Demand Response is best described as balancing a customers electricity need with the company’s electricity output.  Both sides want to reduce costs as much as possible so they must meet somewhere in the middle with happiness.  It also decreases the demand load which allows us to decrease the use of electricity during the day, and even at peak times which saves us, as consumers, a lot of money.

National Grid has some demand response programs that “help reduce energy costs, and help system integrity for a few critical hours during the year.”  Some of the conditions that they say lower energy use are when there is a “tight power supply, local distribution equipment is approaching capacity limits, and when wholesale power supply prices are expected to exceed $100 per mWh.”  These are the three main times that National Grid feels are necessary to lower energy use by s substantial amount.

Another company that has a demand response program is EnerNOC.  Their main goal is to “reduce peak demand for utilities and grid operators.”  This helps their demand response program be a lot faster, cleaner, and cost efficient than peaking power plants.  EnerNOC is not only for individuals, it is even more efficient for businesses and institutions.  Since they are both a lot bigger than a single persons home, they save a lot of money by using demand response to prevent blackouts and other harmful events.

In my opinion, demand response is a great idea.  It saves the consumer a lot of money on their electric bill which is usually the most expensive, it saves businesses a lot of stress and money by helping out their communities, and it is a great thing to have.  Demand response is a very interesting subject because there are so many factors that go into it.  Not just for the consumer but also for the companies that are providing it.  If both parties are able to come out with a happy medium, then the mission is complete.

References:

http://www.enernoc.com/solutions/demand-response.php

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

http://www.nationalgridus.com/masselectric/business/programs/3_demand_response.asp

The other day, my group members and I constructed the robot lab.  It is a fairly simple lab in which you put together a lego robot.  First, we had to put together the lego part of the robot which took us a little longer than everyone else.  We didn’t realize we were looking at the wrong instructions so that put us behind right away.  Once we got the right directions, we had one minor mishap but pulled it together.  The reason we had trouble putting the legos together was because some of the parts look the same on the screen.  For example, you couldn’t really tell the difference between the black and grey lego pieces on the computer screen.  Once we figured it all out we completed the building part of the exercise.

Once the robot was built, we had to connect wires from the battery of the robot to the robot itself.  This gave the robot power so we could run some tests.  In order to run these tests the last thing we needed to do was connect a usb cord from the robot to the computer.  By doing this we were able to control the robot and the way it acts.

The last step of the exercise was to calculate 3 different levels of power and average them together to figure our percentage of error.  First we ran the robot for 1.5 seconds with 75% power.  Our measurement was that the robot went .9 meters and the computers measurement was .886527m which came out to be a 1.3473% error.  Secondly, we ran the robot for 1.5 seconds with 50% power.  Our measurement was .57m and the computers was .557917m which came out to be a 1.2083% error.  Lastly, we ran the robot for 1.5 seconds with 25% power.  Our measurement was that the robot went .24m and the computer said it went .232665m which came out to be a .7335% error.

Summing it all up, our average percent error was 1.09636% error.  This number should be as close to 1 as possible so we didn’t do too bad.  It would have been nice to get it a little closer to 1 but we gave it our best.  I enjoyed the lab very much and look forward to the next one.

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster was caused by an earthquake and tsunami that hit the nuclear plants on March 11, 2011.  This disaster was the worst thing that has happened in the history of Japan.  The magnitude 9.0 earthquake was followed by a series of tsunamis that wiped out a lot of Japan.  The disaster caused all power sources to shut down and the supply of cooling water was stopped.  This left many people without power and water for days and weeks.  The government even raised its International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) from a 4 to its highest rank 7 because of its impact on the world not just Japan.

Water was a huge problem in the disaster.  At the end of March, government officials tested the water in the power plants which happened to have high levels of radiation.  According to the National Safety Society, contaminated water leaked into the sea at least twice.  The only effort to prevent further leaks was to move any contaminated water into any water tank that was not full.  Looking at the bigger picture however, the contaminated water is still in the ocean which is very harmful to society.  Not just for the wildlife in the sea, but also to us humans that eat seafood, and/or go to the beach a lot.  In my opinion, I believe that the Japanese government could do a better job if they were prepared for something like this.

In April, he Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) had a plan to “cool down the reactor cores by filling their containment vessels with water.”  In the month of May, a hole was found in a pipe that caused a lot of their water to get more contaminated from the radiation.  Since this plan failed, they tried again but this time they filtered the water through a large machine.  Unfortunately, this plan failed as well and they are still working on it till this day.

I’m no scientist, but wouldn’t you think a large nuclear power plant would have been prepared for this kind of disaster.  I mean being a huge isolated island on the ocean isn’t a big enough reason?  Whoever the masterminds who structured the power plant should have realized that they need a backup plan, generator, and other backup water tanks and pipes or recourses incase something like Fukushima happened.  Even though it was by far the largest disaster in Japanese history and nobody could have predicted it, it is still something you need to take initiative for just as a safety measure.

References:

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110910p2a00m0na008000c.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/08/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-pm-japan