What is a Virtual Power Plant?

Brought to my attention ... 

Virtual Power Plant   from www.next-kraftwerke.com

How to Network Distributed Energy Resources

A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is a network of decentralized, medium-scale power generating units as well as flexible power consumers and storage systems. Learn more about the purpose of this network and the technology that powers our VPP.

What is the Objective of a Virtual Power Plant?

Depending on the particular market environment, VPPs can accomplish a whole range of tasks. In general, the objective is to network distributed energy resources such as wind farms, solar parks, and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units, in order to monitor, forecast, optimize and trade their power. This way, fluctuations in the generation of renewables can be balanced by ramping up and down power generation and power consumption of controllable units. But the VPP not only helps stabilizing the power grids. It also creates the preconditions for integrating renewable energies into the markets. Individual small plants can in general not provide balancing services or offer their flexibility on the power exchanges. This is because their generation profile varies too strongly or they simply do not meet the minimum bid size of the markets. By aggregating the power of several units, a VPP can deliver the same service and redundancy and subsequently trade on the same markets as large central power plants or industrial consumers .... '

Could Bamboo be the next Source of Renewable Energy?

 Worked with Bamboo in a Florida planting, it is an amazing stuff, But Never thought of it in this way.

Could bamboo be the next source of renewable energy?

by Wiley. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

An article in GCB Bioenergy describes why bamboo may be an attractive resource in efforts to develop environmentally friendly renewable energy to replace fossil fuels.

The authors note that bamboo grows rapidly, absorbs carbon dioxide, and releases large amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere. They describe various processes—such as fermentation and pyrolysis—that can be performed to convert its raw material into bioethanol, biogas, and other bioenergy products. A tool with limitations is currently available for selecting the most appropriate bamboo species for different bioenergy production processes.

"We conducted a review of energy conversion methods for bamboo biomass and found that bioethanol and biochar are the primary products obtained," said first author Zhiwei Liang, of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Science.

"Since the chemical composition of bamboo varies across different species, future research efforts should focus on gathering a more extensive collection of quantitative data for selecting species advantageous for minimizing biomass pre-treatment time and cost."

The Promise and Difficulty of Geothermal Energy

 Have a long time interest in Geothermal Energy.  Seen it in successful operation in Iceland.  I see that Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has a good state of the technology view of this effort in Youtube at:  https://youtu.be/l6UGpaKnkS0 

Sabine Hossenfelder  @SabineHossenfelder  

37,633 views  Feb 18, 2023  #science

Also, Check out Brian Keating's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrianKeating 

Sign up for Brian's Newsletter here: http://briankeating.com/list

There is a lot of energy right under our feet, a relic from Earth's hot past as a ball of plasma. But how much can geothermal energy realistically do for us? What technologies are currently being pursued, what are the risks, and is it even carbon neutral? In this video we have collected all the relevant facts and numbers for you.

The footage of Staufen at the beginning of the video comes from Tom Scott's video that you can watch in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgle...  

Topics:

00:00 Intro

00:53 How Much Geothermal Energy is There?

06:37 What are the Challenges?

13:08 What Can New Technology Do?

16:07 What Are the Risks?

19:51 Summary

20:21 Into The Impossible With Brian Keating

Four Themes Shaping the Future of the Stormy European Power Market

Euro Energy details in play  ... 

Four themes shaping the Future of the Stormy European Power Market

January 27, 2023 | Article    in McKinsey

By Markus Schülde,  Xavier Veillard  and  Alexander Weiss 

Demand for electricity in Europe is surging at a time when supplies are disrupted. To adapt to the market’s uncertainty and rising prices, players will have to be clear-eyed about what’s ahead.

The past year has been a tumultuous one for European energy markets. After experiencing extreme volatility and all-time highs little more than a year ago,1 power prices across the continent rose to a nearly unfathomable level last fall. Wholesale prices of both electricity and natural gas nearly quadrupled from previous records in the third quarter of 2022 compared with 2021, creating concerns for skyrocketing energy costs for consumers and businesses (Exhibit 1). Prices have since fallen unexpectedly, thanks in part to warm winter weather.

