Skip to main content

Chuck Brands

Chuck Brands's Public Library

Risky Business and Dynamic Transactive Energy Pricing – Removing barriers to Free Energy - The New Daedalus - New Daedalus

"Utilities today must play not to lose rather than to win. They cannot adapt new technologies quickly because they must always be reliable. Market actors that cannot accept risk, cannot afford to innovate. End nodes can voluntarily accept risk, and so can afford to adopt new technology. If Denver, where we met this month to form the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), is plunged into darkness for a week, it is a dire outcome; if my home fails for a week, is provides entertainment to my neighbors. The difference between grid-level innovation and end-node innovation is the difference between tragedy and comedy.

Smart grids will transfer risk to their end nodes. Economic agents which assume risk will expect to be paid for it. These payments will be the fertilizer for an untold number of new technologies. The best way to transfer risk and payments together is self-balancing, self organizing free markets in energy. Systems that can participate in these markets for us as well as systems that can store or generate energy on-site, will be the reward."

www.newdaedalus.com/...g-barriers-to-free-energy.html - Preview

Distributed Energy Grids can use Diverse Energy Storage - The New Daedalus - New Daedalus

"District energy grids distribute thermal energy, whether in the form of heat (steam) or of cooling (chilled water). These systems can pre-cool (or pre-heat, although this is less common) water for distribution. Thermal storage lets district energy microgrids shift energy use to off-peak hours. In a modern transactive grid, such shifting can be part of demand response. Microgrids with significant thermal storage may be able to run entirely on site-based alternative energy during peak hours. They may be able to store off-peak generation converted to thermal energy."

www.newdaedalus.com/...se-diverse-energy-storage.html - Preview

Green Business - Cisco Building Mediator ups the ante on smart, green building implementation | Features | Green Building

It’s great to have this sort of interactivity, but do you get building owners to buy that kind of connectivity?

Huijbregts: We see a few key triggers. Energy use is important. With such a system, measuring use is easier. Once you know what you are using, it’s easier to reduce that use. The second trigger is cost savings. Using such a system can actually reduce costs by $2-3 per square foot. About a 10-15 per cent reduction is what we’re looking at. Thirdly, safety and security is important. We see an increasing need, specifically in big enterprises - government, education and healthcare, particularly - the need to do a better job at protecting assets. In the loosest terms, that includes people, but also intellectual property and equipment. This means considering video surveillance, access control, RFID, asset location based asset tracking, and biometrics - all these things are IP based.

Each of these three have very hard ROI related to them. The proposition we offer is that using smarter building controls frees up funds to invest in resources that add value to the core business.

GB: But initially this must come with a substantial price tag - not something anyone wants to see today.

Huijbregts: Often real estate and energy are not core assets to a business, so with some of our partners, we have now created performance contracting concepts, or let’s energy-funded models, where we go in to a customer with a big building or a campus of buildings and say, "We’ll do an audit of how much energy you consume, we’ll then do an audit of how much IT you already have that we could leverage to reduce that energy use." From that, maybe we’ll come up with strategies to improve upon some of the technology concepts to even further help the customer reduce energy. Then, we get paid out of the savings, so we turn a capital expenditure - up front costs that almost no one has these days - into an operational expenditure savings. We get paid out of that, but you’ll still save more. Whatever you save on top of that you’ll be able t

www.green-business.ca/...n-building-implementation.html - Preview

Corporations and Conservatives

"The more important split is that liberals represent people while conservatives represent corporations. The rich tend to side with corporations against the rest of us, but that's just one of many human fault lines that corporations have managed to exploit. They also take advantage of our racial, religious, and social divisions. Corporations, for example, care not at all about abortion or gay rights -- but if politicians who stand for corporate power can use those issues get votes, that's wonderful for them."

weeklysift.blogspot.com/...sifting-sifts-of-2009.html - Preview

1 - 20 of 40106 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page

Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »

Join Diigo