IBM

Industry Leaders Work to Strengthen Power Grid

By


Ontario’s largest power distributor – Hydro One – is looking to transform the province’s aging electrical system into a state of the art power delivery network. The utility recently selected IBM and Telvent to lead the charge toward a more energy efficient and reliable 21st century power grid.

Built in the 1950’s, Ontario’s electric grid took a centralized approach to power delivery, but the changing nature of electricity generation and transmission, with distributed sources becoming more prevalent, requires a more versatile grid design. Keep reading →

 /  Published April 10, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Electric Car Boosters Seek To Calm ‘Range Anxiety’

By


The interior of the General Motors Detroit Hamtramck Assembly Plant is shown October 11, 2011 in Hamtramck, Michigan. Officials from the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration toured the plant today to highlight the Obama administrations fuel economy standards.

Electric vehicle manufacturers and advocates are facing questions from an increasingly interested US public about how the cars work and whether they can meet conventional driving needs. Keep reading →

 /  Published February 24, 2012 at 2:00 PM

Energy History And Board Diversity: The First Lady Of Cleantech Speaks

By


Nancy Floyd is the founder and managing director at Nth Power, a venture capital firm established specifically to invest in clean energy startups. Floyd began her career as the first professional recruitment of a woman at the Vermont Public Utilities Commission. In 1982, Floyd founded NFC Energy Corporation, which developed over $30 million in wind projects and sold the company, generating a 25-fold return within three years. She then went on to help found a telecoms company, which was sold to IBM in 1987.

Nth Power now has $430 million under management and successfully exited investments through nine M&As and four IPOs since the firm started investing in 1997. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 31, 2012 at 11:00 AM

IBM Partners Up To Build First Statewide Smart Grid

By


Vermont’s electricity grid is learning to talk back, thanks to a partnership between technology giant IBM and the state’s VELCO transmission company that the firms say is a model for smart grid efforts across the US.

A new communications and control network will be stung along more than 1000 miles connecting transmission substations to Vermont’s distribution utilities as part of efforts to improve power grid reliability and security, the companies said in announcing their partnership at the DistribuTECH conference this week. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 26, 2012 at 6:00 AM

New Cisco Smart Grid Plan Merits Careful Study

By


I’ve been warning for a long time that Cisco’s smart grid ambitions were going to force major changes onto the industry. The first of those changes has arrived today with the release of the first detailed version of the company’s grand framework — the reference architecture it calls GridBlocks.

The main points Keep reading →

 /  Published January 23, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Four New Ways To Solve The Energy Challenge

By


In labs around the globe, scientists are working on radical technologies, from 500-mile car batteries to solar space farms. The holy grail in the electric-car world is beating range anxiety: the fear you’ll run out of juice in the middle of nowhere. Today’s electrics, like the Nissan Leaf, have a range of about 100 miles, but scientists at IBM are in hot pursuit of a better technology. In the 1990s researchers hypothesized that they could create energy by combining lithium with oxygen, making what is now referred to as a lithium-air battery. Today IBM and some 50 other labs globally are working on versions that would let an electric car go 500 miles a charge — a potential game changer for models like BMW’s i3 concept vehicle. This article is a linkout.

 /  Published January 5, 2012 at 11:00 AM

All In The Smart Grid: AOL Energy Year In Review

By


Once an obscure technology, smart grid nearly become a household name this year when the White House announced this June a multi-pronged smart grid strategy.

“Even in today’s information age, many utilities don’t have real-time information about the state of the grid,” the White House said at the time. It lauded two high school girls, Daniela Lapidous & Shreya Indukuri, juniors at the Harker Upper School in San Jose, California who successfully implemented a smart sub-metering system in their school. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 12, 2011 at 6:00 AM

Electric Vehicle Report Highlights Gap Between Industry And Consumers

By


It’s not uncommon in the power sector to hear that executives are simply out of touch with consumers.

A recent IBM report which surveyed 1,716 US drivers and 125 industry executives, shows that this may also be true in the electric vehicle (EV) industry. Furthermore EV executives might not be doing enough to connect with other industries. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 18, 2011 at 6:00 AM

Ocean Power Means Green Energy For Ireland

By


Ireland’s waters are famous for their crashing waves and as the country looks for ways to meet its renewable energy standard of 16% by 2020, these waves are becoming an increasingly important energy resource.

IBM and The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) have announced a joint effort to both understand and minimize the potentially harmful environmental impacts of so-called “wave energy conversion devices.” Chief among the concerns is noise pollution that can disrupt fish migrations and other marine ecosystems. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM

Smart Grid Staffing: Outsource To… Argentina?

By


Eric Miller, former senior VP at Trilliant, has decamped the U.S. He is in search of the ideal spot to set up a software development shop focused on electric power and related clean technology. He thinks he has found it in Argentina.

The problem Keep reading →

 /  Published October 31, 2011 at 6:00 AM
Page 3 of 41234