Metals Tech

The agreement promises fewer and shorter power outages, better customer control of electricity usage, and important steps enabling the energy transformation and electrification of the Swedish society.

In a landmark agreement signed by Ellevio, one of Sweden’s largest electricity distribution companies, Malmö-based One Nordic and French technology giant Sagemcom, the partnership will see over one million customers supplied with next generation electricity meters.

“Ellevio will be one of the first Swedish electricity distribution companies to go to the next stage in the development of tomorrow’s smart, customer-oriented electricity meter systems. Modern meters offer both greater supply reliability and make it easier for those aiming to produce their own electricity in the future,” says Johan Lindehag, CEO at Ellevio.

In the accelerating transformation of the Swedish energy system, smarter grids play a key role. The partnership will enable Ellevio to spearhead the implementation of one of the most crucial pieces of the puzzle: a modern electricity meter system.

The first new meters will be installed during a pilot project in Stockholm between April 2020 and September 2020, but all 960,000 of Ellevio’s customers will have a new meter installed before the end of 2023.

“This is a highly important and strategic project for our company and a vital component of the development of low-carbon infrastructure. With a new meter system we can tackle society’s energy challenges as well as provide Ellevio’s customers with better information about their electricity usage,” says Lindehag.

For the household customer, future electricity consumption will be easier to adapt to times of the day when it is most beneficial. The smart grid will also provide Ellevio with information essential to strengthening the electrical grid, which will result in fewer and shorter power outages. In addition, a new system will dramatically improve the ability to meet increasing demand for energy in a society aimed at electrification and low-carbon economy.

The agreement with One Nordic and Sagemcom will be in place for ten years (with the possibility of extending the agreement for a maximum of six years) and covers the provision of just over one million smart meters, including installation, a communication solution, implementation, and associated services.

“Alliances and partnerships are valued highly by Ellevio, and this permeated the procurement process. Complex infrastructure programmes such as this necessitate strong and transparent cooperation in order to succeed, and we are both pleased and enthusiastic about our choice of One Nordic and Sagemcom,” says Lindehag.

Procurement process

Johan Svensson, programme manager AMM at Ellevio, is responsible for the meter exchange project and explains there was a very comprehensive agreement of over one thousand pages ahead of the request for proposals.

Ellevio sent out a draft agreement in all parts at the time of the inquiry.

“This lead to the negotiation process being both shortened and everyone involved really understands – even before the agreement is signed – what is included,” Svensson says.

He emphasises that it is crucial for successful cooperation and partnerships in the future.

Svensson says the procurement process has gone even better than planned:

“The feedback that we got from the market was that the procurement was handled in a very professional way and we were given the same feedback from the players who participated in the procurement,” he concludes.

If the term “smart” were to be used in its purest sense, smart street lighting has been around for a millennium – starting with a very human face. Until the 20^th century, it was human beings that managed lighting, setting about each evening and morning to turn lamps on and off, and maintaining this early part of what would form a vital part of what was to become the electricity grid.

The electric street lighting system

A lot changed. At the turn of the 20^th century, electrified street lighting was well on its way, and fell under the authority of electric utilities and local councils. This meant that lighting could be remotely controlled from a single source, and linked to season-based schedules, requiring only that faults be reported by either residents or the council.

These steps forward were significant, and one of the first major steps in the automation of city-level electrical infrastructure, but it created problems too. For example, faults such as faulty bulbs, storm or weather damage or even regular maintenance meant mobilising manpower, which was time consuming and expensive. As the 20^th century wore on, and as manufacturing and management became more automated, the labour cost factor as well as time became challenges.

Non-working street lights affected a lot more than just a utility’s bottom-line however, it affected society even more greatly. Damaged street lighting would affect pedestrian and motorist safety, and business operations would be impacted.

Street lighting is also one of heaviest consumers of electricity – and the bill for this “unmetered consumption” ultimately falls on the customer. Until recently, consumption like this could only be measured periodically, and mostly, inaccurately.

The bulbs used until recently were inefficient – generating large amounts of lost heat energy, and are being replaced by much more efficient LED lighting. These factors resulted in excess cost.

Until as recently as ten years ago these problems were global, but the advent of more advanced grid communications, where two-way communications between utilities and assets became possible has opened the way to future smart cities, and smarter utilities.  

