read in connectedplanetonline.com by John McDonald

As CAT-iq offers ultra low power solutions for smart grid we found this article relevant for you.

Creating a smarter grid is the “checkered flag” our industry has been eyeing for years — long before the term “smart grid” was coined. We’ve developed the technology and assembled the pieces, but deployment has been confined to local exits from the slow lane.

Now, with stimulus funding and increasing consumer awareness, it’s time to move smart grid into the express lane. We have a phenomenal opportunity to accelerate smart grid deployment, and we’ll need a strategic road map in place to optimize the integration of smart technologies into our infrastructure. We also need to shift gears from traditional “siloed” processes to a strategic, holistic drive toward energy delivery.

Driving holistic strategies
The strategic road map to a smarter grid starts with open, collaborative strategies from key drivers of smart grid solutions.

Read the complete article.

John D. McDonald, P.E., is an IEEE Fellow and past president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES). He is also a member of IEC Technical Committee (TC) 57 and Working Groups (WGs) 3 and 10, the VP of Technical Activities for the U.S. National Committee (USNC) of CIGRE, and the past chair of the IEEE PES Substations Committee. Additionally, Mr. McDonald is the General Manager of Marketing for GE Energy T&D.

This Kit offers a relatively easy and cost-effective way for homeowners and renters to get the security benefits of Internet-connected home monitoring, including mobile alerts. Designed for quick and easy installation by the user (D-Link claims that the system can be installed from scratch in about 30 minutes, using pre-set default settings) the system connects using the broadband router in the home. Once installation is complete, in-home activities and security options can be remotely monitored and controlled through a personalized Web portal account at mydlink.com. Alerts from wireless sensors around the home are instantly relayed by text, e-mail and voice-call to system owner. It’s also possible to set up alerts for designated contacts, or for activities at certain times of day.

Once the Starter Kit is installed, the system can be expanded with a number of high-end features that are available as optional accessories, including infrared motion detection, door/window contacts, keypad, personalized key fobs, fire, carbon monoxide, and water leak detectors. The system can be used for low security applications too, such as letting working parents when their kids get home safely from school, or even monitoring pets during the day. A home video option is available with D-Link IP cameras which can capture and record events with remote access to the images available through the Web site or via mobile phones.

A green companion to the Home Monitor is the D-Link Home Energy Monitoring Starter Kit. According to D-Link this Kit lets consumers measure the energy consumption of all electrical appliances in the home, turning the Home Monitor into the ultimate smart energy 'Green Machine'. Once the Energy Monitor is installed and linked to the Home Monitoring Starter kit, consumers can use the MyDLink portal to program devices to power-down when the home is empty, helping reduce carbon emissions and reduce utility bills by saving electricity.

The energy monitoring kit is equipped with two power-usage sensor adapters (additional sensors may be purchased separately) that plug into the home's wall sockets near where the electrical appliances are located. By plugging the appliances directly into the kit's sensor adapters, users can automatically download energy consumption data to their personal mydlink.com Web page where they have access to real-time power usage levels; daily, weekly and monthly breakdowns; cost conversions and graphical analysis.

These two kits make a smart package for homeowners interested in upgrading their security and energy consumption options with one integrated and expandable solution.

Alcatel-Lucent’s research division, Bell Labs, spearheaded the launch of a global consortium of academics, operators and vendors on Monday, tasked with the remit of developing technologies capable of making the global communications network 1000 times more energy efficient than it is today.

At a launch event in London, the Green Touch initiative brought together boffins from industry, academia and government labs, and proposed to invent and deliver radical new approaches to energy efficiency that will sit at the heart of sustainable networks for decades to come.

Despite an absence of industrial peers on the founders’ roster, Bell Labs also issued an open invitation to all members of the tech and communications community to join the initiative.

Introducing the initiative, Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, said the end game of a thousand fold reduction is roughly equivalent to being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the internet, for three years using the same amount of energy that it currently takes to run them for a single day. But make no bones about it, this kind of shift requires a redesigning of the global network’s infrastructure components from the ground up.

Using the cars on road comparison, Gee Rittenhouse, vice president of research at Bell Labs and consortium lead, said that today’s global communications networks produce around 300m tonnes of carbon emissions over the course of a year – equivalent to 50 million cars on the road. At present, these emissions are being driven by the explosion in data usage, which, over the next decade is expected to rise significantly.

In order to combat this, Green Touch has set itself a five year agenda in which to come up with the enabling technologies to deliver this 1000 fold increase in energy efficiency, most of which will come from advancements in wireless (according to Rittenhouse if wireless wasn’t an issue here, energy efficiency could be increased by a factor of ten million).

But the main obstacle, apart from the fact these technologies have yet to be developed, will be getting the operator community on board – the companies buying this energy efficient kit.

This dilemma was acknowledged by Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, who said that the technologies developed will compete on price and performance and efficiency. “It will be affordable, but not so much that this change will happen overnight,” he said. “But ultimately it will be an and-and, not an or-or world.”

The founding members of the initiative include service providers AT&T, China Mobile, Portugal Telecom, Swisscom and Telefonica; academic research labs: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab (WSL), the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES); government and nonprofit research institutions the CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics, imec, The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA); and industrial labs Bell Labs, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), and Freescale Semiconductor.

Issued from a 3 euro carbon donation supplement added to each conference entry fee, the green donation will support ABAE, a leading environmental organisation in Portugal, where the 2010 FTTH Conference will be held. This non-profit organisation is dedicated to raising public awareness in matters of sustainable development and good environmental practices, themes that are firmly embedded in the FTTH Council Europe’s mission. The contribution will specifically support ABAE’s innovative ECO-Escolas project and its educational campaigns in 1.300 Portuguese schools.

The 7th FTTH Conference will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, on 24 and 25 February 2010, and more than 2.500 attendees are expected. Dedicated to a wide range of fibre-related topics such as regulatory and policy affairs, technical solutions and market environment, this edition of the landmark FTTH event will focus on fibre-enhanced content and services.

Four months before its opening, ANGA Cable, Europe’s leading Trade Fair and Congress for Cable, Broadband and Satellite is nearly fully booked. The organizer has received more than 300 exhibitor registrations – demand for floor space is higher than that of the previous year at the corresponding point in time. The registrations already account for more than 90 percent of the available floor space.

ANGA Cable Show will take place 4 - 6 May 2010 and comprises an exhibition and an international congress. The organizer, who is not tied to any exhibition site, has opted once again for the Cologne Fairground in 2010. In 2009 there were 383 exhibitors and more than 13,600 trade visitors from over 69 countries. 42 % of the visitors travelled to ANGA Cable from abroad.

The highlights of the congress which takes place alongside the exhibition are the German Strategy Summit and the International Broadband Summit. Participants will include top level representatives from Alcatel-Lucent, Cable Labs, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Eutelsat, Kabel Baden-Württemberg, Kabel Deutschland, Liberty Global, Motorola, NetCologne, ProSiebenSat.1, SES Astra, Unitymedia, YouSee, and ZDF. All 20 congress events will be translated simultaneously (German/English).

The FTTH Council Europe is urging world leaders to consider the potential of fibre-to-the-home in reducing carbon emissions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) to be held in Copenhagen, 7-18 December.
More than 180 countries will gather at this event to negotiate a new international treaty to tackle climate change. As noted by The Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change, an international organization representing business leaders: “The one thing we do not have is time.” That is why the FTTH Council Europe is stressing the fact that fibre-to-the-home is a future-proof technology that is ready to be deployed today, which has huge potential for reducing carbon emissions.

In 2008 the FTTH Council Europe commissioned a comprehensive study on the environmental impact of fibre-to-the-home deployment. The research, which was carried out by life-cycle assessment experts PricewaterhouseCoopers/Ecobilan, found conclusive evidence that fibre-to-the-home is a highly sustainable broadband technology with a lifetime of at least 30 years.

Savings could even be higher in many regions where roads and railways are overloaded and where municipalities are considering heavy, costly and environmentally unfriendly extensions of these facilities. Instead investment in FTTH facilities could be addressed: 1 million fibre-to-the-home users would lead to 30,000 fewer people commuting to work each day on average. Road works, hence CO2 emissions, could also be avoided. This is not taken into account in the studies.

The environmental benefits of fibre go beyond carbon emissions. The research also indicated that fibre deployment would have a positive impact on depletion of stratospheric ozone, atrophication of water resources, and a reduction in other forms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Simultaneously, many countries around the world are formulating strategies to boost their economies through universal access to high-speed broadband. The FTTH Council Europe believes that fibre-to-the-home can serve a double purpose: delivering a future-proof broadband infrastructure, while also helping nations, regions, municipalities, and operators to meet their carbon reduction objectives.

To find out more about the work of the FTTH Council Europe’s Sustainable Development Committee (SUDEFIB), and assess the environmental impact of fibre access networks using the web-based “FTTH Configurator”, visit www.sudefib.eu.