CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--U.S. energy objectives are closely intertwined with--and in many cases, rely upon--the country's broadband infrastructure, government officials and smart-grid company executives say.
The Federal Communications Commission on Monday held a "field hearing" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the role of communications in energy and environment. It was an information-gathering session designed to help set a national broadband strategy.
The entire notion of the smart grid supposes connectivity at different points along the grid. Adding digital technologies to the existing system will allow energy to be used more efficiently, increase reliability, and let grid operators use more solar and wind power, say smart-grid advocates.
During the hearing, speakers argued that broader broadband coverage lays the foundation for those benefits by enabling smart-grid applications, such as home energy monitoring, alerting utilities to outages, and charging plug-in vehicles economically and without stressing the grid.
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who has been involved in both telecom deregulation and energy legislation, said here Monday that future economic growth is tied closely to the intersection of energy and broadband.
U.S. Rep Ed Markey speaks during the FCC's hearing on broadband with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski seated.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)"The smart grid is an electricity Internet. Without the broadband revolution, you cannot have the revolution we're talking about," Markey said. "If you look at the energy sector and the broadband sector, you can determine the economic growth of that country."
In the case of consumers, smart-grid companies are already relying heavily on home broadband connections. Smart meters are equipped with networking gear so that data can regularly be sent back and forth between customers and utilities. Millions of smart meters will be installed in the next three years. But there will still be millions of homes without smart meters, and many utilities have limited meter communications for security reasons.
As a result, energy monitoring companies are designing products so that they can function with an Internet connection instead. Rather than have a smart meter provide real-time energy use to an energy display, for example, data can be collected using different workarounds, including Internet gateways that give consumers access to a Web portal.
Wider broadband coverage would open up energy-efficiency services delivered through home energy displays to a bigger set of people, said Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril, a company focused on smart energy monitoring.
"It's cheaper to give low-income families access to a broadband than it is to give them smart meters," he said. "We use the existing broadband to compensate for the fact that smart meters are not in place."
Regulatory 'hairball'
Better broadband coverage opens up the market to more businesses, too, said Rick Counihan, president of regulatory affairs at energy-efficiency company EnerNoc.
EnerNoc ratchets down electricity use in office and industrial buildings during peak times by connecting to its customers' meters. That communication with many smaller companies is done with a cellular modem, rather than an Internet connection, which makes the service more expensive, he said.
For utilities, connectivity is integral to improving the reliability of the grid, according to executives from utility companies who said that more radio spectrum would help ensure reliable communications to detect outages.
The other area that needs work on the government level is standards and interoperability. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is now leading an effort to establish the necessary standards for smart-grid, covering everything from cybersecurity to in-home communication protocols. But there would need to be coordination among various government agencies for new grid products to be plug and play.
Regulations need to be put in place to promote efficiency at utilities and to reflect peak-time and off-peak pricing of electricity, panelists said.
"The technology is there. The markets are there. The entrepreneurial drive is there," said venture investor Chuck McDermott of Rockport Capital. "The hairball occurs at the regulatory side. We don't have a system that accommodates a dynamic market."
Artist's rendering of the Cloud structure envisioned for the 2012 Olympics in London.
(Credit: MIT Senseable City Laboratory)An extensive team of engineers, designers, and architects from around the world unveiled plans on Monday to create a digitally connected structure to grace the 2012 Olympics in London.
The structure, called the Cloud, is both a physical and digital cloud designed to broadcast real-time data and images on spherical, three-dimensional screens. While the images would float high above the city, the sound would be broadcast at ground level.
Carlo Ratti, head of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a team leader on the project that includes experts from across the world and Google as a partner. Ratti is known for his work on a textualizing waterfall at the Zaragoza World's Fair in 2008, the Real Time Rome population-tracking project, and the EyeStop bus shelters throughout Florence, Italy.
In a statement, Ratti referred to the Cloud as a "new form of collective expression and experience and an updated symbol of our dawning age: code rather than carbon."
The Cloud will power itself, using a combination of solar energy from photovoltaic panels installed both on- and off-site.
