In India, home solar energy on a pay-as-you-go plan

Simpa Networks sells distributed energy solutions on a “progressive purchase” basis; customers make a small initial down payment for a solar energy system and then pre-pay for the service.

About a year ago we wrote about Nokero’s effort to replace kerosene with solar-powered light bulbs in the developing world, and recently we came across a like-minded initiative that takes such goals even further. Based in Bangalore, India, Simpa Networks has developed a new pricing model that aims to make household solar energy systems “radically affordable” to the 1.6 billion consumers around the world who currently have no access to electricity.

Simpa Networks is a venture-backed technology company aiming “to make modern energy simple, affordable, and accessible for everyone,” in the company’s own words. Toward that end, it sells distributed energy solutions on a “progressive purchase” basis; customers make a small initial down payment for a high-quality solar photovoltaic system and then pre-pay for the service, topping up their systems in small user-defined increments using a mobile phone. Powered by the Simpa Regulator — a tamper-proof, system-integrated microcontroller and user interface — and cloud-based software, the system ensures that once prepaid consumption is exhausted, the solar home system is temporarily disabled until another payment is made. Each payment, meanwhile, also counts towards the final purchase price. Once fully paid, the system produces clean energy, free and clear for the rest of the system’s expected 10-year useful life.

Now available for customers in Karnataka, India, Simpa Networks’ model is built upon proprietary risk mitigation technology, with investment opportunities for market rate and social investors, it says. Time to help expand clean energy access around the globe?
Website: www.simpanetworks.com

Source: Springwise

Des centrales électriques en orbite terrestre, c'est possible !

 D'après l'Académie internationale d'astronautique basée à Paris, des programmes spatiaux pourraient être mis en oeuvre d'ici 30 ans, dans le seul but de capter l'énergie solaire directement de l'espace, un moyen rentable selon elle de pourvoir aux besoins en énergie des terriens.

Le schéma élaboré par des scientifiques du monde entier met en scène des centrales électriques en orbite qui captent les rayons du soleil avant de les transmettre vers la terre. Ce procédé serait techniquement réalisable d'ici une décennie ou deux, rien qu'en se basant sur les technologies existantes en laboratoires.

Concrètement, le projet consisterait à lancer en orbite géostationnaire des satellites chargés de capter l'énergie du soleil et pourvus de bras articulés orientables. L'avantage majeur du système proposé réside dans le positionnement des différents satellites en orbite sur l'équateur qui bénéficient d'un ensoleillement maximal et permanent (24h sur 24h).

Chaque satellite réfléchirait ensuite l'énergie captée vers un dispositif maître, qui à son tour convertirait l'énergie concentrée en électricité pour après les transmettre vers la terre via un laser ou une antenne à micro-onde. Au final, des équipements au sol s'occuperaient de récupérer ces flux extraterrestres et de les injecter dans les réseaux électriques.

"Un projet pilote visant à démontrer la faisabilité de cette technologie est tout à fait envisageable grâce notamment aux lanceurs à bas coûts actuellement en cours de développement" a déclaré John Mankins, - ancien responsable Concept à la NASA -, qui a dirigé cette étude.

Toutefois, des obstacles existent avant d'arriver à une telle réalisation, le rapport citant pêle-mêle : la problématique des débris spatiaux, le manque d'études ciblées et le coût final de développement. C'est pourquoi le rapport recommande que les acteurs à la fois des secteurs publics et privés financent ensemble des études de viabilité.

Source : Enerzine

L'énergie des mers : futur champs de bataille

 Siemens, le géant industriel allemand a annoncé le 4 novembre dernier avoir porté à 45% sa participation dans la société "Marine Current Turbines (MCT)" basée à bristol, au Royaume-Uni et spécialisée dans les générateurs d'énergie marémotrice.

"Avec cette opération, Siemens renforce ses activités dans la production d'énergie marine. Nous allons développer activement la phase de commercialisation des engins novateurs de Marine Current", a déclaré Michael Axmann, directeur financier de la Division Solaire et Hydro du secteur Énergie chez Siemens.

L'énergie des océans connaît un fort taux de croissance au niveau mondial tirée par les engagements de réduction de CO2. Jusqu'en 2020, les experts prévoient une croissance à deux chiffres sur ce marché. De nouvelles estimations du potentiel mondial de production d'électricité utilisant des centrales marémotrices avancent le chiffre de 800 térawattheures (TWh) par an. A titre de comparaison, cela équivaudrait entre 3% et 4% de la consommation mondiale d'électricité.

