50K homes to turn into power plant

Tesla, Australia unveil new plan

SYDNEY, Feb 4, (AFP): Some 50,000 homes in South Australia will receive solar panels and Tesla batteries, the state government announced Sunday, in a landmark plan to turn houses into a giant, interconnected power plant.

South Australia is already home to world’s biggest battery in an Elon Musk-driven project to provide electricity for more than 30,000 homes.

The state government has since been looking for more ways — particularly through renewables — to address its energy woes after an “unprecedented” storm caused a state-wide blackout in 2016.

Under a new plan unveiled on Sunday, a network of solar panels linked to rechargeable batteries will be provided free to households and financed by the sale of excess electricity generated by the network, the government said.

“My government has already delivered the world’s biggest battery, now we will deliver the world’s largest virtual power plant,” state Premier Jay Weatherill said in a statement.

“We will use people’s homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefitting with significant savings in their energy bills.”

A trial phase will begin with 1,100 public housing properties, each supplied with a 5kW solar panel system Tesla battery.

Following the trial, the systems will be installed at a further 24,000 public housing properties before the scheme is opened up to other South Australians over the next four years.

The government is also set to look for an energy retailer to deliver the programme to add more competition to the market.

The rollout will be supported by the

prepared to help secure water collection points if “Day Zero” occurs.

The Associated Press is exploring how residents are coping as water restrictions tighten in an attempt to avoid the possible shut-off in mid-April, and it spoke with researchers about where the water usage problems lie.

Kirsty Carden with the Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town state government through a A$2 million ($1.6 million) grant and a A$30 million loan from a taxpayer renewable technology fund.

Tesla said in a statement to AFP that the virtual power plant would have 250 megawatts of solar energy and 650 megawatt hours of battery storage.

Provide

“At key moments, the virtual power plant could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant,” the company added.

Australia is one of the world’s largest producers of coal and gas but the South Australian blackout raised questions about its energy security.

Several ageing coal-fired power plants have closed, while strong demand for gas exports and a rise in onshore gas drilling bans have fuelled concerns of a looming domestic energy shortage in the next few years.

More than 60 percent of electricity generation in Australia is from coal, with 14 percent from renewables, according to government data published in 2016.

A plan to use satellite imagery and aerial mapping to protect Indonesia’s peatlands — a vast carbon sink and source of much of the country’s greenhouse emissions — was awarded a $1 million prize on Friday.

The cutting-edge technology will be used by authorities to clamp down on illegal clearance of the land for plantations, helping to prevent a repeat of annual forest fires that plague the region while also reducing the country’s carbon footprint.

The government, with the support of international partners, came up with

pointed to the city’s leafy suburbs. “It has been in the areas where people have gardens, they have swimming pools and they are much more profligate in the way that they use water, because they’re used to the water just being, coming out of the taps,” she said.

Some residents appear to be changing their ways, she said, but “there have been problems in the more affluent areas where the idea of a competition two years ago to help achieve its commitments under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The winning entry from the International Peat Mapping Team was recognised by the judges for offering “the most accurate, timely and costeffective methodology for mapping peatlands”.

Bambang Setiadi, an Indonesian member of the winning team, told reporters that Indonesia has the largest tropical peatland area in the world.

“We need technology to measure the depth of peat domes and water levels,” said Setiadi, whose team also included scientists from Indonesia, Germany and the Netherlands.

Peatlands are fragile ecosystems formed over thousands of years by the accumulation of dense wet plant material.

When drained or cleared by fire to make way for commercial plantations, such as for palm oil or pulpwood, the carbon is released into the atmosphere.

In 2015, Indonesia experienced its most serious fires in some years, worsened by dry weather caused by an El Nino phenomenon, and cloaked large stretches of Southeast Asia in choking smog for weeks.

A moratorium on conversions of new peatlands was established in 2011 to improve management and reduce fires.

But poor spatial data and overlapping forestry maps are a major hindrance for authorities trying to enforce regulations governing them.

Indonesia’s geospatial agency, which oversaw the internationally funded competition, said the new mapping technology would be deployed this year.

people are just, ‘We’ll pay for it.’”

About a quarter of Cape Town’s population lives in the informal settlements, where they get water from communal taps instead of individual taps at home, Carden said. “And there are always pictures of running taps and broken fixtures and ‘Look at the leakage’ and all the rest. But the reality is that those 1 million people out of a population of 4 (million) only use 4.5 percent of the water.” (AP)

App keeps eye on stars’ sleep:

Bundesliga club Hertha Berlin are keeping a “big brother” eye on the physical condition and sleep quality of their team with the help of a smart phone app.

Since the beginning of the season Hertha’s stars, such as former Chelsea striker Salomon Kalou, have to answer a short questionnaire each morning.

Using their smart phones, players must rate their level of fatigue, sleep quality, muscle soreness, stress levels and mood condition.

The players rate each category from one (worst) to five (best) and the questionnaire takes around 15 seconds to answer.

“It’s so we can learn how the boys slept, whether their legs hurt or their muscles are cramped,” Hertha coach Pal Dardai told German daily Bild.

The information goes to the club’s fitness coach Henrik Kuchno.

“At 8:00 am (0700 GMT), each player gets the five questions on the phone, which he has to answer by 9:00 am.

“It’s so we can control the subsequent training sessions perfectly and know the degree of stress of each individual.” (AFP)