The team wants to build the Cloud from money donated by individuals and companies through a "cloud raising" effort that will use the digital cloud to solicit donations. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already on board to support the effort. Google plans to run adds via YouTube and its search results pages, according to MIT.
The structure is flexible enough in design that it can be modestly built for $5 million or be expanded to a $50 million project, depending on how much money is raised.
In addition to the many artists, architects, engineers, and computer scientists collaborating on the project, the team also includes legendary author Umberto Eco among its advisers.
Google's Dan Reicher (at podium) was joined by Stanford's Lynn Orr (left), Nth Power's Tim Woodward, and Under Secretary of Energy Kristina Johnson (onscreen) at an event Monday on innovation in green energy.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--Ahead of a key international summit on climate change, Google hosted a panel discussion at its offices here Monday on the need for the U.S. to play a key role in the development of the next generation of energy.
Energy experts from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and MIT joined Google's Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives and energy venture capitalist Tim Woodward of Nth Power in a wide-ranging discussion on a very timely topic: how to transition the world toward a more sustainable form of energy consumption and production. They were later joined via video conference by Kristina Johnson, undersecretary of energy at the U.S. Department of Energy.
The panelists sought not only to emphasize that such a move is essential, but one that presents enormous economic opportunity for countries that get ahead of the technology and innovation curve. "If we really do pull off changing the world's energy system, then a whole lot of money is going to be spent on putting the equipment in place to do that," said Lynn Orr, director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
The discussion was held a week before the beginning of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Copenhagen with representatives from 192 countries. The conference is expected to produce some sort of global agreement on reducing carbon emissions and embracing alternative forms of energy, although the scope of any such agreement is very much up in the air.
Several panelists agreed with the assertion of Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, that no matter what happens in Copenhagen, substantial progress has already been made this year with climate-change talks between the U.S. and China.
"China wants to be seen as a modern country," said Ernie Moniz, director of MIT's Energy Initiative. That means that not only do they want in on the gold rush toward green energy, they recognize that their citizens could be greatly affected by climate change.
Copenhagen aside, much of Google's interest in fostering debate in this area is designed around getting the federal government to play a larger role in helping technology research make it out of the labs and into the market, Reicher said. "We don't do a very good job in this country of moving technologies through this pipeline," he said.
Google is throwing its considerable resources behind green technologies such as wind, solar thermal, and advanced geothermal, Reicher said. In 2007, Google announced plans to generate 1 gigawatt of clean electricity through investments in companies that are researching and developing clean-energy technology.
The CMT-380 serial hybrid sports car is built on a Factory Five Racing kit car platform.
(Credit: Capstone)In an unlikely alliance, Capstone, manufacturer of electricity-generating microturbines, and Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director Richard Hilleman have built a hybrid sports car for the upcoming Los Angeles Auto Show. The CMT-380 uses an electric power train with a range-extending diesel-fueled microturbine. A lithium polymer battery pack gives the CMT-380 80 miles of pure electric range, and the microturbine generates power for an additional 500 miles.
The car itself is built on a kit car platform, the Factory Five Racing GTM supercar. Capstone cites performance figures of 3.9 seconds to 60mph and a 150mph top speed. Impressively, the microturbine burns its fuel so cleanly that no catalytic converter or other exhaust treatment is needed for the car to meet California's Air Resources Board emissions requirements.
Not the first name that comes to mind in the automotive industry, Capstone has been making microturbines for stationary facilities and hybrid public transport vehicles since 1988. The microturbine in the CMT-380 is the company's smallest, generating 30 kilowatts. Capstone claims many benefits of its microturbine technology over an internal combustion engine, such as compact size, low maintenance, and efficient operation.
But forget buying your own CMT-380. Capstone says it may build a limited number based on interest at the Los Angeles Auto Show, but the car really serves as a demonstration of microturbine technology. Capstone will look for interest in the technology from automakers.
When you're the host city for international climate change negotiations, using energy-efficient LED lights on the Christmas tree apparently isn't enough.