MCT prévoit de présenter dans les prochains mois à des investisseurs 2 projets comprenant 8 mégawatts (MW) et 10 MW, respectivement le projet Kyle Rhea en Ecosse et celui d'Anglesey Skerries au Pays de Galles.

Par ailleurs, MCT a prévu d'installer un système marémotrice dans les infrastructures "FORCE" basées dans La baie de Fundy au Canada et a reçu un bail du Domaine Royal (Crown Estate) pour déployer 100 MW au large de Brough Ness, sur la pointe la plus méridionale des Iles Orkney en Ecosse.

MCT a déjà mis en place avec succès son premier démonstrateur d'envergure, le SeaGen, en Irlande du Nord à Strangford Lough. Depuis Novembre 2008, les deux turbines axiales du SeaGen, d'une capacité combinée de 1,2 MW, ont été reliées au réseau alimentant l'équivalent d'environ 1.500 foyers. A ce jour, le SeaGen aurait injecté sur le réseau plus de 2.7 GWh d'électricité !

Les hydroliennes génèrent de l'électricité en utilisant le courant des marées. La turbine 'SeaGen' est fixée sur une structure et est entraînée par le flux des marées avec un avantage clé : la puissance générée est prévisible dans le cycle des marées. Cette technologie est similaire à celle d'une éolienne comprenant des pales actionnées non pas par l'énergie éolienne, mais par le courant des marée. L'eau a une densité énergétiques de plus de 800 fois à celle du vent. Les turbines jumelles tournent avec un angle de 180 degrés afin de capter d'un façon optimale le courant des marées (direction + vitesse).

De son côté, le groupe Alstom - concurrent direct de Siemens - se prépare également à faire un plongeon dans l'énergie marémotrice l'année prochaine. Le groupe français est en train de construire un démonstrateur d'un mégawatt de puissance, utilisant une technologie sous licence du canadien Clean Current Power Systems. Lors d'une conférence à Bali le mois dernier, Philippe Gilson, directeur d'Alstom énergie des océans, a affirmé que son groupe prévoyait d'installer en 2012 sa turbine entièrement submersible de 20 mètres de haut dans la baie de Fundy (Nouvelle-Écosse).

Smart Grid Revolution? GE Launches Smart Grid as a Service

General Electric is taking the smart grid platform to the next level. Can it pay off at scale? Plus, 3G cellular and Consert join the project.

Here’s General Electric’s smart grid-as-a-service pitch. The city utility of Norcross, Ga. wants a smart grid, but doesn’t have the money to buy one for itself. GE’s Grid IQ Solutions as a Service will build it for a monthly fee, and then run it all from a giant cloud computing platform in Atlanta.

That, in a nutshell, is the project GE and the Atlanta suburb of Norcross, Ga. announcedlast week -- and it could mark the start of a new trend. GE hasn't said how much it's charging Norcross per month, or how many months it would take to deliver a profit on the project. But the more utilities GE signs up, the more economical -- or profitable -- the solution becomes.

That’s particularly true on the IT side of the budget. Most utilities don't want to have to buy the servers needed to run today’s smart grid, or to pay the salaries of the people you need to run it. But GE Energy is headquartered in Atlanta, and it has a lot of “computing horsepower” that it can shift around the region, said Mike Carlson, general manager of smart grid solutions for GE Energy. That could give Norcross and other Grid IQ service customers slices of the huge computing assets they only need every month, to process billing statements, say, or manage emergency response communications during a storm -- and let GE's experts manage it all.

Norcross expects to add about $1 per month to bills for the utility’s 4,200 customers to pay for the project, but they’ll get lower meter management costs, quicker outage management response and quicker restoration times in return, Carlson said. Though Norcross hasn’t approved the budget for future phases of the project, “It also sets them up for advanced energy management, like demand response capabilities, electric vehicle integration, and advanced distribution requirements," he said -- pretty much everything you’d expect the smart grid to connect to someday. Eventually, GE can hand the controls over to the utility after a while, or keep running the entire thing from its central command center.