Such volatility highlights the structural challenges Europe faces as it seeks to transition its energy system away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels. At a time when these decarbonization efforts are boosting electricity demand across Europe, the market is reeling from unprecedented supply constraints. The war in Ukraine, disruptions to nuclear facilities in France, and low output from hydroelectric plants have combined to significantly reduce the continent’s dispatchable power—electricity that can be easily switched on and off. Primarily driven by drought, hydro output was down by 19 percent between January and September 2022 across Europe, compared with the same period in 2021.2 In France, where 32 of the country’s 56 reactors were down for maintenance in September, nuclear energy output has declined by 14 percent over the same period (Exhibit 2).3 Even more destabilizing is the dwindling supply of Russian gas. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied 30 percent of Europe’s natural gas, a resource that exerts a large influence on electricity prices and is a mainstay of the continent’s power mix. That proportion dropped to 15 to 20 percent in 2022 and is likely to decline further this year..... ' 

Floating Solar Farms

Alternative energy connections for remote grids.

Could floating solar farms survive out at sea?  on the BBC

Getting electricity to all of Indonesia's islands is challenging    By Emma Woollacott, Technology of Business reporter   Indonesia is a nation of more than 10,000 islands, so supplying the whole country with electricity is a huge challenge.

More than a million people are not connected to the electricity grid at all.

"Those people who don't have electricity are living on remote islands, so in this situation it's hard to connect a cable to them and it's hard to install other expensive solutions such as wind turbines," says Luofeng Huang, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Cranfield University.

Solar power is one option to provide those islands with energy. It has become much cheaper in recent decades - the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that it is becoming the cheapest option for new electricity power plants.

But solar farms take up lots of space - space that might be better used for housing, farming and business.  So scientists and engineers are working on ways to install solar panels on the ocean surface, providing power to those living onshore nearby.

"Floating solar is very convenient because it can just be put on top of the water, and if you need more electricity you can put on more solar panels," says Mr Huang.

Floating solar is already in use at a number of sites around the world, but on lakes, rather than the sea...'  

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

Listened to the report on the Nuclear Fusion testing Breakthrough this past week by the DOE and Lawrence Livermore Labs (LLNL), More to follow. Here is a presentation to the press and panel discussion.

https://youtu.be/Cmzep3YaRNI

Panel Discussion: Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

On December 5 2022, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This historic, first-of-its kind achievement will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy .... ' 

Energy Harvesting from 5G

Requirements to run IOT Systems. 

Energy harvesting: energy-autonomous IoT communication in 5G networks

Press release / November 09, 2022

Minimal vibrations, temperature differences and even light can be used to generate power for small electronic systems. At Booth B4/258 of the electronica 2022 trade show, Fraunhofer researchers will demonstrate how 5G radio modules with higher energy consumption can now be powered autonomously through energy harvesting — without the use of batteries and cables.

A piezoelectric vibration converter supplies energy to sensors used in a building condition monitoring system. © Kurt Fuchs / Fraunhofer IIS

Sensors are key elements of the Internet of Things (IoT). They collect information, for example, about the condition of a machine or an infrastructure, process it and pass it on. The numerous sensors can obtain the required energy from batteries or via a cable connection. Fraunhofer researchers have now found a way to harvest enough energy to operate these sensors using vibrations from machines, equipment or buildings, as well as from temperature differences between pipes, lines or valves, and the environment.

“Powering a sensor node through energy harvesting technology makes it independent from other energy supplies. This saves the cost arising from energy-storage devices, such as a batteries, and eliminates the maintenance effort required for battery replacement. It also makes cable installations redundant,” says Dr. Peter Spies from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Nuremberg, explaining the advantages. The autonomous sensors are used for data collection and transmission, e.g., for the condition monitoring of machines, buildings or bridges, as well as for smart metering systems.

Spies and his team have been researching for some time how and where energy harvesting technologies can be optimized and deployed. Due to the rise in energy prices, their field of research is rapidly gaining relevance, and inquiries from industry are piling up. Their latest development is a so-called NarrowBand IoT module that collects and transmits utility data in a 5G network. To ensure that the modules and sensors can be operated energy independently, they were specially measured and optimized for energy consumption. This opens up new possibilities for autonomously powering not only LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) but also other radio systems with higher energy consumption and more advanced functionalities, such as bidirectional communication. The systems could then also be operated in a public network.