The traditional Christmas tree in Copenhagen's City Hall Square will be powered by people, rather than a distant power plant. The square has been equipped with 15 bicycles which, when pedaled, light up the 700 LED bulbs on the tree.
Staying fit and lighting the night in Copenhagen.
(Credit: Denmark tourism bureau)The 17-meter-high tree went up on Sunday during an opening ceremony in which Saint Nicholas climbed a fire truck ladder to the top of the tree and lit fireworks. Even during the ceremony, the lights were being powered by the bicycles, according to a representative from the city of Copenhagen. Children, a mayor, and international VIPs joined in the pedaling during the opening ceremony, he added.
The carbon-light approach to lighting the traditional Christmas tree is one of the attractions being organized for COP15, the latest round of international climate change talks, which start next week. The purpose of these meetings is to establish treaties to limit the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
Reuters has a list of the commitments under discussion during the negotiation, which include a goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, a "threshold that many scientists see as a threshold for dangerous climate change."
Expectations that there would be a major breakthrough in Copenhagen have been low in part because the U.S. Congress has not been able to pass an energy and climate bill that would limit greenhouse gas emissions. But the past two weeks have seen a number of political twists, summarized here at the New York Times.
All the political jockeying, though, could have a real impact on green technology and innovation. For the most part, green-tech entrepreneurs and investors are not betting on having a hefty price attached to carbon in the immediate future. Rather any climate regulations serve mainly as a signal that the economic system will find a way to create a financial incentive for technologies that reduce emissions.
Another important topic for discussion in Copenhagen is how green technologies will be transferred to poor countries, writes Earth2Tech.
In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.
Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channeled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.
"It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls," said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.
Beneath Helsinki's Uspenski Cathedral a new data center is being built whose heat will help warm homes in the Finnish capital.
(Credit: Jrielaecher/Wikimedia Commons)Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.
Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the Internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing--known as "cloud computing."
Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.
Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.
One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing--the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.
"It is a pressing issue for IT vendors since the rise in energy costs to power and cool servers is estimated to be outpacing the demand for servers," said Steven Nathasingh, chief executive of research firm Vaxa.
"But IT companies cannot solve the challenge by themselves and must create new partnerships with experts in energy management like the utility companies and others," he said.
Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one-third of those of airlines, but are growing 10 percent a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.
Energy savings
Besides providing heat to homes in the Finnish capital, the new Uspenski computer hall will use half the energy of a typical data center, Sipila said.
Its input into the district heating network will be comparable to one large wind turbine, or enough to heat 500 large private houses.
"Green is a great sales point, but equally important are cost savings," said Pietari Paivanen, sales head at Academica: the center, when expanded as planned, will trim 375,000 euros ($561,000) a year from the company's annual power bill. Academica's revenue in 2008 was 15 million euros.
"It's a win-win thing. We are offering the client cheap cooling as we can use the excess heat," Sipila said.
The center's location in the bowels of the cathedral has an added bonus: security. It is taking over a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War II as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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LONDON--The head of the U.N.'s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a "Climategate" row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming.
Climate change skeptics have seized on a series of e-mails written by specialists in the field, accusing them of colluding to suppress data which might have undermined their arguments.
The e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, were stolen from a British university by unknown hackers and spread rapidly across the Internet.
But Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stood by his panel's 2007 findings, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). "This private communication in no way damages the credibility of the AR4 findings," he told Reuters in an e-mail exchange.
This report helped to underpin a global climate response which included this week carbon emissions targets proposed by the United States and China, and won the IPCC a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The e-mails hacked from Britain's University of East Anglia last week showed scientists made snide comments about climate skeptics, and revealed exchanges about how to present the data to make the global warming argument look convincing.
In one e-mail, confirmed by the university as genuine, a scientist jokingly referred to ways of ensuring papers which doubted established climate science did not appear in the AR4.
Pachauri said a laborious selection process, using only articles approved by other scientists, called peer review, and then subsequently approving these by committee had prevented distortion.
"The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments," he added in a written statement to Reuters.
"There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed."
"This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental."
