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Colin Bennett

Energy-efficient air conditioning - Air-flow routing - 0 views

  • Air-conditioning systems with demand-responsive routing of air flow help improve environmental conditions, additionally providing an enormous potential for saving energy. SAUTER-Cumulus relies on SCHMIDT® flow sensors based on thermal anemometer technology to ensure precise volumetric flow measurement.
Glycon Garcia

Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy | Video on TED.com - 0 views

  • Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy
  • What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage -- so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap." Donald S
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    "Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy Tweet this talk! (we'll add the headline and the URL) Post to: Share on Twitter Email This Favorite Download inShare Share on StumbleUpon Share on Reddit Share on Facebook TED Conversations Got an idea, question, or debate inspired by this talk? Start a TED Conversation, or join one of these: Green Home Energy=Hydrogen Generators-alternative sources Started by Kathleen Gilligan-Smith 1 Comment What is the real missing link in renewable energy? Started by Enrico Petrucco 8 Comments Comment on this Talk 60 total comments Sign in to add comments or Join (It's free and fast!) Sort By: smily raichel 0 Reply Less than 5 minutes ago: Nice smily raichel 0 Reply Less than 5 minutes ago: Good David Mackey 0 Reply 3 hours ago: Superb invention, but I would suggest one more standard mantra that they should move on from and that is the idea of power being supplied by a centralised grid. This technology seems to me to be much more beneficial on a local scale, what if every home had its own battery, then home power generation becomes economically more viable for everyone. If you could show that a system like this could pay for itself in say 5 years then every home would want one. Plus for this to be implemented on a large scale requires massive investment that could be decades away. Share the technology and lets get it in homes by next year. Great ted talk. Jon Senior 0 Reply 1 hour ago: I agree 100%. Localised energy production would also make energy consumers more conscious of their consumption and encourage efforts to reduce it. We can invent and invent all we want, but the fast solution to allowing renewable energies to take centre stage is to reduce the base energy draw. With lower baseline consumption, smaller "always on" generators are required to keep the grid operational. Town and house-l
Colin Bennett

Smart Grid: PHEV adoption and grid impact: a cost-efficient solution to accommodate inc... - 0 views

  • Superconductor cables, only recently available for utility applications, uniquely solve these issues. A single distribution voltage superconductor cable can carry amounts of power normally associated with transmission voltage levels, therefore eliminating the need for multiple cables and greatly simplifying placement issues.  Superconductor cables also have a unique dual-personality; under normal conditions they conduct power very efficiently, but during faults they actually limit the amount of current that can flow through them. This eliminates the risk of substation equipment damage from excessively high fault currents when paralleling substations. The installation of superconductor cable-powered bus ties between distribution substations serve as an efficient means to utilize more effectively and fully the existing power delivery infrastructure while simultaneously increasing reliability.
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    Superconductor cables, only recently available for utility applications, uniquely solve these issues. A single distribution voltage superconductor cable can carry amounts of power normally associated with transmission voltage levels, therefore eliminating the need for multiple cables and greatly simplifying placement issues. Superconductor cables also have a unique dual-personality; under normal conditions they conduct power very efficiently, but during faults they actually limit the amount of current that can flow through them. This eliminates the risk of substation equipment damage from excessively high fault currents when paralleling substations. The installation of superconductor cable-powered bus ties between distribution substations serve as an efficient means to utilize more effectively and fully the existing power delivery infrastructure while simultaneously increasing reliability.
Colin Bennett

The Need for Distributed, Dynamic, and Decoupled Power Flow Control - 2 views

  • This article, the first in a three-part series, focuses on the need for a new class of distribution grid infrastructure, one that enables distribution utilities to dynamically manage power flow from sub-station to load, ensures end-to-end power quality and reliability in the face of increasingly dynamic grid conditions, and drives greater systemic efficiencies, all based on a business case that stands alone without reliance on subsidy.
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?
Colin Bennett

Nexans' innovative overhead line technology helps Brazil solve electricity transmission... - 1 views

  • Resulting from a five-year development programme involving Nexans’ technology centres in France and Belgium, this innovative overhead line technology consists in a thermal resistant aluminium conductor wrapped around a composite carbon core. Compared with a traditional ACSR (Aluminium Conductor Steel Reinforced) which uses steel core, the composite carbon core of the same diameter is much lighter and 50 percent stronger. Most importantly, the carbon core’s coefficient of thermal expansion is roughly one tenth of that of steel, so it expands (and ‘sags’) much less when heated by the high current flowing in the conductor, enabling the vital safety clearances to be maintained between the conductor and the ground, even at high operating temperatures.
Colin Bennett

Zero-Waste Valorisation of Bauxite Residue (Red Mud) - 1 views

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    "To tackle its (critical) raw material dependency, Europe needs comprehensive strategies based on sustainable primary mining, substitution and recycling. Freshly produced flows and stocks of landfilled industrial residues such as mine tailings, non-ferrous slag and bauxite residue (BR) can provide major amounts of critical metals and, concurrently, minerals for low-carbon building materials."
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'Fuel battery' could take cars beyond petrol - 0 views

