Smart Power Grid

June 2016
ABSOPULSE's 1,500Vdc input, 2,500W DC-DC converter serves power transmission systems

HVT-2K5-1300/24-4U5 heavy-duty, high input voltage, industrial-quality dc-dc converter

ABSOPULSE Electronics has recently released the HVT-2K5-1300/24-4U5, a heavy-duty, high input voltage, industrial-quality dc-dc converter designed for driving low voltage equipment. It is typically designed into power systems that transmit high voltage and high power over long distances.  The unit conve
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Date:
06/30/2016
Tesla aims to speed clean energy transition with Solar City Deal

Tesla announced it has made an offer to buy SolarCity

For Elon Musk, it was “kind of an obvious thing to do.” Recently, energy storage and electric vehicle provider Tesla announced it has made an offer to buy SolarCity, the largest residential solar installer in the United States. The move would turn Tesla into a vertically-integrated clean energy company, wi
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Date:
06/29/2016
The Building Technologies Office (BTO) has selected three projects to receive a total of $3.7 million to study the effects of improving the implementation of commercial building energy codes. The Institute for Market Transformation (Washington, DC) will help develop and test a methodology to accurately and cost eff
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Date:
06/29/2016
The case of Switzerland hints at the shoals that post-Brexit Britain must now navigate, including trade in electricity, where countries clearly benefit from the very cross-border ties U.K. voters have rejected. Brexit, to put it bluntly, will leave the U.K. at an electricity market disadvantage. The U.K.-Swiss parallels are striking
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Date:
06/28/2016
IBC SOLAR, a leader in photovoltaic (PV) systems and energy storage, has signed a cooperation agreement with DHYBRID Power Systems, an developer of hybrid applications. Through this cooperation, both partners want to make use of their respective competencies in order to become one of the market-leading providers of
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Date:
06/28/2016
EnerKnol Research releases primers on the State of Solar: 2016

The U.S. is expected to add two times more solar in 2016 compared to 2015 thanks to declining PV technology costs, state programs, and federal incentives

The U.S. is expected to add two times more solar in 2016 compared to 2015 thanks to declining PV technology costs, state programs, and federal incentives. Two state programs have primarily accelerated the adoption of distributed solar: renewable portfolio standards – regulatory mandate to increase renewable en
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Date:
06/27/2016
Juniper Research has found that smart traffic management and smart parking initiatives, will save some 4.2 billion man-hours annually by 2021 - equivalent to each city driver saving nearly an entire working day per year. Juniper found that while the ‘smart city’ remains a relatively young concept, many citi
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Date:
06/27/2016
Brite Semi and Semitech to collaborate on industrial M2M SoC

Narrowband PLC and low-power wireless technologies are the keys to the heterogeneous smart grid networks of the future

Brite Semiconductor, a leading ASIC/SoC design and turnkey solution provider, announced the collaborative development of an industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) system on chip (SoC) with Semitech Semiconductor, a leading provider of power line communications (PLC) solutions that enable the transformation of the ele
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Date:
06/24/2016
As part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan to create American jobs, develop clean energy sources and cut carbon pollution, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced the first step to support wind energy development in federal waters offshore Hawaii, by issuing a call for information and nominations to
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Date:
06/24/2016
Novel Bifacial Cell technology to enhance energy yield of PV modules

bifacial n-PERT (BiPERT) solar cell

Imec, a leading nano-electronics research center and partner in Energyville, will present at this week’s Intersolar Europe/EU PVSEC a highly efficient bifacial n-PERT (BiPERT) solar cell featuring a bifaciality value close to 100%. With a rear cell efficiency close to the efficiency measured from the front of
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Date:
06/23/2016
HITEC Power Protection taps Garrett Forde as new CEO

Garrett Forde

HITEC Power Protection (HITEC), the inventor of diesel rotary UPS, announced the appointment of Garrett Forde as the company’s new CEO. Forde is a well-respected leader with in-depth commercial and business development experience working with international technology companies in the Americas, Asia and EMEA.
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Date:
06/23/2016
China joins global drive for transformer efficiency

