Posts Tagged: "energy"

The Facebooks, Googles and Netflixes of the world, edge providers that provide Internet services via websites but not an Internet connection like ISPs offer, have every reason to support the current net neutrality regime at the FCC because it benefits their bottom line, preventing ISPs from charging them for the incredible amount of bandwidth which they eat up. Proponents of net neutrality have presented the debate to the public as the individual consumer versus the larger ISPs, which has been successful in increasing regulations for ISPs having much smaller subscriber bases and lower market capitalizations than edge providers. While ISPs are prevented from zero-rating, or offering digital content for free to subscribers, under the current net neutrality regime, Facebook and Twitter are increasingly offering live sports broadcasts for free to their users.

The Anhui solar farm is the world’s largest floating farm but its 40 MW capacity is much lower than other large photovoltaic power stations across the world. However, news reports have focused on the fact that the Anhui farm is the latest in a string of renewable energy plant construction projects, which have been ramping up in China. In recent years, that country’s central government has made steps towards building massive solar farms on land, including a 2,550-hectare plant in the Gobi Desert.

The number of U.S. patents granted for clean energy technology has recently dropped following a near 10-year period of growth. In fact, according to the Brookings Institute, the number of CleanTech patents granted in the country fell by a whopping nine percent between 2014 and 2016. When the economy picks up and things shift again, energy patents should be able to move forward, but for now, the uncertainty with the current Trump administration has brought things to a complete standstill.

As of late, the spike of clean energy technology innovation is slowing down in the United States, during a time that the Trump administration is aiming to drastically cut government research spending in the industry… The slump in clean energy patents is a direct result of the downturn in oil and gas prices, according to Morico. “When oil was trading at over $100 per barrel just before the crash in 2014, there was a lot of investment going into renewable/clean energy. After the prices of oil crashed, investors started cutting back their investments in renewable/clean energy because the costs of many of these technologies couldn’t compete with low oil and gas prices,” he explained.

The official announcement released by both GM and Honda notes that both companies enjoy patent portfolios related to fuel cell battery technologies, which are among the world’s largest. A review of clean energy patents granted during 2015 by the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index (CEPGI) shows that GM and Honda rank first and second, respectively, among companies that have been assigned U.S. patents directed at fuel cells between 2002 and 2015; the press release from the companies contradicts this slightly, claiming that Honda is third-place in this category. During the 14 years surveyed by the CEPGI, GM has earned 918 U.S. patents on fuel cells and related technologies while Honda has earned 757 U.S. patents.

Sunday, November 6th marks the 26th anniversary of the first U.S. patent issued to Baliga for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. U.S. Patent No. 4969028, which is titled Gate Enhanced Rectifier. It claimed a gate-controlled semiconductor power device having a body of semiconductor material with regions of opposing types of conductivity forming a p-n junction, two power electrodes disposed in ohmic contact with different regions of the semiconductor material, an insulated gate electrode disposed on a surface to control the conduction of opposite type conductivity carriers in a channel to either induce an opposite conductivity or repress the channel’s conductivity. The resulting semiconductor device achieves both forward and reverse blocking capability and can be switched on and off with a low power requirement.

On Wednesday, June 29th, the United States Patent and Trademark Office hosted a panel titled Innovation to Power the Nation (and the World): Reinventing our Climate Future. This panel featured several important players involved in climate change within the United States. USPTO Director Michelle Lee delivered the keynote address while the panel was moderated by Amy Harder of the Wall Street Journal, who posed interesting and through provoking questions to the panelists. The panel comprised, Dr. Kristina Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of Cube Hydro Partners, Dr. Bantval Jayant Baliga, Director of the Power Semiconductor Research Center at North Carolina State University, Bob Perciasepe, President of the Center or Climate Change and Energy Solutions, and Nathan Hurst, Chief Sustainability & Social Impact Officer at Hewlett Packard, Inc.

With an increase in the number of patents being issued for clean energy technologies, it’s not surprising to see predictions of increased patent litigation in the sector. Patent infringement cases in the clean energy sector have already involved many of the industry’s top companies, including Westinghouse Solar, Zep Solar, DuPont (NYSE:DD) and SunEdison. Although patent issuances have exploded in that field, the market isn’t nearly as crowded as smartphones and other industries where a much higher number of patents have issued, making those sectors more visible to NPEs. With the renewed calls for both private and public investment into clean energy R&D in the wake of the Paris climate change conference, it’s clear to see that intellectual property owners who can successfully navigate the patent market could make significant financial gains.

Airbus Group SE (EPA:AIR), based in Leiden, Netherlands, is a multinational corporation focused on the development of aerospace and defence technologies. Sales figures indicate that Airbus will outsell top rival Boeing Company (NYSE:BA) for 2015, although lagging production may result in Boeing being able to fulfill more orders by the end of the year. Airbus has shown some interest in…

The current state-of-the-art in nuclear power plant reactor design and construction is known as Generation III+. These reactors are essentially safer versions of the Generation III reactors that began operation in 1996 starting with the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa commercial plant in Japan. Generation III+ reactors must operate within very strict safety guidelines. The power plant’s structure must be durable enough to withstand a plane crash without releasing radiation. Power plants must operate for periods of 60 years. The grace period after reactor shutdown, during which time no human intervention is required, must be 72 hours. Further, the risk of core melt accidents must be low enough that a risk assessment analysis returns a calculated core damage frequency (CDF) of 1×10-4 per year.

In all, the world’s nuclear power plants have accrued a total of 16,000 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operation and yet there have only been 12 total nuclear power reactor accidents around the entire globe, far fewer than the total number of coal or gas mining explosions the world has experienced over the years. In our ongoing series looking at nuclear power’s potential, prompted by Japan’s short return to nuclear power after its 2011 disaster, we’re taking a quick look back at three major nuclear reactor events to see what the actual fallout has been from those accidents and if we’ve learned our lessons adequately enough to charge forward with making nuclear power a great part of America’s clean energy portfolio.

On some basic level everything can be characterized as an idea. It is also all too easy for those who are not technically trained to believe, no matter how wrongly, that implementation is a trivial or ministerial act. Just monitor the windmills, if they are operating at a less than optimal level adjust them, tilt the blades a little. No big deal. Anyone could have thought of that, and a college student could have written the code over a weekend. Moreover, windmills are extremely old technology, so merely applying a computer process to something so old can’t be patent eligible.

Near the middle of August, a nuclear power plant operated by Kyushu Electric Power in the Japanese city of Sendai restarted its reactors to produce electricity once more for the country’s electrical grid. The move is significant because it is the first of 25 nuclear power plants in Japan to restart after applying to reopen since the 2011 explosion of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the world’s most recent nuclear disaster. There have understandably been some mixed reactions to the decision. Areas around the Fukushima Daiichi plant are still so heavily contaminated with radiation that there are many of the 160,000 people originally evacuated from the region who still cannot return.

A lot of research and development into alternative fuels for aircraft has focused on biofuels, which has also been an area of focus of automakers. Last January, Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA) announced a series of developments in creating green diesel that cuts carbon dioxide emissions in half compared to conventional fossil fuels. The company also unveiled a breakthrough in the effective biofuel conversion of halophytes, shrub like plants indigenous to the Middle East which grow in seawater found near desert terrain.