See on Scoop.it – Green Energy Technologies & Development
Spectrolab has achieved a new world record efficiency for a multi-junction solar cell.
>The Sylmar, California-based company’s previous record of 37.8 percent was set in April. Analysts Lux Research predicts that by 2022 Spectrolab cells could reach 50 percent efficiency. And Boeing says the new semiconductor bonding technology could be used to power spacecraft and unmanned aerial vehicles.<
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They’re billed as a fresh, clean alternative to toilet paper – but waste-water utilities across Canada say personal wipes are creating putrid sewage clogs that are costing Canadian ratepayers at least $250 million a year.
>MESUG members have set up traps across Ontario municipalities, Orr said, and they’re catching hundreds of flushable wipes. The situation is the same across the country, with officials in Penticton, B.C., recently complaining publicly about the wipes.
Canadian utilities aren’t alone in their battle against personal wipes.
In the U.S. capital region, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission has spent more than $1 million installing powerful grinders to shred wipes before they reach pumps on their way to treatment plants.
The utility has also devoted hundreds of man-hours to unclog pipes and repair broken sewer lines. It blames wipes for blockages that have caused sewage to overflow into streams or back up into residential basements.<
See on globalnews.ca
See on Scoop.it – Green Building Design – Architecture & Engineering
If successful, Title 24 will open the door to increased amounts of energy efficiency financing, expanded sources of capital and lower financing costs.
>California’s Title 24
Title 24 is California’s body of state building codes. These codes have been revised to move the building industry toward comprehensive building solutions with a goal of achieving Zero Net Energy (ZNE) residential and commercial buildings. In a ZNE building, the annual building’s energy consumption is equal to the building’s onsite renewable energy generation. California has set a goal for all new residential construction to be ZNE by 2020 and for all new commercial construction to be ZNE by 2030. Additionally, the repurposing and remodeling of existing buildings that are of a size-threshold defined by Title 24 will also have to comply with Title 24 revised codes.
Financing a “smart” Zero Net Energy building
The challenge of financing any energy efficiency or renewable energy project is in providing assurances to the source of capital that the project will actually generate sufficient cost savings to cover financing costs plus repayment of invested capital. The number one challenge for winning energy efficiency investments is the uncertainty in documenting bill savings results. Too often, the cost savings generated by an investment in energy efficiency is lost in higher electric bills as new loads are added and utilities raise rates.
Information technologies that monitor, control and financially operate a building through links to real time prices of grid-supplied electricity are the foundation for enabling Title 24 project financing. Smart ZNE buildings will operate to optimize the economics between reducing building demand, reducing energy consumption, on-site generation, use of on-site energy storage and purchases of grid electricity.
What will further enable the financing of ZNE buildings is the ability of enabling information technologies to “look forward” in time to proactively shape a building’s operation and grid purchases to financially support the building’s project financing. The technologies that can achieve these results have already been invented. What California is pursuing through its Title 24 code revisions is a massive economies of scale push for these technologies to drive their costs down and increase their ability to be financed.
The sales pie just got bigger…a lot bigger
Beginning in 2014, Title 24 will blow the sales doors open for smart building technologies, energy efficiency technologies, onsite energy storage and renewable energy technologies. Title 24 will create a new competitive landscape for architects, general contractors, sub-contractors and vendors based upon their ability to offer price competitive services and products that comply with Title 24 codes. The construction industry’s sales path for energy efficiency projects will no longer be anchored by utility incentives that support targeted energy efficiency upgrades like re-lamping a building with more efficient lights. The new sales path will be based upon cost-effectively delivering code compliance to achieve financeable building performance. New competitive advantages will be won by contractors and architects that offer building performance assurances to building owners and financing sources.<
See on www.triplepundit.com
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Data scientists may consider themselves fish out of water when it comes to applying game-theoretic approaches to customer engagement. Nevertheless, it provides a valuable set of approaches for behavioral analytics.
>Customer engagement is a bit of a game, because, deep down, it’s a form of haggling and bargaining. Let’s be blunt: everybody has an ulterior purpose and is manipulating the other party in that direction. The customer is trying to get the best deal from you, and you’re trying to hold onto them and sell them more stuff at a healthy profit.
Customer engagement is not solitaire, and, unlike many online games, it always has very real stakes. By its very nature, customer engagement is an interactive decision process involving individuals and organizations, entailing varying degrees of cooperation and conflict in the course (hopefully) of a stable and mutually beneficial outcome.
Game theory is a modeling discipline that focuses on strategic decision-making scenarios. It leverages a substantial body of applied mathematics and has been used successfully in many disciplines, including economics, politics, management and biology. There has even been some recent discussion of its possible application in modeling customer-engagement scenarios to improve loyalty, upsell and the like.
