Smart grids: New study highlights key challenges and trends in the EU

Smart grids: New study highlights key challenges and trends in the EU

  8:47:00 PM    Science Lover

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Intelligent electricity networks – smart grids – are a key component in the EU energy strategy, but substantial investments are needed to make them a reality. A new study from the European Commission's in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), presents a review of 219 smart grid projects Europe-wide. The vast majority of investments, amounting to about €5.5 billion, were made in old Member States ("EU15"), while new Member States ("EU12") tend to lag behind.

By providing a complete catalogue of the projects to date, the report showcases how smart grids can help integrate more renewables, accommodate electric vehicles, give more control to consumers over their energy consumption, avoid blackouts and restore power quickly when outages occur.

European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, says: The implementation of smart grids is a significant opportunity for European industry to research, to market and to export new technologies, to create new jobs and maintain global technological leadership. We are only at the beginning of the transition to smart grids, and at this stage, sharing the results of research projects can help increase the stock of knowledge and add impetus to innovation in this field.

The report shows that Distribution System Operators (DSOs) play a leading role in coordinating smart grid deployment across Europe. DSO-led projects represent about 27% of all projects and about 67% of investments. However, the study underlines that current regulation in EU Member States tends to promote cost efficiency by reducing operation costs rather than by upgrading to a smarter system. It warns that the investment potential on smart grids will have difficulty accelerating without revising the current regulatory models. Regulation should ensure a fair sharing of costs and benefits in the set up of services platforms, as power system owners and operators are expected to sustain the majority of investments whereas several players might get benefits from smart grids.



Smart grids enable a two-way exchange of information and power between producers and consumers, and this leads to increased transparency, promoting responsible energy saving measures on the consumers' side. Success stories in the EU15 Member States confirm that consumer engagement is crucial to the effectiveness of smart electricity systems and needs to be won through trust, understanding and clear tangible benefits. For example, real-time information on electricity consumption and prices allowed consumers to save up to 10% of electricity.

The survey indicates that in almost all countries a significant amount of investment addresses the integration of different smart grid technologies. Most technologies are known, but their integration - i.e. how well they work together - is the key challenge for the success of these projects and the overall smart grid concept.

Background

This inventory compiled by the Joint Research Centre results from a request from the Directorate-General for Energy (DG ENER) to start a data collection effort to develop a catalogue of Smart Grids projects in Europe and to carry out a qualitative analysis of their results. The analysis contributed to the drafting of the Commission Communication "Smart Grids: from innovation to deployment", adopted in April 2011 [COM (2011) 202].

Links

"Smart Grid projects in Europe: lessons learned and current developments" report: JRC Smart Electricity Systems website: http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Itemid=137

EC Communication on Smart Grids – Smart grids: from innovation to deployment - COM(2011) 202, 12/04/2011 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:52011DC0202:EN:HTML:NOT

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Scientists to Control Quantum Mechanical Force

Scientists to Control Quantum Mechanical Force

  1:39:00 AM    Science Lover

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are developing a way to control the Casimir force, a quantum mechanical force that attracts objects when they are only hundred nanometers apart.

These are MEMS used to detect the presence of the Casimir Force. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Argonne National Laboratory)

"The Casimir force is so small that most experimentation has dealt simply with its characteristics," said Derrick Mancini, interim director of the Center for Nanoscale Materials. "If we can control this force or make it repulsive, it can have dramatic effects on the development of nanoelectromechanical systems."

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Invading Black Holes Explain Cosmic Flashes

Invading Black Holes Explain Cosmic Flashes

  1:15:00 AM    Science Lover

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Black holes are invading stars, providing a radical explanation to bright flashes in the universe that are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy today.

Artist's concept: In the center of a swirling whirlpool of hot gas is likely a 

beast that has never been seen directly: a black hole. 

(Credit: A. Hobart, CXC)

The flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are beams of high energy radiation – similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons – produced by jets of plasma from massive dying stars.

The orthodox model for this cosmic jet engine involves plasma being heated by neutrinos in a disk of matter that forms around a black hole, which is created when a star collapses.

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Shifting Sound To Light May Lead To Better Computer Chips

Shifting Sound To Light May Lead To Better Computer Chips

  1:29:00 AM    Science Lover

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A plasma is generated by a laser pulse similar to how sound is converted to light.
(Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

By reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone, researchers may have a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs and transistors are built.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have for the first time converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.

Commonly used piezo-electric speakers, such as those found in a cell phone, operate at low frequencies that human ears can hear.

But by reversing that process, lead researchers Michael Armstrong, Evan Reed and Mike Howard, LLNL colleagues, and collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nitronex Corp., used a very high frequency sound wave - about 100 million times higher frequency than what humans can hear - to generate light.

“This process allows us to very accurately ‘see’ the highest frequency sound waves by translating them into light,” Armstrong said.

The research appears in the March 15 edition of the journal Nature Physics.

During the last decade, pioneering experiments using sub-picosecond lasers have demonstrated the generation and detection of acoustic and shock waves in materials with terahertz (THz) frequencies. These very same experiments led to a new technique for probing the structure of semiconductor devices.

However, the recent research takes those initial experiments a step further by reversing the process, converting high-frequency sound waves into electricity. The researchers predicted that high frequency acoustic waves can be detected by seeing radiation emitted when the acoustic wave passes an interface between piezoelectric materials.

Very high-frequency sound waves have wavelengths approaching the atomic-length scale. Detection of these waves is challenging, but they are useful for probing materials on very small length scales.

But that’s not the only application, according to Reed.

“This technique provides a new pathway to generation of THz radiation for security, medical and other purposes,” he said. “In this application, we would utilize acoustic-based technologies to generate THz.” Security applications include explosives detection and medical use may include detection of skin cancer.

And the Livermore method doesn’t require any external source to detect the acoustic waves.

“Usually scientists use an external laser beam that bounces off the acoustic wave – much like radar speed detectors – to observe high frequency sound. An advantage of our technique is that it doesn’t require an external laser beam – the acoustic wave itself emits light that we detect,” Armstrong said.

Article source : ScienceDaily

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Microsoft plans job portal in India

Microsoft plans job portal in India

  5:00:00 PM    Science Lover

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NEW DELHI: Microsoft Corp yesterday announced that it was in talks with partners in government and industry for a job search portal.

The company said that it plans to launch a job search service this year for the country's nearly 400,000 engineers graduating every year. Microsoft's job portal will compete with Info Edge (India) www.naukri.com and Monster Worldwide’s www.monsterindia.com, among others. Its online portal www.msn.com will provide educational content to students.

The company has also entered into an agreement with Advanced Micro Devices and Zenith Computers to make and sell personal computers in India.

The computers, priced at Rs 21,000, would be sold in 10 retail outlets each in Bangalore and Pune from July on a test basis for three months and will be expanded later on the basis of response.

"We don't see any gain in the short term. Our perspective is long term," Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan told reporters.

In 2006/07 the total installed base of PCs in India was 22 million, that is, a PC for about every 50 Indians, industry tracking body IDC said in a recent report.

SOURCE : THE TIMES OF INDIA

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