COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF SMART GRIDS PROJECTS IMPLEMENTATION

Smart Grids are one of a key component of the EU strategy towards a lowcarbon energy future and efficient energy use. From an economic point of view, it\u27s main characteristic is big investment, and benefits are seen after some time with risk of being smaller than expected. Therefore it is important to make a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of those projects. Paper presents restrictions of current electric power networks along with solutions that are offered by Smart Grids. Guidelines for conducting the cost-benefit analysis of Smart Grid projects are compared and applied on pilot projects, to demonstrate use of methodologies for reducing uncertainties and incentivizing investments. As a part of qualitative analysis, social aspect of Smart Grid projects is described. In the end of this paper, it is given an overview of what has been done and what will be done in European Union

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

NetJobs: A new approach to network monitoring for the Grid using Grid jobs

With grid computing, the far-fl�ung and disparate IT resources act as a single "virtual datacenter". Grid computing interfaces heterogeneous IT resources so they are available when and where we need them. Grid allows us to provision applications and allocate capacity among research and business groups that are geographically and organizationally dispersed. Building a high availability Grid is hold as the next goal to achieve: protecting against computer failures and site failures to avoid downtime of resource and honor Service Level Agreements. Network monitoring has a key role in this challenge. This work is concerning the design and the prototypal implementation of a new approach to Network monitoring for the Grid based on the usage of Grid scheduled jobs. This work was carried out within the Network Support task (SA2) of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project. This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 1: Grid Computing From the origins of Grid Computing to the latest projects. Conceptual framework and main features characterizing many kind of popular grids will be presented. Chapter 2: The EGEE and EGI projects This chapter describes the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGEE project (2004-2010) was the�flagship Grid infrastructure project of the EU. The third and last two-year phase of the project (started on 1 May 2008) was financed with a total budget of around 47 million euro, with a further estimated 50 million euro worth of computing resources contributed by the partners. A total manpower of 9,000 Person Months, of which over 4,500 Person Months has been contributed by the partners from their own funding sources. At its close, EGEE represented a worldwide infrastructure of approximately to 200,000 CPU cores, collaboratively hosted by more than 300 centres around the world. By the end of the project, around 13 million jobs were executed on the EGEE grid each month. The new organization, EGI.eu, has then been created to continue the coordination and evolution of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) based on EGEE Grid. Chapter3: gLite Middleware Chapter three gives an overview on the gLite Grid Middleware. gLite is the middleware stack for grid computing used by the EGEE and EGI projects with in a very large variety of scientifi�c domains. Born from the collaborative efforts of more than 80 people in 12 different academic and industrial research centers as part of the EGEE Project, gLite provides a complete set of services for building a production grid infrastructure. gLite provides a framework for building grid applications tapping into the power of distributed computing and storage resources across the Internet. The gLite services are currently adopted by more than 250 Computing Centres and used by more than 15000 researchers in Europe and around the world. Chapter 4: Network Activity in EGEE/EGI Grid infrastructures are distributed by nature, involving many sites, normally in different administrative domains. Individual sites are connected together by a network, which is therefore a critical part of the whole Grid infrastructure; without the network there is no Grid. Monitoring is a key component for the successful operation of any infrastructure, helping in the discovery and diagnosis of any problem which may arise. Network monitoring is able to contribute to the day-to-day operations of the Grid by helping to provide answers to specific questions from users and site administrators. This chapter will discuss all the effort lavished by EGEE and EGI in the Grid Network domain. Chapter 5: Grid Network Monitoring based on Grid Jobs Net Jobs is a prototype of a light weight solution for the Grid network monitoring. A job-based approach has been used in order to prove the feasibility of this non intrusive solution. It is currently configured to monitor eight production sites spread from Italy to France but this method could be applied to the vast majority of Grid sites. The prototype provides coherent RTT, MTU, number of hops and TCP achievable bandwidth tests

Ocean Energy in Belgium - 2019

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Kickoff of offshore wind power in China: playoffs for China wind power development

Year 2010 is the significant year of offshore wind power development in China. The first national offshore wind power project is connected to the grid, and the first round of concession projects marks the strong support from central government. It is foreseeable that offshore wind power capacity in China will expand rapidly in the future, and the understanding pattern of it is crucial for analyzing the overall wind market in China and global offshore wind power development. This paper firstly provides an overview of global offshore wind power development, then in China, including historical installation, potential of resources, demonstration and concession projects, and target of development. Based on this, analysis on current policies related to offshore wind power and their implementation, current wind farm developers and turbine manufacturers of China's offshore wind industry is done. All the previous analysis generates complete evaluation of current status and some issues and trends of China offshore wind power development, based on which some policy recommendations for sustainable development of offshore wind power are made

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Renewables 2005: Global Status Report

The Global Status Report provides an assessment of several renewables technologies -- small hydro, modern biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, and biofuels -- that are now competing with conventional fuels in four distinct markets: power generation, hot water and space heating, transportation fuels, and rural (off-grid) energy supplies. The report finds that government support for renewable energy is growing rapidly. At least 48 countries now have some type of renewable energy promotion policy, including 14 developing countries. Most targets are for shares of electricity production, typically 5-30 percent, by the 2010-2012 timeframe. Mandates for blending biofuels into vehicle fuels have been enacted in at least 20 states and provinces worldwide as well as in three key countries -- Brazil, China and India. Government leadership provides the key to market success, according to the report. The market leaders in renewable energy in 2004 were Brazil in biofuels, China in solar hot water, Germany in solar electricity, and Spain in wind power. The Global Status Report fills a gap in the international energy reporting arena, which has tended to neglect the emerging renewable energy technologies. Regular updates will be produced in the future. The report was produced and published by the Worldwatch Institute and released today at the Beijing International Renewable Energy Conference 2005, sponsored by the Government of China. This Conference brings together government and private leaders from around the world, providing a forum for international leadership on renewable energy and connects the wide variety of stakeholders that came together at the International Conference for Renewable Energies in Bonn, Germany, in 2004. The creation of REN21 was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. Formally established in Copenhagen in June 2005, REN21 is now supported by a steering committee of 11 governments, 5 intergovernmental organizations, 5 non-governmental organizations, and several regional, local, and private organizations

Towards a lightweight generic computational grid framework for biological research

Background: An increasing number of scientific research projects require access to large-scale computational resources. This is particularly true in the biological field, whether to facilitate the analysis of large high-throughput data sets, or to perform large numbers of complex simulations – a characteristic of the emerging field of systems biology. Results: In this paper we present a lightweight generic framework for combining disparate computational resources at multiple sites (ranging from local computers and clusters to established national Grid services). A detailed guide describing how to set up the framework is available from the following URL: http://igrid-ext.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/portal_guide/. Conclusion: This approach is particularly (but not exclusively) appropriate for large-scale biology projects with multiple collaborators working at different national or international sites. The framework is relatively easy to set up, hides the complexity of Grid middleware from the user, and provides access to resources through a single, uniform interface. It has been developed as part of the European ImmunoGrid project

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure