Aboitiz to build new hydropower facilities in Bukidnon

DAVAO CITY, Philippines - Amid the power shortage in Mindanao, a wholly owned unit of Aboitiz Power Corp has announced its plans to construct two run-of-river hydroelectric power plants in Kitaotao, Bukidnon.

Hedcor Inc vice president for business department Gregorio Jabonillo said the plants will have a combined generation capacity of 28.2 megawatts.

Jabonillo explained that the facilities would harness the water running from Sita River and Simod River to run its turbines for power generation.

He added that about 90% of the water in the river will be diverted through pipes to create enough push to generate power in the turbines.

The facilities will cover up to 5 kilometers of Sita River and 4 kilometers of Simod River.

“After the process, we will also return the water to the river in a cleaner state,” Jabonillo said.

Jabonillo said that the proposed facility in Sita River is targeted to have a capacity of 16.4 megawatts while that in Simod River is expected to produce 11.8 megawatts.

Yearly, the facilities are estimated to generate 59 million kilowatt-hours power, which would help boost supply in Mindanao, he explained.

The company said aside from power generation, the power complex will also bring different forms of benefits and assistance to the host communities.

“Our facilities, which will be built on the ancestral domain of our brothers and sisters from the indigenous tribes of Bukidnon, will produce substantial benefits to the host communities including employment, medical assistance, schools and infrastructure projects,” Jabonillo said.

And the most important benefit of the host communities from these facilities, he added, is the annual generation share from the operations.

In the rounds of consultations with the tribal communities, the company promised the residents that there is nothing to worry about any ill environmental effects of the proposed project.

However, Mindanao-based environmental group Panalipdan criticizes the power project for possible adverse effects to the local ecosystem.

Juland Suazo, spokesperson of Panalipdan, said that despite the promises made by the company that the facility will champion clean energy, it will still have emissions, and the pipes where the water will be diverted will eventually accumulate methane.

“If the flow of water would be diverted and redesigned then definitely this would have its unimaginable adverse effects on the flora and fauna in the community,” Suazo said.

Possible long-term effects of the projects include unpredictable flashfloods and the drying of the irrigation system, which is being used on the rice fields of the farmers, he explained.

“The accumulation of wealth is privatized while the accumulation of damages is socialized,” Suazo said.

Aboitiz and Hedcor consistently asserted that their clean technology will have no negative impacts to the environment. - Rappler.com

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UK urged to build pilot-free jets

25 October 2011 Last updated at 17:30 GMT Researchers say formation flying could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% Investment in new aeroplane technologies is the key to the UK maintaining its status as an aerospace leader, according to a report.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) said the country's research and development spending has "flat-lined" since the 2008 financial crisis.

It said that made the UK's position vulnerable to China, India and Brazil.

It urged the creation of a research centre to test ideas such as pilot-free planes and solar-powered flight.

"The UK aerospace sector already employs over 100,000 people around the country and is worth over £29bn a year to our economy, but we need to take action now to ensure this sector can continue to thrive and grow," said Stephen Tetlow, chief executive of IMechE.

He said the UK was currently the second biggest aerospace manufacturer in the world.

However, it is being challenged by emerging economies, which are offering firms competitive R&D opportunities to boost their market share, as well as the promise of cheaper labour.

Future tech

IMechE's Aero 2075 report made three recommendations to secure the UK's lead.

IMechE's concept design for a double decker blended wing aircraft, capable of carrying 650 passengers Industry and government should agree a strategic vision for investing in the UK's aerospace sectorThe UK should establish an advanced technologies aerospace research centreGovernment should restore R&D support to pre-recession levels

If the suggestions were to be followed, the institution suggested there could be a range of UK-designed innovations in the skies over the next 50 years.

It said these could include formation flying, where a group of aircraft cruise in a V-shaped formation to reduce drag and boost fuel efficiency.

IMechE said there were opportunities to explore generating power mid-flight from renewable sources, such as solar and hydrogen fuel cells. However, it warned batteries would have to become lighter.

It noted that the UK was already involved in the production of unmanned aerial vehicles for the military. It said the research could be extended to develop pilot-less freighter aircraft, even if passengers resisted the idea.

Perhaps its most radical idea was the suggestion that a large "mothership" aircraft could carry smaller individual units, which would be released over designated areas, allowing passengers to be dropped off closer to their final destinations.

"These technologies may seem fanciful, but there is engineering research that shows that these technologies are feasible," said Philippa Oldham, head of transport at IMechE.

"These aircraft would be expensive but it's important to remember that these developments bring jobs and investment back into the UK."

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Enterprises build optimized data centers too

Filed Under: commentary

Web giants and mega-size cloud-computing providers garner most of the attention when it comes to highly tuned and optimized data center designs. In April, Facebook shared the specifications for the servers it builds as part of an effort its calling the Open Compute Project. More recently, Facebook engineers have written about testing an extreme multi-core chip design from Tilera. Google has long been known for taking unique approaches to server and data center operations and design, although the company is generally secretive about the specifics.

This sort of hyper-optimization around scale was supposedly going to rapidly drive all computing to happen at a small number of very large providers. The economies of scale, so the reasoning went, would be such as to render anything smaller cost prohibitive.

It hasn't played out that way--for a variety of reasons. And one of those reasons is that enterprises can play the data center optimization game too--and, in fact, may be better off with an approach that optimizes for their unique situation rather than for a mass audience. GE Appliances & Lighting's announcement yesterday that it's opening a new data center at its Louisville, Ky., Appliance Park headquarters offers a nice illustration of this trend.

GE's data center includes 128 cabinets of high-density servers.

(Credit: GE)

The new facility reuses most of the walls, floor, and roof of existing factory space at Appliance Park. The location is historically interesting because it's where the first commercial UNIVAC computer went in 1954. (For the computer history buffs, the UNIVAC 1 had about 5,200 vacuum tubes, used mercury delay lines--basically big columns of mercury--for storage, and ran at 2.25MHz.) The systems in the new facility are rather more advanced and even cutting-edge compared to the rackmount servers that are the norm in typical data centers.

Two 27,000-gallon thermal storage tanks that are part of the cooling system

(Credit: GE )

The most common servers today are 1U (1.75-inch) or 2U (3.5-inch) high, contain two multi-core processors, and are packaged into 42U-high cabinets. By the time networking equipment and other gear gets added, a cabinet typically draws about 4 to 7 kilowatts of power and dissipates an equivalent amount of heat. This latter point is important because that sort of power density was, for a long time, considered to be about the limit for conventional air cooling. And few companies wanted to deal with the complexity of more sophisticated cooling techniques.

However, GE's data center houses servers designed to operate in the 18 to 24 kilowatts per cabinet range. High-density obviously means the servers take up less space. It also means that, combined with high-efficiency cooling systems, less energy is needed to cool the servers. This is one reason that the new GE facility is one of the 6 percent of LEED-certified buildings globally to achieve Platinum certification. (LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system.)

For a long time, optimization and technical innovation at the chip and server level were the norm while data centers were more about real estate and a fairly standardized set of infrastructure related to power and cooling. That's changing.

If you have a question or comment for Gordon Haff, you can submit it here. However, because our editors and writers receive hundreds of requests, we cannot tell you when you may receive a response.

Gordon Haff has more than 20 years of IT industry experience, dealing with many aspects of enterprise hardware and software. He writes primarily about the evolution of large-scale computing, application access, and related software and device trends. Gordon is senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, but the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

This blog takes a deep (and often skeptical) look at trends big and small in the world of enterprise servers, data centers, and "Yotta-scale" computing, delving into related software, networking, and device trends driving change in (or being driven by) back-end systems.

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