WCA March 2015

From the Americas

In the view of the analysts, most customers and public service commissions are simply not ready for the change to what is known as dynamic pricing, which is intended to benefit the whole system – customers and utilities alike. (“Power Savings of Smart Meters Prove Slow to Materialise,” 5 th December) The problem is that the electric appliances able to automatically take signals from the meter are not yet available, leaving it up to the customer to manually manage energy consumption. “The smart meter giving people real-time access to price information is not going to make them get up in the middle of the night and turn their dishwasher on,” John P Hughes, the vice president for technical affairs at the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, an industrial-user consumer group, told the Times . “Getting the enabling technology to do that is going to take a long time.”  Illinois has about 25,000 households on smart meters, less than one per cent of those eligible, according to CEO Anne Evens of Elevate Energy, which administers the programme for two utilities. One customer who takes the time and trouble to utilise the programme to utmost advantage reported an estimated savings of $15 to $20 a month. Her typical electric bill is $110. This customer, whose 122-year-old house is in River Forest, ten miles west of Lake Michigan, told Mr Wald: “You try to do the right thing for the environment and your pocketbook, keeping both in mind.” A milestone in the utilisation of focused sunlight results in the highest efficiency yet for conversion into electricity Scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have succeeded in converting over 40 per cent of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest such efficiency ever reported. Results of outdoor tests in Sydney were independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at its outdoor test facility in the USA. “We used commercial solar cells but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry,” Dr Mark Keevers, who managed the project, told R&D Magazine . (“Researchers Set World Record in Solar Energy Efficiency,” 8 th December) A key element of the UNSW design is the use of a custom optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight normally wasted by tower-mounted commercial solar cells and convert it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could. Such filters transmit particular wavelengths of light while reflecting others. The work was funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and supported by the Australia–US Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics. Technology

Ms Miller noted that Watson, which already culls documents for scientists, keeps on polishing its résumé. Last year it began advising military veterans on such complex life decisions as where to live and which insurance to buy. Now IBM is trying to teach Watson emotional intelligence. The company says its prize invention is not replacing workers but rather assisting them, by enabling them to be more productive in new types of jobs. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and an inventor of the Web browser, would appear to concur in the IBM view. Mr Andreessen believes that what we are seeing is the latest chapter in the story of economic development over the last 200 years. He told Ms Miller: “Just as most of us today have jobs that weren’t even invented 100 years ago, the same will be true 100 years from now.”  But Ms Miller observed that it will be years before we know what happens to the people whose jobs Watson is learning to do. And millions of Americans are out of work now. “The Upshot,” the Times blog in which Ms Miller’s article appeared, always concludes with a summary. She wrote: “Not even the people who spend their days making and studying new technology say they understand the economic and societal effects of the new digital revolution.” Energy Until electrical appliances can take orders from the new meters, the ‘smart grid’ in the USA has got the cart before the horse “It is a strategy that will become increasingly important as more wind turbines and solar panels are connected, and produce electricity without any relationship to the level of demand.” The strategy cited by energy reporter Matthew L Wald of the New York Times is the switch to the so-called smart grid, which enables the new meters in tens of millions of USA households to “talk” directly to the electric company. The meters can record use by the hour, adjusting the price as the market changes and notifying the customer of the best time to buy energy. The goal, of course, is to reduce demand during peak hours, shifting consumption to periods when cheaper, cleaner electricity is available. The reasoning is that, as prices rise on summer afternoons or fall in the middle of the night, consumers will learn to tailor their electricity usage – charging an electric car, or running a dishwasher or washing machine – during times of lower prices. But this is not happening. Experts consulted by Mr Wald say that exploitation of the capabilities of the new meters still lies many years away, despite billions in federal subsidies that have helped finance the innovation.

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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2015