35238157
submission
transporter_ii writes:
A compressed air energy storage (CAES) plant was first built in Germany in 1978, but East Texas will be the site of one of the world's first modern CASE plants. How does it work? A CAES power generation facility uses electric motor-driven compressors (generated by natural gas generators) to inject air into an underground storage cavern and later releases the compressed air to turn turbines and generate electricity back onto the grid, according to the plants owner. The location near Palestine, Texas was selected because of its large salt dome, which will be used to store the compressed air. The plant is estimated at 350 million-plus, and will create about 20 to 25 permanent jobs.
36160
submission
transporter_ii writes:
What hardware/software combination would best be suited for an 802.11x city-wide Mesh or PtMP network for use in a WISP application? Rather than this being a case of letting Slashdot do all of our research for us, we have already deployed two wireless systems with mixed results. One, a Motorola Canopy system, was extremely expensive but worked very well as long as line of sight was available. Given that we are located in East Texas, the LoS issue, combined with equipment cost, caused us to move to an 802.11b Mesh Network. For this network, we used custom-built APs that consisted of PC Engines WRAP boards, 200 mW radio cards, and Locustworld software, because of it centralized management features. While this setup was much more affordable, we have been plagued with a host of problems. The wireless network will slow down even though there is still plenty of bandwidth left on our backend, traffic that passes through just a couple of hops slows to an even slower pace for no apparent reason, and the APs will hang and/or reboot randomly under high temperature (again this is Texas) and high traffic. All in all, it has been a pain for us and our customers. Is there any Mesh or PtMP equipment that offers good stability, can handle the heat well, offers good network management features, and does so at least a somewhat affordable price? And for clarification, the system does not have to be fully 802.11x. Using a different spectrum for backhauls is something we are really interested in, except for the 900 Mhz spectrum, which is already pretty crowded in our area. Information on a setup that works good in an area with a lot of trees would also be extremely appreciated.
