Solar panels no savior in a blackout

Some of the roughly 6 million power customers in the northeast without electricity in Hurricane Sandy's wake may be glancing around at a handful of homes with solar panels on their rooftops, thinking their clean-powered neighbors might have juice. However, most residential solar panels are connected to the power grid, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, and when the grid goes down, so do they. One reason the grid-connected solar systems shut down automatically in outages is that when the power goes off, if home solar installations send electricity onto the lines, it could electrocute workers repairing them. In the U.S., it is also rare for residential solar customers to have batteries in their home to store the power coming off their roofs in case of a broader outage.

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first published week of:   11/05/2012

10 mile evacuation zone may not be adequate for some nuclear power plants

The United States should customize emergency plans for each of the nation’s 65 nuclear power plants, a change that in some cases could expand the standard 10-mile evacuation zone in place for more than 3 decades, an expert panel recommended in a report that was to be released March 9. That’s one of the lessons to emerge in a 40-page report set to be released 3 days before the 1–year anniversary of Japan’s nuclear disaster from a committee that examined the incident for the American Nuclear Society. The panel included a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a fellow at a Department of Energy laboratory, and seven other nuclear scientists. The report concluded U.S. nuclear power oversight is adequate to protect public health and safety but that emergency zones “should not be based on arbitrary mileage designations.” Under rules in force since 1978, communities near nuclear plants must prepare federally reviewed evacuation plans for those living within 10 miles of the facility.

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first published week of:   03/12/2012

23.73 million homes don-t have electricity — NERC committee

A total of 23.73 million households, out of the 28.9 million in Nigeria, do not have access to the national electricity grid, the Committee on Public Inquiry on Metering in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry has said.

This means that 82.1 per cent of Nigerian households do not have access to electricity from the national grid.

The committee, set up by the National Electricity Regulatory Commission, and chaired by a lawyer, Mr. Bamidele Aturu, said at the presentation of its report on Wednesday that the country require about N50bn to provide meters for all electricity consumers.

It also disclosed that out of the 2.89 million meters available in the country, 701,385 were faulty.

This means that 22 per cent of all meters installed in the country are faulty in spite of the fact that until recently, the Power Holding Company of Nigeria had been charging all electricity consumers the Meter Maintenance Fee.

The committee also found that the electricity distribution companies carved out from PHCN had not yet accounted for the N2.9bn released to them as subsidy for meters under the first phase of the Multi-Year-Tariff-Order.

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first published week of:   06/04/2012

6 new smart grid products - from the cloud to a system-on-chip
by Doug Peeples — SGN News Editor

Apparently the smart grid is still young enough that its component technologies are continually evolving. You can see that readily by taking a quick peek at the mass of announcements and press releases from vendors that fill media inboxes every week.

first published week of:   10/01/2012

70% of Muni Utilities Could Install Smart Meters by 2017
Municipal utilities could emerge as key drivers of innovation and volume in water, gas, and power metering.
by Katherine Tweed

The case for smart grid, and smart meters in particular, is dicey for many large utilities that are not always incentivized for efficiency. But most of the 2,000 or so municipal utilities across the United States purchase power they don't generate -- and they're desperate to save money through smart grid technologies, especially during these cash-strapped times.

That's one of the factors that is going to make the municipal utility sector one of the largest drivers of smart grid investment over the next five years, according to a new report by GTM Research, "The Muni Smart Grid 2012: A Survey of Utility Deployment, Expenditure and Strategy."  While municipal utilities only serve about 13 percent of electric customers in the U.S., they are expected to spend $4.5 billion to $9 billion on smart gird from now until 2017, the report found.

Seventy-two percent of municipal utilities surveyed said that smart meters are a prerequisite to the utility’s vision of a smarter grid. GTM Research expects RF mesh to dominate in this market, with RF point-to-multipoint coming in second. Munis will also likely be looking for platforms that can support distribution automation applications, which respondents said was the second most important application of smart grid. 

But the smart grid industry is going to have to adjust to meet the needs of the municipal utility sector. One of those needs is a lower-cost approach to meet the smaller customer base of a lot of municipal players. While there are a few huge munis, like the city of Los Angeles, the majority serve 1,000 to 10,000 customers, with an average size of about 64,000 customers for those utilities surveyed by GTM Research.

Another key finding of the survey is that municipal utilities are largely in the planning or investigatory stage of smart grid, with only 14 percent saying they were already moving forward with a large-scale deployment. While that's an indicator of opportunity in the sector, it's also a sign that so far, many municipal utilities are still concerned about price and payback for the systems they'll be asking their ratepayers and elected city officials to pay for.

That also pushes municipal utilities to want to leverage smart grid platforms for multiple purposes. For instance, while advanced metering networks can’t necessarily meet all the requirements for bandwidth and latency for distribution applications, 41 percent of respondents said that current AMI network solutions could meet their DA needs.

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first published week of:   09/10/2012

iPhones that charge when you walk, via electromagnetic induction? Apple is looking into it
by Staska

Finding enough power to run all the stuff in your mobile gadget, is probably the biggest problem facing device developers today. While the chip power is increasing according to Moore’s law, the battery technology to run them is improving at a glacial pace. So getting your iPhone or Droid to last just a single day on a moderate use is considered a big achievement.

Well, Apple may have an idea how to to improve your iPhone endurance even without bigger battery. What if your iDevice was able to transform a kinetic energy into electricity? That way, your iPhone will be auto-charging when you run, walk around, or move it in some other way.

You probably heard about the process of electromagnetic induction in high-school. That’s when you move a magnet next to a wire coil to generate electricity. But those are huge, where would you put such a contraption inside the iPhone?

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first published week of:   09/24/2012

Volume 31

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