1 fired, 2 suspended for roles in blackouts

One worker at the state’s power grid has been fired and two others were suspended for triggering rotating blackouts that led to nearly 1 million Southern Californians losing their electricity in the wee morning hours of April 1, the agency that oversees the grid said Thursday. The Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, said the disciplinary actions took place April 9, slightly more than a week after the plant shutdown triggered rotating outages in 17 areas from the Mexican border into Orange County. The confirmation came a day after a state senator alluded to the firing during hearings in Sacramento on the issue. Citing privacy concerns, an ISO spokeswoman did not identify the employees except to say that they were “operations people who worked on the control room floor” at the agency’s headquarters in Folsom. Shortly after the blackout, the three employees were reassigned to other tasks while the agency investigated what happened. To prevent another needless outage, the ISO is retraining workers to ensure that power plants aren’t shut down when they’re needed, implementing procedures to clarify what steps should be taken in a similar situation and changing its alarm system to warn of a lack of generation before a major power plant is shut down.

Details Here

first published week of:   05/03/2010

8 Teams Move on to Semi-Finals in 2009-2010 Clean Energy Prize Competition

Eight teams touting new business ideas that include a system to enhance electric vehicle batteries, to a new method to produce a gas used in solar cell production, to plans for turning food waste into fuel all have moved on to the semi-final round of judging in the Clean Energy Prize competition.

The competition, presented by DTE Energy and the University of Michigan, challenges teams to develop business plans that promise to move a new, clean-energy technology from the laboratory to the market place.

The eight teams that made it into the semi-finals will compete next on the morning of Feb. 12 in the semi-final round. That afternoon, the finalists will compete for the largest shares of a $100,000 prize pool.  

The eight teams that will face off in the semi-finals are:

• Advanced Battery Control: offers a proprietary smart battery management system, which will radically enhance battery utilization in electric vehicles.
• Carbon Perks: a service that motivates people to incorporate energy efficient practices into their lifestyles while helping utilities reduce the costs of providing peak power.
• Enertia: brings to market a multiple patent-pending innovation that will harness ambient kinetic energy and extend the lifetime of wireless electronic devices tenfold, while at the same time replacing toxic electrochemical batteries.
• Food Waste Energy: manufactures and installs anaerobic biodigestors that help restaurants save energy and waste disposal costs by producing natural gas from food waste on site.
• Green Silane: produces silane gas for customers on-site in a manner that is flexible, low-cost, and environmentally benign, revolutionizing the supply chain for this critical input to semiconductor, flat-screen display and photovoltaic panel production.
• Ice Mitigating Systems: developed a two-fold approach to counter the effects of ice on offshore wind turbines. The solution, which addresses the turbine blades and its structural foundation, will be licensed to manufacturers and the company will provide the necessary consulting services to implement these systems.
• ReGenerate: manufactures and leases modular anaerobic digestors to institutional food service operators, transforming food waste discards into on-site renewable energy as well as nutrient-rich fertilizer products that will be cobranded and sold through retail outlets.
• Smart Energy Inc.: providing the bridge between the Smart Grid and consumers, empowering consumers with control over their energy usage and appliances.

first published week of:   02/01/2010

After Google incident, Wi-Fi data collection goes on

Four months ago, amidst a backlash from government regulators and privacy advocates, Google stopped collecting Wi-Fi data with its Street View cars. But that doesn’t mean Google has stopped collecting wireless data altogether, and neither have other companies such as Apple. Instead of sending out cars to sniff out wireless networks, Google is now crowdsourcing the operation, with users of its Android phones and location-aware mobile applications doing the reconnaissance work for it. In the past few months, Apple has quietly started building a similar database, leveraging its large base of users to log basic Wi-Fi data. There are others: A Boston, Massachusetts company, Skyhook Wireless, has been logging wireless access points for years, as has its competitor, Navizon of Miami Beach, Florida. It is a trend that has been spurred by the intense interest in applications such as FourSquare and Facebook Places. As it becomes increasingly important for programs that run on a user’s phone to know exactly where a person is — to be location-aware in industry parlance — having a way of figuring out exactly where a person is becomes critical. But the companies collecting this data have not come under much scrutiny, many users do not understand how the data is being collected or why, and security experts are just now starting to discover some of the ways this information could be misused.

Details Here

first published week of:   09/13/2010

Ameren Merges Illinois Utilities, With New Name of Ameren Illinois Company

Ameren Corp. has completed the merger of its three Illinois electric and natural gas utilities – AmerenCIPS, AmerenCILCO and AmerenIP – into a single public utility now known as “Ameren Illinois.”

The reorganization has been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the appropriate notice was filed in the spring of 2010 with the Illinois Commerce Commission.

The legal name for the combined utility is Ameren Illinois Company, and it is a direct subsidiary of Ameren Corporation. In addition, AmerenUE, which serves approximately 1.2 million customers in Missouri, today began doing business as “Ameren Missouri.”

The reorganization of the Illinois utilities does not affect the current customer electricity and natural gas rates.

Details Here

first published week of:   10/04/2010

Association of Energy Services Professionals Announces Winners of its 2010 Energy Awards

The Association of Energy Services Professionals ( www.aesp.org) announced winners of its Energy Awards and its B. H. Prasad Award during the opening plenary session of its 20th National Conference and Expo, held in Tucson on February 8-12, 2010. The AESP Energy Awards recognize individuals, teams or organizations that have:

• Contributed to the advancement of the energy services field;
• Raised awareness of an energy services program or need;
• Represented the “best in class” in designing, implementing, or evaluating an energy services program; or
• Demonstrated an outstanding commitment to advancing the energy services field.

This year’s award recipients were:

• Energy Trust of Oregon – Outstanding Achievement in Energy Program Design & Implementation for its New Homes Program.
• Puget Sound Energy – Outstanding Achievement in Energy Program Design & Implementation for its Duct Ninja Program and Rock the BulbTM Campaign.
• ComEd – Outstanding Achievement in Energy Program Design & Implementation for its Energy Usage Data System (EUDS) Program.
• Pacific Gas & Electric – Outstanding Achievement in Energy Program Design & Implementation for its Business and Consumer Electronics (BCE) Program.
• Toronto Hydro – Outstanding Achievement in Marketing Communications for its Get Smart Toronto Time-of-Use Program.
• PowerCentsDC – Outstanding Achievement in Pricing and Demand Response for its Smart Meter Pilot Program.
• Southern California Edison – Outstanding Achievement in Pricing and Demand Response for its Participating Load Pilot (PLP) Program.
• OPOWER – Outstanding Achievement in Energy Efficient Technology Deployment for its Home Energy Reporting Platform.

first published week of:   03/15/2010

Bat Study leads to Possible Solution
Partial curtailment leads to reduced mortality

Have wind plant operators found a solution to one of the unexpected and vexing operational problems that plagued some operations in recent years?

I wrote about one effort in Texas that seemed to bear results. Now, there's research along the Appalachian Ridge, where bat mortality has caused headaches for wind operators in recent years.

According to Iberdrola Renewables, the second year of ground-breaking research to study the interaction between bats and wind turbines at the Casselman Wind Power Project shows that increasing cut-in speed of the turbines, the minimum wind speed necessary for turbines to begin spinning and producing electricity, during low wind periods in the late summer and early fall reduced bat mortality up to 93 percent. The study was published in “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment,” a journal of the Ecological Society of America.

Iberdrola Renewables, the owner of the Casselman wind farm, partnered with independent conservation group, Bat Conservation International (BCI), to implement the ground-breaking study at the southwestern Pennsylvania wind power project. 

Details Here

first published week of:   11/15/2010

Volume 31

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