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Professor Victor Li at the University of Michigan has developed a self-healing concrete that can help alleviate the need for demolition and replacement of concrete after it has been subjected to heavy stress. By devising a concrete that controls the way it cracks under stress, the concrete can withstand tensile strain hundreds of times more than ordinary concrete. Beyond its remarkable flexibility, this concrete can then heal itself, as well.

"In Li"s lab, self-healed specimens recovered most if not all of their original strength after researchers subjected them to a 3 percent tensile strain. That means they stretched the specimens to 3 percent beyond their initial size. It"s the equivalent of stretching a 100-foot piece an extra three feet—enough strain to severely deform metal or catastrophically fracture traditional concrete."

"The professor says this new substance could make infrastructure safer and more durable. By reversing the typical deterioration process, the concrete could reduce the cost and environmental impacts of making new structures. And repairs would last longer."

Link: Michigan Today (thanks KGS!)

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A new catalyst based on iron works as well as platinum-based catalysts for accelerating the chemical reactions inside hydrogen fuel cells. The finding could help make fuel cells for electric cars cheaper and more practical.

Fuel cell researchers have been looking for cheaper, more abundant alternatives to platinum, which costs between $1,000 and $2,000 an ounce and is mined almost exclusively in just two countries: South Africa and Russia. One promising catalyst that uses far less expensive materials--iron, nitrogen, and carbon--has long been known to promote the necessary reactions, but at rates that are far too slow to be practical.

Now researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Quebec have dramatically increased the performance of this type of iron-based catalyst. Their material produces 99 amps per cubic centimeter at 0.8 volts, a key measurement of catalytic activity. That is 35 times better than the best nonprecious metal catalyst so far, and close to the Department of Energy"s goal for fuel-cell catalysts: 130 amps per cubic centimeter. It also matches the performance of typical platinum catalysts, says Jean-Pol Dodelet, a professor of energy, materials, and telecommunications at INRS who led the work.

The improvement, reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, is "quite surprising," says Radoslav Adzic, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, who also develops catalysts for fuel cells. The new material meets a benchmark for hydrogen fuel cells set five years ago that "we thought nobody would ever meet," adds Hubert Gasteiger, a visiting professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "For the very first time, a nonprecious metal catalyst makes sense."

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Victoria has announced it will start rolling out smart metering technology via energy distributors by the end of this year.

Energy and Resources Minister Peter Batchelor today announced Victoria"s plan to equip 2.5 million Victorian households and small business with digital "smart" electricity meters, with the first deployments due by the end of the year.

Southeast Melbourne, Mornington Peninsula, and the northern and inner western suburbs of Melbourne will be the first to get the new meters, via energy distributors United Energy Distribution and Jemena.

"Jemena and UED have finalised agreements with a range of suppliers to source and install the new meters with the first expected to be installed in households later this year," said Batchelor in a statement.

"The two distributors will begin notifying the first households and small businesses of arrangements to replace old meters during the next few months."

Key benefits the minister hopes to achieve from the new technology include remote meter reading, maintenance requests, and switching. Households and businesses will also get greater visibility of actual energy consumption via 30-minute updates.

Greater transparency of consumption habits could allow households and retailers to adjust behaviour to suit off-peak pricing options, said Batchelor. "This could mean cheaper electricity could be offered at set times during the day, so a household could save money by ensuring more of their heavy electricity use is during these times."

Distributors have until 2012 to supply customers with the technology.

NSW"s deadline for the roll-out of smart metering technology is 2017. Country Energy (CE) and IBM announced joint plans to trial the technology amongst 10,000 households in the coming months. At a recent media briefing CE spokesperson Ben Hamilton said the technology was evolving too rapidly for large investments in it today.

But whether Victorian households change behaviour following the deployment of smart metering will depend on another factor: price sensitivity to energy. A CE household trial in NSW revealed it was children and not parents who responded to automated alerts, for example, that lights had been left on.

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Research demonstrates that the use of mobile telephony is contributing to the social and economic development of African people. Owners of mobile phones buy minutes in bulk which they sell at a small profit. Places which never had a public phone booth can now connect to the world.

Because of the lack of electricity, South African Bram van Reenen found a solution to charging phones. He travels from village to village in a cart, charging phones with solar energy. The cart is covered with solar panels.

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I’m encouraged by many of the end-of-year stories coming out of the greentech community. Most of them argue that the “smart grid” will be a major story in 2009, and as my own year-end musings show I couldn’t agree more. In fact, my final story of the year is about the smart grid and its inevitable coming into being. Much of my story is through the seasoned eyes of Marzio Pozzuoli, founder and CEO of Woodbridge, Ontario-based RuggedCom Inc., the leading supplier of hardened communications gear to utilities around the world. In other words, RuggedCom sells routers, switches and wireless equipments for electrical substations. As more of this gear is installed we begin to see the grid as an extensive two-way communications network, able to collect and transmit information to where it’s needed.

The next step? Creating the software and setting up the systems that can organize, analyze and ultimately act on the information collected in a way that improves the efficiency, reliability and self-healing capability of our electricity system and makes integration of renewables and distributed generation much easier. No wonder the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and other giants of the IT sector are beginning to take notice and position themselves in what promises to be a massive market.

Before the Internet there were small private networks that connected PCs, and before these networks were stand-alone computers incapable of sharing information.

And before the computer? We had the trusty old typewriter.

Looking forward, the technological evolution that in three decades moved us from the mechanical typewriter to Internet-connected computer is destined to be repeated in the move to modernize the continent"s antiquated electricity system, experts say.

The goal: turn a dumb network of lines and electromechanical devices that is heavily reliant on human intervention into an efficient, two-way, automated "smart grid" that collects, shares and acts on information to manage the flow of electrons.

