50,000 still without power in Pennsylvania after last week's storm

Tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians began a fifth day without power Sunday as emergency crews worked through freezing temperatures to clear debris and downed power supply lines from roads.

Also Sunday, a tour bus crashed in rural southern Pennsylvania, sending 27 people to hospitals in Pennsylvania and Maryland, a Bedford County emergency dispatcher told the Los Angeles Times.

 

It was unknown whether there were fatalities. Twelve people were taken to a "safety area" to be picked up by the tour bus company, said the dispatcher, who said he was not authorized to identify himself or the company. A representative for the Pennsylvania State Police declined to comment.

 

The lingering danger of Wednesday's storm was felt the worst in Chester County, just west of Philadelphia, where county emergency officials estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 people still had no electricity.

 

Thirty Chester County residents have been hospitalized with carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to stay warm in their homes since the storm hit, one county emergency official told the Los Angeles Times.

 

“Unfortunately, there are some people that are being desperate and doing dangerous things like having a charcoal or gas grill in their homes, using their generators inside,” Robert Kagel, the deputy director for the county's emergency management, told The Times. "One guy took a Duraflame log and lit it on fire on his kitchen table."

 

PECO, a Pennsylvania linear power supply, said the aftermath of Wednesday's storm was the second-worst the company has seen after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc across the Northeast in the fall of 2012. Power may not be fully restored until the end of this week.

 

Pennsylvania's troubles began with a cocktail of two weather events early last week. On Monday, several inches of heavy, wet snow fell across the state, and then early Wednesday morning, a freezing rain encased that snow in ice.

 

Tree branches could not handle the weight of the snow and the ice, collapsing on roads and power lines.

 

At one point, more than 600,000 PECO customers were without power; that figure had fallen to a little more than 50,000 as of Sunday, according to the utility's website.

 

"Basically we’ve restored camping power supply to 93% of the customers affected by the  storm," Fred Maher, a PECO spokesman, told The Times. “They’re coming down at a pace. It’s a good pace, but we’d like it better. ... We’ve had some restoration times where it’s, 'OK, we’ll think we’ll get everybody online tonight at 11,' " and then workers find out there’s more work to be done.

 

The company has amassed 6,100 employees, contractors and utility workers from other states to help with the recovery effort, but they've been hampered by "bone-numbing" cold, Maher said. Sunday's high reached 27 degrees, with a low predicted of 18.

 

 In Chester County, officials were still struggling to reopen all the roads,   with 140 still closed, down from about 450 when things were at their worst and the county's drivers were blocked from getting where they needed to go.

 

"The challenge with a lot of it is that there’s utility lines tangled up in it," Chester County's Kagel said of the road debris. He said sometimes emergency workers would have to wait for PECO crews to make sure downed power lines weren't an electrocution threat before the roads could be cleared.

 

Waiting for PECO has become an unfunny game for Pennsylvanians still without power, who have taken to social media to broadcast their outrage over the possibility of waiting until the end of the week -- Valentine's Day -- to see the total return of power everywhere.

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Nest Competitor Monitors Your House’s Leaks on the Cheap

Earlier this month, as Google was snatching up the smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, a lesser known home sensor company made its own announcement. SNUPI Technologies, a Seattle startup, said it had garnered $7.5 million in funding. That might be pocket change compared to the Nest deal, but it was a significant endorsement just ahead of SNUPI’s first product launch: a low-power wireless sensor network called WallyHome that tracks humidity, water leaks, and temperature throughout a building.

There are already many home monitors on the market; some, such as Lowe’s Iris Home Management System and a water leak and flood sensor from General Electric, are even wirelessly networked. What makes WallyHome novel is its use of a low-power communication scheme that gas sensor send data back to an Internet-connected base station over significant distances and through obstructions like walls and floors while sipping power from a coin-cell battery.

