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Storing Renewable Energy is a tough problem. Here is a wiki on Grid Energy Storage.
One I just found is Gravity Power.
Gravity Power, LLC, a spin-off of LaunchPoint Technologies, Inc., is developing a revolutionary grid-scale electricity storage system. The company's new Gravity Power Module(GPM) exploits the established principles of pumped storage hydropower, but extends the concept in a new direction: Down.
Here is a presentation if you are interested.
The majority of corporations environmental groups are part of a marketing organization. This group can be used to coordinate the grass roots efforts in the company as employees are passionate about making a difference in the world beyond just shipping their services.
Here is an example at eBay Green. https://twitter.com/eBayGreen
But, sometimes the green efforts are primarily wired for damage control. An example is here in this Economist article on China's hydroelectric dams.
Yet it does not matter how strong the case may be against Xiaonanhai, because the battle against a hydropower scheme in China is usually lost before it is fought. The political economy of dam-building is rigged. Though the Chinese authorities have made much progress in evaluating the social and environmental impact of dams, the emphasis is still on building them, even when mitigating the damage would be hard. Critics have called it the “hydro-industrial complex”: China has armies of water engineers (including Hu Jintao, the former president) and at least 300 gigawatts of untapped hydroelectric potential. China’s total generating capacity in 2012 was 1,145GW, of which 758GW came from coal-burning plants.
...
There is also a political reason why large hydro schemes continue to go ahead. Dambuilders and local governments have almost unlimited power to plan and approve projects, whereas environmental officials have almost no power to stop them.
Here is where damage control is used.
Environmental officials who have not been financially captured by the dambuilding economy find themselves as scarce as some of the fish they are charged to protect. Environmental activists, meanwhile, can request access to public records and demand public hearings, both required by law. But they say that these avenues are barred when they are most needed—on controversial projects that face vocal opposition. For example, the authorities have rejected requests for public records on Xiaonanhai and they have not granted a public hearing.
This is something I learned over 5 years ago when watching how one corporation had its environmental group set up, and I knew it was not really that interesting to me as they were like a faux green effort.
I was having my annual backflow testing on the sprinkler system in the house. The City of Redmond where I live requires sprinklers for my house, office, and beach house which means I have backflow prevention valves and i found a reasonable cost done by Linda Pfeiffer.
Linda Pfeiffer
A Women’s Touch LLC
State Certified B4287
Backflow Technician
Licensed, Insured and Bonded
When chatting with Linda we were discussing roofs and fire departments risk to getting up there, then she said the big thing now is the solar panels are changing how fire departments can fight a fire and whether they will be electrocuted.
Here is a story of a warehouse with solar panels was quite possibly completely destroyed because the environmentally sensitive solar panels. Whatever environmental impact was accumulated was most likely undone by the fire.
Firefighters battling the massive 11-alarm blaze at the Dietz & Watson distribution center in South Jersey faced an unlikely foe during the fight -- solar panels.
A solar array with more than 7,000 photovoltaic panels lined the roof of the nearly 300,000 square-foot refrigeration facility which served as a temporary storage center for the company’s deli meats and cheeses. But the panels, while environmentally sustainable and cost-saving, may have led to the complete destruction of the warehouse.
Fighting the fire under bright blue skies Sunday, Delanco Fire Chief Ron Holt was forced to keep firefighters from attacking the blaze from the roof because of electrocution concerns.
"With all that power and energy up there, I can't jeopardize a guy’s life for that,” said Holt. Those electrocution fears combined with concerns of a collapse forced firefighters to simply spray the building with water and foam from afar.
Ken Willette from the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit that develops standards for firefighting, says electrocution is one of the hazards firefighters are increasingly facing fighting blazes at structures where solar panels are deployed.
We don't often hear of a data center fire. When there is a fire, the electrocution risk from the UPS batteries will make people cautious. Can you imagine how the fire fighting changes if the roof is covered with solar panels?
“The new paradigm is firefighters might encounter building systems they have little or no knowledge of,” Willette said. “It used to be homes and commercial buildings had roofs and walls and heating and ventilation systems that the fire service was used to dealing with…modern technology, both in building construction and these other alternative energy systems, have changed that.”
Something to think about when you are deciding whether to put solar panels on your roof or an adjacent piece of property.
Steve Ballmer had an analyst review this last week and one of the top stories covered is Ballmer discussing the mistakes made focusing on Windows Vista.
Ballmer Blames Vista for Microsoft's Smartphone Failures
PC Magazine - 13 hours agoMicrosoft's outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer this week admitted that Redmond was so focused on the much-maligned Windows Vista a decade ago that it missed the boat on smartphones. "If there's one thing I guess you would say I regret, I regret that there was a ...Ballmer Blames Vista for Windows Phone's Failure
DecryptedTech - 5 hours agoSo you all remember Windows Vista right? It seems that Microsoft and Steve Ballmer also remember that failed OS (despite current appearances with Windows 8). In fact Steve Ballmer is usingWindows Vista as an excuse for their late entry and poor ...Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer blames Windows Vista for his company's ...
