User:Jpiteo

Exulans Corporation, Inc. is an American company that designs, manufactures, and sells energy storage, generation, and management devices and components. Exulans Corporation is a privately held company, a C-corporation established in the State of Delaware. Exulans Corporation first gained attention by introducing the PowerCenter j10B, a fully integrated and hermetically sealed hybrid power supply designed to be installed residentially in very large numbers thereby changing traditional topology of power transmission and distribution. Exulans CEO, Joe Piteo, has said that he envisions Exulans as a design and manufacturing company that offers devices and components that specifically provide utility companies and other energy providers with real alternatives to the traditional grid network structure. To facilitate that vision, Exulans has created the PowerCenter and made a number of related advancements in the technology storing and generating power and energy. A key element is the Exulans eOS, “energy Operating System”. As PowerCenters are autonomous remotely controlled devices that are capable of learning, Exulans needed to create a software application that is similar in architecture to a traditional computer operating system. In other words, the eOS treats energy in a manner logically similar to the way a computer OS treats data and the components that manipulate data.

The world needs more power
Developed countries are struggling through transmission and distribution issues and developing countries are faced with challenges of both generation and distribution issues. In fact, the standard of living of every region in the world is defined by the amount of energy available to it. More specifically, energy availability has proven to be the single most significant factor in the determination of a region’s standard of living, i.e., the developed and developing world.

The U.S. Canada Power System Outage Task Force, organized after the 2003 Blackout of the central and eastern time zones of the U.S. and Canada to develop recommendations to reduce or prevent future failures, said it clearly and concisely: “Modern society has come to depend upon reliable electricity as an essential resource for national security; health and welfare; communications; finance; transportation; food and water supply; heating, cooling and lighting; commercial enterprises; and even entertainment and leisure – in short, nearly all aspects of life.”

The power network, or “the grid”, as it has become commonly referred to, has come under extreme pressure in the last two decades as it has suffered from transmission constraints in the U.S. and other developed countries, and extension and generation restrictions in the less developed regions of China, Africa and the like. For example, with respect to the United States’ transmission systems, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in their 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure assigned the electricity industry a grade of D+ based on the fact that, “electricity demand has increased by about 25% since 1990 while construction of transmission facilities decreased by about 30%.”

These networks, designed over a century ago, did not foresee the breath of development that would occur beyond the centralized suburban areas. These areas could be powered by a large centered power plant with limited transmission. Transmission into the vast outlying rural areas was not contemplated when there plants were built. Then, as these networks were extended to try to accommodate these more rural locations, the designers underestimated the demand that would be required by these outlying areas and the variations in the flow of power which would accompany the long distance trading of electric power to meet that demand.

This ever increasing demand will continue to exacerbate this problem according to the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), a power funded industry organization who projects that, “demand for electricity is expected to increase by 45% by 2025,” as new electric powered vehicles are introduced and further developed and the economy begins to grow again.

Solar and wind generators hold the promise of populating these old style networks with small distributed power sources. However, even this change is nearly impossible to implement, because the primary bottleneck in the current infrastructure is in the transmission system, not in generation. These outdated centralized networks need more than a few additional nodes of anemic power or the utilities cannot hope to meet the energy needs of their customers today, let alone tomorrow.

The current “fix”, as noted earlier, is to ration power by way of rolling blackouts through a transmission system which has reached maximum capacity during peak demand periods. According to the summer, 2006 edition of Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering, “the average U.S. customer loses power 214 minutes per year as compared to 70 minutes in the United Kingdom, 53 minutes in France, 29 minutes in the Netherlands, 6 minutes in Japan and 2 minutes in Singapore,” [as a result of these rationing techniques].

How serious is the problem?
Brownouts, blackouts and grid failures are becoming more common each year. Data compiled by professors from Carnegie Mellon University’s Electricity Industry Center and the college of Engineering at the University of Vermont shows the number of blackouts has increased from approximately 45 per year from 1991 to 1995 to an average of 204 per year from 2001 to 2005, an increase of just under 500%. Industries and manufacturers are forced to shut down or delay production during peak periods. Painful any time; such forced shutdowns only worsen in an economic recession. Estimates vary, but CNN reported in August 2010 that the annual cost of power outages in the U.S. is at least $119 billion, while a 2004 study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) estimated the annual cost of power outages was between $22 billion and $135 billion, and the ASCE’s 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure concluded that power outages and quality disturbances cost the economy $25 billion to $180 billion per year, the costs while varying, are all stopping.