In another e-mail, according to news accounts, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." The revelation of the e-mails was more embarrassing than serious fodder for doubts about the causes of, or basis for climate change, scientists responded this week.
"It is unfortunate that an illegal act of accessing private e-mail communications between scientists who have been involved as authors in IPCC assessments in the past has led to several questions and concerns," said Pachauri.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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OSLO--Promises of greenhouse gas curbs by China and the United States brighten prospects for next month's U.N. climate summit but leave big tangles over cash, rich nations' emissions cuts, and how to tie down a legal treaty.
"This is clearly some progress on the Copenhagen road," Frank Jotzo, deputy director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, said of pledges by the world's top two emitters to tackle global warming.
But he noted China's goal of slowing its rising emissions by 2020 was voluntary and President Barack Obama's plan to cut U.S. emissions by 3 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 faced obstacles in the Senate.
Indeed, China's goal of reducing carbon intensity--the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per yuan of economic activity--by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels still means its emissions will rise, but less than economic growth.
However, analysts welcomed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Obama's decisions to go to the December 7-18 talks in Copenhagen as a sign of personal commitment to a deal. Obama will visit on December 9, before the main U.N. summit on the last two days.
But Obama's proposed emissions cuts are probably too small to encourage other rich nations to make deeper offers in Denmark. Industrialized nations as a group are offering cuts in emissions averaging between 14 percent and 18 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
"It's not enough in itself to unlock new offers," said Knut Alfsen, research director of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.
But he said that Washington could sweeten its offer, perhaps with money for research and development or aid to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change such as droughts, more powerful cyclones, or rising sea levels.
Silent on funds
"The White House...was noticeably silent about finance" in announcing Obama's plans for Copenhagen, said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF environmental group's global climate initiative.
The United Nations wants at least $10 billion a year to help developing nations cope with climate change and convince them that the rich are committed to fighting global warming. And it wants mechanisms to raise far more in the long term.
Carstensen said Obama was likely to argue that his greenhouse goal is a 17 percent cut from 2005 levels after sharp rises since 1990 and sets the United States on a path for deeper cuts than many of its industrial allies by 2030.
Cuts by rich nations are far below demands by developing nations such as China and India that they need to cut by between 25 percent and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst of global warming.
Analysts also say there are uncertainties about the final form of a Copenhagen deal since most nations say time is too short for Copenhagen to agree to a full legal treaty. Denmark wants a "politically binding" pact and a legally binding text in 2010.
"A politically binding promise by a politician...is a meaningless term," said Tom Burke, of the E3G think-tank in London. "There is a serious intent but what it means is fuzzy."
Group of Eight nations, for instance, often make political promises without following up.
"At the end of the day, the atmosphere doesn't care if it's a binding agreement or not, it cares about whether countries are doing action," said Jake Schmidt, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
Additional reporting by David Fogarty in Singapore, Jeff Mason in Washington, and Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing.
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Nissan's all electric Leaf goes into mass production next year.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)Automakers tend to agree that the electrification of the car is inevitable, but Nissan is leading the way by readying a mass-market, affordable electric car for production. The Leaf is a midsize hatchback with a range of a little more than 100 miles, according to Nissan. Although Nissan didn't let us drive it, the company brought the Leaf to CNET's headquarters so we could get a close look at what might be the future of driving.
When Nissan first released pictures of the car, commenters found it ugly, with its bulbous headlights giving it a frog-like appearance. But in person, the length of the car mitigates that criticism. And looking over those headlights, we could see that they are longer, and more fin-shape than bulbous. The lights are LEDs, used because of their low power draw. The shape of the headlight casings has an aerodynamic purpose, splitting airflow around the side mirrors.
A hatch in front of the car conceals two plug-in points, one a standardized socket for electric vehicles and the other a proprietary Nissan design that can charge the batteries to 80 percent in 30 minutes. The Nissan plug, which would only work with very specific charging stations, uses DC power so that the onboard inverter doesn't have to convert external AC power for the DC batteries. The standardized plug will work with more sources, taking AC power from the grid and running it through the inverter, lengthening the time it takes to charge the batteries.
