will go a long way to reducing the datacenter's infrastructure electricity demands, which makes up a considerable portion of the usage. Some suggestions exist out there for building more robust hardware that can withstand higher temperatures, but aside from a concern over expenses that do not offset, there's still going to be a need for air conditioning no matter how hardy the servers are; that kind of thing must be handled at the building infrastructure level.
I think data centers, and the enterprises that establish them, run them, and pay the power bills for them, should be and are on the vanguard of synthesizing hardware design and building design that take electricity prices and use patterns into account, that get the most "bang for the buck" out of each kilowatt consumed, and that will push the development of smart grid capabilities at the customer level.
To build a little bit on my criticism of Duke's Jim Rogers' top-down approach to energy efficiency last week, customer response, action, and innovation with respect to the data center power use issue illustrates how price signals and the dynamics of economic change create incentives for such customers to invest in energy efficiency technologies, in a decentralized and distributed way, that in aggregate can contribute substantially to reducing overall energy and resource use. When the incentives are there, presented through the transparency of true costs, customers will act.
Here is an old but interesting post about data centers and smart grid: that is in the Knowledge Problem archives: http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/2007_08.html
The August 28, 2007 post is called Data Center Power Use, Storage, and Smart Grid, by Lynne Kiesling, and underscores how the increase in computing and Internet usage has had an impact on power consumption. The post has a link to an even older eWeek article from August 2006 that notes that IT administrators are becoming energy managers and are deeply involved in efforts to align data-center power demands with "green" movement goals. "
The post states that, "as the typical server unit has shrunk from a stand-alone pedestal the size of a filing cabinet to 2U (3.5-inch) stackables, 1U (1.75-inch) pizza boxes and even blades, both power and heat cause problems," and quotes one expert: "The whole industry has gotten hotter and more power-hungry. Within the last five years, servers went from using around 30 watts per processor to now more like 135 watts per processor ... You used to be able to put in up to six servers per rack; now it's up to 42."
It quotes a Berkeley National Labs source: "Every kilowatt burned by those servers requires another 1 to 1.5 kW to cool and support them." (Jon Koomey, a staff scientist and consulting professor at Stanford University).
Here's more from the same post:
In early 2007 Congress authorized the EPA to evaluate data center power use and cooling, and a separate industry report found that data center power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005. Yes, doubled.
Meanwhile, a data center power outage in July 2007 disrupted Internet activity at such popular sites as LiveJournal, Craigslist, Technorati, and TypePad. This very interesting analysis from O'Reilly discusses the continuous power system (CPS) flywheel backup system that the data center had in place:
The advantage of a CPS over a battery-based system is that the power going to the datacenter is decoupled from the utility power. This eliminates the complex electrical switching required from most battery-based systems, making many CPS systems simpler and sometimes more reliable.
In this incident, latent defects caused three generators to fail during start-up. No customers were affected until a fourth generator failed 30 seconds later, which overloaded the surviving backup system and caused power failures to 3 of 8 customer areas.
That failure was an interesting example of a cascading failure occurring in the backup system (but cascading failures are a subject for another post!). The large power use of data centers necessitates more sophisticated, or more complex, backup systems, so reducing datacenter power use could take some strain off of the redundant backup systems as well as reducing overall resource use.
More recently, this SmartCool blog discusses IBM's efforts to "green" their data centers, and this post makes a hugely important point:
The other aspect of the greening of datacenters is going to be green building techniques themselves. Intelligent management solutions like a SmartCool system or smart grid technology will go a long way to reducing the datacenter's infrastructure electricity demands, which makes up a considerable portion of the usage. Some suggestions exist out there for building more robust hardware that can withstand higher temperatures, but aside from a concern over expenses that do not offset, there's still going to be a need for air conditioning no matter how hardy the servers are; that kind of thing must be handled at the building infrastructure level.
I think data centers, and the enterprises that establish them, run them, and pay the power bills for them, should be and are on the vanguard of synthesizing hardware design and building design that take electricity prices and use patterns into account, that get the most "bang for the buck" out of each kilowatt consumed, and that will push the development of smart grid capabilities at the customer level.
To build a little bit on my criticism of Duke's Jim Rogers' top-down approach to energy efficiency last week, customer response, action, and innovation with respect to the data center power use issue illustrates how price signals and the dynamics of economic change create incentives for such customers to invest in energy efficiency technologies, in a decentralized and distributed way, that in aggregate can contribute substantially to reducing overall energy and resource use. When the incentives are there, presented through the transparency of true costs, customers will act.
Black & Veatch predicts Smart Grid and Smart Appliances
Here's an interesting article that predicts Smart Grid connectivity push over the next decade will revolutionize how we think of and use energy. Smart appliances is part of what this author envisions, including plug-in electric cars (which are really just big appliances in a way, they're just mobile!) and also noted is the estimate that power outages and disturbances cost the United States $100Billion each year.
See, "Black & Veatch plugs into 'smart grid' utility megatrend," online at: http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/othercities/kansascity/stories/2008/06/30/story6.html
Quotes:
- "Such services will be in high demand as an increasingly wired and green society forces electric utilities to add communication and interactivity among themselves, users and even household appliances."
- "With most of the nation's 3,170 electric utilities expected to participate in the smart grid evolution during the next decade, "the market will be substantial," Black & Veatch spokesman George Minter said."
See, "Black & Veatch plugs into 'smart grid' utility megatrend," online at: http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/othercities/kansascity/stories/2008/06/30/story6.html
Quotes:
- "Such services will be in high demand as an increasingly wired and green society forces electric utilities to add communication and interactivity among themselves, users and even household appliances."
- "With most of the nation's 3,170 electric utilities expected to participate in the smart grid evolution during the next decade, "the market will be substantial," Black & Veatch spokesman George Minter said."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
