An interview with Van Jones in January 2015 explains my connection to the pop singer who passed of late.
Van Jones on closing Silicon Valley's diversity gap https://t.co/APL6m3ip5x via @usatoday
— Nate. (@natemurthy) April 23, 2016
Category Archives: Engineering
What the Federal ITC Extension Means for the US Energy Storage Market
Some analysts expect energy storage deployments to reach ~1.7 GWh by 2020
GTM Research expects an additional half a gigawatt of storage paired with renewables between 2016 and 2020. Though storage alone doesn’t qualify for the federal Incentive Tax Credit (ITC), if installed with solar PV or wind, energy storage systems historically have been able to claim tax credits, as long as they meet certain requirements. Both the Department of the Treasury and the IRS are deliberating over whether storage should automatically qualify for the ITC. If renewables-paired storage does become explicitly eligible, there is an even more significant upside for projected deployment in the coming years.
Read: What the Federal ITC Extension Means for the US Energy Storage Market
The new “smart grid” is now the “internet of things”
The “internet of things” surpassed the “smart grid” in December 2013 as the more popular search phrase. That following month, in January 2014, Google coincidentally announced their acquisition of Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash. Now let’s see what major deals will accompany GE’s “industrial internet”–if it ever takes off.
A Summer in India
Reply
Hundreds of millions of people across India were left without power on Tuesday in one of the world's worst blackouts, trapping miners, stranding train travelers and plunging hospitals into darkness when grids collapsed for the second time in two days.
India’s electricity distribution and transmission is mostly state run, with private companies operating in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Less than a quarter of generation is private nationwide.
The Great Green Fuel Debate
A member of the U.S. Navy watches the USS Roosevelt as it passes the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, while arriving for the 25th annual Fleet Week celebration in New York, May 23, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid
The U.S. Navy angered Republicans by spending $26 a gallon for biofuels for this week’s Great Green Fleet demonstration, but the Air Force received little attention when it paid twice as much per gallon to test synthetic jet fuel last month.
Despite all the heat Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has been receiving from the more fiscally austere members of Congress, I think it would be insightful to remind ourselves of the high costs and risks the federal government placed on building out the interstate highway system or the infrastructure for the Internet and the social/economic benefits we’ve accumulated since they days when a dial-up connection once cost $35,000 a month.
It’s a worthwhile investment.
The Global Food Crisis: more evidence
The research coming from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) this month reflects previous concerns I’ve made in earlier articles[1],[2],[3],[4],[5] about the relationships of biofuels and commodities market speculation with food prices and the mechanisms driving these prices upward. Although the evidence doesn’t unequivocally confirm these concerns, this NECSI research paper is a stepping stone toward a general theory of what I’d like to call “ecodynamics”: namely, the study of the interactions of capital flows with natural resources. The abstract of the paper summarizes the fundamental argumentative thread which is worthy of peer-reviewed investigation:
In a previous paper published in September 2011, we constructed for the first time a dynamic model that quantitatively agreed with food prices. Specifically, the model fi t the FAO Food Price Index time series from January 2004 to March 2011, inclusive. The results showed that the dominant causes of price increases during this period were investor speculation and ethanol conversion.
Timothy A. Wise (director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute — Tufts University) posted this very informative article on his “Triple Crisis” weblog (6 March 2012) regarding the NECSI data and food price model. A year earlier, he wrote another succinct piece on food price volatility that initially captured my interest and led me to the NECSI paper mentioned above.
Keep It Flowing
A view of a drilling rig and distant production platform in the Soldado Field off Trinidad's southwest coast, September 10, 2011. (Credit: Reuters/Andrea De Silva)
(Reuters) – Hackers are bombarding the world’s computer controlled energy sector, conducting industrial espionage and threatening potential global havoc through oil supply disruption.
This article published by Reuters comes out the same week that researchers at MIT released a report stating the need for better direction of protecting the nation’s electric power infrastructure. I felt this was one of the keenest observations in the article:
“Oil needs to keep on flowing,” said Riemer Brouwer, head of IT security at Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO).
“We have a very strategic position in the global oil and gas market,” he added. “If they could bring down one of the big players in the oil and gas market you can imagine what this will do for the oil price – it would blow the market.”
