The U.S. Department of Energy has produced an excellent report on the Smart Grid that delves into this complex subject matter in considerable detail. The report is titled “The Smart Grid: An Introduction” and is dedicated to the education of all interested members of the public to the nature, challenges and opportunities surrounding the Smart Grid and its implementation. Building out the Smart Grid is a colossal task comparable in scope to the construction of the interstate highway network or the construction of the Internet. It is daunting, but it is a task that can no longer be postponed; one that simply must be done; as well as something we need to do as a nation for reasons of national security, to lay a foundation for our continuing prosperity and to preserve our nations global influence.
This update highlights several current issues and developments in the solar energy space. Concerns have been raised about the potential deleterious impact of utility scale solar energy projects in the fragile water poor desert environments of the Mohave Desert. Large scale solar collection farms use water to wash the mirrors and for concentrating solar thermal often use water for cooling.
In a significant boost to the emerging high temperature superconducting wire sector, American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC), a leading supplier of super-conducting wire, announced that LS Cable Ltd. (LS Cable) has ordered approximately 80,000 meters of its 344 superconductors, AMSC’s proprietary brand of second generation (2G) high temperature superconductor (HTS) wire.
Superconducting cables are poised to play a critical and important role in the evolving smart grid. Superconducting cables are capable of carrying much more current and have significantly lower impedance than conventional cables; because of this they facilitate more efficient AC power flows within the grid.
CleanTech Los Angeles is a multi-agency collaboration between CRA/LA, Caltech, DWP, JPL, Mayor’s Office, Port UCLA, and USC to establish Los Angeles as the global leader in research, commercialization, and deployment of clean technologies. It brings together groups like the city’s power and water utility, the chamber of commerce, and the universally recognized scientific research heavyweights UCLA, USC and CalTech with the aim to help LA region become a global center of green technology, green jobs and green manufacturing, officials explained. The ultimate goal is a lofty one: to become the global capital of clean technology.
Quite a bit is happening in the smart grid sector. In this post I quickly look at the breaking announcement by Vice President Joe Biden of more than $3.3 billion in stimulus funding for grants to drive the rollout of a nationwide electrical smart grid.
I continue to follow the hacking of the grid story and try to give some various perspectives on this issue and what is being done about it.
Finally I post on how the growing adoption of renewable energy like solar and wind will require the grid to evolve into a much smarter, robust system and to incorporate systems for storing transient excess energy.
The Smart Grid promises to make our energy (and also water and sewage systems) more efficient, robust and responsive by building a paired parallel information and control network onto the existing distribution networks. However hooking up the grid’s multitude of component units to a network also opens up the potential for the grid to be hacked — in much the same way anything that is exposed to the internet can be hacked.
The Lopez Community Land Trust, a non-profit, community-based organization that acquires land to hold in trust in order to provide for permanent affordable housing in an environmentally sensitive and socially responsible manner. It is offering summer and fall internships in sustainable agriculture that will offer work experience on organic farms and research work for future projects. Opportunities are available for touring permaculture operations and biodynamic farms in the area as well.
Offshore Wind Gets Major Boost with announcement by President Obama that the Department of the Interior has finalized a long-awaited framework for renewable energy production on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Wind energy continues rapid growth according to new report from the American Wind Energy Association. The US has surpassed 25 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind energy capacity in 2008. Construction of a new wind farm has begun in Texas. Seatle firm proposes floating offshore wind farms.
The Northeast Green Building Conference 2009, the leading Green building educational event in Upstate New York, takes place this Thursday and Friday, April 23-24, at the Clarion Hotel, 3 Watervliet Avenue Ext., Albany.
