Monthly Archives: August 2007

A Paper Battery?

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Lynne Kiesling

Here’s some new interdisciplinary research that is using nanotechnology to create energy storage in a paper-like material.

Details of the project are outlined in the paper “Flexible Energy Storage Devices Based on Nanocomposite Paper” published Aug. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The semblance to paper is no accident: more than 90 percent of the device is made up of cellulose, the same plant cells used in newsprint, loose leaf, lunch bags, and nearly every other type of paper.

Rensselaer researchers infused this paper with aligned carbon nanotubes, which give the device its black color. The nanotubes act as electrodes and allow the storage devices to conduct electricity. The device, engineered to function as both a lithium-ion battery and a supercapacitor, can provide the long, steady power output comparable to a conventional battery, as well as a supercapacitor’s quick burst of high energy.

The device can be rolled, twisted, folded, or cut into any number of shapes with no loss of mechanical integrity or efficiency. The paper batteries can also be stacked, like a ream of printer paper, to boost the total power output.

“It’s essentially a regular piece of paper, but it’s made in a very intelligent way,” said paper co-author Robert Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer.

“We’re not putting pieces together – it’s a single, integrated device,” he said. “The components are molecularly attached to each other: the carbon nanotube print is embedded in the paper, and the electrolyte is soaked into the paper. The end result is a device that looks, feels, and weighs the same as paper.”

As with all such research, the proof of concept is cool, but they have not tested for manufacturing scalability yet. Unlike some other storage media, though, in this case the component parts are all inexpensive; no expensive catalyst is required because this is simply a storage device. So we’ll see what happens …

Hat tip to Slashdot, naturally.

The Smart Grid and Renewable Energy

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Lynne Kiesling

Last week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an article discussing how our nearly century-old, analog wires network is not up to the challenge of being a modern, distributed system that includes renewable energy:

The nation’s electric power transmission system, aka the grid, could be imagined as an overworked tangle of fraying household wires repeatedly spliced together by your grandfather, who refuses to call the electrician. It is based on century-old technology and, from a modern management perspective, is dumb.

Often, it’s likened to the nation’s highway system. But one local utilities executive said that is wishful thinking.

“More like a collection of New England country lanes,” said Roger Garratt, resource acquisition manager for Puget Sound Energy.

The article then goes on to discuss how to use digital technology, including remote sensors, fault identification, and end-user devices, to create a modern, digital network capable of real-time information flow and both automated and human responses to that information:

A better, approach, Pratt and Virden said, is to make the grid smarter.

The GridWise project is one of several national efforts to improve management of the grid for both producers and consumers. It could do for the power grid what the Internet did for the communications system.

“Right now, the grid is operated by managers who respond to issues or challenges directly and with a feedback time on the scale of minutes,” Pratt said.

Managers faced with power overloads or energy deficits turn power lines on or off to try to keep the grid’s flow in balance, he said.

GridWise sensors would automatically monitor electricity flow and respond to changes in seconds rather than minutes, Pratt said.

I’m glad to see more articles like this in the daily press, because it will heighten awareness of the ability to use digital technology as a low-cost alternative to new generation and wires construction, to enable us to meet anticipated demand growth and to accommodate new and distributed types and sources of energy. People just don’t think about infrastructure like this until it is inadequate for the job.

Phillipine Wholesale Power Market Operator Seeks to Improve Detection, Deterrence of Market Power Abuse

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Michael Giberson

Lest readers of Knowledge Problem believe that U.S. energy markets are the only ones subject to allegations of manipulation, from Manila comes word that the Phillipine Electricity Market Corp. is improving up its wholesale power market monitoring. The market operator hopes to deter future market power abuses similar to the alleged abuses that beset the market in the third month of its operation last year.

According to a newspaper report, PEMC’s market surveillance committee found state-run Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM) guilty of anti-competitive behavior spike during the Aug. 26-Sept. 25 trading month of last year. The Energy Regulatory Commission later cleared PSALM of price manipulation charges, saying it found no prima facie evidence to start its own investigation on the matter.