TopNews United States - 2 hours agoDuring the course of a Q&A session at Microsoft's recent meeting for financial analysts and institutional shareholders, the company's outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft's excessive focus of the doomed Windows Vista OS a decade back was ...Ballmer: Blame Vista for Our Mobile Woes
NewsFactor Network - 3 hours agoThe Vista issue did take Microsoft's -- and Ballmer's -- eye off the mobile ball and focused everything on the operating system. The organizational ... "It would have been better for Windows and probably better for our success in other form factors." Timing Is ...
I have worked on Client OS from 1988 to 2001 at Apple and Microsoft. After Windows XP in 2002 came the next version of Windows code name "Longhorn", aka Vista. There were political battles on who would head up the developer relationships for the platform and I threw in the towel before the fight to Vic Gundotra (Director of Windows Developer Relations) who now is Sr VP of Eng at Google.
Why did I turn my back on Windows Vista in 2001? After 10 years at Microsoft, I had learned my lessons, kept my mouth shut and just move on. What would have I said?
Windows Longhorn will fail because management has told the OS team to innovate. Everyone needs to be innovative. You cannot tell a whole OS team to innovate and expect it to work. The kernel team, the graphics system, printing team are all creating new ways to do things, and a simple thing like print will not work. This is what happened when Apple created the Pink OS (taligent) and faced the reality of Blue (System 7) was more realistic to ship.
Bill Gates is quoted as being surprised that Taligent was insignificant in the industry.
In 1997, when Bill Gates was asked what trend or development over the past 20 years had really caught him by surprise, his reply was:
Windows Vista was also despite 5 years of painful development shipping in Jan 2007 insignificant in the industry. While this was all going on I switched to Server OS team, then management tools, and left the company in 2006. I never touched a Windows Vista release (2002 -2007) until 2008 when I got a new laptop and it ran Vista.
The mistake made by so many executives when ordering innovation is they don't understand how the pieces work together. The team that needs to innovate works best if they know parts of the system will not change. If you try to build a new innovative building with a ground breaking foundation, state of the art super structure, with never before used electrical and mechanical systems, and new finishing material, you would need to build the building at least 3 times to get things to work.
There is a way out of this predicament. If you design the process to have many iterations of small changes with the teams working closely together it is possible. But, this team should be as small as possible and as far away from executives with top down edicts. Kind of like a SkunkWorks. When you end up with the smaller team you can make the decisions on where the innovation needs to come from and not everyone should innovate.
The mistake made is when you measure the success of a team based on how innovative they are, you have people taking risks they don't need to.
Windows Vista failed because the top down order was everyone needs to innovate to build the new version of Windows.
What end users and the media think is innovative is many times the result of many iterations of failure. Windows Vista failure. Windows 7 success. Windows 8 failure. Next OS?????
This last week I was in Iceland at a media/analyst event sponsored by RMS, Datapipe, and Verne Global. Honestly, I spent so much time talking to so many different people, I find it easier to reference the public disclosures than to write on my own. :-)
The #1 topic of interest to me is RMS as a customer choose its first data center to be a green one with 100% renewable with Datapipe in Verne Global's data center.
Here is the press release from the customer, RMS. This is RMS's first data center, a green one with 100% renewable energy.
RMS Launches First Global Data Center, Taps Verne Global and Datapipe for 100 Percent Green Computing Environment
Verne Global and Datapipe deliver renewably powered high-performance computing for RMS’ revolutionary exposure and risk management environment
KEFLAVIK, Iceland – Sept. 19, 2013 – Verne Global today announced that RMS, the world’s leading catastrophe risk modeling firm, is deploying its RMS Cloud from Verne Global’s data center campus in Iceland. Powered by the RMS Cloud, RMS(one)TM, the insurance industry’s first real-time exposure and risk management environment, will empower insurers and reinsurers to execute risk modeling, underwriting and portfolio management on a single, open platform hosted in a 100 percent green environment. RMS(one) TM will leverage Datapipe’s Stratosphere® high-performance computing (HPC) green cloud platform for peak loads.
“With RMS(one) running on the RMS Cloud we are giving our customers unprecedented freedom, business agility and competitive advantage by allowing them to execute on their entire exposure and risk management strategies,” said Bobby Soni, chief platform and services officer at RMS. “RMS(one) offers the industry’s first secure, reliable and scalable computing platform coupled with big data infrastructure, which streamlines our customers’ modeling, underwriting and portfolio management processes.”
Here is one post from ZDNet's David Chernicoff.
RMS demonstrates the importance of the private cloud
Summary: Lack of reliability in Amazon EC2 a major motivator in private cloud investment
By David Chernicoff for Five Nines: The Next Gen Datacenter |September 20, 2013 -- 12:51 GMT (05:51 PDT)
Here in DatacenterKnowledge's post from Rich Miller.
Data Center Customers Warming to Iceland
September 19th, 2013By: Rich Miller
Verne Global CEO Jeff Monroe calls its Iceland-based data center “the ultimate energy hedge” for its ability to provide long-term price visibility through 12 to 20-year contracts. (Photo: Colleen Miller)
and a post from Colleen Miller.
Free Cooling in Iceland: A Closer Look at the Verne Global Data Center
September 19th, 2013By: Colleen Miller