It"s a transition already underway, and for good reason. The transformer devices in a typical electrical substation – that is, a point on the grid where power is converted from a higher to lower voltage (or the reverse) – are designed to last 40 years. The average age of transformers in North America is currently 42.

"You"ve got this aging infrastructure that isn"t going away, and you can"t just say you"re not going to replace it. There"s no choice but to replace it," says Marzio Pozzuoli, founder and CEO of Woodbridge-based RuggedCom Inc.

And that might come sooner than expected. President-elect Barack Obama has promised a major economic stimulus package that includes substantial investment in the U.S. transmission infrastructure, including smart-grid technologies. Similar talk is occurring around the world, including Canada, and companies such as RuggedCom are primed to benefit. "It all looks good for us," Pozzuoli says.

IBM"s recent campaign goes well beyond mere image — and beyond green — to envision a "smarter" world in which problems as wide-ranging as health care costs, energy and resource shortages, government inefficiency, threatened waterways, climate change, and traffic congestion can be addressed by a blend of systems thinking, technological innovation, and computing power. It"s an intriguing campaign aimed at helping redefine IBM from its roots as a computer maker to its more recent incarnation as a self-described "global services company."

"Smarter Planet" isn"t IBM"s first foray into the green scene. In 2007, the company launched a program called Big Green Innovations to mine the company"s vast wealth of expertise and technology to create products and services to help address customers" and society"s environmental challenges. Big Green, a play on the company"s longtime nickname, Big Blue, takes aim at everything from creating carbon dashboards to help lower companies" carbon emissions, to designing energy efficient data centers and more powerful solar cells. But it seemed more of an inward-looking effort, an attempt to collaborate with existing clients, and not a means of communicating with the marketplace. (You can listen to a 2007 interview I did on the topic with Sharon Nunes, who heads the Big Green Innovations program, and Wayne Balta, IBM"s VP of Corporate Environmental Affairs.)

Recently, I talked to Rich Lechner, IBM"s VP of Energy & Environment, and John Kennedy, its VP of Integrated Marketing Communications, to learn more about the "Smarter Planet" series — what was behind the ads and what the company hopes to accomplish from them. ... Lechner described the many environmental challenges that, he says, could be solved by "smarter" systems:

"In a world in which water, energy, power are severely constrained, you don"t have to look far to see, for example, that only 30 percent of the potential electricity that"s available at the energy source actually reaches the doorstep of the consumer. Or that significant amounts of traffic congestion are caused just by people circling, looking for empty parking spaces, wasting fuel. You can look at our distribution systems around the world and see that more than 20 percent of all the shipping containers and more than 25 percent of the trucks moving around on a global basis are empty. You look at the way that food is distributed and understand that the average carrot in the United States — the lowly carrot — has traveled 1,600 miles to get to your dinner table, and you say clearly something could be done to improve the efficiency of our food distribution system. And water: We"re projecting that over a billion people won"t have access to safe drinking water in just ten years time, and yet today, just five food and beverage companies consume enough water on an annual basis to serve the daily needs of everyone on the planet.

"We looked around and we said there"s plenty of room for improvement and our expertise in IT [information technology] coupled with our deep industry knowledge and our ability to look at and re-engineer processes gave us a unique vantage point to comment on the need to exploit this growing intelligence and where the first opportunities for exploitation might exist."

The vision for "Smarter Planet" was laid out in a November 17, 2008, speech by IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano. "The world will continue to become smaller, flatter ... and smarter," he said. "We are moving into the age of the globally integrated and intelligent economy, society and planet. The question is, what will we do with that?"

The "Smarter Planet" ads — what Kennedy calls an "op-ad" campaign — are Palmisano"s answer. They are designed "to get a reader to think about the world from a systems point of view, and along the way, describe these opportunities for systems," says Kennedy. Each week"s ads cover a different topic: energy, traffic, food, infrastructure, retail, banking, and more.

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After half a century of walking their dogs under the same old streetlamps, New Yorkers are ready for a new age of enlightenment. Gotham"s own Office for Visual Interaction won an international competition to design a replacement. Its inspiration: LED headlights. "We took the same idea and made it vertical," OVI"s Enrique Peiniger says. The new lamppost"s 4-to 6-foot head boasts up to 100 LEDs with multiple lenses that can be configured to dial in specific lighting "footprints" of uniform brightness. For New York, the coverage patterns will be tailored for three distinct situations—park, street corner, and mid-block.

How many workers will it take to change the bulbs? A lot fewer. LEDs last twice as long as the current high—pressure sodium bulbs. Oh, and they burn 30 percent less energy. Plus, the fixture"s modular design makes it easy to swap out chips as LED technology improves. OVI is putting the finishing touches on its prototypes, and if tests go well next year, the lamps will soon start lighting up the city that never sleeps.

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The address will review the fundamental changes now being faced by electricity grids in Britain, across Europe, and beyond. What are the drivers creating this radical change; how will it affect end customers and the industry; how well is the UK placed, and what are the risks and opportunities ahead.

Electricity Grids – facing the third industrial revolution? John Scott The 2008 Hunter Memorial Lecture, Birmingham, UK. 2008-12-09 12:00:00.0 Power Channel >> go to webcast>> recommend to friend

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GE was actually working on a program to make incandescents more efficient. But now they have completely ceased all research and development into the bulb.

Instead, GE will redouble its efforts on LED and OLED technology (pictured.) Along with the announcement that they are ceasing incandescent development, they announced that they hoped to have their white OLEDs for sale by 2010. OLEDs have the ability not just to kill the bulb, but to kill the entire idea of a lamp, as they can be flat, bendable and even transparent.

Oh and, of course, they can be even more efficient than CFLs.

Via OLED Info

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