Hurricane Sandy was the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the second-costliest hurricane in United States history. Classified as the eighteenth named storm, tenth hurricane and second major hurricane of the year of 2012, Sandy was a Category 3 storm at its peak intensity when it made landfall in Cuba. While it was a Category 2 storm off the coast of the Northeastern United States, the storm became the largest Atlantic hurricane on record (as measured by diameter, with winds spanning 1,100 miles (1,800 km)). Estimates as of June 2013 assess damage to have been over $68 billion (2013 USD), a total surpassed only by Hurricane Katrina. At least 286 people were killed along the path of the storm in seven countries.

Sandy developed from a tropical wave in the western Caribbean Sea on October 22, quickly strengthened, and was upgraded to Tropical Storm Sandy six hours later. Sandy moved slowly northward toward the Greater Antilles and gradually intensified. On October 24, Sandy became a hurricane, made landfall near Kingston, Jamaica, and re-emerged a few hours later into the Caribbean Sea and strengthened into a Category 2 hurricane. On October 25, Sandy hit Cuba as a Category 3 hurricane, and then weakened to a Category 1 hurricane. Many experts who predicted the storm believe that it is tied to global warming. Well, we all somehow have seeing people talk whether on the radio or TV, even at home about how the earth is changing and its temperature. Those climate changes are really affecting our environment and in return causing devastating natural disaster as earthquakes, volcanic eruption, as well as strong hurricane like sandy.

I do believe that Sandy is a possible global warming manifestation and I have researched a few sites to prove my beliefs.

According to NCAR senior climatologist Kevin E. Trenberth, “the storm was caused by “natural variability” but adds that it was “enhanced by global warming”. One factor contributing to the storm’s strength was abnormally warm sea surface temperatures offshore the East Coast of the United States—more than 3 °C (5 °F) above normal, to which global warming had contributed 0.6 °C (1 °F).  As the temperature of the atmosphere increases, the capacity to hold water increases, leading to stronger storms and higher rainfall amounts.

As they move north, Atlantic hurricanes typically are forced east and out to sea by the Prevailing Westerlies. In Sandy’s case, this typical pattern was blocked by a ridge of high pressure over Greenland resulting in a negative North Atlantic Oscillation, forming a kink in the jet stream, causing it to double back on itself off the East Coast. Mark Fischetti of Scientific American said that the jet stream’s unusual shape was caused by the melting of Arctic ice.

According to another source:

Global warming theory (Emanuel, 2005) predicts that a 2°C (3.6°F) increase in ocean temperatures should cause an increase in the peak winds of the strongest hurricanes of about about 10%. Furthermore, warmer ocean temperatures are expected to cause hurricanes to dump 20% more rain in their cores by the year 2100, according to computer modeling studies (Knutson et al., 2010). We have pushed our climate system to a fundamentally new, higher-energy state where more heat and moisture is available to power stronger storms, and we should be concerned about the possibility that Hurricane Sandy’s freak size and power were partially due to human-caused climate change.

From a third source:

There are three different ways climate change might have influenced Sandy: through the effects of sea level rise; through abnormally warm sea surface temperatures; and possibly through an unusual weather pattern that some scientists think bore the fingerprint of rapidly disappearing Arctic sea ice.

It is certain that our sea levels are rising, the climate are changing, and those turbulences are tied to the prediction of global warming. Some people might still doubt that there is a relation, but the clues and hints are appearing in front of our eyes every day and unfortunately things are just going to get worse because the thing that we depends on are the ones that are also contributing to the change in our planet.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/how-global-warming-made-hurricane-sandy-worse-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/hurricane-sandys-huge-size-freak-of-nature-or-climate-change

The nation’s electric power grid is one of the best avenues of commerce for as long as it existed. Those wires running down the street, or underground in your neighborhood, are responsible for more than $350 billion in sales each year. It’s secure, reliable and – judging by recent weather events – can be practically destroyed and rebuilt in short order. In a more basis understanding on how useful electricity or the power of energy without it our world wouldn’t be the same or make nothing at all. Electricity is not a luxury, but a necessity to sustain and stabilize people’s lives, the economy, and other factors on a global scale.  For example, without electricity, our home ad anything inside it would not work. The markets that we get our food would be closed. Most people, even I sometimes take it for granted, but if we take a second a think of 15 minutes without electricity is equal to a man with no brain or a being with no soul.

So how does nation’s electric power grid work?  Well here is how we all come about to have a share of that electricity in our home and business:

Electricity relies on an interconnected system that is composed of three distinct elements, as described below and illustrated by Figure 1:

1. Generation facilities—including approximately 5,800 major power plants and numerous other smaller generation facilities;²  
2. High-voltage transmission lines—a network of over 450,000 miles that connects generation facilities with major population centers;³ and
3. Local distribution systems that bring electric power into homes and businesses via overhead lines or underground cables. The first two elements are usually referred to as the bulk power system.

The United States’ system of generation, transmission and distribution facilities was built over the course of a century. Centralized electric generating plants with local distribution networks were started in the 1880s and the grid of interconnected transmission lines was started in the 1920s. Today, we have a complex patchwork system of regional and local power plants, power lines and transformers that have widely varying ages, conditions, and capacities.

What are the PROs and CONs?

CONs

The aging of equipment explains some of the equipment failures that lead to intermittent failures in power quality and availability. The capacity of equipment explains why there are some bottlenecks in the grid that can also lead to brownouts and occasional blackouts. These concerns make it critical to understand what investments may be needed to keep the system in a state of good repair, and what implications any shortfall could have on the nation’s economy.

It’s also operated mainly by proprietary hardware, telecommunications, and software platforms that make it more expensive to run than it should be.
So how do we make the grid simpler to operate, and less costly? Interoperability.

Just like your laptop can operate with devices from many manufacturers interchangeably, the electrical grid of the future needs to be able to exchange data with different devices from many manufacturers locally in the field.

Unfortunately, many utilities are “siloed” by proprietary technologies that backhaul data to a centralized hub such as a head end server. Without cross-industry collaboration and tactile evaluation of device interoperability in the field, support for the technology requirements to realize the potential benefits will never occur.

Duke Energy has initiated research projects to build and deploy low-cost controllers in the lab and in the field to better manage the electric grid. This requires building a field message bus to exchange data between assets.
This data exchange can only happen if these devices are connected either through wired or wireless technologies. Once connected, the data exchange is facilitated by non-proprietary protocols and open standards – always keeping data privacy and security at the forefront.

Obviously, non-proprietary protocols and open standards sound easy enough. But every company has its own “secret sauce” that must work only with all the other secret stuff they make. It’s one of the main challenges to the concept of the internet of things.

In this proof of concept, Duke Energy is using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT). The OASIS MQTT standardization process is making MQTT an open, simple and lightweight standard protocol for M2M telemetry data communication. Implementations of a field message bus and distributed intelligence applications for the electric grid have the potential to enable interoperability at a low cost and to achieve significant cost savings. These savings are attributed to improved operational performance, faster response times, and better management of distributed energy resources (DER) and utility-owned devices.

The key to unlocking these values is for utilities and vendors to implement a standards-based, interoperable field message bus that facilitates the translation and sharing of relevant local data between disparate assets. This will enable the development of distributed intelligence applications to enhance the performance of existing centrally managed systems.

http://www.asce.org/Infrastructure/Failure-to-Act/Electricity-Infrastructure-Report-Executive-Summary/

Plugging interoperability into the nation’s electric grid

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