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"Clean Tech: What technology are you, your lab or your workplace developing that will improve how we generate or use energy?"
Use swarm logic to manage the diversity of loads in a building, thereby smoothing demand and reducing peaks
Bees function with precious little information exchanged between each other, and very small “instruction sets” encoded in their brains — no master bee shouts out orders in a command & control fashion, yet the hive thrives even as bees come and go, or the weather changes, and thanks to decentralized, autonomous, independent decision-making by each bee, known as swarm logic.
REGEN has encapsulated this style of control methodology so that electrical loads can now operate as a group, automatically smoothing out demand without sacrificing comfort, all by listening to each other and making independent, autonomous decisions without the need for a complex, static, command & control system (http://www.regenenergy.com/Resources/Envirogrid%20Methodology.pdf).
This methodology is also ideally suited for managing the demand of a fleet of electric vehicles, whether charging at one location or across a utility’s entire service territory (http://markkerbel.blogspot.com/2011/02/regen-energy-expands-demand-management.html)
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On February 10th, 2011 at 8:29 pm tom just Said:
technology using “Swarm Logic” what a brilliant idea. How do they feed the bees inside the sealed control box? LOL… serious I checked out REGEN’s website and their technology is state of the art for DM energy controls and… they really work!
On March 15th, 2011 at 3:51 pm Ripton Mom Said:
Constantly finding viable ways to think of our movement patters as humans is an important control in our universe. Finding models for our behavior in nature is an ideal that I support fully. We must begin to see things from different perspectives to understand the intelligence of changing our current ways.
On March 15th, 2011 at 5:25 pm Susanna, PF Web Maven Said:
I’m constantly amazed by the fact that all the organisms on the planet respond to the SAME challenges we face as humans, and yet the way we live is far more disruptive to nature. Thanks for your comment! If you didn’t catch it earlier this year, check out a speech by bio-mimicry expert Janine Benyus from the Green Gov conference (her segment starts about an hour in).