Next up, Hadoop

Thus far, LinkedIn’s biggest push has been in improving its nearline and online systems (“Basically, we’ve hit the ball out of the park here,” Ghosh said), so its next big push is offline — Hadoop, in particular. The company already uses Hadoop for the usual gamut of workloads — ETL, model-building, exploratory analytics and pre-computing data for nearline applications — and Ghosh wants to take it even further.

He laid out a multipart vision, most of which centers around tight integration between the company’s Hadoop clusters and relational database systems. Among the goals: better ETL frameworks, ad-hoc queries, alternative storage formats and an integrated metadata framework — which Ghosh calls the holy grail — that will make it easier for various analytic systems to use each other’s data. He said LinkedIn has something half-built that should be finished this year.

Allowing existing reactors to simply run out their licensed lifetimes in the current scenario, nuclear power may simply disappear, he writes. "Absent an extremely large injection of government funding or further life extensions, the reactors currently operating are going to end their licensed lifetimes between now and the late 2050s," Bradford concludes. "They will become part of an economics-driven US nuclear phase-out a couple of decades behind the government-led nuclear exit in Germany."

"Our deep understanding of complex protective schemes and, utility-specific SCADA requirements enables effective automation and management of substations as a center of intelligence within the grid," said Dermot O’Leary, EVP and GM of Substation Solutions for BPLG. "The substation is key to managing the growing complexity of distributed energy resources in the distribution grid and the connectivity of our distribution grid solutions with our substation automation offers unique value to utilities as they execute their intelligent grid roadmaps."

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The research team behind the project is designing a prototype system which will forecast sunlight and solar power every 15 minutes over specific solar facilities thereby enabling utilities to continuously anticipate the amount of solar energy available. The project is funded with the help of a $4.1 million US Department of Energy (DOE) grant and will draw on cutting-edge research techniques at leading government labs and universities across the country, in partnership with utilities, energy companies and commercial forecast providers.

Much of the work will be focussed on generating detailed predictions of clouds and atmospheric particles that act to reduce incoming solar energy.

The initial strike price for the first generation of tidal arrays should be set at £280-300/MWh, RenewableUK says. For wave technology, the initial strike price should be £300-320/MWh. “This will catalyse the marine energy industry, leading to economies of scale and learning through experience, which will lower the strike price for the second generation of arrays in 2018.” Meantime, under EMR, contracts would only last for 15 years – the report says this should be extended to 20 years to give investors an adequate return – otherwise the strike price would have to be higher.

“The wave and tidal energy industry has reached an exciting period as it moves from single device demonstrator projects to the first small proving arrays,” says Krohn. “However, there are significant hurdles that need to be overcome to ensure the sustained growth of the industry. It’s time to get real about the potential risks so that we can work with Government and others to find the solutions as early as possible.”