Judge Won’t Block Whole Foods – Wild Oats Merger

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Michael Giberson

An update: Yesterday a federal judge refused the FTC’s request to temporarily block the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger. The Associated Press reported that the judge’s reasoning “was detailed in a 93-page court document that was sealed because it contains corporate secrets.” Pretty obviously, as an attorney is quoted in the AP story as saying, “It appears that the court likely placed value on the evidence submitted by Whole Foods showing that the company faces meaningful competition from conventional supermarkets.” FTC can appeal the ruling.

Hat tip to Volokh Conspirator Peter Bernstein. A commenter there speculates: “Seriously, what was the FTC thinking? Are there just no antitrust violations going on and they didn’t want to fire anyone?”

The AP article observes, “The FTC last won an antitrust case in court in 2002, when it succeeded in blocking Libbey Inc. from buying restaurant glassware maker Anchor Hocking Corp. from Newell Rubbermaid Inc.”

For more discussion, see a Geoff Manne posting at Truth on the Market (also cited at Volokh). Truth on the Market also has a post up in response to the ruling with links to their related posts.

Forbes Article on Smart Grid Technology and Dynamic Pricing

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Lynne Kiesling

The headline of this Forbes article reads “What Would You Pay To Stay Cool?” Using pending Congressional energy legislation as the springboard for the article, Ashlea Ebeling does a very good job of discussing the combination of digital technology and dynamic pricing that can transform the electric power network into a more resilient, dynamic, transactive, and cost-effective one.

She notes correctly that the combination of enabling technology and dynamic pricing would create the opportunity for even small, residential customers to get access to lower power prices in off-peak periods, and that even though utilities are balking at the expense of investing in AMI (advanced metering infrastructure), they will get some operational and cost benefits too:

But the utilities need smart grid too because it will help them meet new federal standards for power reliability, argues Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, a free-market think tank. “In almost every region we’re soon to be below the safe margin (for reserve energy) for high energy use days,” he says. “This is a quick way of reducing demand,” he adds. Burnett, naturally, is a fan of deregulation and argues that it helps spawn innovative ways to control costs and rates, including smart grid technology.

As of now, most residential and commercial customers still pay their electric utility a flat rate multiplied by the kilowatt hours they use. A meter man stops by each house and reads the electric meter, or drives by and picks up the reading. “That ‘s a dumb grid,” says Burnett. (In deregulated states, some commercial customers–for example, a big office building or factory using 500 kilowatts or more at once–already have special pricing deals with utilities, with prices varying by the hour.)

But with a smart grid in place, a utility could restructure rates, and then offer all its customers products that allow either the customer, or the utility, to control usage based on demand and hourly rates. Example: A smart thermostat allows a customer to program it so when the electric rate hits a certain price on a summer day, the target temperature in his house becomes two degrees warmer and the air conditioner doesn’t run as much.

She then goes on to discuss the increasing opportunities customers will have to receive prices to devices, to automate their responses to price changes. She closes by discussing the technology and pricing pilots that have shown the potential value creation from enabling technology + dynamic pricing, and which I discussed in my paper in the Searle Center Annual Review of Regulation 2007.

See also the post on the article over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog.

Small Jets Worsen Airport Delays, and the FAA Cannot/Will Not Adapt

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Lynne Kiesling

The other day I read this Wall Street Journal article about the effect of small jets on air traffic delays ($$), and the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. Here’s the punchline:

At La Guardia, half of all flights now involve smaller planes: regional jets and turboprops. It’s the same at Chicago’s O’Hare, which is spending billions to expand runways. At New Jersey’s Newark Liberty and New York’s John F. Kennedy, 40% of traffic involves smaller planes, according to Eclat Consulting in Reston, Va. Aircraft numbers tell the tale: U.S. airlines grounded a net 385 large planes from 2000 through 2006 — but they added 1,029 regional jets — says data firm Airline Monitor.

