I had absolutely no idea what demand response was before this assignment, so it took some time to ween through lots of information to find something valuable to use in my blog.

Finding something interesting was the real challenge… that I did not overcome.

Demand response allows us to reduce energy consumption during peak hours of the day.

When we flip a switch we expect the electricity to be there, but how does it get there? That is the work of the grid, a web of high voltage transmission lines.

When you turn on a light, electricity travels in an instant to your home and the bulb glows — that’s called demand.

Demand Response comes in three forms – emergency demand response, economic demand response and ancillary services demand.

1. Emergency demand response is employed to avoid involuntary service interruptions during times of supply scarcity.

2.Economic demand response is employed to allow electricity customers to curtail their consumption when the productive or convenience of consuming that electricity is worth less to them than paying for the electricity.

3. Ancillary services demand response consists of a number of specialty services that are needed to ensure the secure operation of the transmission grid and which have traditionally been provided by generators.

Demand response is what protects a city of neglectful consumers from blacking out and is generally used to refer to mechanisms used to encourage consumers to reduce demand.

BUT WHY WOULD BIG BUSINESSES BUY INTO THIS?!

Well…

Corporations that participate in demand response programs can receive cheaper electricity rates, or rebates at the end of the year.

I guess a little incentive can make anyone eco-friendly.

Resources:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/demand-response.htm

http://www.pge.com/demandresponse/

www.eia.gov

The Great East Japan Earthquake hit the Sanriku Coast of Japan on March 11, 2011 with a magnitude of 9.0, causing great damage to the region. However, it was the tsunami that followed which devastated the country, with a final death toll of over 20,000.
Together, the earthquake and tsunami were much larger than Fukushima nuclear plant was built to handle. When the earthquake hit, 3 terminals of the plant shut down because the external power supply was destroyed. For the next hour private generators provided the plant with the electricity it needed, but when the tsunami arrived they were destroyed as well. The last resort was battery power which lasted only 8 hours, at which point concerns rose of a complete core meltdown because if cooling could not be restored the core would melt.
At this time the meltdown was days away and the operators main priority was to cool the core in anyway they could. They began injecting seawater and boric acid (a containment agent) into the core. The process lowered the temperatures to a non-dangerous levels and venting was no longer required.

Fukushima Explosion

Fukushima Explained

Sources:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/fukushima_accident_inf129.html
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/region/asro/tokyo/publ/2011disaster.htm
Youtube.com

Well, I Never Was That Good With Lego Sets!

1/17/12- Today was the first day of class, and the day we began working with Basic 2-Motor NXT cars by Lego Mindstorms.

I WISH I HAD THIS WHEN I WAS A KID! Following diagrams, we each pieced our car together. Some people worked in groups and some, like myself, worked alone. There were SO many parts! I definitely had trouble finding the ones to match the picture because they were so similar to one another– I guess I am not that detail oriented.

The body was not difficult to build at all, neither were the first two wheels.

– It was the small wheel that was giving me trouble:

After about 10 minutes of wondering why my car did not look like the one in the diagram, I found where I went wrong, switched out a small grey lego with 4 attachment pegs, for the correct, and larger, lego piece with 6 pegs– and FINALLY pieced my car together (way after most of the class had moved on to programming).Then I plugged my robot into the computer, but by this time I had missed most of the instructions on programming, so I basically gave up and looked on with the group next to me.

Using LabView, a programming application for the robot-car, we entered commands to get the robot car driving in a straight line. There were many more functions, but by this time it was the end of the class.

Finished Robot Car:

And here is a video I found on Youtube.com that gives you an idea of the Lego Mindstorm robot capabilities and programming.

Lego Mindstorms Tutorial <– Click here!

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1/24/11- Today we used LabView to measure the velocity of the Robot Car.

First, we put the robot-car from last week back together. The car that I picked up was not mine, and the front wheel needed to be reconstructed.

Using LabView, we programmed the car to move in a circle. After we then measured the velocity by hand and compared it to the computer’s calculation and then compared the percent error.  The computer said that the distance travelled was .253733 meters and the number of wheel turns was 1.46667 rotations.When I did this by hand I measured .27 meters: percent error was 6.2 %