At the electronica 2022 trade show, held from November 15-18 in Munich, Fraunhofer IIS will be using the NarrowBand IoT module and a mioty® radio sensor to show how these sensors can be operated entirely without cables or batteries using a thermo-electric generator or a vibration converter. Also on display will be a smart screw connection whose preload force can be monitored remotely thanks to energy-autonomous sensor technology. This means that loose screws should no longer pose a safety risk to bridges, machines or buildings in the future.  ... ' 

Cemvitafactory Producing Carbon Neutral Hydrogen

For extraction of carbon neutral hydrogen from oil drilling wells: 

Brought to my attention:   https://www.cemvitafactory.com/

'Gold Hydrogen'

Gold Hydrogen is a novel source of carbon neutral hydrogen produced from depleted oil reservoirs that are ready for plug and abandonment, extending the life of wells that would otherwise be a significant burden. Gold hydrogen is produced biologically and in the subsurface.  Full PDF    ...

More efforts underway described at link  ... 

(If you have thoughts on this effort,  comment or email me)

Ai with Less Energy

 Smaller Devices

New Chip Expands the Possibilities for AI    Allison Whitten  in Quanta Magazine

An energy-efficient chip called NeuRRAM fixes an old design flaw to run large-scale AI algorithms on smaller devices, reaching the same accuracy as wasteful digital computers.

Artificial intelligence algorithms cannot keep growing at their current pace. Algorithms like deep neural networks — which are loosely inspired by the brain, with multiple layers of artificial neurons linked to each other via numerical values called weights — get bigger every year. But these days, hardware improvements are no longer keeping pace with the enormous amount of memory and processing capacity required to run these massive algorithms. Soon, the size of AI algorithms may hit a wall.

And even if we could keep scaling up hardware to meet the demands of AI, there’s another problem: running them on traditional computers wastes an enormous amount of energy. The high carbon emissions generated from running large AI algorithms is already harmful for the environment, and it will only get worse as the algorithms grow ever more gigantic.

One solution, called neuromorphic computing, takes inspiration from biological brains to create energy-efficient designs. Unfortunately, while these chips can outpace digital computers in conserving energy, they’ve lacked the computational power needed to run a sizable deep neural network. That’s made them easy for AI researchers to overlook.

That finally changed in August, when Weier Wan, H.-S. Philip Wong, Gert Cauwenberghs and their colleagues revealed a new neuromorphic chip called NeuRRAM that includes 3 million memory cells and thousands of neurons built into its hardware to run algorithms. It uses a relatively new type of memory called resistive RAM, or RRAM. Unlike previous RRAM chips, NeuRRAM is programmed to operate in an analog fashion to save more energy and space. While digital memory is binary — storing either a 1 or a 0 — analog memory cells in the NeuRRAM chip can each store multiple values along a fully continuous range. That allows the chip to store more information from massive AI algorithms in the same amount of chip space.

As a result, the new chip can perform as well as digital computers on complex AI tasks like image and speech recognition, and the authors claim it is up to 1,000 times more energy efficient, opening up the possibility for tiny chips to run increasingly complicated algorithms within small devices previously unsuitable for AI like smart watches and phones.

Researchers not involved in the work have been deeply impressed by the results. “This paper is pretty unique,” said Zhongrui Wang, a longtime RRAM researcher at the University of Hong Kong. “It makes contributions at different levels — at the device level, at the circuit architecture level, and at the algorithm level.”  .... ' 

Diesel Shortages Loom

Watching the supply chain: 

US diesel supplier warns companies to prepare for shortages, higher prices for consumers

Alexandra RossOctober 31, 2022  in LocalToday.News

Josh Yoder, owner of Yoder Farms, says he spends $1,500 a day on a tractor while diesel costs are skyrocketing.

Fuel supplier Mansfield Energy is taking steps to prepare for a diesel shortage on the East Coast of the United States and is issuing an advisory to companies relying on the fuel to plan rather than panic.

Last week, Mansfield Energy hoisted a red flag on the impending diesel fuel shortage in the US southeastern region, speculating that it could be due to “weak pipeline ship economies” and historically low reserve supply.

NEW JERSEY, USA – MAY 11: An aerial view of the Phillips 66 Oil Refinery is seen on May 11, 2022 in Linden, New Jersey, United States. () (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)

On a normal day, East Coast markets stockpiled 50 million barrels, but less than 25 million barrels are available right now.

Also read: US diesel supplier warns companies to prepare for shortages, higher prices for consumers

“A tight supply of diesel will drive up prices, which will eventually make it too expensive for some people,” the company said in a press release on Monday. “High prices will lower demand enough to balance it with limited supply.”

FUEL COMPANY ISSUES DIESEL SHORTAGE WARNING, SAYS ‘RAPID DEVELOPMENT’ CONDITIONS

Mansfield warned consumers may feel pain at the pump in the US economy, but supply will still be available for businesses that rely on diesel to operate.

“That’s not to say there won’t be occasional situations where there’s a real physical shortage of product,” the company said. “Some cities could get by on diesel for a few days, at least at the terminal level. But the fuel supply chain is dynamic and suppliers will join forces to fill supply gaps.” ... ' 

Duke Energy Smart Healing Grids

Been following this for some time, impressive results so far.  Much more to be done. 

 Duke Energy Florida's smart-thinking grid improves response, power restoration for customers during Hurricane Ian

Smart, self-healing technology in Florida helped to automatically restore more than 160,000 customer outages during powerful storm

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Oct. 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As Hurricane Ian made its way across Florida, Duke Energy's grid improvements were already on the job helping to combat power outages from the storm.

Smart, self-healing technology helped to automatically restore more than 160,000 customer outages and saved nearly 3.3 million hours (nearly 200 million minutes) of total lost outage time.

"Hurricane Ian is a strong reminder of the importance of grid hardening and storm preparedness to help keep the lights on for our customers," said Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president. "Self-healing technology is just one of many grid improvements that Duke Energy is making to avoid outages, restore service faster and increase reliability for our customers."

Much like the GPS in your car can identify an accident ahead and reroute you around the incident to keep you on your way, self-healing technology is like a GPS for the grid. The technology can quickly identify power outages and alternate energy pathways to restore service faster for customers when an outage occurs.

Additionally, self-healing technology provides a smart tool to assist crews in the field with power restoration after a major storm like Ian, helping reduce outage impacts and freeing up resources t help restore power in other locations.

Three days after Hurricane Ian exited the state, Duke Energy Florida wrapped up restoration of approximately 1 million customers. This progress enabled the company to deploy more than 550 Duke Energy workers from throughout Florida, as well as contractors from across the country, to help restore power for Lee County Electric Cooperative customers.

Crews worked in Cape Coral and Pine Island, one of the hardest-hit areas in the storm's path and completed power restoration for the majority of customers on Pine Island within approximately one week after arriving to the island.

Prior to Ian in 2022, smart, self-healing technology had helped avoid nearly 250,000 extended customer outages in Florida, saving around 285,000 hours (17.1 million minutes) of total lost outage time.

Duke Energy currently serves around 59% of customers in Florida with self-healing capabilities on its main power distribution lines, with a goal of serving around 80% over the next few years.

Self-healing technology video.

Self-healing grid system animation video.

Duke Energy Florida

Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 10,300 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.

Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America's largest energy holding companies. Its electric utilities serve 8.2 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and collectively own 50,000 megawatts of energy capacity. Its natural gas unit serves 1.6 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. The company employs 28,000 people.  ... ' 

Ethereum Completes Merge and Rehaul of Blockchain, Stock Falls

Will this be enough?   

Ethereum Merge Brings 'Sell-the-Fact' Price Move in Crypto Markets  in CoinDesk

The price stability that prevailed after Ethereum's shift to a more energy-efficient "proof-of-stake" network suddenly evaporated as ether slid 9.1%, its worst day since late August.

By Jocelyn Yang, Omkar Godbole

The price of ether (ETH) tumbled suddenly in cryptocurrency markets Thursday, ending a stretch of price stability that prevailed in the hours after the Ethereum blockchain completed its historic shift to a more energy-efficient "proof-of-stake" blockchain, known as the Merge.

