Electricity

Nest’s Elegant Learning Thermostat — but is It Transactive?

Lynne Kiesling A team of highly skilled and design-savvy engineers have revealed Nest, an elegant, well-designed thermostat that can learn your preferred settings, analyze your data to spot energy-saving and money-saving opportunities, and look lovely on your wall. Earth2Tech has a review article on Nest, as does Greentech Enterprise. This summary description, from the Earth2Tech …

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Exelon’s John Rowe and Google’s Eric Schmidt: Truth to Power?

Lynne Kiesling Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of two prominent executives performing sound public choice analyses, and I think they complement each other, at least in my work! This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured an interview with Exelon’s John Rowe, A Life in Energy and (Therefore) Politics. Exelon is the third largest investor-owned utility/generation owner in …

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Smil’s Brief List of the Pioneering Creators of Electric Systems

Michael Giberson In the process of explaining why Steve Jobs, though talented, is no Thomas Edison, Vaclav Smil name-drops a “brief list of the pioneering creators of electric systems”: This fundamental innovation [the electric power system] was created during a remarkably short period of time—most of it between the late 1870s and the beginning of …

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Propublica Gets the Establishment View on the Arizona-socal Blackout, the Establishment Says It Needs More Money and Authority

Michael Giberson At ProPublica, Ariel Wittenburg assesses the meaning of the early September blackout affecting parts of Arizona, Southern California, and Northern Mexico. The proximate cause was substation maintenance in Yuma, Arizona and an apparent fault in protective systems that should have kept surrounding lines running during maintenance. As these systems failed, the disturbance reached …

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Economist’s Babbage Column on Network Reliability

Lynne Kiesling The usually-reliable Babbage columnist at the Economist has written a misguided commentary on last week’s power outage in San Diego and its broader implications (and, unfortunately, Glenn has picked it up on Instapundit, which will magnify the effects of its misguidedness). He starts by summarizing what’s known about the fault that led to …

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Interstate Commerce in Electric Power – Arizona Policymaker’s Two-faced View

Michael Giberson Yesterday the staff of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az) conducted a “Solar Summit” in Washington, D.C. You can watch all three hours of the program here, or maybe you’d rather read the overview provided by Phil Riske at the Rose Law Group Blog, “Mayes, Spitzer bemoan congressional Republicans ‘retrenching’ against renewable energy funding and …

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Beacon Power Patents Idea of Flywheels for Frequency Regulation?

Michael Giberson Can Beacon Power patent the idea of using flywheel technology for frequency regulation? Apparently the answer is yes, at least according to Beacon’s press release. “Beacon Power invented the idea of using high-energy flywheels to regulate grid frequency, so it’s appropriate that we’ve now been awarded a core patent for the idea,” said …

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Whales and Electricity, and Sustainability

Lynne Kiesling A few weeks ago I was thrilled to speak at the inaugural Summer Institute on Sustainability and Energy, organized by the University of Illinois-Chicago in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago. The students were from diverse fields and between them and the other …

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Smart Appliances and the Innovation Cycle

Lynne Kiesling Appliance and consumer electronics manufacturers are starting to incorporate digital technology with energy-related applications into their products … but as with most new technologies, the first commercial stage of the innovation cycle takes the form of “because we can” product differentiation rather than use-specific innovation. Take the example that Technology Review highlighted this …

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