Baby Don't Hertz Me

Several weeks ago, the professor who is supervising me for the summer and I were talking about technology. This is to be expected since he is an ECE professor and I am an ECE student. It started as a run of the mill conversation until we somehow managed to get on the topic of why my supervisor always needed to have an RSS feed on his mobile devices. He insisted on the RSS feed to have easy access to Slashdot. When my supervisor first mentioned Slashdot I wondered what it was. A quick google search and some reading showed that it is the eloquent sibling of Reddit. Not to bash Reddit too hard but it can sometimes be hard to wade through the heaping pile of garbage that can be collect in a Reddit thread. There isn't an up/down-voting system but the content is definitely of a higher quality than Reddit. You can usually tell a post is of a higher quality by the number of comments. The comment counter takes the visual place of the up-vote counter on Reddit. Slashdot may have a g...

Photo: Top of Diamond Head, Honolulu, Hawaii I was recently in Hawaii for my honeymoon with my dear, darling wife. Being an electrical engineering student I got thinking about how Hawaii would actually end up getting their electricity. Being a remote island would give some interesting When my plane was landing in Honolulu International Airport I was able to see something not that shocking; hundreds if not thousand of solar panels on building everywhere. Both residential and commercial building were completely loaded with solar panels. Being in a sunny tropical location I was less than surprised. Once we had gotten all settled in to our hotel I decided to start looking at what options the islands had except for solar. I was expecting maybe some geothermal since they are a volcano-ridden island. My expectation of their main power source was nuclear. Some research showed me that they are getting the majority of their power from petroleum (+80%) but have more and more solar being ...

Smart grid? What is it? The IQ of the power systems going up? The grid becoming sentient? I would vaguely say yes to the last two questions. Smart grid is at least at a very high level "making the electrical grid smarter". By "smarter" what is really means is more efficient, but smart grid sounds cooler than "more-efficient grid" so the choice makes sense. One problem with power distribution and really any public service that needs large scale, large distance distribution is peak needs. Say we only need an average of 100 MW for a region however we only need 10 MW between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm but we need 200 MW at 8:00 am when everybody wants to take a shower with hot water. The power company will need to be able to provide 200 MW of power or risk customers going out of service. During that peak time many people may be trying to do additional activities that require power that can be done at any given time. For example somebody puts on laundry bef...