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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2015
From the Americas
Ms Miller noted that Watson, which already culls documents
for scientists, keeps on polishing its résumé. Last year
it began advising military veterans on such complex life
decisions as where to live and which insurance to buy. Now
IBM is trying to teach Watson emotional intelligence.
The company says its prize invention is not replacing
workers but rather assisting them, by enabling them to be
more productive in new types of jobs. Marc Andreessen,
a venture capitalist and an inventor of the Web browser,
would appear to concur in the IBM view.
Mr Andreessen believes that what we are seeing is the latest
chapter in the story of economic development over the last
200 years. He told Ms Miller: “Just as most of us today have
jobs that weren’t even invented 100 years ago, the same will
be true 100 years from now.”
 But Ms Miller observed that it will be years before we
know what happens to the people whose jobs Watson is
learning to do. And millions of Americans are out of work
now.
“The Upshot,” the Times blog in which Ms Miller’s article
appeared, always concludes with a summary. She wrote:
“Not even the people who spend their days making
and studying new technology say they understand
the economic and societal effects of the new digital
revolution.”
Energy
Until electrical appliances can take
orders from the new meters, the ‘smart
grid’ in the USA has got the cart before
the horse
“It is a strategy that will become increasingly important as
more wind turbines and solar panels are connected, and
produce electricity without any relationship to the level of
demand.”
The strategy cited by energy reporter Matthew L Wald of the
New York Times is the switch to the so-called smart grid,
which enables the new meters in tens of millions of USA
households to “talk” directly to the electric company.
The meters can record use by the hour, adjusting the price
as the market changes and notifying the customer of the
best time to buy energy.
The goal, of course, is to reduce demand during peak
hours, shifting consumption to periods when cheaper,
cleaner electricity is available. The reasoning is that, as
prices rise on summer afternoons or fall in the middle of the
night, consumers will learn to tailor their electricity usage –
charging an electric car, or running a dishwasher or washing
machine – during times of lower prices.
But this is not happening. Experts consulted by Mr Wald say
that exploitation of the capabilities of the new meters still
lies many years away, despite billions in federal subsidies
that have helped finance the innovation.
In the view of the analysts, most customers and public
service commissions are simply not ready for the change
to what is known as dynamic pricing, which is intended
to benefit the whole system – customers and utilities
alike. (“Power Savings of Smart Meters Prove Slow to
Materialise,” 5th December)
The problem is that the electric appliances able to
automatically take signals from the meter are not yet
available, leaving it up to the customer to manually manage
energy consumption.
“The smart meter giving people real-time access to price
information is not going to make them get up in the middle
of the night and turn their dishwasher on,” John P Hughes,
the vice president for technical affairs at the Electricity
Consumers Resource Council, an industrial-user consumer
group, told the Times . “Getting the enabling technology to
do that is going to take a long time.”
 Illinois has about 25,000 households on smart meters,
less than one per cent of those eligible, according to
CEO Anne Evens of Elevate Energy, which administers
the programme for two utilities. One customer who takes
the time and trouble to utilise the programme to utmost
advantage reported an estimated savings of $15 to
$20 a month. Her typical electric bill is $110.
This customer, whose 122-year-old house is in River
Forest, ten miles west of Lake Michigan, told Mr Wald:
“You try to do the right thing for the environment and
your pocketbook, keeping both in mind.”
Technology
A milestone in the utilisation of focused
sunlight results in the highest efficiency
yet for conversion into electricity
Scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW)
have succeeded in converting over 40 per cent of the
sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest
such efficiency ever reported. Results of outdoor tests
in Sydney were independently confirmed by the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory at its outdoor test facility in
the USA.
“We used commercial solar cells but in a new way, so these
efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar
industry,” Dr Mark Keevers, who managed the project, told
R&D Magazine. (“Researchers Set World Record in Solar
Energy Efficiency,” 8th December)
A key element of the UNSW design is the use of a custom
optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight normally wasted
by tower-mounted commercial solar cells and convert
it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells
themselves ever could. Such filters transmit particular
wavelengths of light while reflecting others.
The work was funded by the Australian Renewable Energy
Agency and supported by the Australia–US Institute for
Advanced Photovoltaics.