Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

With a small but growing proportion of electricity in Europe being supplied by wind and solar power, grid operators need new ways to deal with fluctuations in supply. The supply from solar drops dramatically at night, while wind installations only provide power when the wind is blowing. GE’s new plant can ramp up electricity generation [...]

The storage and balancing needs of a simplified European power system, which is based on wind and solar power generation only, are derived from an extensive weather-driven modeling of hourly power mismatches between generation and load. The storage energy capacity, the annual balancing energy and the balancing power are found to depend significantly on the [...]

Underground low-voltage electricity networks have several advantages over overhead networks including reliability of supply, safety and improved visual amenity. The economic viability of replacing existing overhead networks with new underground networks depends on the value of these benefits to households, but no complete value estimates are available in the literature. This paper represents a contribution [...]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued its first Guidelines for Smart Grid Cyber Security, which includes high-level security requirements, a framework for assessing risks, an evaluation of privacy issues at personal residences, and additional information for businesses and organizations to use as they craft strategies to protect the modernizing power grid from [...]

Researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent nonprofit research organization for the utility sector, have designed a 140-pound, six-foot-long prototype of a robot that they plan to test for the first time at an outdoor lab later this month. The device uses rollers to clamp onto and move along a line. It can [...]

The interest on microgrid has increased significantly triggered by the increasing demand of reliable, secure, efficient, clean, and sustainable electricity. More research and implementation of microgrid will be conducted in order to improve the maturity of microgrid technology. Among different aspects of microgrid, this paper focuses on controls of microgrid with energy storage. A comprehensive [...]

EASTERN: In July 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) published the findings of a year-long assessment of the costs, challenges, impacts and benefits of wind generation providing 20% of the electrical energy consumed in the United States by 2030. Developed through the collaborative efforts of a wide-ranging cross section of key stakeholders, that final [...]