Posts Tagged ‘smart grids’
Panasonic Plans to Build a ‘Sustainable Smart Town’ in Japan by 2014
Unprecedented private-sector development
But the idea here isn’t to create a town stripped to the bare minimum energy usage. Rather, by building the “Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town”--Fujisawa City in Kanagawa Prefecture being the larger urban area here--with next-gen power-generating and power-saving infrastructure from the ground up, the companies plan to show just how green a town can be when various technologies are stacked together and work in unison.
As such, Fujisawa SST won’t necessarily be home to never-before-seen, cutting-edge technologies, but to a variety of common green tech staples that, despite their availability, are expensive to retrofit into older buildings and towns.
For instance, every roof structure will be embedded with modern solar panel technology that both powers the house and banks unused energy in a . Transportation infrastructure will be designed with electric vehicles in mind. Networked sensors all over town will control things like public lighting, ensuring wattage doesn’t go to waste via a local smart grid.
Basically, Fujisawa SST is envisioned as a bottom-up approach to energy efficiency--a green village built from scratch with modern green technologies rather than less-efficient older tech. Panasonic wants to use it as a template for other larger communities in Japan and elsewhere. If all goes as planned, Fujisawa SST will start receiving residents in March of 2014 and finish filling up its houses by 2018.
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Texas Town Installs a Monster Battery for Backup Power
The sodium sulfur battery is the largest of its type
The huge battery began charging up this week and can store up to four megawatts of power for up to eight hours. It represents the first NaS battery in Texas and the biggest in the U.S., and has already earned the local nickname of BOB (big-old battery).
Before BOB's arrival, the Texas town had an agreement with the Mexican government that allowed it to transfer the town's electrical load over to Mexico -- but that took time and left people without power for a certain period.
Similar room-sized sodium sulfur (NaS) batteries have already found growing use among U.S. utility companies that want to put off expensive or building new transmission lines. notes that the batteries, built by NGK Insulators of Japan, store energy and can help ease blackouts for cities.
Electric Transmission Texas helped put the battery project together for around $25 million. But the utility has also agreed to build a second 60-mile transmission line to Presidio for about $44 million by 2012.
Such a battery could also serve as a test bed for utility companies to see how the devices can help with energy storage regarding , such as wind power or solar power. That sounds good to us, as long as utility companies don't simply lean on the batteries as a technological crutch to avoid giving the power grid its much-needed makeover.
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