Chinese transformer manufacturing supply chain is still grappling with the same challenge of balancing performance with cost

China may not have legislated on transformer efficiency in the way that the United States and the European Union have done but the Chinese transformer manufacturing supply chain is still grappling with the same challenge of balancing performance with cost. “In China many transformers are still using thermal p
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Date:
06/22/2016
AEG Power's hybrid energy solution cuts costs of energy storage

Hybrid Energy Storage System

AEG Power Solutions, a global provider of power electronic systems and solutions for industrial power supplies and renewable energy applications, today announced it has developed a unique Hybrid Energy Storage System which combines standard battery storage with power-to-heat technology to reduce the total cost of
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Date:
06/22/2016
Tesla’s mission has always been tied to sustainability. We seek to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transportation by offering increasingly affordable electric vehicles. And in March 2015, we launched Tesla Energy, which through the Powerwall and Powerpack allow homeowners, business owners an
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Date:
06/22/2016
HARTING current sensors help protect renewable energy systems

HARTING current sensors

HARTING released information about the uptake of its current sensors by the renewable energy industry, and how they are ensuring the continuous and reliable operation of wind turbines for major wind farm installations around the world. For example, one of the world’s major wind turbine manufacturers is us
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Date:
06/20/2016
Utilities can supercharge the EV market

Roland Hwang, NRDC

America’s utilities are uniquely positioned to supercharge the national electric vehicles market by spurring a rapid deployment of charging stations, increasing public awareness of EVs’ economic and environmental benefits, and incentivizing drivers to charge cars at times that will help bring more solar an
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Date:
06/17/2016
A German folk festival provides a field test for low-voltage power distribution

The transformer stations are integrated in the folk festival backdrop

Stuttgart's folk festival on the "Wasen" is one of the largest folk festivals in Europe, and proves a challenge for the grid operator in Stuttgart every year. In 2015, it also served as a field test. Mobile measuring boxes captured all load flows in the ten local secondary substations on the festival sit
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Date:
06/16/2016
WAGOs compact ECO supplies offer multiple mounting modes

ECO power supplies

WAGO's latest slim EPSITRON ECO power supplies are EN 60335-1 compliant and incredibly versatile. DIN-35 rail and chassis-mount options and a small profile make the ECO the ideal choice for installation in ultra-compact control cabinets. In addition to control cabinets, ECO power supplies are also ready for
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Date:
06/14/2016
From early days working on projects to add communication and intelligence to power supplies, which eventually became the Digital Power industry known today, the question of safety and security and how the power supply industry was prepared to address such issues continues to grow in importance. While there is ve
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Date:
06/13/2016
Expectations for digital power have run high, especially when one considers the explosive growth created by digital logic in many other markets. However, overall, acceptance of the technology has arguably been firm rather than explosive, despite even the early digital power solutions being at least equal and ty
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Date:
06/13/2016
Harsh environments are a reality for many electrical systems used in motor control or solenoid control applications.  The electronics that control motors and solenoids are by necessity in close proximity to the high currents and voltages used to create the physical movement required by the end application.  In addition
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Date:
06/13/2016
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the continuing adoption of Digital Power System Management (DPSM) within the communications and computer industries continues to be driven, in large part, to the high current levels demanded by the sub-20nm ASICs and/or FPGAs that are at the core of their system architecture. By
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Date:
06/13/2016
Working in the industry, we live very close to the developments that are advancing our technology and the systems based upon them. We see nascent science turn into rough prototypes and then into finished products on a regular basis. We are familiar, even if not comfortable, with the rapid pace of progress and ho
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Date:
06/13/2016
There have been several comparisons of eGaN FETs with silicon MOSFETs in a variety of applications, including hard-switched, soft-switched, and high-frequency power conversion. These studies have shown that eGaN FETs have large efficiency and power density advantages over silicon MOSFETs. Here we’ll focus on
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Date:
06/13/2016
We are in a transition phase between two epochs of history; the end of the fossil-fuel dominance of society, and the start of a multi-layered green energy economy. This transition, as all change can be, is painful, but necessary if we are to achieve both the functional advances of a smart integrated grid and an
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Date:
06/11/2016
Integration or optimization…which comes first?

