Unsustainable Power Research Articles

Empire, Secular Materialism, and Alternative Knowledges

Abstract: This essay probes the ways that secular thought worked in tandem with the imperial management of colonized peoples. Colonial policies of religious neutrality could not fully obscure the judgmentalism toward the religions of colonial subjects, exposing the power dynamics within which secular discourses of empire operated. A case in point is the rationale for the introduction of English literature into the colonial curriculum as a secular surrogate for Christian values. No writer of the imperial age was more attuned to the complex workings of the secular imagination and the conflictual languages of tolerance and intolerance than Rudyard Kipling, for whom India served as a backdrop for probing the unsustainable power of colonial legislative reforms in altering the religious mindset of Indians. His fascination with technology and its conceptual relation to occultism enabled him to probe the intersections between religion and science, highlighting his imaginative reinterpretation of secularism's fragility as a mechanism of colonial power.

3D Printing of Flexible BaTiO3/Polydimethylsiloxane Piezocomposite with Aligned Particles for Enhanced Energy Harvesting.

With the rapid development of human-machine interactions and artificial intelligence, the demand for wearable electronic devices is increasing uncontrollably all over the world; however, an unsustainable power supply for such sensors continues to restrict their applications. In the present work, piezoelectric barium titanate (BaTiO3) ceramic powder with excellent properties was prepared from milled precursors through a solid-state reaction. To fabricate a flexible device, the as-prepared BaTiO3 powder was mixed with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer. The BaTiO3/PDMS ink with excellent rheological properties was extruded smoothly by direct ink writing technology (DIW). BaTiO3 particles were aligned due to the shear stress effect during the printing process. Subsequently, the as-printed composite was assembled into a sandwich-type device for effective energy harvesting. It was observed that the maximum output voltage and current of this device reached 68 V and 720 nA, respectively, for a BaTiO3 content of 6 vol %. Therefore, the material extrusion-based three-dimensional (3D) printing technique can be used to prepare flexible piezoelectric composites for efficient energy harvesting.

Electricity Transmission Losses, Electricity Consumption, and Economic Growth in Ghana

An unsustainable power supply has dire consequences for every economy. Extant studies focused on the nexus of electricity consumption and economic growth to the neglect of electricity transmission losses (ETL). This paper argued that quantifying the effect of ETL on electricity consumption and understanding its implications on growth will incite actions to improve the electricity transmission system in Ghana. Using yearly data from 2000 to 2020 in an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, the study concludes that ETL reduce the total amount of electric power consumed in Ghana by 34%. Again, a reduction in electricity consumption due to ETL reduces national income and Ghana’s growth at large. Factors including electricity price, exchange rate, and inflation also influenced electricity consumption and economic growth in Ghana. The study suggests massive improvement in its electricity transmission system to reduce electricity losses, increase electricity consumption, and enhance economic growth.

Sustainable Power Supply: A Catalyst for Economic Development In Nigeria

This paper focuses on the sustainable power supply and ways to enhance it that will culminate into economic growth now and even in the future, it highlights the importance of sustainable power supply as catalyst to economic development and examines the works of some experts in the area. It also discusses the Nigeria’s under development as a contribution of the inadequate and unsustainable power supply to it, stressing sustainable power supply as a tool for “Economic Growth and Development,” which seems to be mirage presently. The paper having examined the Renewable Energy Sources (RES) as an option for achieving sustainable power supply in Nigeria, it then concluded that Nigeria as a country should encourage the implementation of energy mix involving conventional and renewable technologies to increase power supply that will achieve rapid economic development and generate employment capabilities for its teeming youths, thereby reducing insecurity and other crimes related vices. Keywords: Sustainable power supply, energy mix, renewable technique, Economic growth

A Techno-Economic Model for Wind Energy Costs Analysis for Low Wind Speed Areas

The global population is moving away from fossil fuel technologies due to their many disadvantages, such as air pollution, greenhouse gases emission, global warming, acid rain, health problems, and high costs. These disadvantages make fossil fuels unsustainable. As a result, renewable energy is becoming more attractive due to its steadily decreasing costs. Harnessing renewable energy promises to meet the present energy demands of the African continent. The enormous renewable energy potential available across the African continent remains largely untapped, especially for wind energy. However, marginal and fair wind speeds and power densities characterize African wind energy resulting in low and unsustainable power in many areas. This research develops a techno-economic model for wind energy cost analysis for a novel, Ferris wheel-based wind turbine. The model is used to techno-economically analyze the siting of wind turbine sites in low wind speed areas on the African continent. The wind turbine’s technical performance is characterized by calculating the annual energy production and the capacity factor using the wind Weibull probability distribution of the cities and theoretical power curve of the wind turbine. Its economic performance is evaluated using annualized financial return on investment, simple payback period, and levelized cost of electricity. The techno-economic model is validated for 21 African cities and shows that the Ferris wheel-based design is very competitive with four current, commercial wind turbines, as well as with other sources of energy. Hence, the new wind turbine may help provide the economical, clean, renewable energy that Africa needs.

Agroecosystem resilience. A conceptual and methodological framework for evaluation.

This article proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing agroecosystem resilience, in which aspects such as agrarian structure and peasant community agency are included as determining factors. The methodology is applied to a comparison of two peasant communities in Latin America (Brazil and Colombia), emphasizing the capacity to transform unsustainable power structures in place of adapting to them. We find that when agrarian structure is more equitable and peasant agency is strongly developed through political formation, organization and women's participation, then there is a greater construction of resilience that improves peasant livelihoods and dignity. This application demonstrates that when agency is strongly developed, as in the case of Brazil, it is possible to transform structural conditions that restrict resilience. The inclusion and consideration of biophysical variables, management practices, agrarian structure and agency, through a participatory approach, allows for the identification of factors that inhibit or potentiate the resilience of agroecosystems.

Guest Editorial Advances in Quantum Communications, Computing, Cryptography, and Sensing

Seven decades after the foundation of classical information theory and the invention of the transistor that launched the digital communication and computing revolutions, we are entering a new era of quantum information science and engineering (QISE). Despite holding its impressive sway for nearly 60 years, the celebrated Moore’s law is beginning to hit physical limits, as the ever-shrinking transistor size is making it necessary to account for quantum effects. Concurrently, the growing demand for high-rate processing is imposing unsustainable power and heat dissipation requirements. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop quantum information processing systems that can circumvent the limitations of existing technology.

Sub-THz/THz Interconnect, Complement to Electrical and Optical Interconnects: Addressing Fundamental Challenges Related to Communication Distances

The big data era has witnessed expansion of information traffic at a 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during one decade, as shown in Figure 1(a) [1], [2]. Rising data rates magnify hierarchically down to shorter communication distances. That is, data rate increases are exchanged from interdata centers to interrack, interboard, interchip, and intrachip scenarios. For almost two decades, microprocessor speeds have been stalled due to unsustainable power consumption [4], resulting in multicore computer architectures. Although the multicore architecture mitigates the data processing power consumption requirement, it demands higher data communication rates from core to core, due to increasingly complex functionalities and systems. Figure 1(b) presents the input?output (I/O) bandwidth and I/O pin number evolution through time [5], [6]. The I/O bandwidth increases by approximately 2 every two years or 10 every five years, while the I/O pin number grows at a much smaller rate, 1.7 every five years, because of process and mechanical constraints. This results in a widening gap between I/O bandwidth requirements and capabilities, notoriously named the interconnect gap, which has been a major and long-standing challenge for more than a decade.

Unsustainable power distribution? Women Leaders in Polish Academia

Unsustainable power distribution? Women Leaders in Polish Academia

Electrode‐Free Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Harvesting Human Biomechanical Energy and as a Versatile Inartificial Physiological Monitor

The emergence of portable health monitors and wearable versatile sensors brings a promising approach for real‐time physiological surveillance. However, the complicated wiring connections and unsustainable power supplies have largely hindered their combination. Herein, a human body‐based electrode‐free triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is demonstrated, which can not only effectively harvest biomechanical energy from human walking and running, but can also serve as a self‐powered versatile inartificial physiological monitor. Most importantly, no electrode material is required in the TENG. In virtue of triboelectrification between the sole and the floor, electricity is produced during human motions with the desirable open‐circuit voltage of more than 150 V under casual walking. The performance of the TENG is investigated under variable environmental conditions and different configurations to evaluate its adaptability. By extracting inartificial electric signals from any part of the human body, information of the footwork, lameness, body weight, and jumping height can be actively transmitted out without using any external power sources. This work provides a new self‐powered route of health surveillance and disease diagnosis.

APPROX-NoC

The trend of unsustainable power consumption and large memory bandwidth demands in massively parallel multicore systems, with the advent of the big data era, has brought upon the onset of alternate computation paradigms utilizing heterogeneity, specialization, processor-in-memory and approximation. Approximate Computing is being touted as a viable solution for high performance computation by relaxing the accuracy constraints of applications. This trend has been accentuated by emerging data intensive applications in domains like image/video processing, machine learning and big data analytics that allow inaccurate outputs within an acceptable variance. Leveraging relaxed accuracy for high throughput in Networks-on-Chip (NoCs), which have rapidly become the accepted method for connecting a large number of on-chip components, has not yet been explored. We propose APPROX-NoC, a hardware data approximation framework with an online data error control mechanism for high performance NoCs. APPROX-NoC facilitates approximate matching of data patterns, within a controllable value range, to compress them thereby reducing the volume of data movement across the chip. Our evaluation shows that APPROX-NoC achieves on average up to 9% latency reduction and 60% throughput improvement compared with state-of-the-art NoC data compression mechanisms, while maintaining low application error. Additionally, with a data intensive graph processing application we achieve a 36.7% latency reduction compared to state-of-the-art compression mechanisms.

Fine-Grained Energy-Efficient Consolidation in SDN Networks and Devices

The constant evolution and expansion of the Internet and Internet-related technologies has exposed the limitations of the current networking infrastructures, which are represented by the unsustainable power consumption and low level of scalability. In fact, these infrastructures are still based on the typical, ossified architecture of the TCP/IP paradigm. In order to cope with the Future Internet requirements, recent contributions envisage an evolution towards more programmable and efficient paradigms. In this respect, this paper describes the basic issues, the technical approaches, and the methodologies for the implementation of power management primitives in the context of the emerging Software Defined Networking. In detail, we propose to extend one of the most prominent solutions aimed at increasing networking flexibility, the OpenFlow Protocol, to integrate the energy-aware capabilities offered by the Green Abstraction Layer (GAL). However, the mere introduction of node-level solutions would be of little or no use in the absence of a network-wide management scheme to guarantee inter-operability and effectiveness of the proposed architecture. In this respect, this work also proposes an analytical model for the management of a network with these capabilities. The results will show how our solutions are well suited to provide a scalable and efficient network architecture able to manage the orchestration and consolidation of the available resources.

Computational geometry in the parallel external memory model

Continued advances in VLSI scaling combined with unsustainable power consumption of frequency scaling resulted in parallel processors having become mainstream as demonstrated by modern multicores. Current off-the-shelf processors already contain up to 16 cores and the prototypes boast up to 48 cores on a single chip.