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The past year has seen a major uptick in deployments of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE).  This acceleration is a direct result of developments in the market for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs): More than 135,000 PEVs will be sold globally in 2012, and growth is expected to continue at a steady pace.  According to a new report from Pike Research, a part of Navigant’s Energy Practice, the EVSE market will expand steadily, as well.  Unit sales of EVSE will rise from under 200,000 in 2012 to almost 2.4 million in 2020.  By 2020, the study concludes, 11.4 million EV charging stations will be in operation worldwide.

In addition to a rise in major incidents, power organisations also face growing challenges from an aging workforce, deteriorating equipment, a growing demand for electricity – especially from emerging economies, environmental regulation, and the rise of renewable energy.Philippe Du Four, Chairman of Marsh’s Global Power Practice, commented: “Insurers are reconsidering their stance on pricing and conditions for the global power industry following sustained heavy losses arising from machinery breakdown, fire and explosion, natural perils and associated business interruption. Improving risk management techniques to reduce claims frequency and costs should be a business imperative for power organisations.”

Globally, more than half of the energy consumption in buildings – which is expected to rise from 31,983 terawatt-hours (TWh) to 51,253 TWh by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) – comes from residential buildings.  According to a recent report from Pike Research, a part of Navigant’s Energy Practice, the energy efficient housing sector will expand rapidly over the remainder of the decade, growing from an annual market value of $14 billion in 2012 to almost $84 billion in 2020.

Researchers at Stanford University have used nanoparticles of copper hexacyanoferrate to create electrodes that could lead to large batteries for storing excess power from the electrical grid for future use.

Practical conductors require acceptance of less than perfect superconducting behaviour because such conductors actually operate continuously in a slightly resistive mode

Recognising this issue, the Committee’s recent report recommends that the Code of Practice for Landlords includes a requirement for mandatory periodic checks on electrical safety.

With this new impetus, engineers and start-up companies have jumped at the challenge, and while beamed power is still in its infancy, three viable options seem to be emerging. The use of radio waves to transmit electricity is perhaps the most obvious solution, since you can in principle use the same kinds of transmitters and receivers used in Wi-Fi communication. Powercast, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has recently used this technology to transmit microwatts and milliwatts of power over at least 15 metres to industrial sensors. They believe a similar approach could one day be used to recharge small devices like remote controls, alarm clocks and even cellphones. A second possibility, for more power-hungry devices, is to fire a finely focused infrared laser beam at a photovoltaic cell, which converts the beam back to electrical energy. It's an approach PowerBeam has adopted, but so far its efficiency is only between 15 and 30 per cent. While that could serve more power-hungry appliances, it would in practice be too wasteful. The technology has been used to power wireless lamps, speakers and electronic photo frames that require less than 10 watts to function. Over time, as both the lasers and photovoltaic cells improve, the company hopes efficiencies of up to 50 per cent will be possible. "There's no reason we couldn't power a laptop eventually," says Graham. Unlike some other possible techniques, a sharply focused beam loses minimal energy over large distances, preserving its efficiency: "A hundred metres is no big deal."

In this paper we demonstrate the ability of this technique to increase the density in Bi-2212 wires, which leads to a three-fold increase in JC with respect to drawn wires, making this approach very promising for fabricating Bi-2212 wires for high magnetic field magnets, i.e. above 25 T.

As offshore wind farms are being built farther from the coast and more offshore oil and gas installations are powered from shore, there will be an increasing need for long-distance underwater power transmission in the years to come.