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Twitter has acquired Lucky Sort, a startup that specializes in data visualization, the two companies announced Monday.
>The startup will move to San Francisco where it will join Twitter’s revenue engineering department.
Twitter has acquired multiple startups in the data space in recent months, including the scalable computing company Ubalo and the social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs.<
See on mashable.com
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The Green Energy Act stripped Ontarians of their right to appeal decisions on locating energy facilities.
>Former premier Dalton McGuinty told a legislative committee this week that “there was a faulty selection process for gas plant sites and they were wrongly located and had to be shut down.”
But that faulty process was the result of his much-ballyhooed Green Energy Act. And the cost of the faulty process and the subsequent shutdown of the Oakville and Mississauga sites will be $585 million or more.
[…]
The result is that Ontario electricity rates, at one time among the lowest in North America, are now some of the highest. Ontario residential customers are paying about three times more for electricity than they did when McGuinty took office. Ontario industry, which used to benefit from low electricity costs, is suffering.<
See on www.thestar.com
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WASHINGTON, DC – A study released today shows that distributed solar generation (DG) and net energy metering will provide Arizona Public Service (APS) customers with $34 million in annual benefits.
>The study found that for each dollar of cost, DG provides $1.54 worth of benefits to APS customers. The net benefits for APS customers will amount to $34 million per year beginning in 2015. Benefits include savings on expensive and polluting conventional power and power plants; reduced investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure; reduced electricity lost during transportation over power lines, as distributed solar power is generated and consumer locally; and savings on the cost of meeting renewable energy requirements.
“This study clearly shows that solar offers concrete net benefits to all APS ratepayers, regardless of whether or not they have installed solar” said Carrie Cullen Hitt, senior vice president of state affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). “It’s essential that we keep smart policies like net metering in place so that Arizona can continue to benefit from its abundant solar resources.”<
See on www.seia.org
See on Scoop.it – Green Energy Technologies & Development
Transactive energy markets hold the promise to achieve economic efficiency and reliability across the bulk power system and distribution networks. This research area was identified in the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute’s Grid2020 report released last fall, and was the topic of the third discussion of the series in April 2013.
>Significant untapped potential exists to leverage a new class of flexible mixed distributed assets (e.g., distributed generation, responsive demand, storage, power electronics and electric vehicles), what has been called DR 2.0, to manage the power system. But, this requires changes in both market designs and grid operations. […]
Current wholesale market rules are significant barriers to participation as they effectively do not distinguish a 500 MW power plant from a 5kW electric vehicle battery. This is very unfortunate, as the technology to tap these smaller resources and create significant value for customers is available today. Heather Sanders, Director, DER Policy at CAISO shared that, “a challenge is to create market participation rules that meet operators’ needs for reliability, but also facilitate customer value opportunities.” <
See on www.intelligentutility.com
See on Scoop.it – Green Energy Technologies & Development
Highview Power Storage, an award-winning UK developer of utility scale liquid air energy storage technologies, has had two multi-MW projects successfully put through to the feasibility stage of DECC’s Energy Storage Technology Demonstration…
See on www.gasworld.com
>Project one involves the National Grid, Costain and Highview, for a proposed utility-scale demonstration project of a fully integrated liquid air energy storage plant of up to 6MW output, hosted by National Grid’s Grain Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) site at the Isle of Grain in Kent.
The plant would have around five hours of operation (30MWhs), making it the largest demonstration of new energy storage technology in the UK.<
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Vin Diesel has a simple message for Facebook: You guys owe me big.
>Vin Diesel told Entertainment Weekly: “(They asked me) to come up to their office to explain what the f— I was doing, and why I had so many fans … Facebook really owes me billions of dollars … But whatever.”<
See on www.inquisitr.com
See on Scoop.it – Green Energy Technologies & Development
Squaraine dye helps to improve light absorption, recycle electron and enhance the light to energy conversion in solar cells, increasing efficiency by a whopping 38 percent.
>The Yale researchers relied on Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET), a well-known biochemical mechanism, to achieve this radical new energy conversion rate.
“In this type of solar cell—FRET-based heterojunction polymer solar cells—extra energy is able to migrate from one molecule to another over long distances. The dye, which is highly absorbent in the near-infrared region, both broadens the spectral absorption of solar cells and enhances electricity transmission,” Physorg explains.<
See on inhabitat.com
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According to a Huffington Post report and other media sources, on Friday, Illinois got a step closer to getting tough on persons who place posts on the Internet
>The lawmakers passed the measure to hopefully stop violent occurrences in which persons have gathered, run the streets and stopped traffic, robbed, and terrorized people. The flash mobs of note in Chicago have occurred along Michigan Avenue – the Magnificent Mile which is known for its high-end shops and stores. Other areas frequented by tourists have been targeted by the flash mob activists as well.<
See on www.examiner.com
See on Scoop.it – Green & Sustainable News
New data from a national charity RECycling of Used Plastics Ltd (Recoup), has found that 70 per cent of the 610,000 tonnes of plastics packaging recycled in 2011 came from domestic kerbside collections.
>Future outlook
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has issued yearly targets for businesses concerning the recycling of paper, glass, wood, steel, aluminium and plastics for the period 2013-2017. Although the targets for most of these materials remain static or see only slight increases, the targets for plastic recycling increase by five per cent each year.
This means the plastic recycling target for 2017 is 57 per cent – up from 32 per cent in 2012 – a figure that the British Polythene Industries (BPI) plc has warned is ‘unachievable’.<
See on www.resource.uk.com
See on Scoop.it – Green & Sustainable News
The industry must fight the perception that wind energy cannot compete with fossil fuels
>Borrowing a page from environmentalists
To that end, some wind power advocates argued that the industry should borrow a page from the environmental movement by challenging renewable energy naysayers head on and ratcheting up its rhetoric on wind energy’s environmental benefits relative to fossil fuels rather than seeking to peacefully coexist alongside the oil, coal and gas sectors.
Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation and one of several high-profile environmental leaders addressing the Chicago conference, told AWEA members that they represent “an insurgent industry” that is “taking on an incumbent industry that plays hardball.”
“I would urge you all to become more aggressive,” he added, “because if you don’t be more creative, more aggressive, more willing to take risks, this industry will move along at a pace that will not solve our problems.”
See on www.scientificamerican.com
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