Wireless Sensors To Monitor Power Grids

Roland Piquepaille writes "Major power outages like the ones which affected the New York state last month or Western Europe ten days ago are becoming more frequent — even if their causes were different. In some cases, the utility companies have to dispatch electricians all over the place to discover the cause of the power failure or simply to restore power. Engineers at the University of Buffalo think they have a better solution: deploy wireless 'nanotech' sensors to monitor the networks and to find the exact location of a failure. They also say that even if the technology is almost available, several years of research are necessary before such a solution can be used by electrical companies. Read more for additional details about this attractive solution."

Nanotech?

[SultanCemil]

Why nanotech? Power infrastructure isn't exactly tiny. Why not just normal wireless sensors? Buzzword much...?

Bah

[ErikTheRed]

For all of the technical details given in either article, they might as well propose monitoring the lines with an army of fairies that communicate using magic pixie dust, deployed via unicorns.

Wireless?

[frieza79]

what about wired sensors? The infrastructure is already in place. When the sensors stop sending data, the power must be down at that location. It would be easy to map out which sensors arent responding.

Batteries?

[MD_Willington]

Inductive charging works fine, put the unit on the line... Check EOS manufacturing: http://www.eosmfg.com/news/index.html [eosmfg.com]

This is nanotechnology?

[krnpimpsta]

The article keeps referring to these sensors as nanotechnology.. since when were 2-3 inch devices considered "nanotech?"

Autonomic Computing

[mcrbids]

So I was reading this magazine called "Optimize". It's one of those freebie trade rags where you simply have to sign up as a "CTO / CIO" to get, along with about 5 lbs of junk mail every day.

Anyway, I was reading about so-called "autonomic computing" with "dynamic resource allocation" and "self-healing capabilities". It was this fluffy, buzzword-laden stuff that just didn't quite dig with me.

Just when I thought that there might actually be something here for me to look into, I noticed an example and jumped on it.

The example was of an "enterprise" backup that had to be done nightly, and some tech weenie had to remote in at 1:00 AM every night to check disk space and kick off the backup. How did they do it the autonomic way? Well, they set up a background scheduler that would automatically check for disk space and start the process!

Yep, that's right. A cron job that did about 5 lines of shell scripting. WTF?

This sounds to be just as buzzword laden and content poor. I've come to conclude that the number of buzzwords used to describe a particular application are inversely proportional to the substance of said application.