Green Wombat

“Smart agents” have infiltrated Australia’s renewable energy research center. The smart agents are wireless motes the size of a Treo that adorn office walls while other versions are attached to refrigerators, a wind turbine and solar panel arrays. The agents communicate among themselves, analyzing data and adjusting the center’s power systems and air conditioning. For instance, when the smart agent that controls the facility’s solar arrays learns from the weather report that maximum photovoltaic power will be produced around 2 in the afternoon, it will notify the agent that controls the center’s air conditioning. “That agent may say, `I’ll wait until 2 p.m. to turn on the air conditioning
when we have renewable energy coming online,’ ” said Glenn Platt, the smart agent
project leader for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, when the Green Wombat visited the CSIRO Energy Centre this week. Other agents monitor individual offices, observing that one person may prefer warmer temperatures than others. The mote (like the one pitctured at right) will adjust the thermostat for that office, saving on air conditioning costs. 

CSIRO has been trialing the technology with utilities who are interested in installing smart agents in individual homes to control heating, air conditioning and appliances. Each home would be plugged into a neighborhood smart grid, with every house exchanging information with the others about power useage. Managing peak demand is a challenge for utilities – when it’s a scorcher, everyone turns on their air conditioning at the same time – so the agents learn which residents can tolerate higher temperatures and who is at home when. That allows the power company, through the agents, to turn
off the air conditioning in a handful of
houses for 15 minutes at a time to manage peak demand rather than implement rolling blackouts that take entire neighborhoods off the grid. As the share of electricity generated by solar and wind power grows, Platt expects demand for smart agents to rise as homes, businesses and utilities will need to manage increasingly complex systems to ensure that the cheapest and greenest energy is used a the right times.

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PG&E, one of the United States’ largest and greenest utilities, is working on technology that would allow plug-in hybrid cars to feed electricity to the power grid during peak demand, Green Wombat has learned. That would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by letting the utility to switch to Prius power when demand spikes rather than being forced to buy "dirty energy" from  coal-fired power plants.  In effect, a plug-in hybrid becomes a back-up generator. "Your car will be able to keep your home powered during a blackout," Roland Risser, PG&E’s director of customer energy efficiency, told Green Wombat last night at a dinner put on by the utility, Sun Microsystems and eBay to promote their environmental programs.

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Microsoft (MSFT) is working on an "environmental dashboard" to let companies monitor their energy and water use, waste management and other activities. "Global warming is a reality, it’s a top-of-mind issue for business decision makers, and it is not going away," wrote Microsoft exec James Utzschneider on a company discussion forum. "Companies will need systems to track and mitigate the impact they have on the environment." Utzschneider is the general manager for marketing for Microsoft Dynamics, which makes software to manage corporate finances, manufacturing, purchasing and planning, among other things. The environmental dashboard will collect relevant data from those activities and give executives a snapshot of their green bottom line so they can pinpoint ways to improve efficiency and minimize the impact on the environment.

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