Browsing by Subject "electricity"
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Item The Pecan Street Project : developing the electric utility system of the future(2009-08) Smith, Christopher Alan; Eaton, David J.; Webber, Michael E., 1971-The Pecan Street Project (PSP) is a public-private initiative that seeks to establish the City of Austin and its electric utility, Austin Energy (AE), as leaders in developing the electric utility system of the future and clean energy economy. The four main components of the project are to: 1) develop a local, public-private consortium dedicated to research and development of clean energy technologies and distributed power generation; 2) open the city’s electric grid to act as a lab to test emerging clean energy technologies; 3) develop a new business model to ensure AE’s continued profitability; and 4) show the world how the new business and systems model can work. This report provides a case study of PSP and describes an analytical approach for evaluating projects, programs, and policies proposed by PSP working groups to develop a cleaner, more efficient electric system. This report includes a history of the project, discusses opportunities and challenges identified by PSP, and evaluates the potential economic, environmental, system, and other impacts of different project ideas through a technical analysis. This report concludes with a series of recommendations to PSP and identifies policy implications for the City of Austin, AE, other policymakers, and other electric utilities.Item Statewise Correlates of Civil Nuclear Energy(2014-08-01) Kafle, NischalQuantitative empirical analysis has been used in several works, over the past decade or so, to identify correlates of states motivation for pursuing military nuclear technology. Nelson and Sprecher used such methodology to identify various national attributes that correlate to states peaceful use of nuclear power for electricity generation, which was termed as \Nuclear Reliance." The major initial objective for the present work was to replace a dichotomous subjective independent variable used by Nelson and Sprecher to represent engagement in international commerce in civil nuclear technology with more objectively defined variables carrying a similar representation. Ordinary least squares stepwise regression was applied to a dataset consisting of 27 independent variables that was created for this study. Data for 13 of 27 independent variables were added to the dataset from previous study, and 9 of 14 previous attributes data were updated. Supervised stepwise regression was used to create a linear regression model with five predictors having acceptable confidence level (p < 0:01) and coefficient of determination (R^(2) ? 0:51). Results from stepwise linear regression showed that states that trade knowledge and material for nuclear power technology are heavily involved in civil nuclear power that states that are not involved in international trade of such technology and material. Analyses of the individual steps at several different levels of aggregation showed that some predictors were included as a consequence of improvements to residuals only for a few states. Preliminary results show that an analysis based on change from some prior year (1980 was used, for illustrative purposes) has considerable promise.