This won't be the last time you hear the words "smart grid" and "service" put together. GTM Research predicts U.S. utilities will spend $8.5 billion from 2011 to 2015 on smart grid enterprise IT. Of course, much of that will be spent by big utilities doing multi-million meter projects, and many of them will choose to own their own IT, Carlson said. But even the biggest utilities are turning to the cloud to manage the flood of smart meter data coming at them -- take the 100-terabyte data management and warehousing project now underway with Southern California Edison, Itron, IBM, SAP and Teradata.

Indeed, the cloud could theoretically do everything a utility-owned IT can do. This isn’t a fact lost onbig IT vendors like IBM and Microsoft that are busy designing “smart city” IT platforms. Nor is it lost on GE’s key grid competitors, such as Schneider Electric, which has bought software vendors Telvent and Summit Energy to build up the IT brains behind its power equipment muscle, or ABB, which bought power industry software vendor Ventyx for $1 billion last year, to name two examples. Indeed, Schneider has launched a cloud-based energy efficiency services offering, though for power users (buildings and data centers) rather than utilities.

But GE’s monthly fee-for-service version of smart grid is uncommon right now. Who’s buying? GE is starting with Electric Cities of Georgia, the 51-member municipal utility group that brokered the services deal between GE and Norcross, and stands ready to broker more deals, Carlson said.

All in all, about 3,000 small to mid-size utilities have about 35 million meters that need to be smartened up at some point, Carlson said. Beyond Norcross, GE is testing its services platform in a handful of pilot projects, he added, though he wouldn’t name them.

Municipal and cooperative utilities are a big and relatively untapped market. GTM Research polled nearly 100 municipal utilities this year and found that 40 percent expected smart meters to reach most of their customers in the next three years, but more than one-third of them expected that to take a decade or more. GE isn’t the only smart grid vendor eyeing the market, however -- SAIC's smart metering service offering, IBM’s smarter cities platform and Lockheed Martin’s demand response platform for electric co-ops are three potential competitors. 

Investor-owned utilities are less likely to be interested in a services model, since they get to recover all their capital costs in rate cases argued before relatively politically insulated state regulatory commissions. City utilities and co-ops, on the other hand, have to get rate increases past a city council or an irate faction of members, and have to finance big capital projects with bonds or loans, Carlson noted.

Of course, each utility’s smart grid needs will be different. In Norcross, GE is working with startup Consert, which will offer real-time home energy sensors and controls over a 3G cellular network, Carlson said. That’s a big project for Consert, which won a GE Ecomagination investment last year and is also backed by Qualcomm and Verizon.

“Consert and 3G are part of our go-to-market strategy,” Carlson said, though he made it clear GE would also support mesh networking and other common smart meter communications technologies. Still, it’s a good plug for cellular smart grid, as well as an interesting example of one smart grid platform making use of an existing communications system, rather than building its own. GE hasn’t picked a cellular provider for the project yet, Carlson said.

Source: GreenTechMedia

iZettle, Europe’s answer to Square, is out of beta

Stockholm-based iZettle — a company that is building a payments system not entirely unlike the much-heralded Square — is taking a big step forwards today by coming out of beta.
The system, which consists of a plug-in device and app, goes live today, with approval from Visa, MasterCard and Europay, and focus on helping small merchants and individuals — many who don’t currently take card payments.
The full commercial launch only covers Sweden right now, but now it’s officially up and running after a trial period that started in August, it’s ready to grow quickly. The company recently took $11 million of funding to help exactly that expansion.
According to MasterCard’s Matt Taraldsson, the card provider will be helping it roll out across the continent soon.

“Since its launch in Sweden in August iZettle has proven to be a big success, and has clearly shown that small businesses and individuals appreciate the convenience and security of taking card payments anytime, anywhere. We are proud that iZettle continues to build on MasterCard’s expertise – and as they now initiate their commercial launch across Europe we think it’s great news that millions of merchants for the first time will be able to take card payments”

There’s clearly an opportunity here, and Square has been making a lot of noise — not least because of CEO Jack Dorsey’s zen-like appearance at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference last week.
But no doubt skeptics will no doubt look on iZettle as little more than a clone of Square: yet another example of a European company copying an American rival in order to corner the market first. Pricing, for example, fits the bill: just like Square, iZettle takes a 2.75 percent cut of each transaction for processing. But iZettle also takes a fee of €0.16 (22 US cents) per transaction on top, making it slightly more expensive to use.