The internet of things (IoT) means that almost any electronic device can communicate with other assets, or utility or municipal management. The rollout of smart metering has been one example of the modern grid, where consumption data is shared wirelessly and instantly, thanks to technologies cellular and radio technologies like Sigfox, LoRa and Wi-fi.

The benefits to cities, utilities and citizens globally:

Utilities quickly realised that this kind of automated grid communications held greater potential – it could connect major elements of city infrastructure at every level at which utilities have control, and new areas of potential growth. Water management, power outage management, microgrids where consumers could sell power back to the utility and street lighting are just the immediate possibilities. In fact, reactive or proactive but labour-intensive and time-sensitive tasks could be streamlined and made much cost-effective, saving both the utility, and therefore, the customer, money.

For instance, a damaged street light can automatically report that a fault has occurred in the delivery of power, allowing for grid management software to re-route power to the street light, as part of a “self-healing” grid.

In the case of a damaged light, the asset would notify work crews immediately, so repairs can be scheduled and effected in less time, with less effort and expense. This also minimises the impact such a fault would have on society.

These technologies and solutions are all enablers of the next step modern settlements are taking – becoming truly smart cities, where road transport, smart buildings, electric vehicles (EVs) and charging infrastructure, and even monitoring air pollution are now part of the utility ecosystem.  

According to researchers at Navigant Research, a quarter of the 221 cities worldwide being tracked by its Smart City Tracker are rolling out smart street lighting initiatives.

In a recent webinar, we explored the role utilities have in ensuring these new technologies are adopted, and the central role utilities will play in the smart cities of the future, but the one major piece of infrastructure that will enable all of these technologies? Smart Street Lighting.

“With lower hardware costs, new streetlight tariff structures, and innovative financing mechanisms, LED and smart street lighting technology is now reaching even small and medium-sized cities. Smart streetlights are now well on their way to forming the backbone of larger smart city initiatives.” – Ben Gardner, President of the NorthEast Group

The potential:

Smart street lighting is being seen as the backbone from which these technologies can stem thanks to IoT. Hong Kong has recently started a smart street lighting pilot which features several of the technologies also being incorporated into other global initiatives, such as:

• IoT-enabled smart sensors can communicate city data such as weather, air quality, temperature, and even foot and vehicle traffic to utilities and municipalities.
• Electric vehicle charging can be incorporated into street lights, providing easy and convenient charging, given that EV’s have already reached equal pricing with petrol or diesel vehicles, and countries are outlawing fossil-fuelled transport in place of e-mobility solutions for public and private transport.
• Services can also include Wi-Fi hotspots for use by consumers, or parking spot availability, and even public notices and advertising.

Lastly, smart street lights can be powered by renewable sources, such as solar or wind power, meaning they can be entirely self-powered, and even send excess power back to the utility, helping balance demand and make the grid more resilient.

Street lighting projects globally:

One of the most rapidly evolving regions is Oceania, where Australia and New Zealand are investing up to $780 million in streetlights over a ten-year period. Over 95% of streetlights in Oceania will have been converted to LEDs, while 70% will be networked by 2027.

According to Ben Gardner, president of Northeast Group: “The New Zealand government is now funding 85% of the cost of streetlight projects and Australian states have come up with new financing mechanisms and lighting codes that are encouraging deployments. New Zealand already has over 25% of its streetlights networked.”

Australia’s move to develop smart grid infrastructure has been a key driver. The majority of the streetlights are primarily owned by utilities, but as smart city plans increase, smart street lighting will provide a critical foundational layer.

In the US, according to a new study conducted by Northeast Group, over the next decade, almost 90% of US streetlights will be converted to LEDs, while 38% will be networked.

The vast majority of the country’s 306 largest cities have now either begun or are considering deploying both LED and smart or connected, streetlights.

ComEd in Illinois has announced that they will upgrade 140,000 street lights to smart units and Tampa Electric in Florida recently followed suit.  

It is estimated that the ComEd initiative could save Chicago in the region of $10 million annually.

Tampa Electric will install 260 000 Itron smart photocells by 2024.

In New York, the city’s power authority recently allocated $7.5 million dollars in smart streetlighting funding. The City of Syracuse will be the first large municipality in New York to test new streetlight technologies, and the pilot project planned installation of equipment that can expand Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G internet connection capabilities on its streetlights, and install other digital enhancements to city-wide services.

Eurelectric has reported that European cities are aiming to have 10 million smart street lights installed by 2025.

In France, Enedis, the local DSO is piloting the use of street lighting infrastructure and electric vehicle charging.  According to Domonique Lagarde, Director of the Electric Mobility Programme for the utility: “We have recently completed a pilot in which we utilised the public lighting grid as charging points and found the right solution to make this work from both a technical and contractual perspective in order to effectively deliver charging infrastructure without having to develop new grids specifically for charging. We are now wanting to roll this out to a larger area.”

The road to the future is lit by smart street lighting – the backbone to technologies that will see cities shaped by new efficiencies, cleaner more sustainable cities, and climate change goals met.

Using a new type of dual polymer material capable of responding dynamically to its environment, Brown University researchers have developed a set of modular hydrogel components that could be useful in a variety of “soft robotic” and biomedical applications.

The components, which are patterned by a 3-D printer, are capable of bending, twisting or sticking together in response to treatment with certain chemicals. For a paper published in the journal Polymer Chemistry, the researchers demonstrated a soft gripper capable of actuating on demand to pick up small objects. They also designed LEGO-like hydrogel building blocks that can be carefully assembled then tightly sealed together to form customized microfluidic devices—”lab-on-a-chip” systems used for drug screening, cell cultures and other applications.

The key to the new material’s functionality is its dual polymer composition, the researchers say.

“Essentially, the one polymer provides structural integrity, while the other enables these dynamic behaviors like bending or self-adhesion,” said Thomas Valentin, a recently graduated Ph.D. student in Brown’s School of Engineering and the paper’s lead author. “So putting the two together makes a material that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

Hydrogels solidify when the polymer strands within them become tethered to each other, a process called crosslinking. There are two types of bonds that hold crosslinked polymers together: covalent and ionic. Covalent bonds are quite strong, but irreversible. Once two strands are linked covalently, it’s easier to break the strand than it is to break the bond. Ionic bonds on the other hand are not quite as strong, but they can be reversed. Adding ions (atoms or molecules with a net positive or negative charge) will cause the bonds to form. Removing ions will cause the bonds to fall apart.

For this new material, the researchers combined one polymer that’s covalently crosslinked, called PEGDA, and one that’s ionically crosslinked, called PAA. The PEGDA’s strong covalent bonds hold the material together, while the PAA’s ionic bonds make it responsive. Putting the material in an ion-rich environment causes the PAA to crosslink, meaning it becomes more rigid and contracts. Take those ions away, and the material softens and swells as the ionic bonds break. The same process also enables the material to be self-adhesive when desired. Put two separate pieces together, add some ions, and the pieces attach tightly together.

That combination of strength and dynamic behavior enabled the researchers to make their soft gripper. They patterned each of the gripper’s “fingers” to have pure PEGDA on one side and a PEGDA-PAA mixture on the other. Adding ions caused the PEGDA-PAA side to shrink and strengthen, which pulled the two gripper fingers together. The researchers showed that the setup was strong enough to lift small objects weighing about a gram, and hold them against gravity.

“There’s a lot of interest in materials that can change their shapes and automatically adapt to different environments,” said Ian Y. Wong, an assistant professor of engineering and the paper’s corresponding author. “So here we demonstrate a material the can flex and reconfigure itself in response to an external stimulus.”

But potentially a more immediate application is in microfluidics, the researchers say.

Hydrogels are an attractive material for microfluidic devices, especially those used in biomedical testing. They’re soft and flexible like human tissue, and generally nontoxic. The problem is that hydrogels are often difficult to pattern with the complex channels and chambers needed in microfluidics.

But this new material—and the LEGO block concept it enables—offers a potential solution. The 3-D printing process allows complex microfluidic architectures to be incorporated into each block. Those blocks can then be assembled using a socket configuration much like that of real LEGO blocks. Adding ions to the assembled blocks makes a water-tight seal.

“The modular LEGO blocks are interesting in that we could create a prefabricated toolbox for microfluidic devices,” Valentin said. “You keep a variety of preset parts with different microfluidic architectures on hand, and then you just grab the ones you need to make your custom microfluidic circuit. Then you heal them together and it’s ready to go.”

And storing the blocks for long periods before use doesn’t appear to be a problem, the researchers say.

“Some of the samples we tested for this study were three or four months old,” said Eric DuBois, a Brown undergraduate and co-author on the paper. “So we think these could remain usable for an extended period.”

The researchers say they’ll continue to work with the material, potentially tweaking the properties of the polymers to get even more durability and functionality.

