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James Wright

Italy - Prysmian to develop and deliver new submarine HVDC Scotland-England p... - 0 views

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    Prysmian Group, the industry leading cable and systems provider, won a contract worth a record-breaking €800M for the development of a high voltage DC submarine power transmission link between Scotland and England. The project will involve the use of at least 400km of a new Prysmian-developed cable product called Mass Impregnated PPL cables, which utilises new material technology to operate with a record longhaul wiring voltage rating of 600kV. This means that energy losses will be kept to a minimum, resulting in a low CO2 footprint for the supply of Scotland-sourced renewable energy for England and vice-versa (the link will be bidirectional). Commissioning is expected in late 2015.
Colin Bennett

ABB revised 5 year plan aims to outgrow its markets from 2011-15, execute on cost and p... - 0 views

  • In its updated 5-year strategy announced today, ABB also said tight execution on cost and productivity—aiming for annual productivity improvements equivalent to 3-5 percent of cost of sales—will further contribute to increasing profitability over the period, along with targeted expansion of its service and software businesses.
  • ABB’s strategy is built around five components: increasing competitiveness by matching production to local market needs while driving productivity and quality improvements; capitalizing on macro trends such as emerging market growth, resource efficiency and climate change where markets are growing faster than global GDP; leveraging its leading market positions and technologies in core businesses like power grids and industrial automation to take market share; continuing its successful acquisition policy to accelerate growth in priority gap areas; and exploiting disruptive opportunities, such as direct current (DC) technologies, to enable a wide range of energy efficient automation and power solutions.
Colin Bennett

New cable plant in US to support reinforcement of transmission grid - 0 views

  • The plant has a distinctive 131 meter extrusion tower, built to allow the insulation material to cool symmetrically around the metal cable conductor. It is ABB’s first high-voltage cable plant outside Europe, and will manufacture high-voltage transmission cables for both AC and DC applications.The cables produced at the new facility are also well suited to bringing power from remote wind and solar installations to the grid. More than 130 people will work at the $90 million facility built by ABB.
Colin Bennett

The return of Direct Current (DC) - 0 views

  • There’s little doubt that HVDC will continue to be rolled out by most utilities, but the costs and complexity mean an HVDC supergrid is some way off. Innovation doesn’t stand still, however, and advances in key areas that reduce equipment costs, aid development of IT tools and control algorithms, could one day make the case for supergrids irresistible.
Colin Bennett

Design and construction of a high temperature superconducting power cable cryostat for ... - 0 views

  • These results verify that the developed DC superconducting cable is reliable and fulfils all the requirements necessary for successful use in various power applications including railway systems.
Colin Bennett

ABB has successfully tested new extra high-voltage transformer - 0 views

  • A new generation of transformers to be used in world’s first 660 kilovolt (kV) DC power transmission link in China.
Wade Ren

The end of Bretton Woods 2? - 0 views

  • The Bretton Woods 2 system – where China and then the oil-exporters provided (subsidized) financing to the US to sustain their exports – will come close to ending, at least temporarily. If the US and Europe are not importing much, the rest of the world won’t be exporting much.
  • And rather than ending with a whimper, Bretton Woods 2 may end with a bang. In some sense Bretton Woods 2 has been on life support for a while now. China’s recent export growth has depended far more on Europe than on the US. US demand for non-oil imports peaked in 2006. One irony of the past year is that the US was borrowing far more from China that it was buying from China. Campaign rhetoric that the US was paying for Saudi oil with funds borrowed from China isn’t far off – though it leaves out the fact that the US also borrows from Saudi Arabia to pay for Venezuelan, Mexican and Nigerian oil.
  • If Bretton Woods 2 ends in 2009 – if US demand for imports falls sharply in the last part of 2008 and early 2009, bringing the US trade deficit down – it won’t have ended in the way Nouriel and I outlined back in late 2004 and early 2005. We postulated that foreign demand for US debt would dry up – pushing up US Treasury rates and delivering a nasty shock to a housing-centric economy. As Brad DeLong notes, it didn’t quite play out that way. The US and European banking system collapsed before the balance of financial terror collapsed. Dr. DeLong writes: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The end result of this crisis though could be rather similar: a sharp contraction in credit, a fall in US economic activity, a fall in US imports and a fall in the amount of foreign financing the US needs.* The US government is (possibly) trying to offset the fall in private demand by borrowing more and spending more — but as of now there is realistic risk that the fall in private activity will trump the fiscal stimulus.
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  • Or, to put it more succinctly, Bretton Woods 2, as it evolved, hinged both on the willingness of foreign central banks to take the currency risk associated with lending to the US at low rates in dollars despite the United States large current account deficit AND the willingness of private financial intermediaries to take the credit risk associated with lending at low rates to highly-indebted US households.
  • But now US financial institutions are neither willing nor able to take on the risk of lending even more to US households. For a while the US government was able to ramp up its lending to households (notably through the Agencies) and in the process effectively take over the function previously performed by the private financial system (over the last four quarters, the flow of funds data indicates that the Agencies provided around $800 billion of net credit to US households). But now the US government is struggling to keep the financial system from collapsing. It doesn’t seem like it will able to avoid a sharp fall in the overall availability of credit.
  • It is now clear how the financial sector kept profits up: it took on more risk, as it shifted from borrowing short to buy safe long-term assets (Treasuries and Agencies) to borrowing short to buy risky long-term assets. Leverage in the system also increased (and for some broker dealers that seems to be an understatement), as more and more financial institutions believed that the US had entered into an era of little macroeconomic or financial volatility. The net result seems to have been a truly explosive concentration of risk in the hands of a core set of financial intermediaries in the US and Europe. Securitization – it seems – actually didn’t disperse risk into the hands of institutions able to handle it.
  • I hope that the process of adjustment now underway isn’t as sharp as I fear. The US economy gradually can shift from producing MBS for sale to US investors flush with cash from the sale of safe securities to China and Saudi Arabia to producing goods and services for export – but it cannot shift from churning out complex debt securities to producing goods and services overnight. Indeed, in a slowing US and global economy, improvements in the US deficit will likely come from faster falls in US imports than in US exports – not from ongoing growth in US exports.
  • But right now it looks like there is a real risk that the adjustment won’t be gradual. And it certainly looks like the flow of Chinese (and Gulf) savings to US households over the past few years has produced one of the largest misallocations of global capital in recent history.
  • US taxpayers are going to be hit with a large tab for the credit risk taken on by undercapitalized financial intermediaries. Chinese taxpayers may get hit with a similar tab for the losses their central bank incurred by overpaying for US and European assets as part of its policy of holding its exchange rate down. The TARP is around 5% of US GDP. There are plausible estimates that China’s currency losses will prove to be of comparable magnitude. Charles Dumas puts the cost at above 5% of GDP: “Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research estimates that China makes 1-2 per cent on its (largely) dollar reserves. It then loses up to 10 per cent on the exchange rate and suffers a Chinese inflation rate of 6 per cent for a total real return in renminbi of about minus 15 per cent. That is a loss of $270bn a year, or a stunning 7-8 per cent of gross domestic product.”
  • Jboss — if some of the Chinese inflow could be redirected into investment in alternative energy, that would indeed be a win/ win. Some infrastructure bank style ideas have promise in my view — basically, the flow that used to go to freddie/ fannie could go to wind farms and the like. I would rather see more adjustment in china (i.e. more investment in Chinese infrastructure) but during the transition, if there is one, to a lower Chinese surplus, redirecting chinese financing toward new energy tech would be offer real benefits.
  • China likes 3rd generation nuclear power. Safe, lower cost than NG or coal, very much lower cost than coal with carbon sequestering, and zero carbon footprint. Wind is about 4X more expensive than our electric costs now. That’s in an area with consistent wind. Solar is worse. I don’t know if we can sucker them into investing in our technical fairy tales. Here’s a easy primer on 3rd gen nukes. http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCostOfNuclearPower
    • Wade Ren
       
      is this true?
  • btw, solar thermal installations are so easy & affordable to retrofit onto existing structures, it’s amazing that there aren’t more of them here…until you realize that they work to decentralize energy. cedric — china is already doing it in china. they are way ahead of the curve over there. my partner brought back some photos of shanghai — rows of middle class homes each with a small solar panel on top. and that’s just the tip of the iceberg — an architect friend just came back from beijing and wants to move to china (he’s into designing self-powering structures and is incredibly frustrated by the bureaucracy and cost-prohibitive measures in the US).
  • I went to engineering school right after the Arab Oil Embargo, and alternative energy was a hot topic then. All the same stuff you hear of nowadays. They even offered entire courses on it , which I took. Then my first mini career was in the power plant biz, before Volker killed it with interest rates and the Saudies killed any interest in alt. energy with their big oil field discovery. For the last 5 years I’ve been researching what’s changed, and it is frighteningly little. Solar cells are still expensive and only have a 15% conversion efficiency. They developed the new cost reduced film technology, but that knocks down efficiency to 7%. Wind power works where there is wind constantly. Generators are mature technology and are already 90 some percent efficient. Geothermal, tidal, ect. work where they are available. Looks like coal gasification and synfuel is out because it makes too much CO2. Good news is 3rd gen nuclear is way better than 1st gen plants. Hybrid cars are good, and battery technology is finally getting barely good enough for all electric cars to be practical.
  • According to news report today, Japan’s trade surplus is less than 1 billion $ in September 08, a whopping 94% decrease compared to September 07. Does it imply that going forward Japan can not buy as much treasury as before?
Glycon Garcia

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=51761&src=rss - 0 views

  • President George W. Bush called on Congress to support a international clean energy fund to bring renewable energy technology to those in the developing world. He made his remarks at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference in Washington DC.
Sergio Ferreira

Pancake motors will compete with standard designs - 0 views

  • will compete on price with conventional DC and universal motors
  • claimed to be the only type of motor with no torque ripple
Colin Bennett

China to Invest 500 Billion Yuan in Ultra-High Voltage Grids- Economic Observer News- C... - 0 views

  • China plans to invest more than 500 billion yuan in constructing a system of UHV AC and UHV DC grids in the coming five years, according to Liu Zhenya, general manager of the UHV Grid Extension Project. According to Liu, the total length of China’s UHV transmission lines will reach 40,000 kilometers.
Panos Kotseras

Italy - Prysmian awarded offshore wind farm cable project in the North Sea - 0 views

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    Prysmian announced that it has been awarded a project worth more than €250ml by the Dutch-German grid operator TenneT in order to link the offshore wind park DanTysk in the North Sea to the German Grid. Prysmian said that the interconnection comprises of HVDC subsea and land cable types at a voltage of 320 kV DC along a 159 km sea route and then a 45 km land route. The cables and accessories will be manufactured from 2012 onwards at Prysmian's HV factories in Europe.
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