At press time, the second-largest cryptocurrency was down 9.1% to $1,489, its biggest daily decline since Aug. 26. By contrast, bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency, was down only about 2% on the day. The CoinDesk Market Index was down about 4%.

The sudden price dump looks like a "buy-the-rumor, sell-the-fact" response, said Riyad Carey, a research analyst at crypto data firm Kaiko.

“There is still a lot of leverage in ETH markets, so volatility should be expected and will probably be welcomed by traders who watched the Merge go by without much of a move up or down,” Carey told CoinDesk in a written note. “We’ve also seen market depth decrease and spreads increase, so that will likely factor into larger price movements.”

The 'Ethereum Merge trade' unwinds 

CoinDesk reported earlier on blockchain data showing that investors were sending ETH to crypto exchanges in droves – often taken as a sign that holders are getting ready to dump. The cumulative inflow of $1.2 billion was the largest in six months.

By most accounts, the Ethereum blockchain appears to have dodged major technological snafus that might have led to a much deeper price crash. ... ' 

Nanomagnets, Wine and AI

 Interesting application with energy implications.

Nanomagnets Can Choose a Wine, Could Quench AI's Thirst for Energy

By National Institute of Standards and Technology. July 22, 2022

Scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, the University of Maryland, and Western Digital Technologies have developed artificial intelligence (AI) devices that could consume less energy and operate faster than other hardware. The researchers programmed a neural network from magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) and trained it to taste wines virtually.

The team used 148 of 178 wines produced from three grape varieties, with each wine possessing 13 properties; each property was assigned a value between 0 and 1 for the network to appraise when distinguishing between wines. The network then "tasted" a dataset that included 30 previously unknown wines, yielding a 95.3% success rate and committing just two errors on the untasted wines.

The results indicate an array of MTJ devices could potentially be scaled up and assembled into new AI systems.

From National Institute of Standards and Technology

View Full Article     

An Electric Connection: Homes Helping the Grid

Appliance connections.

Home Helping the Grid.  By Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. May 26, 2022

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Oklahoma have invented technology that could reduce strain on the national power grid by controlling residential appliances more efficiently.

PNNL's Michael Brambley said the project sought an affordable, easy-to-install system that residents control, and which households are incentivized to adopt through "a more favorable electricity rate."

The researchers designed the system with smart technology firms pecobee and Shifted Energy, to transform electric resistance furnaces, electric resistance water heaters, heat pumps, and air conditioners into smart appliances that are connected to the grid and managed on demand.

Brambley explained that the retrofitable system "is designed for the millions of homes that could benefit from this method but don't prefer or can't afford to buy smart appliances."

From Pacific Northwest National Laboratory  Full article. 

Algae Powered ARM Chips for Low Energy

Note low energy specification.  How practical at this time?

Scientists Create Algae Computer Powered by Photosynthesis    By The Verge, May 17, 2022

Scientists have used algae to power a low-energy computer chip for six months.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge sealed a colony of cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae, inside a metal enclosure the size of an AA battery. The unit was then left on a windowsill, according to New Scientist, where the algae photosynthesized, generating a tiny current of electricity that powered an ARM Cortex-M0+ chip.

The system is only a proof of concept, but its creators hope algae-powered chips could be used in future Internet of Things devices. They say the advantage of using algae over traditional batteries or solar power is that it has a smaller environmental impact and could potentially provide continuous power.

"The growing Internet of Things needs an increasing amount of power, and we think this will have to come from systems that can generate energy, rather than simply store it like batteries," Professor Christopher Howe, joint senior author of the paper, said in a press statement. "Our photosynthetic device doesn't run down the way a battery does because it's continually using light as the energy source."

From The Verge

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Fundamental Energy Transitions

But could take more or less based on the fundamental breakthroughs required.

Fundamental Energy Transitions Can Take a Century Electricity’s benefits were obvious, but it still took a lifetime to dominate,    By VACLAV SMIL   in IEEE Spectrum

ONE HUNDRED AND forty years ago, Thomas Edison began generating electricity at two small coal-fired stations, one in London (Holborn Viaduct), the other in New York City (Pearl Street Station). Yet although electricity was clearly the next big thing, it took more than a lifetime to reach most people. Even now, not all parts of the world have easy access to it. Count this slow rollout as one more reminder that fundamental systemic transitions are protracted affairs.