The clone argument is a little unfair to iZettle, however, since it has had to build an entirely different technology for processing payments. Its gadget is slightly larger than Square’s box, and it’s one which plugs into the bottom of an iPhone, rather than the headphone jack at the top. This isn’t just a matter of looking different for the sake of it, however: it’s practical.

The simple magnetic swipe system used by most American cards (and therefore by Square) is pretty antiquated to Europeans, who largely used chip-based PIN entry to verify their purchases.
That means payment devices need to have a card inserted into them, rather than using a quick swipe-and-sign approach. It also means, theoretically, that the services are more secure by design: something that could be useful as iZettle looks to expand into new territories.

The bigger point is that both companies are working to change the payments industry, one of the largest markets around, and one of the least dynamic. Yes, there are plenty of similarities between the two — but there’s more than enough room for several players right now.

Source: Gigaom

Sharp : cellule photovoltaïque avec une efficacité de conversion de 36,9%

http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/68143.htm

L'entreprise japonaise d'électronique Sharp Corporation a développé une cellule photovoltaïque possédant une efficacité de conversion de 36,9%, ce qui constitue un record mondial pour des cellules fonctionnant sans concentrateur de lumière. Cette avancée est possible grâce à la structure en trois couches de la cellule photovoltaïque.

Ce type de cellules photovoltaïques multijonction utilise différentes couches de photoabsorption : une première couche d'arséniure d'indium-gallium, une seconde couche d'arséniure de gallium au milieu, puis une couche d'arséniure d'indium-gallium pour la couche supérieure. Cette structure permet d'atteindre à la fois une absorption maximale et une efficacité de conversion très importante. Elle est utilisé pour les satellites spatiaux.

Cette avancée est le fruit de recherches engagées depuis l'an 2000 par Sharp. En effet, la compagnie avait déployé des efforts conséquents de recherche dans le développpement de cellules photovoltaïques tri-couches. En 2009, Sharp avait atteint une efficacité de conversion de 35,8%, grâce à la présence d'une couche inférieure d'arséniure d'indium-gallium. Sharp annonce avoir atteint cette efficacité de conversion grâce à la réduction de la résistance des jonctions entre les couches de cellules photovoltaïques en série.

Ce projet a été réalisé en partenariat avec l'agence NEDO [1], dans le cadre du thème de recherche "Recherche et Développement des cellules photovoltaïques innovantes" et le record d'efficacité de conversion a été enregistré et confirmé par l'AIST [2]. Dans l'avenir la compagnie prévoit de réaliser des couches photovoltaïques ultrafines sous forme d'un film, dans l'espoir de rendre possible la fabrication de cellules photovoltaïques flexibles.

Un projet de démonstration va être monté en 2012. L'entreprise vise l'utilisation des nouvelles cellules photovoltaïques sur les panneaux solaires des satellites. La commercialisation est annoncée pour 2014-2015, de possibles applications dans le domaine automobile sont également envisagées.

--

[1] NEDO : New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization

[2] AIST : National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

ORIGINE : BE Japon numéro 593 (10/11/2011) - Ambassade de France au Japon / ADIT - http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/68143.htm

In Prague subways, virtual grocery stores enable shopping by phone

Through a partnership between P&G and Mall.cz, Prague’s four busiest subway stations now include virtual grocery stores that offer shopping by phone for delivery at home. 

 

Regular Springwise readers may recall our coverage of Tesco’s effort to offer grocery shopping by smartphone on South Korean subways, and recently we came across a similar initiative in the Czech Republic. Through a partnership between global brand P&G and Mall.cz, Prague’s four busiest subway stations now include virtual grocery stores that offer shopping by phone for delivery at home.

Launched last month, the new, virtual subway grocery stores feature oversized wallpaper or posters with product pictures and prices, simulating the look of product-filled shelves in a real, bricks-and-mortar store. When consumers see an item they need, they can simply point their iOS or Android-based mobile phone at the associated QR code and it will automatically submit the order to the online store, where it can be completed. The shopper then receives a message to confirm delivery time; free second-day delivery is guaranteed.

The new virtual grocery stores will be available until the end of 2011, according to a P&G press release, with extra product categories added as the holidays approach. Other brands and retailers around the globe: be inspired!
Website: www.pg.com/en_US/index.shtml and www.mall.cz

Source: Springwise