As air-travel woes have spread, some aviation officials and regulators, including the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, have begun saying delays could be eased if airlines would consolidate some of their numerous flights on larger planes.

Just two problems with that. One is that airlines like having more flights with smaller jets. The other is that passengers like it, too.

Airlines like smaller planes because they are a cost-minimizing way to serve a wider range of destinations with more frequency; they also help the airlines achieve higher load factors. Passengers like smaller planes (well, maybe not the planes exactly, they are not comfortable) because they mean more frequent service. However, when you have higher volumes of traffic and unanticipated things happen, delays can domino and propagate. In the existing system, that’s the tradeoff.

But, and here’s the point where I get annoyed, there are so many potentially valuable and innovative ways that the FAA can manage airspace better than they currently do, but what do they want to do? They want to force airlines to use larger planes:

Trying to tackle airport crowding, the FAA last year proposed a complicated plan to force airlines to increase the average size of the planes they land at La Guardia. FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, questioning the use of many smaller planes and their more-numerous flights, says that “from the standpoint of passengers and from the standpoint of getting the best use out of high-priced real estate, this is not the way we should be going.” But the FAA plan encountered fierce opposition and is in limbo. “A solution eludes us,” Ms. Blakey says.

There is no excuse for the FAA’s retrograde, top-down mentality, other than just plain inertia and failure of imagination. Just think of the number of ways that we can implement better airspace management. We can replace regional radar control with a GPS network, which has been proposed and delayed because of its expense. But when Ms. Blakey of the FAA says later in the article that eventually the airlines will have to increase plane sizes because of the higher congestion costs they are bearing, why can’t she and her FAA colleagues apply that same logic to funding the GPS system through airline fees? Because the airlines use their political power to stop it, thereby exposing themselves to this congestion cost and the perpetuation of inefficient, obsolete, top-down airspace control instead of technology-enabled decentralized airspace coordination.

And then there’s the way airlines pay for landing slots; they pay by weight, which means that smaller planes pay less even though they actually use more runway because of the longer timing requirements in the small plane slots. Again I ask, given digital technology and our ability to implement sophisticated, decentralized systems, why are we not auctioning off takeoff-landing slot pairs at these congested airports??? Such an auction would induce the airlines to bid based on value, which would ameliorate both the weight differential problem and the peak-hour landing time challenge (i.e., lots of planes want to land around rush hour when those slots aren’t priced any differently than other times). The WSJ article does discuss peak pricing of landing slots, but in a cursory manner.

The technology is available and it’s gotten increasingly cheaper over the past two decades. For how long are we air travelers going to tolerate this failure of imagination and perpetuation of an inefficient status quo? When will airlines realize that implementing airspace technology systems and landing slot auctions provides a decentralized coordination mechanism that will alleviate some of the need for top-down FAA control that they complain about?

Wired’s Autopia blog also noted this article, and made the pithy observation that

America’s airport infrastructure needs radical improvement. Yet inevitably politicians talk about adding runways or upgrading air-traffic control systems. We need whole new ways of thinking about air travel–ways that take into consideration (heaven forbid!) how people actually travel.

FTC Accidently Reveals Whole Foods Trade Secrets: Wal-Mart a Target of Whole Foods Negotiating Strategy

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Michael Giberson

Attorneys for the FTC inadvertently revealed Whole Food company trade secrets when they filed documents in court that had been incorrectly redacted. (The background behind the material intended to be redacted was set to black, making it impossible to read the black text, but not hard at all to search or copy and paste the text. Court officials noted the error and replaced the documents with secure versions, but not until after it had been downloaded by some in the public.)