Nissan developed the lithium ion batteries for the Leaf in conjunction with NEC. The batteries are flat slabs that fit in the chassis of the car. Weighing about 500 pounds, the battery placement and distribution helps to lower the Leaf's center of gravity. Beyond charging from a plug, the Leaf also incorporates regenerative braking. Similar to the Tesla, as soon as you lift off the accelerator, regenerative braking kicks in, sending juice to the batteries and slowing the car.
The Nissan Leaf goes on sale in December of 2010 as a 2011 model. Nissan is counting on 20,000 preorders for the car, and will initially build them in Japan. By the third model year, the company expects to start producing them from its plant in Smyrna, Tennessee.
If you need more evidence that energy storage is much more than lithium ion batteries, take a look at the latest smart-grid utility storage projects.
The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced that $620 million in stimulus funding is going to 32 smart-grid programs, which will be coupled with another $1 billion in private money. A total of $770 million from government and industry sources in the next few years will go to energy storage, giving a number of storage technologies a dose of real-world experience. (See this PDF for details.)
(Credit:
PG&E)
Notable in the list is the prominence of compressed-air energy storage and flow batteries, two technologies rarely discussed just a few years ago. Also in the mix are flywheels and using batteries for distributed energy storage in communities.
It's unlikely that all the DOE-aided projects will immediately prove to be commercially viable. But storage has clearly emerged as a key component in the vision of the smart grid. A number of start-ups are developing technologies they hope can address a specific storage application or undercut pumped hydro, considered the cheapest form of utility storage, on price. With pumped hydro, water is pumped uphill and released at peak times to run a generator. But its use is limited by geography.
Many of the 16 Energy Department power storage grants were focused on storing wind power, which is a variable source of energy. In California, for example, utility Pacific Gas & Electric plans to store the power generated by wind turbines at night, when turbines are most productive in underground caverns. During the day, when grid demand is higher, the air is released and passed through a turbine to make electricity.
The advantage of underground compressed air storage is that it can be cheaper than batteries and can store many hours worth of energy. PG&E forecasts that its Kern County, Calif., project can deliver 300 megawatts of power for 10 hours, enough to supply tens of thousands of homes.
Another novel technique is using metal tanks to store compressed air, a technology being developed by a Dartmouth College spin-off SustainX. The compressed air is released to run a hydraulic motor that drives a generator to make electricity.
Flow batteries, meanwhile, use tanks of liquid electrolyte solutions. When the two liquids interact, there is a chemical reaction that creates a flow of electricity.
An advantage of this approach is that store large amounts of energy and discharge relatively quickly, according to the Electricity Storage Association. One project will use technology from Premium Power, which makes tractor trailer-size zinc flow batteries to maintain a steady frequency on the grid and supply power during times of peak demand.
Different strokes
The variety of technologies points to the range of energy storage applications. Flywheels from award winner Beacon Power, for example, can absorb and discharge megawatts' worth of power to the grid but only in 15-minute bursts. Still, flywheels are getting more attention because they are a nonpolluting replacement to the natural-gas plants now used to smooth out short-term fluctuations in grid frequency, according to the company.
Click on the image for a slide show of different energy storage technologies.
(Credit: AEP)Large batteries, too, will be further tested for grid storage. Duke Energy plans to use multiple battery types for 20 megawatts' worth of power delivery at the Notrees Windpower project in Texas. The "hybrid" battery system is being designed for two tasks: to smooth out short-term grid fluctuations and to supply hours' worth of power during the day, according to a Duke Energy representative.
Utility Portland General Electric in the next two years plans to install five batteries from auto battery supplier Ener1 to supply enough juice to power 400 homes for about an hour. Alternative chemistries, including lead carbon batteries from East Penn Manufacturing, will also be used.
One project will test the viability of used car batteries for grid storage. Lithium ion plug-in car batteries from A123 Systems will be used to supply 25 kilowatts for two hours in 20 community energy storage projects. The performance of lithium ion batteries degrades after many years in a car, but there is still sufficient storage and power for grid applications, utility executives say.