SNUPI cofounder Gabe Cohn believes this long-distance, low-power approach will endear the product to homeowners who want a reliable sensor network that requires little maintenance and can be installed easily. The base station plugs into a wall outlet and an Internet router via an Ethernet cable. Six wireless sensors are placed in leak- or humidity-prone areas, such as behind a toilet, under a dishwasher, or near a sump pump. And each sensor’s battery should power the device for up to 10 years without a replacement, Cohn says.

Most sensor networks rely on wireless protocols like Wi-Fi, ZigBee, or Bluetooth to send a signal to a base station tens of feet away. Some of these networks require devices that boost a wireless signal so it can go around walls or through floors, and they tend to require multiple battery replacements during their lifetimes.

Instead of blasting a wireless signal tens of feet, the WallyHome sensors emit a relatively weak wireless signal. While the signal isn’t powerful enough to reach a base station on its own, it can reach inside walls and resonate with the copper wiring that carries electricity. WallyHome effectively turns these internal power lines into antennas, propagating honeywell sensors data to a base station, which is plugged into the same lines. Data is then uploaded to a cloud-based data collection and analysis service, and a person can check the status of a sensor using the Web and a smartphone app. The system sends a text, e-mail, or mobile phone alert if water is detected or temperature and humidity thresholds are exceeded. “You have these wireless sensor nodes you can place anywhere in the house or building because power lines go anywhere,” says Cohn.

The concept of using power lines to augment wireless sensor networks arose from research conducted by Cohn and co-inventors Matt Reynolds and Shwetak Patel, both professors at the University of Washington. In addition to cofounding SNUPI (Sensor Network Utilizing Powerline Infrastructure) in 2012, Patel, who was one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2009, also cofounded Zensi, acquired by Belkin in 2010. Patel was awarded a MacArthur award in 2011.

Elizabeth Mead, an analyst at IHS, a research firm, says that energy management is crucial for home networks. Low-power devices are becoming increasingly important, especially as the number of sensors in home networks proliferate.
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Winning combination for photovoltaics: graphene and perskovite

When it comes to graphene and photovoltaics, for the most part it's only been a story about replacing the indium tin oxide (ITO) used as the transparent electronics of organic solar cells.

But last year Spanish researchers in collaboration with teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany started to change the game and took graphene into the conversion and conduction layers of a photovoltaic cell.

Now, Spanish scientists at the Universitat Jaume I in collaboration this time with researchers from Oxford University have developed a photovoltaic system in which graphene and titanium dioxide combine to serve as the charge collector while perovskite acts as the sunlight absorber.

The mineral perskovite is enjoying a period of rapid improvements for its use in solar cells where its particular crystal structure offers an inexpensive solution for creating photovoltaics with high charge-carrier mobility and long diffusion lengths. These properties make it possible for the photo-generated electrons and holes to travel long distances without energy loss. In real world terms this means that the fct electronics in perskovite-based photovoltaics can travel through thicker solar cells, which absorbs more light and thereby generates more electricity than thinner cells.

This latest combination of perskovite with graphene, which is described in the journal Nano Letters ("Low-Temperature Processed Electron Collection Layers of Graphene/TiO2 Nanocomposites in Thin Film Perovskite Solar Cells"),  offers a way to produce perskovite solar cells more cheaply and with a high efficiency.

Previous perovskite cells needed a 500-degrees C sintering process to build the electron collection layer. So that pretty much rules out making solar cells on inexpensive polymer substrates as well as creating multi-junction device architectures.

But the graphene and the titanium dioxide consumer electronics collection layers can be produced at temperatures that never rise above 150 degrees C.

The researchers also report that not only can they produce the perskovite solar cells in a low-cost process but also that the energy conversion efficiency reached 15.6 percent, just slightly above the 15 percent achieved by the highestper-forming perskovite cells manufactured with the sintering process. The conversion efficiency also surpasses levels reached when silicon and graphene are combined.

Based on this latest research, It would seem that when graphene and perskovite are a winning combination in photovoltaics.
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Australia Heat Wave Strains Power Supplies, Sparks Wildfires

Temperatures soared to more than 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit) in southeastern Australia as a heat wave strained electricity supplies and sparked wildfires.

