Lightning-fast, efficient data transmission developed at Stanford. Jan Petykiewicz / School of Engineering This carrier holds a single chip containing hundreds of the Stanford low-power LEDs integrated together. A team at Stanford's School of Engineering has demonstrated an ultrafast nanoscale light-emitting diode (LED) that is orders of magnitude lower in power consumption than today's laser-based systems and is able to transmit data at the very rapid rate of 10 billion bits per second. The researchers say it is a major step forward in providing a practical ultrafast, low-power light source for on-chip data transmission. Stanford's Jelena Vuckovic, an associate professor of electrical engineering, and Gary Shambat, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, announced their device in a research paper set to be published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
"Low-power, electrically controlled light sources are vital for next-generation optical systems to meet the growing energy demands of the computer industry," said Vuckovic. Media Contact. World-Leading Smart Grid Demo on Maui Island, Hawaii. Clean Power Published on November 16th, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan Hawaii is a clean energy leader, and it is now looking to more efficiently use that clean energy with the development of a world-leading smart grid demonstration project on Maui Island, Hawaii. The project, a project of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), is based on the Japan-U.S. Clean Energy Technologies Action Plan. Specific objectives of the project include: “to establish a system model for the integration of clean energy and to verify cutting-edge technologies in a smart grid system on Maui where a high percentage of renewable energy is already in place” and to contribute to “standardization of a low-carbon social infrastructure system deployment to other islands and semitropical regions all over the world.”
And specific targets are as follows: Interesting project. Wind turbines on Maui Island by peachygreen About the Author. Obama Announces Job-Creating Grid Modernization Projects. Clean Power Published on October 5th, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan The Obama administration announced a few hours ago that it will “accelerate the permitting and construction of seven proposed electric transmission lines” to help create jobs and support the growth of renewable energy around the U.S. Of course, even beyond renewables, a more modern grid will help the U.S. by increasing the safety and security of our electricity network. These 7 pilot projects (in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Wisconsin), are projected to create thousands of jobs and will increase the capacity of our electric grid.
“AWEA applauds the Obama administration for taking steps to move from merely talking about transmission to actually getting projects permitted and under construction. What exactly are these projects pilots of? You can read statements from some of their representatives on the DOE’s website. Image Credit: About the Author. Market for Smart City Technology to Reach $16B a Year by 2020. [Editor's Note: Updated on September 30, 2011, to include further comments from report co-author Eric Woods.] There are many visions for cities of the future, as GreenBiz colleague John Davies noted in a blog earlier this week.
But idea of a smart, connected urban environment is central to those views. GreenBiz Group's term for that highly connected world is VERGE, and a forecast just out from Pike Research says the market for technology to support such a world is expected to grow to $16 billion in spending annually by 2020. From 2010 to 2020, total investment in smart city infrastructure is expected to reach $108 billion. "No single technology defines the smart city, except perhaps ubiquitous broadband communications," the report from Pike says. "However, a number of iconic technologies can be highlighted as key components of the smart city vision Access to information, basic data analysis and people in real time have already become table stakes for connectivity in today's world.
GM Upgrades OnStar to Power First Real-World, Smart Grid EV Pilot | Business. Hard to believe that OnStar -- GM's in-car mobile data service -- celebrates its Sweet 16 this year. Back in 1995, when the service was launched for GM's luxury line, pundits griped it was just a superfluous add-on. This was back in the cell phone Stone Age when they were still a luxury, analog and kinda huge. Few predicted then that telematics would mushroom in importance over the next decade. These days six million subscribers pay for OnStar's emergency assistance, remote diagnostics, mapping, entertainment and more. To that long list, add one more trick OnStar is helping GM to pull off: offering a short-cut to connect electric vehicles (EVs) to the smart grid.
GM yesterday announced the launch of a pilot program that can let utilities and customers skip the need to install physical smart grid points to manage recharging of their EVs. The Detroit automaker is calling the trial the first "real-world pilot of smart grid solutions. " On Electric Vehicle Usage and the Smart Grid. This post delves into a somewhat arcane subject, which is the usage and re-charging strategies and decisions users of electric vehicles EVs will need to become adept at as penetration of these all electric vehicles increases and the many factors that influence price of power for example need to be well integrated into an individuals individual usage pattern. by Dr.
Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, lecturer at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. Read his blog, Agents in the Smart Grid. Connect with Sarvapali on Linkedin. Electric vehicles (EV)s are likely to make significant demands on how the grid operates but also on how people will use them most efficiently while minimising their impact on their lifestyle. To understand what types of systems will need to be designed, we consider some of the key features of EV usage in the smart grid as outlined by [1,2]. To read more on the subject of electric vehicles see our related post: “Can Electric Vehicles Take Off?
Future Computers Could Use 1 Million Times Less Energy, Researchers Say. Emerging computer technology that would use magnetic microprocessors instead of silicon-based chips has the potential to consume 1 million times less energy per operation than existing computers, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley researchers. Unlike existing microprocessor technology, which relies on electric currents that generate enormous amounts of wasted heat, the new technology, currently under development, would instead use closely packed magnetic chips to store and process information that would not require any moving electrons, the researchers say. According to their paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, such microprocessor chips have the potential to dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature — or the minimum allowed by the second law of thermodynamics, known as the Landauer limit.
Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360. Josh Harris Takes His Wired City To Kickstarter. For the past year, Josh Harris has been trying to get funding for his Wired City concept. It’s a crowdsourced Internet TV station where all the viewers are also the broadcasters, multicasting to each other and the World Wide Web. If this sounds a little like the documentary movie We Live In Public that is because Harris was its subject. He also founded Jupiter Communications and Pseudo a decade ago, but he’s a little bit eccentric. His ultimate vision for Wired City is wild (check out my interview with him from last year below). Harris once told me that all he needed was $50 million to build it.
I suggested he might want to start with a smaller, less expensive piece of it to prove it out. Now he’s taken his idea to Kickstarter, where he is trying to raise $25,000 to build a “net television pilot.” In it’s first day, the project has already raised $2,108. A Wired City Official dress uniform including jacket, pants, socks, underwear, collared shirt, t-shirt and formal hat. IBM Tops List of World's Most Energy Efficient Supercomputers | Computing. IBM supercomputers lead the Green500's latest list of the world's most energy efficient high-performance computers. Versions of the company's prototype for the next generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer hold the No. 1 and No. 2 spots in the Green500 list released late last week.
The compilers of the Green500, which is issued each summer and fall, rate high-performance computers according to mflops -- millions of floating-point operations per second -- per watt, a measure of the amount of computing power generated per watt of power consumed. The IBM NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 2, which is to be used by two U.S. Department of Energy national labs, heads the roster with a rating of 2,097.19 mflops/W -- marking the first time that a supercomputer on the Green500 list exceeded 2,000 mflops/W.
The IBM NNSA/SC Blue Gene/Q Prototype 1 sits in the second slot on the list with 1684.20 mflops/W. The prototype led the Green500 list last November. Here is the Green500's Top 10 list for June 2011: