EPB Deploys America’s Fastest Fiber-optic Smart Grid – Lee Baker, Smart Grid Consultant – Electric Energy Online

See on Scoop.itGreen Energy Technologies & Development

EPB Deploys America’s Fastest Fiber-optic Smart Grid – Lee Baker, Smart Grid Consultant – While many utilities struggle with the question of whether or not to build a Smart Grid, for the Electric Power Board (EPB) in …

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

Chattanooga: The Smarter City

EPB [Electric Power Board] is one of the first community-owned utilities to install a 100% fiber-optic network, which uses the fiber optic network for Smart Grid applications, in addition to the triple-play media services (i.e., high speed Internet, video and telephone) EPB already provides.

“Chattanooga is light years ahead when it comes to providing ultra fast broadband,” said Tom Edd Wilson, President and CEO of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. “By offering the fastest available speeds to a whole community comprising a diverse population living in both urban and rural areas, Chattanooga has become the living laboratory for today’s innovations and tomorrow’s companies.”

EPB has built fiber optics throughout their entire customer service area and communications services are now available to all homes and businesses. By the end of 2012, all 170,000 homes and businesses will be equipped with a Tantalus smart meter.

[…] EPB already has 22 large industries signed up for a time-of-use (TOU) rate program, and its projected that together they will save $2.3 million a year. Those kinds of savings help businesses run more efficiently and bring jobs to the community.

“What makes Chattanooga stand out is that it is leveraging the network both for a full range of Smart Grid applications and communications connectivity,” Wade added.

“We looked at how the communication system and the electric system interact for many years and realized how closely tied together they are. As costs have stabilized and technology matured, we felt that the time was right to proceed with the project.”

“We’re building this network not just for today but for the future. The system we’re building will provide rapid, two-way communications with every meter, home and device, making it possible and practical for our customers to interact with their energy use as never before.”

See on www.electricenergyonline.com

Day after patch, Java zero-day sold to highest bidders

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With exploit sold for $5,000 via cybercrime forum, experts double down on calls for consumers to uninstall the software

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

“Java is fundamentally broken because it is built upon a broken promise: That it runs in a protected sandbox which somehow protects the user,” Krebs told CSO Online on Wednesday.

Sunday’s patch was an effort to quiet a firestorm of criticism and calls not only from a majority of security experts but even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for consumers to disable Java on their PCs.

This latest report intensified some of those calls, but also a bit of pushback, although not in the form of any major defense of Oracle. Simon Crosby, […] banning or disabling Java would not solve the problem. “Humans develop buggy code — […] they can all be subverted,” he wrote. “Moreover, many users (and businesses) depend on Java … banning it would severely impact my ability to work.”

Crosby wrote that “micro-virtualization” can solve the problem with Java and other insecure applications with “hardware isolation to enforce ‘need to know’ on a per-task basis on the endpoint.”

See on www.networkworld.com

Energy Efficiency in Data Centres to Lower Costs and Benefit the Environment

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LONDON, Jan. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — The data centre market is growing at an extremely high rate and its boom…

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

“Data centre managers are under constant pressure to lower the TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] and energy is one of the main components of the overall data centre operation cost.  […]

Data centres are classified as mission critical facilities and any down time will result in a significant financial loss. In order to ensure highest availability, data centre managers employ high powered UPS systems. These UPS systems consume about 7% of the total energy.   […]

See on www.prnewswire.com

Energy Managers Also Manage People

See on Scoop.itGreen Building Operations – Systems & Controls, Maintenance & Commissioning

It takes three specifically-trained professionals to run a successful energy-management program at a large facility, according to a column in Chemical Processing

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

While the energy manager assumes responsibility for the company’s energy program, he or she can can get help from energy consultants & energy auditors.

See on www.energymanagertoday.com

The Negawatt Revolution — Solving the CO-2 [& Energy] Problem —

See on Scoop.itGreen Energy Technologies & Development

Introduction

“My 1976 article entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, suggested two ways in which the energy system could probably evolve over the next fifty years or so, using the United States as an example. If you divided by something like a factor of nine or ten, you would get Canada.”…

“If the U.S. spent only enough on efficiency to keep up with growth and demand for electric services, plus the net retirement of generating capacity, we would have almost enough capital left in surplus to double our rate of investment in durable manufacturing industries.”

The Importance of Electrical Efficiency

“Why do I concentrate on electricity? First, because it is by far the costliest form of energy. Each cent per kilowatt-hour is equivalent in heat content to oil at $17 dollars a barrel, roughly the world oil price. So the electricity we buy, even in Canada where it is quite cheap, is equivalent to heat at many times the world oil price. Therefore saving electricity is more financially rewarding than saving direct fuels. In addition, electricity has enormous capital leverage because central electric systems — the whole systems — are about 100 times as capital intensive as the traditional direct fuel systems (you know, Texas and Louisiana and Alberta oil and gas — the sorts of things on which our economies were built). In fact a quarter of all the development capital in the world goes to electrification.

“Also electricity has huge environmental leverage. Power plants burn a third of the fuel in the world. They account for a third of the CO2, therefore, released from the burning of fossil fuel. In my own country they release two thirds of the sulphur oxides and a third of the nitrogen oxides. What’s more, every unit of electricity you save at the point of use saves typically three or four units of fuel, namely coal at the power plant. And in socialist or developing countries that ratio is more like five or six to one.

So you get the most environmental benefit from saving electricity, as well as the most financial benefit.”

See on www.ccnr.org