There’s an aggressive schedule to put together a DR standards document for submission to the IEEE Standards Board — to have a final draft ready by March 2000. Overall, this is a huge undertaking. According to one estimate, there are at least 18,000 “combinations,” considering the number of different kinds of distribution circuits, inverter types, size ranges, and “issues” to address.
Commercial buildings alone consume about 15% of all energy at a cost of $85 billion annually. Half of this consumption is wasted, compared to what is cost-effectively achievable. To realize these savings requires a careful examination of the process by which buildings are designed, built, commissioned, and operated, using a life-cycle approach.
A new lightweight, inexpensive, accurate carbon monoxide (CO) sensor and monitoring system has been developed by scientists LBNL and Quantum Group Incorporated (QGI, San Diego), under a cooperative R&D agreement (CRADA).
LBNL has begun a new and novel area of inquiry, exploring how energy relates to insurance-loss risks. The program is opening a number of fascinating new areas, and opening lines of communication between the insurance industry and the many different players in energy and environment.
In March 1999, Energy Minister John Battle set out the Government’s blueprint for the future of renewables, reaffirming its commitment to developing the industry and boosting research and development expenditure to £43 million over the next three years.
Material Integrity Solutions, Inc., specializes in mechanical and structural analysis and design of complex components for a number of industries including power generation, gas transmission, electronics, and manufacturing.
This article by our friend Mark Mills appeared in World Climate Report, and again (modified) in the June 1 issue of Public Utility Fortnightly. A good reality check on the rhetoric of distributed generation. I especially like the point that there’s no “Moore’s Law” for electric power generation.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to harness the power of the ocean waves (and this is excluding tidal and ocean thermal schemes). A small company in New Jersey called Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) has worked intensively on this since the company began operations in 1994, and appears to have a solution at hand.
