We recently completed a dense electrical metering and wireless sensor network deployment in Cory Hall as part of a California Energy Commission supported Building-to-Grid Testbed to explore how an extremely complex load can potentially cooperate with the grid, both for demand response and for increasing the penetration of renewable supplies.
This April Peter released his second book, Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities. Smart Power examines the industry’s technology, cost characteristics, and ability to function as a sustainable business.
IBM has made a generous gift of a cloud computing cluster, housed in a dedicated laboratory in Sutardja Dai Hall that will lend significant resources to solving some of the most challenging problems facing us in energy and water.
Are some regions of the world smarter than others? Are they more sustainable? Greener? More innovative? Do things just work better in some regions, and do these regions offer better jobs to workers and better investments to investors? How do these regions attract people and capital, and create value?
The proposed Google Book Search (GBS) settlement can be viewed as a way to achieve copyright reform through the class action settlement process. This is especially evident in its plan for commercializing orphan works and in the compromises it embodies concerning revenue splits for authors and publishers in respect of ambiguous contracts about e-book rights and its new procedures to ensure that author reversion rights will be effectuated.
Kayje Booker is a Berkeley Lab researcher and UC Berkeley graduate student in ecosystem sciences. She is exploring how carbon markets can serve as catalysts for innovation in technologies for the poor.
The successful integration of renewable resources in the electric grid at high penetration levels – that is, sufficient to meet a 33% renewables portfolio standard for California – entails diverse technical and organizational challenges. These challenges are described here in terms of a coordination problem in time and space, balancing electric power on a range of scales from microseconds to decades, and from individual homes on distribution feeders to hundreds of miles.
The goal is to develop new and innovative technologies that will lead to 10x the capabilities of current products at 1/10x the cost. An additional even more challenging goal is to also achieve 10x reliability. The intent of the project is to also promote research collaboration between the universities, national laboratories, and private industry.
SETI combines state-of-the-art network technology with novel data processing algorithms in order to determine how people are distributed within a building. The ultimate goal of the seed-funded project is to model and accurately predict how buildings will be used in order to achieve significant energy savings.
Using the latest digital mapping technologies, “Local Code” documents the location and character of 1,500 City-owned “remnant parcels” in San Francisco.