Such transitions tend to follow an S-shaped curve: Growth rates shift from slow to fast, then back to slow again. I will demonstrate this by looking at a few key developments in electricity generation and residential consumption in the United States, which has reliable statistics for all but the earliest two decades of the electric period.   .... ' 

Dandelion Energy

More interesting energy solutions of note.  Note connection to drones.  Practical uses?

 Battery-Free Devices Float on the Wind like Dandelion Seeds

University of Washington News, Sarah McQuate, March 16, 2022

University of Washington (UW) researchers have developed a tiny battery-free device that can be blown by wind currents, like dandelion seeds. The sensor-conveying devices can travel up to 100 meters (roughly 328 feet). Once they land, solar panels power their electronics, which can share sensor data wirelessly up to 60 meters (196 feet) away via backscattering. The devices feature bristles that bend inward, while a ring structure adds stiffness and slows their descent. "Our prototype suggests that you could use a drone to release thousands of these devices in a single drop," said UW's Shyam Gollakota. "They'll all be carried by the wind a little differently, and basically you can create a 1,000-device network with this one drop." 

Watson Addressing Grid Failures

 Important domain to cover.  

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Tackles Power Grid Failures with AI  in Datanami   By Jaime Hampton

Next time your power stays on during a severe weather event, you may have a machine learning model to thank.

Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab are using artificial intelligence to solve power grid failures. The manager of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Jie Chen, and his colleagues have developed a machine learning model that works to analyze data collected from hundreds of thousands of sensors located across the U.S. power grid.

The sensors, components of what is known as synchrophasor technology, compile vast amounts of real-time data related to electric current and voltage in order to monitor the health of the grid and locate anomalies that could cause outages.

Synchrophasor analysis requires intensive computational resources due to the size and real-time nature of the data streams the sensors produce. There can be difficulty with quickly extracting data for anomaly detection, or the “task of identifying unusual samples that significantly deviate from the majority of the data instances,” as defined in the researchers’ paper.

The ML model can be trained without annotated data on power grid anomalies, which is advantageous because much of the data collected by the sensors is unstructured.

“In the case of a power grid, people have tried to capture the data using statistics and then define detection rules with domain knowledge to say that, for example, if the voltage surges by a certain percentage, then the grid operator should be alerted. Such rule-based systems, even empowered by statistical data analysis, require a lot of labor and expertise. We show that we can automate this process and also learn patterns from the data using advanced machine-learning techniques,” said Chen in an MIT News article. .... '

Russian Energy Hacking Claimed

Energy being attacked? 

US charges four Russians over hacking campaign on energy sector

By Gordon Corera, Security correspondent, in BBC News

The US has charged four Russians government employees with cyber-attacks on the global energy sector. They are accused of targeting hundreds of companies and organisations in around 135 countries between 2012-2018.Their activities are said to have caused two separate emergency shutdowns at one facility in Saudi Arabia.  The conspiracy then allegedly attempted to hack the computers of a company that managed similar critical infrastructure entities in the US.  Some of the individuals are linked by the US indictment to the FSB, Russia's security service. The UK has also sanctioned a Russian defence organisation said to be linked to the attack.  ... ' 

Algae as Energy Source

 Had heard of this some time ago, is it reasonably useful? 

AI Predicts Algae Potential as Alternative Energy Source

By AgriLife Today, March 17, 2022

Scientists at Texas A&M AgriLife Research and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory used artificial intelligence to surpass a targeted level of productivity of algae as an alternative fuel source.

Relatively low yield has constrained algal biofuel's commercialization, with growth limitations induced by mutual shading and high harvest costs. "We overcome these challenges by advancing machine learning to inform the design of a semi-continuous algal cultivation to sustain optimal cell growth and minimize mutual shading," the scientists say in their published research.

The team employed a patented AI advanced learning model to forecast algae light penetration, growth, and optimal density by accommodating continual harvest via hydroponics. They realized a biomass yield of 43.3 grams per square meter per day, versus the latest DOE target range of 25 grams per square meter per day.

From AgriLife Today

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