Extreme heat across the states of Victoria and South Australia is causing high demand for electricity and as many as 100,000 homes and businesses may be affected by power supply outages and reduced supply, Victorian Energy Minister Nicholas Kotsiras said in a statement. Bushfire warnings were in place across the two states and New South Wales, with high winds forecast to increase the danger tomorrow, emergency authorities said.

Play was suspended on some courts at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne, with the temperature reaching 43.9 degrees Celsius. Top-seeded player Serena Williams, who reached the third round, said yesterday it was “too hot to get into rallies,” while two players and a ball-boy have received medical treatment due to the heat.

Electricity prices in Victoria surged 7 percent to A$72.25 a megawatt-hour on Jan. 14, the highest since Jan. 30, 2012, data compiled by Bloomberg show. switch mode power supply in South Australia climbed to A$81 a megawatt-hour on Jan. 13, the highest since March 2012.

AGL Energy Ltd. is working to bring online a unit at the Loy Yang astec power supply in Victoria after the extreme weather led to “unexpected equipment failure,” the company said in a statement.
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Apple's iBeacon sensor technology gets another vote of confidence for use in location-based services

Apple's iBeacon technology will be used by Zebra Technologies to enable customized location-based advertising within retail stores and other venues.

At the National Retail Federation's annual convention, which begins today, Zebra is demonstrating how Zatar, its cloud-based Internet of things (IoT) platform, can work with iBeacons to deliver customized messaging and deals to shoppers. Specifically, the demo will show how iBeacon can communicate with Zatar by sharing a consumer's location with a third-party sensor display application.

Though it didn't get a lot of attention when it was announced at the company's WorldWide Developer Conference during summer 2013, Apple's iBeacon technology is already making waves in the micro-location market. The technology extends location services by recognizing the presence of iOS and other devices via the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (also called Bluetooth Smart), which reduces power consumption via a low pulsing method but also works with the previous "Classic Bluetooth" versions.


Zebra cited Ben Bajarin, analyst at Creative Strategies, who has estimated that up to 190 million Apple iOS devices, as well as a growing number of Google Android devices, support Bluetooth Smart and iBeacon.

"As iBeacon technology becomes more widely deployed, retailers will have an immediate opportunity to transform consumer shopping experiences by integrating location services and display messaging in their stores with minimal investment," said Phil Gerskovich, Zebra's senior vice president of new growth platforms.

Apple's iBeacon is not the only gas sensor game in town, however. For example, Qualcomm last month announced the commercial release of its Gimbal-brand proximity beacons, which also employ Bluetooth Smart technology. And Estimote, which is also targeting the retail market for its wireless beacons, recently raised a $3.1 million seed round from numerous venture firms and angel investors.

In addition to Bluetooth Smart, other micro-location approaches are based on technologies such as Wi-Fi, electromagnetic signals, sound waves, impulse radio ultra wideband and more.

Zebra noted that growing use of cloud computing and the ubiquity of wireless networks have made connecting devices and pressure sensors more cost-efficient, fueling the rapid growth of the Internet of Things.

In a recent blog entry, Creative Strategies' Bajarin forecast that 6 billion connected devices will ship in 2016. "In 2015 alone connected devices will generate over 8 billion zetabytes of data. By 2020 there will be over 200 billion connected devices in use," he said.

Bajarin added that by 2025, he expects there will be 1 trillion connected objects in use.
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Lightower plans aggressive fiber expansion in Chicago

Chicago is about to get a big fiber boost.

Lightower Fiber Networks, which bought the commercial broadband network formerly operated by RCN Telecom Services, is laying down 40 miles of new optical fiber cable in the area over the next 12 months. It plans to connect more than 30 new buildings to its network that runs from the Loop to the suburbs.

Total buildout throughout the market is likely to cost tens of millions of dollars. "It's a pretty big investment," CEO Rob Shanahan says. "It's expensive to build in Chicago."