An Associated Press story helps bring the trade secrets to light. Among the disclosures: Whole foods targeted a highly educated customer base, the company expected to close 30 or so Wild Oats stores if the merger goes through, and the opening of a Whole Foods store nearby can cut up to 30 percent out of the revenue of a Wild Oats store. I was most fascinated by the disclosure that Whole Foods negotiated with suppliers in an effort to drive up costs for Wal-Mart. According to the AP:

Whole Foods set “ground rules” barring suppliers from selling directly to Wal-Mart. “It wants Wal-Mart to have to go through distributors because that raises Wal-Mart’s costs,” the document said.

Holy smokes, Batman, did the FTC just inadvertently reveal that Whole Foods imagines it is competing in the same retail products universe as Wal-Mart? Well that certainly opens up the scope of the market just a bit. That clangorous racket you hear in the background is the sound of Herfindahl-Hirschman Index values crashing to the ground.

Maryland Utilities Commission Asserts Itself

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Michael Giberson

The Washington Post story is headlined, “O’Malley Encouraging Utilities Commission To Assert Its Powers“:

The hearing on the 16th floor of the state government building in Baltimore was as charged as a cross-examination. Two Verizon officials were called to appear before Maryland’s utility regulators to explain a 50 percent increase in customer complaints about their phone service. And from the first moment, it was clear a grilling was in order.

“What are you doing to improve the service?” demanded Steven B. Larsen, the new chairman of the Public Service Commission. Another commissioner, Lawrence Brenner, told the phone company representatives, “It helps if you come along willingly rather than be dragged.”

The article explains that while the Commission is officially less prominent than other state agencies with larger staffs and budgets, “it is emerging under Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) as an aggressive force.” The key word in that last phrase is “under.”

Larsen called the case the “most immediate example” of the commission’s more aggressive approach to regulation, which he said has been adopted slowly by some on the commission staff.

He said some staff members asked, “Why don’t you give them a phone call?” But, Larsen said, “it was obvious to me that we needed to do something immediately.”

It isn’t clear from the article over what period the “50 percent increase in customer complaints” occurred or just how many complaints are at issue. If the 50 percent increase happened quickly, then maybe immediate action was reasonable. If we’re talking a 50 percent higher total last year than the year before, I would wonder why the Commission waited so long to take action (when they could have, you know, made a phone call back when complaints were only 25 percent higher).

Of course, a discrete phone call to signal Commission concerns won’t show how much the Governor cares and won’t generate stories in the press about Martin O’Malley, man of action. Do you get the feeling that the phone calls that the Commission cares most about are those that come from the Governor’s office?

Home of the Groove: Internet Radio Not Dead Yet

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Michael Giberson

I stumbled across the Home of the Groove blog some months back. It turned out to be a great place to delve deeper into New Orleans funk and R&B and related musicality. And recently, the Home of the Groove has sprouted its own internet radio station running a 10-hours and growing playlist of New Orleans lost hits, arcana, and other rarities.

Internet radio is not dead yet. Let’s hope it survives the continuing loving embrace of SoundExchange.

Sally Satel on Incentives, Altruism, and Kidney Transplants

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Michael Giberson

Sally Satel writes on “Supply, Demand, and Kidney Transplants” in Policy Review:

Under the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, anyone who offers or receives something of material value in exchange for an organ can be charged with a felony. The ban ’s rationale was twofold: to prevent lurid scenarios in which desperately poor people auctioned off their spare parts to the wealthy and to ensure that citizens had equal access to the organs collected. “The prisoner in California gets the heart transplant because he needs it and is first on the list. It ’s blind to whether you’re a saint or a sinner or a celebrity. That’s key to maintaining the public trust,” said Mark Fox, former head of the [United Network for Organ Sharing] ethics committee.

But the trust is already damaged because of the death toll over which UNOS presides. The equity that UNOS seeks to preserve is “degenerating into an equal opportunity to die waiting,” nephrologist Benjamin Hippen told the President’s Council on Bioethics last year. The dire shortage of organs today is striking evidence of the fact that altruism is not sufficient to produce enough organs.