Hackers could finance their operations by using options markets to bet on the price movements caused by disruptions, Brouwer said.
“So far we haven’t had any major incidents,” he said. “But are we really in control? The answer has to be ‘no’.”
So how secure are our systems really? It’s better to be preventative than to know the answer to that.
nifty ec2 startup/shutdown scripts
It became incrementally annoying to have to check whether I had an ec2 instance running, booting it up if it wasn’t, copying and pasting the appropriate instance ID to ec2-start-instances, repeatedly invoking ec2-describe-instances to check if it was up, stopping it, copying and pasting… well you get the idea.
These simple scripts will automate the above process, and hopefully save you from typing unnecessarily into your console.
I saved this file as start-ec2 under my ~/.ec2 directory.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | #! /bin/bash #show instances inst=$(ec2-describe-instances | cut -f 3 | grep ^i-) echo "Instance ID: " $inst #start instance echo "booting up..." status="" ec2start $inst while [ "$status" != "running" ]; do status=$(ec2-describe-instances | cut -f 6 | grep run) echo "booting up..." sleep 5 if [ "$status" == "running" ]; then echo $inst " has succesfully booted!" break fi done #when instance is running, associate elastic ip to it eIP="50.16.xx.xx" echo "Associating Elastic IP 50.16.xx.xx to " $inst ec2-associate-address -i $inst $eIP |
Don’t forget to make it executable. Run it and verify the output:
bash$ chmod 755 start-ec2 bash$ ./start-ec2 Instance ID: i-x43xxxx booting up... INSTANCE i-x43bxxxx stopped pending booting up... booting up... booting up... i-x43bxxxx has succesfully booted!
And my shutdown script stop-ec2 is defined as follows (again, don’t forget to chmod 755 it:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | #! /bin/bash inst=$(ec2-describe-instances | cut -f 3 | grep ^i-) status="" ec2stop $inst while [ "$status" != "stopped" ]; do status=$(ec2-describe-instances | cut -f 6 | grep stop) echo "shutting down..." sleep 5 if [ "$status" == "stopped" ]; then echo $inst " has " $status break fi done |
Here is some sample output from the above script:
bash$ ./stop-ec2 INSTANCE i-x43bxxxx running stopping shutting down... shutting down... shutting down... i-x43bxxxx has stopped
Hope all this was as useful to you as it was to me!
characters have been x’ed for privacy purposes
“Fewer guns, more solar arrays”
There is a large swath of the business community that continues to push for alternative energy infrastructure projects as the stimulus to getting our nation out of the current economic slump and ridding our dubious involvement in strategic energy resource-rich nation-states such as Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Read full article.
The Hubris of Empire
So it seems that once again, brilliant network and computer engineers have found a back door into some of the largest multinational corporations:
“The names and e-mails of customers of Citigroup Inc and other large U.S. companies, as well as College Board students, were exposed in a massive and growing data breach after a computer hacker penetrated online marketer Epsilon.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/04/us-citi-capitalone-data-idUSTRE7321PI20110404
Internet security has always maintained an elusive veil of protection. As much as we would like to think that the mapping of our digital selves onto cyberspace remains within our full control (especially with the advent of social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), I predict that such breaches of internet security will continue to be on the rise. [1]
With respect to energy security, the most recent string of network hack-ins at major financial and energy corporations over the last couple of months [2][3] present an interesting problem to the wave of so-called “smart grid” initiatives that intend to provide more automation of our electric power systems. The current VPNs and telemetry systems that facilitate automatic generation control (AGC) to keep the United States’ electricity grid secure have historically been remarkably reliable; however, the additional layers of telecommunications infrastructure being proposed for the grid will present more opportunity for similar breaches we’ve seen at financial and oil firms. One can envision distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks orchestrated by a nation state with enough wherewithal on the future smart grid (several hackers at major banks have been traced to China DNS and IP addresses) by shutting down commercial systems to gain economic advantages.
Only time will dictate the fate of nations.
See also
[1] U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. http://www.us-cert.gov/reading_room/index.html
[2] “Chinese hackers targeted Morgan Stanley in 2009.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/01/morgan-stanley-chinese-hackers (1 Mar 2011).
[3] “Data theft attacks besiege oil industry.” http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20031291-264.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=News-Security (2 Feb 2011),