It's one of the first significant new fiber buildouts since the massive construction during the dot-com boom that produced a glut of optical fibers capacity that lasted more than decade. Now, though, networks are straining from an explosion of social media networks, smartphone and tablet usage, streaming of movies and TV shows, and the push to computerize medical records and make them accessible across vast health care networks.

Lightower, based in Boxborough, Mass., plans to connect buildings in the Loop as well as major data centers in the suburbs.

The company already has fiber connecting major data center hubs, such as CME Group Inc.'s facility in Aurora and 350 E. Cermak Road, which is home to many of the city's trading firms, markets, as well as major telecommunications carriers and Internet service providers. It also leases a fiber connection to the East Coast financial markets.

"We're going to reinforce the fiber downtown to Cermak and build another fiber ring in the Loop," Mr. Shanahan says. "We're going to add fiber from downtown out to Elk Grove Village, then ring in Elmhurst, pick up Oak Park and connect to Aurora."

Making an aggressive bet on demand, Mr. Shanahan plans to extend connections into as many as 20 buildings on speculation.

"We have fiber in about 200 buildings," he says. "But we're missing key buildings on Wacker Drive. That's where we're starting."

Lightower is expanding in just two markets — Chicago and northern Virginia, another major Internet hub. "Chicago is where we're doing the most expansion," Mr. Shanahan says. "Given the size of the market, we think we'll get the most bang for our buck."

The move underscores the importance of Chicago as one of the world's main fiber-optical fiber manufacturer. Lightower moved into the Chicago market in 2013, acquiring nearly 350 miles of fiber when it merged with Sidera Networks, which is the former RCN commercial business.
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IST will also be demonstrating under the “UVLED Ready” banner the world’s first “cross over” conventional UV systems

On Stand 9F34, ITL introduces to the label industry for the first time the all new LEDZero Solidcure 2 range while offering visitors a special preview of its new led bulb manufacturer air-cooled system, which is making its world debut at the show.

Initially launched in July this year, the all new LEDZero Solidcure 2 (above) offers class-leading dose and linearity of output that surpasses other water-cooled units of this type and is also available in a HD (high dose) version which delivers twice the dose of the standard model to match even the most demanding of high speed curing applications.

The slim, ultra-compact architecture of the LEDZero Solidcure 2 enables easy integration while water-cooling provides precision high output. Benefitting from the latest in semi-conductor development, the Solidcure 2 also offers a highly efficient UV LED solution that further reduces energy and cooling input.

Fully scalable in length, it can also be tailored to meet the widest of UV LED requirements in a variety of different machines and applications.

The high speed curing capability of this ground-breaking technology will be demonstrated on a 2 colour flexo-press onthe stand (5D45) of ITL’s technology and marketing partner IST.

IST will also be demonstrating under the “UVLED Ready” banner the world’s first “cross over” conventional UV systems, whereby the standard MBS®-6 UV lamp cassettes can be exchanged for UV LED cassettes utilising the same housings and interconnecting services - a technology that successfully marks the company’s sustained development of energy-efficient UV label printing.

Further working examples of Solidcure 2 and other models from the extensive range of ITL UV LED solutions can be found at the show on a range of both digital and flexo label presses. A full list of these working demonstrations can be obtained from either the ITL or IST stands.

Soon-to-be released, ITL’s VZero LED system is an elegant, compact and modular solution that utilises all of the proven features and benefits of its sister arc product and incorporates them into an LED alternative, unrivalled by any other product in the market.

VZero LED joins an already impressive line-up of new air-cooled UV LED solutions unveiled by ITL during 2013 as the ‘top of the range’ model, and thanks to advanced semi-conductor technology and cooling design offers a high intensity and high dose output that previously was only possible with water-cooled models.

The flexible architecture allows long versions to be produced in scale increments of 90mm and options include 4 different wavelengths of LED’s to be selected to give a perfect match to any chosen ink or coating chemistry.

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