Apple's view of home communications and control - including DC distribution.

Solar energy becomes another 'brick' in the wall

Successful bids for nine new offshore wind farm zone licences within UK waters have been announced. Total capacity reported to be 32 GW. Depth up to 60m, 200 km off-shore.

Here comes the grid!

The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced that $620 million in stimulus funding is going to 32 smart-grid programs, which will be coupled with another $1 billion in private money. A total of $770 million from government and industry sources in the next few years will go to energy storage, giving a number of storage technologies a dose of real-world experience.

Wave energy got a boost with the connection of the Oyster hydro-electric device to the electricity grid in Scotland last Friday.

The Fraunhofer Institute is using a redox flow battery, a type of cell that uses two electrolytic fluids exchanging protons through a membrane. This process generates electricity. Although this type of battery isn't new, the Fraunhofer Institute improved the energy density, making it equivalent to that of a lithium ion battery.

Toyota, the leader in hybrid cars, thinks that the high cost of the lithium ion batteries will keep electric cars from penetrating the mass market for another decade. Over the past three years, Toyota secretly tested lithium ion batteries as a potential replacement for the nickel metal hydride batteries now used in the Prius, according to a Bloomberg report In its tests, Toyota concluded that lithium-ion batteries were safe and reliable, but the higher cost doesn't justify a complete shift over for Toyota's hybrids, executives said. As a result, the company will remain with nickel-based batteries for most of its hybrid cars, according to the report.

$40, 80 lm/watt

Panasonic has launched a new household LED lightbulb in Japan that it says lasts 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

This standard is intended to serve as the communications protocol for smart grids as well as providing WAN facilities to end users.

Chicago (IL) - Broadband over power lines is marching closer to actual availability. The P1901 Working Group today announced the release of the first draft defining medium access control and physical layer specifications for IEEE's Standard P1901. The draft was approved with more than 82% majority vote during a meeting held in Tokyo from July 21 - 24, the IEEE announced today. The initial version is based on technologies using FTT and Wavelet OFDM modulation schemes.

1.7 kWp, 2000kWh per year. How many cars per annum can you charge at, say, 5KWh each? Better stick to bicycles and phones!

South Tyrol gets serious about solar mobility: The "E-Move Charging Station", a pilot project of the Bozen entrepreneur Valentin Runggaldier, is to supply electrically operated bicycles, scooters, cars and even mobile phones with the necessary "fuel" from the sun. The solar charging stations were designed by Michael Scherer from Brixen

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Report available at: http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/cgi-bin/b?cg=corporatedocs&ci=energyst&tu=http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/content/download/554381/1961689/version/3/file/location

"The results show that no urban or suburban sites with a building-mounted turbine generated more than 200kWh (or £26 of electricity) per annum, but the best performing building-mounted turbine, located in a rural area of Scotland, generated nearly 1,000kWh (or £127 of electricity) per annum. Larger free-standing pole-mounted turbines, sited in rural locations, could generate in excess of 18,000 kWh (or £2,300) per annum."

Nissan is to announce that its Wearside factory will start producing batteries for electric cars, which is expected to create 200 new jobs. The £380m project will be supported by the European Investment Bank and aided in part by government grants.

GE appliances have been converted to have electronic controls and will have a small module in the back that will allow it to communicate with a home's smart meter. With that communication link in place, consumers can find out how much electricity individual appliances use and program them to take advantage of off-peak rates.

"The big barrier here, as with any new technology, is that electric utilities are very conservative...Now we're overcoming that obstacle with initial installations, which are relatively short runs but this superconductor pipeline is much grander in scale," he said. In practice, the cables would be placed underground, as gas pipelines are, and have nitrogen cooling stations every seven or eight miles. Fredette said the technology is feasible but would likely need some sort of loan guarantee from U.S. government to test the system in the field.

Scientists in Israel say they have invented a way of turning traffic into electricity. Where does the 'energy' really come from?

There is some concern that millions of plug-in electric vehicles charging at the peak times, such as around 5:30 p.m. when people return from work, could cause power disruptions or require construction of new power plants. To address this, Google has written software with "vehicle dispatch algorithms" that can decide how to best charge cars, Reicher said. In addition to smoothing out the load on the grid, smart charging makes it easier to take advantage of solar and wind power, which are variable sources of electricity.

Researchers from Korea claim to have produced the world's first purely white LED (light-emitting diode).

This article suggests that 10Gb ethernet (copper) is about to take over the (optical) fibre channel for storage area networks. Caution: these networks are usually physically small and dense so cable lengths are short. The added value is high enough to justify the costs (Cost per switsch port still ~100 times higher than 1Gb, tricky cable installation).The comments at the end of the article that imply that 10Gb will be common are unconvincing.

Rather than use a working fluid to capture and transfer the waste heat, GE has developed a new evaporator to transfer it. The new design means that ORCs can be used to convert relatively low-temperature heat (under 500 degrees Celsius) into electricity on a wide range of power sources, including the equipment in coal power plants and small gas turbines, said Thomas Fry, a researcher in GE's Munich offices.