Larry Spaziani, GaN Systems

At APEC 2016 it became abundantly clear to the industry that GaN transistors are here, they're now, and they're proliferating. GaN Systems, EPC, Transphorm, Panasonic, Infineon, Texas Instruments, and other manufacturers and developers all displayed GaN products in varying readiness, from existing only on P
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Date:
06/11/2016
What’s Really Driving the Growth of Smart Grid?

Kevin Parmenter, PSD Contributor

We have heard quite a bit lately about the smart grid and alternative energy, yet what does this really mean?   At the present time, at least from a numbers perspective, the smart grid actually means smart metering at the point of use.  The number of smart meters being deployed keeps growing quite sim
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Date:
06/11/2016
In this article we’ll show how a third way of defining average current leads to an infinite gain of the modulator gain for current-mode systems. Another simple derivation produces a fourth expression for the modulator gain, thus completing the set of gains to be found in the literature. Different Current-Mode Modu
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Date:
06/11/2016
PSDcast - Eaton's Art Mulligan on their PredictPulse remote grid monitoring and management system

Alix Paultre of Power Systems Design

IN this PSDcast Eaton Product Line Manager Art Mulligan discusses their new PredictPulse Service with Alix Paultre of Power Systems Design. PredictPulse is a a next-generation remote monitoring and management system that collects and analyzes data from connected power infrastructure devices to help reduce the ri
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Date:
06/10/2016
Solar glut in California highlights demand for a more integrated regional grid

Regional grids like the one proposed to share all kinds of power already thrive in the Midwest, New England and in the mid-Atlantic

In California, there is so much solar energy that grid operators have to switch off solar farms. One solution of dealing with the additional power generated is to share the renewable wealth across state borders. Right now, California’s grid runs mostly on its own, like an island. But if there was one big Western gr
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Date:
06/08/2016
Vicor released four new DCM products in the VIA package

DCM isolated, regulated DC-DC converters

Vicor released four additional DC-DC converters that are deployed in the rugged, chassis-mountable versions of its DCM family of isolated, regulated DC-DC converters. These new products extend the family by adding two 270V and two 28V nominal products to the family.  Applications: DCMs are commonly used in i
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Date:
06/08/2016
Global infrastructure firm Gannett Fleming and Laramore Douglass and Popham (LDP), an electrical engineering design consulting firm, have created a joint venture partnership. The agreement enables the firms to offer a stronger complement of services and bring the most appropriate expertise to design and construction pr
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Date:
06/03/2016
Fluidic Energy has appointed Jim Enzor to the role of Chief Financial Officer as the company continues global expansion of its game-changing long duration zinc air energy storage technology. As CFO, Jim will lead global finance and play an instrumental role in driving top-line growth and margin expansion, and se
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Date:
06/03/2016
Dialight claims highest available efficiency in the A0/A1 24-48v DC Red Obstruction Controller System

A0/A1 Red Controller System

Dialight, an innovative leader in LED lighting technology, launched its new A0/A1 Red Controller System. The A0/A1 system has the lowest DC power consumption in the industry, making it ideal for operating its Vigilant Low (L-810) and Medium (L-864) Intensity Red Obstruction lights typically for met towers for the
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Date:
06/03/2016
World's first grid-connected tidal array almost complete

One of OpenHydro's turbines is tested before being lowered into the ocean

UPI - A French energy company is a step closer to bringing the world's first grid-­connected tidal array online. Over the weekend, the second of two turbines was lowered into the water off the coast of Brittany. The first turbine was installed in January. The Paimpol-Bréhat tidal array project and the e
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Date:
06/01/2016
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