Customer engagement modeling is a largely unexplored frontier for game theory. The literature on this is relatively sparse right now, compared to other domains where game theory’s principles have been applied. […]<
See on www.ibmbigdatahub.com
A three-year, US$300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will allow Worcester Polytechnic Institute associate professor of mechanical engineering David Olinger to conduct research on developing a new form of ocean energy.
“The research builds on Olinger’s prior research, funded by the NSF and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in which he developed a low-cost kite system that used wind to generate power. Olinger and a team of graduate students developed computational models that predict trajectories and power output for kites of different sizes and tethers of different lengths, which can be used to design kites capable of flying in stable, high-speed figure-eight patterns under changing weather conditions.
The same algorithms can be applied to the design of underwater kites, Olinger said, but “instead of moving air, you have moving water and the kites have rigid wings.”
Olinger will now evaluate possible designs for undersea kites and explore methods for tethering them to floating platforms similar to those used for oil and gas rigs.
WPI said the team will also examine the advantages and disadvantages of mounting turbine generators directly to the kites or placing the generators on the platforms. […]
Olinger’s kite system is similar to one already being developed by Swedish company Minesto, though a WPI representative said the two projects are not related.”<
See on www.hydroworld.com
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In the following post you will find some incredible insights that will help you take results from your social media campaigns to a new level. Contributors to th(…)
Looking for new tools to improve your social media campaigns?
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Government, council and retailer-backed report says ban on landfill could save UK £17bn and heat 600,000 homes
>The ambition is to save the UK economy over £17bn a year through the reduction of food wasted by households, businesses and the public sector, preventing 27m tonnes of greenhouse gases a year from entering into the atmosphere.
The new study, Vision 2020: UK Roadmap to Zero Food Waste to Landfill is the culmination of more than two years’ work and has the backing and input of local authority and industry experts. It sets the framework for a food waste-free UK by 2020.
Last week official figures revealed the average UK family was wasting nearly £60 a month by throwing away almost an entire meal a day. A report from the government’s waste advisory group Wrap showed Britons were chucking out the equivalent of 24 meals a month, adding up to 4.2m tonnes of food and drink every year that could have been consumed. Almost half of this is going straight from fridges or cupboards into the bin, Wrap found. One-fifth of what households buy ends up as waste, and around 60% of that could have been eaten.
At the same time the UK’s largest retailer, Tesco, recently agreed to reduce its multi-buy items and other promotions after revealing that 35% of its bagged salad was being thrown out. It also found that 40% of apples were wasted, and just under half of bakery items.<
See on www.theguardian.com
See on Scoop.it – Green Building Operations – Systems & Controls, Maintenance & Commissioning
Infographic – Energy efficiency. A solution.
Industry has been reported to consume between 40 and 60% (UN Report) of the world’s electrical supply. Motors are the largest consumer of the industrial electrical supply and the greatest opportunity for industry wide savings.
Many motors are over-sized and run inefficiently. Variable speed drives can significantly reduce industrial operating costs, with attractive payback period and reductions in energy consumption by up to 50% or more.
See on www.abb.com
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Access to energy in the U.S. — and the effects of generating it — are a national concern.
>The Forgotten ‘Fifth Fuel’
Access to energy in the U.S. — and the effects of generating it — are a national concern. Debates persist over the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly mix of nuclear energy, coal, gas and liquid hydrocarbons and renewable sources.
Too often left out of these discussions is the so-called fifth fuel: energy efficiency. States have driven benefits for consumers and the environment with policies that both reduce energy use and encourage economic growth.
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) yesterday issued its annual scorecard for each state based on multiple factors, including reductions in greenhouse gas, energy codes for buildings and switching to cleaner fuels.<
See on www.bloomberg.com
See on Scoop.it – Green Building Operations – Systems & Controls, Maintenance & Commissioning
Big Data remains a fairly nebulous concept for many real estate professionals, including those who stand to gain tremendously from it right now: real estate energy managers.
>To effectively time energy retrofit measures, energy managers can first develop those measures. New energy analytical tools such as FirstFuel identify and develop measures, and even estimate a range for capital cost. It does this analysis remotely over the course of a day just by analyzing hourly electricity data (which is sometimes also stored by the utility); no time-intensive on-site energy audit is required. Another new tool is Retroficiency, which provides a high-level look at energy performance improvement potential using the same interval data and, with minimal additional data from the IWMS, can further develop retrofit measures to investment-grade level.
After identifying energy-retrofit measures for the portfolio using remote energy analysis tools or more standard on-site energy analysis, energy managers can create a new retrofit measures database in the IWMS. Having this new database on hand enables managers to integrate energy retrofit opportunities with space management, maintenance and capital upgrade needs, and potentially other real estate issues. Such integration drives down the incremental cost of an energy retrofit, which is the gross cost minus the avoided cost of otherwise required capital or space upgrades.<
See on blog.rmi.org
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