The priorities and efforts of the Energy Department’s nascent Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, or CESER, were laid out by its first acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Adrienne Lotto Thursday.

“We all see the magnitude and sophistication of the threats facing our energy infrastructure. Our nation’s electricity, fuel and delivery systems have become more complex and even more interdependent,” Lotto told attendees of the Association for Federal Information Resources Management’s Cybersecurity Summit in Washington. “As a result, the threat against the sector has become even more frequent and more sophisticated.”

In response, she said Energy Secretary Rick Perry created the new office in February 2018 to elevate the threats to the public and private sectors and allocate resources and a workforce to address those threats head-on. The president included $96 million in the fiscal 2019 budget request to stand up the office.

Lotto said CESER leads the department’s efforts to secure the nation’s energy infrastructure against all hazards, reduce both the risks and impacts of cyber and other disruptive events, and assist in restoration when disruptions do happen—because they inevitably will.

“We address all hazards: cyber, manmade and natural,” she said.

Lotto also went into detail around the office’s early efforts. She said it is developing techniques to enhance the speed and effectiveness of threat and vulnerability information sharing that’s both bi-directional and machine to machine. She said the office has noticed that they’re seeing the threats “not only on the [information technology] side of the house but on the [operational technology] side, as well.”

She said it’s important for “both the federal government and private sector to work towards closing the understanding of that gap.”

Lotto also said that the office is working on a tool called CyOTE, or Cybersecurity for the Operational Technology (OT) Environment, which works to increase situational awareness through an industry-led approach that will share and analyze OT data.  

“That data will be enhanced by insight from the intelligence community and our [Energy] National Labs,” she said.

The office is also participating in exercises with other agencies and industry partners to enhance the security of the nation’s energy systems, and the ability to quickly bounce back after an attack or disruption. Lotto said it recently participated in an exercise with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other key partners on New York’s Plum Island. The office had the opportunity to shut down the island’s grid, and have operators practice “black starting the system,” which is a complex process to re-start a power grid.

“It was really enlightening and the team learned a lot,” she said.

The office is also working with states in both planning and coordination, to ensure they are improving their cybersecurity preparedness framework. Lotto said coordination across all of America’s governments and the private sector is ultimately crucial for success.

“It’s all hands on deck to solve a really big problem,” she said.

Most people think as little as possible about the wastewater that is produced daily from their showers, bathtubs, sinks, dishwashers and toilets. But with the right techniques, it can become a valuable resource.

On average, every Americans uses about 60 gallons of water per day (PDF) for purposes that include flushing toilets, showering and doing laundry. This figure can easily double if outdoor uses, such as watering lawns and filling swimming pools, are also included.

Most of the used water eventually will become wastewater that must be treated before it can be discharged into nature. And that treatment uses a lot of energy. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, water and wastewater facilities account for more than a third of municipal energy budgets (PDF).

My research focuses on recovering resources from wastewater. This process is difficult because wastewater contains many types of contaminants. But researchers in our fields are exploring many creative ways to make valuable products from them.

Energy from organic materials

Diehard wastewater engineers understand the value of wastewater, which they view as an asset rather than a waste. That’s why some of them call it “used water” instead, and refer to what most people call wastewater treatment plants as water resource recovery facilities.

In fact, wastewater can contain more than three times the amount of energy needed to treat it. One simple and mature technique for recovering part of this energy is anaerobic digestion, a natural process in which microorganisms feed on grease and other organic materials in wastewater and produce biogas, just as yeast can eat up barley and spit out beer. Biogas contains roughly 50 percent methane, which can be used as a renewable fuel for boilers, furnaces and heating systems or to turn turbines and generate electricity.

More advanced techniques, such as hydrothermal processes, take sewage sludge — the solids removed from wastewater during treatment — and convert it into biobased fuels that can be used to replace gasoline and diesel fuel. This process is at the demonstration stage.

In additional to sewage sludge, many researchers — including me — are very interested in microalgae. Microalgae are promising feedstocks for biofuels (PDF), and some can grow in wastewater. My colleagues and I have designed hydrothermal systems to turn wastewater-grown microalgae into biofuels. They are still being tested in the lab, but we hope to scale them up in the near future.

