Group items tagged

Under this program, eligible projects may be financed at 0% interest. The "loan" is paid back through the customer's PG&E bill: with the reduced energy savings at least offsetting the loan repayment cost. Once the loan is paid off, the savings are...

Data center developer and operator 365 Main Inc. has issued detailed information regarding the root cause behind why back-up power generators in the company's San Francisco facility failed to start during a PG&E power outage last week, resulting in approximately 40 percent of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up to 45 minutes.

Data center developer and operator 365 Main Inc. has issued detailed information regarding the root cause behind why back-up power generators in the company's San Francisco facility failed to start during a PG&E power outage last week, resulting in approximately 40 percent of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up to 45 minutes.

It looks like a scene from an old episode of The X-Files: As a red-tailed hawk circles overhead and a wild pronghorn sheep grazes in the distance, a dozen people in dark sunglasses move methodically through a vast field of golden barley, eyes fixed to the ground, GPS devices in hand. They're searching for bodies. In this case, however, the bodies belong to the endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and the crew moving through the knee-high grain are wildlife biologists hired by Ausra, a Silicon Valley startup that's building a solar power plant for utility PG&E on this square mile of central California ranchland.

When completed in 2011 this thermal solar project will be the largest in the world, generating 553 megawatts of power for Pacific Gas & Electric in the Mojave Desert in California. The plant is being built by Israeli company, Solel Solar Systems of Beit Shemes, Israel, a successor company to the people that built the nine thermal solar plants in the Mojave Desert, that have operated over the past 20 years and are currently generating 354 MW of electricity.

The E-Flight design team plan to build 10 battery "safe boxes" that will hold 8 Li-Poly battery packs per box. Initially for safety purposes, the battery packs must be charged individually but the long-term goal is to develop a single-plug charging system that could remain in the aircraft at all times.

A week after a slew of popular Web sites were knocked offline temporarily by a power outage in San Francisco, the data center for the Web sites has finally disclosed what went wrong. Basically, backup generators made by a Dutch company called Hitec failed to work, according to an update posted to the Web site of data center 365 Main. Here's what happened: transformer breakers at a San Francisco Pacific Gas & Electric power station unexpectedly opened, causing a power surge that cut off electricity to a portion of the city. (PG&E does not know why the breakers opened.) Three out of 10 of 365 Main's 2.1-megawatt backup generators failed to start up, cutting power to equipment of more than 40 percent of the data center's customers for up to 45 minutes.

Earlier this year, Pacific Gas & Electric, a major California utility company, signed an agreement to purchase hundreds of megawatts of power from Solaren, an SBSP company, beginning in 2016. Last month, another SBSP company, PowerSat Corporation, filed two patents for technologies that the company claims can shave billions of dollars off the launch costs for an SBSP system.

PG&E may be installing millions of smart meters in Northern California, but the nation of Malta (pop. 400,000) is about to become the world's first smart grid island. IBM is building the island's national smart grid network, which will consist of 250,000 smart meters placed in homes around the country.