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    A new approach to storing electrical energy can store more energy than gasoline in the same volume, and could help extend the range of electric vehicles. But some experts say other approaches are more practical. The biggest technological hurdle facing electric vehicles is their range. Even the best rechargeable batteries cannot match the density of energy stored in a fuel tank. Combining electric power with a combustion engine to make a hybrid electric vehicle sidesteps that problem. But a new take on electrical power storage that is part battery, part chemical fuel cell could ditch gasoline for good.The new design stores energy more densely than petrol, and was conceived by Stuart Licht of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and colleagues. Batteries produce electricity from a closed chemical system that is eventually exhausted. Fuel cells use a constant supply of fuel, so they are continually topped up. Licht's cell has features of each. Its negative electrode, or anode, is made from vanadium boride, which serves double-duty as a fuel too. But unlike the flowing fuel of a fuel cell, the material is held internally, like the anode material of a battery. The vanadium boride reacts with a constant stream of oxygen, as in a fuel cell, provided by the positive electrode, or cathode. This brings in a supply of air from outside.
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Ocean Power: Europe's Next Green Thing - 0 views

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    Ireland's OpenHydro and Germany's RWE are spending millions to try to turn the power of waves into electricity With oil prices hitting almost daily record highs and global warming climbing up the public agenda, the need for alternative energy sources has never been more urgent. But while wind and solar have dominated the recent rush to invest in renewables, market watchers reckon it could now be marine energy's turn to shine. Ocean power-using the energy from waves or tidal flows to produce electricity-is quickly coming of age as a viable green resource that could help meet ambitious global targets to reduce greenhouse gases and dependency on fossil fuels. European and North American power companies such as Canada's Emera (EMA.TO) and Germany's RWE (RWEG.DE) are spending millions to fund wind and tidal projects. This investment has led to a new generation of more efficient technologies, with dozens of prototypes expected to be ready for commercial deployment within the next five years. "There's huge interest in both wave and tidal technology," says Thomas Boeckmann, clean tech analyst at market research firm StrategyEye in London. "It's gaining a lot of attention from energy companies, which will be able to offer financial backing and technical expertise to these startups."
Colin Bennett

Electron-democracy - 0 views

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    The way electric power is generated and distributed will change substantially over the next two decades. Power will be democratized, as small-scale production at the individual and community level moves from niche to normal. The resulting "electron-democracy" will still have centralized power plants, but power grid activity will increasingly be dominated by innumerable incremental energy flows between small producers and consumers. This is likely to happen whether or not public policy mandates a shift away from dependence on fossil fuels.
Colin Bennett

Revolutionizing Nano-Device Fabrication Using Amorphous Metals - 0 views

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    Unlike most metals, "amorphous metals" known as bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) do not form crystal structures when they are cooled rapidly after heating. Although they seem solid, they are more like a very slow-flowing liquid that has no structure beyond the atomic level - making them ideal for molding fine details, said senior author Jan Schroers of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.
Colin Bennett

Energy industry is running out of steam - 0 views

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    That is why Mr Miller believes large pools of money will flow into the sector in the coming years to invest in the US' ageing distribution infrastructure and much-needed new capacity. He said private capital will fill the gap developing from companies lack of access to public equity and debt markets, and to meet new energy and infrastructure needs, enabling deals to go through.
Colin Bennett

Despite solid mining outlook, credit quality cools for Australian miners - 0 views

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    S&P is factoring into its mining sector credit ratings a weakening of demand for mining and metals in Europe and the United States "and concerns that this will have a flow-on effect to other emerging markets."
Colin Bennett

Deep-Water Wind: In the Wind, Out of Sight | EcoGeek | Wind, Turbines, Turbine, Power, ... - 0 views

shared by Colin Bennett on 26 Feb 08 - Cached
  • A Norwegian company called Sway is developing a deepwater system that will allow turbines to be situated farther out to sea where winds can be steadier and stronger, and where the turbines are hidden from all save a few passing ships.
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    A Norweigan company, SWAY A/S, is developing a deepwater wind turbine system. It seems that this system may offer a technical solution to two issues which are related to wind.  These  issues are that turbines are an eyesore for some and that of positioning turbines to receive a consistent wind flow. By enabling turbines to be placed far out to sea SWAY theoretically overcomes the eyesore issue. Also, wind flow may be more consistent in the open ocean and therefore a more approporiate environment to harvest consistent wind.
     
Colin Bennett

China wants to build the world a railway - 0 views

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    "Much of that investment will be geared toward transportation projects like the Nigerian railway, as developing countries seek to put in place the capacity needed to keep up with increased flows of people and goods brought by economic growth."
Colin Bennett

US copper scrap flows shrink on virus setbacks - 3 views

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    I've heard the same signal from Europe: tightening scrap market, with problems to be expected in May - July. This issue will affect Europe more than other geographies because of our increased dependence on scrap both in primary and secondary smelters.
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