Mining nutrients from wastewater

Wastewater also contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, essential elements that plants need to grow. In current wastewater treatment processes, we use energy to convert ammonia in the wastewater, which comes mostly from urine, into nitrogen gas. However, industries then use large quantities of natural gas to convert nitrogen gas back into ammonia, predominantly for producing fertilizer, through the Haber-Bosch process.

Clearly, it would be much more efficient to directly extract the ammonia from wastewater without converting it. One way is to use urine-diverting toilets, which already are commercially available, to separate urine from other sources of wastewater. Then the collected urine could be used as fertilizer after sanitizing it to remove pathogens.

Sanitized urine also contains other nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium. The Rich Earth Institute, a Vermont-based nonprofit supported by federal agencies and foundations, is researching ways to turn human urine into fertilizer. The institute is testing harvested urine on real crops, and has found that it works effectively.

Using pasteurized urine as fertilizer reduces waste and resource extraction.

Alternatively, we can recover these nutrients as struvite, or magnesium ammonium phosphate, a mineral that contains magnesium, nitrogen and phosphorus. Struvite can naturally form during wastewater treatment processes, but tends to deposit in tanks and pipes and will damage the equipment if left unattended. By controlling the formation of struvite, it can be recovered in separate reactors.

Researchers have tested recovered struvite on crops in laboratories and achieved yields comparable to commercial fertilizers. The technique is still maturing, but companies are developing commercial versions for wastewater treatment plants.

More possibilities

Want more valuable stuff? Wastewater is literally a gold mine. It contains metals valued up to millions of U.S. dollars per year. These metals are often toxic to aquatic life, so they need to be removed. But conventional removal technologies require a lot of energy and produce toxic sludge.

Researchers are developing new ways to remove and reuse these metals, including membrane systems that selectively can remove precious metals from water and biosystems that use microorganisms to recover them. These techniques are at a very early stage and it is not clear yet whether they will make economic sense, but they have the potential to make wastewater more valuable.

In addition, wastewater is generally warmer than natural water supplies, especially in the winter, so it can serve as a heat source. This technique is well-established and is not limited to commercial scale. You can install drain-water heat recovery systems at home to lower your energy bill.

To me, this is just a beginning. With proper techniques, “wastewater” can offer us much more — and I very much look forward to the day when there is no “wastewater,” just “used water.”

Researchers at the University of Tunis have recently proposed a new system for math formula script and type identification, which is based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Their method, presented in a paper published by Springer, can automatically discriminate between printed/handwritten and Arabic/Latin formulas.

In recent years, researchers have tried to develop systems that can identify the forms in which a document is presented, such as the language used and whether the text is machine-printed or handwritten, in order to select the appropriate recognition system for each document. Most of these approaches focus on identifying different forms of text, while very few are designed to analyze mathematical formulas.

“In this context, we present a new approach dealing with the problem of identification of the script, Arabic or Latin; and the type, hand-written or machine-printed, of math formulas,” the researchers at the University of Tunis wrote in their paper. “This work comes as a part of our research on offline recognition of Arabic math formulas.”

In their study, the researchers presented a syntax-directed system designed to recognize symbols and analyze their arrangement. To recognize symbols, their approach uses statistical features and a Bayes network classifier.

To analyze the structure of a formula, their system employs a top-down and bottom-up parsing scheme based on operator dominance. In other words, their system carries out a lexical, geometrical and syntactical analysis of a formula, which helps it to identify its script (Latin vs. Arabic) and whether it was handwritten or machine-typed.

“Formula parsing consists in applying, from the dominant operator and its context, the appropriate rule to divide the formulas into sub-formulas, which will be recursively analyzed in the same way,” the researchers explained in their paper.

Using a CNN, the approach devised by the researchers first extracts and then classifies connected components of a formula. The researchers trained and evaluated their system using Latin script formulas from the InftyMDB-1 and CROHME databases, as well as Arabic formulas scanned from math books or handwritten by five different writers.

“The proposed recognition system was tested on complex math formulas containing implicit multiplication, subscripts and superscripts, with satisfactory results,” the researchers wrote. “Adding more features, testing other feature selection algorithms and choosing faster classifiers should enhance the performance of the proposed system.”

Overall, the evaluations carried out by the researchers yielded highly promising results, with their system achieving a 94.6 percent identification rate. The parser they used to analyze the structure of formulas also appears to be very robust, as it achieved an impressive recognition rate of 97.63 percent. In their future work, the researchers plan to improve the performance of their system by further developing the CNN’s filters and architecture.