Leader Garden-Helping firms Cultivate and Grow their Leaders

With nary a sunbeam in sight, TVA and the Electric Power Research Institute on Tuesday unveiled a concept for charging the electric vehicles that are just beginning to hit the local highways.

Equipped with about 12 kilowatts’ worth of solar panels and a battery array with about five kilowatt-hours of storage, the six-parking-spot station will be used to analyze the potential impact of electric vehicles on the electric grid as well as ways to supplement that power. It is the first of two such stations to be built in East Tennessee and will serve as a research prototype to model how electric cars can be juiced up when they’re away from home.

via Solar Knowledge: TVA Unveils Electric Vehicle Charging Station Prototype.

Pretty fascinating technology that will support the upcoming launch of many electrical vehicle models.

10 Fastest Computer | rockykawas.com.

Interesting list of the world’s 10 fastest computers.

Thanks to rockykawas.com for the information.

Note:  2 of this list of 10 reside at Oak Ridge National Lab and 9 of the 10 reside in America

HPCwire: ORNL-Led Team Takes Prize for World’s Top Science App.

Congratulations to the Oak Ridge group that achieved 1.84 thousand trillions calculations per second (petaflops).

This application was achieved on one of the Cray supercomputers housed on the ORNL campus in East Tennessee.  Part of the improvement that led to this achievement was a recent upgrade from 4 to 6 processors.

Chattanooga Times Free Press | Accelerated by stimulus.

I find it interesting that our state congressional delegation mainly voted against the Stimulus plan and yet we are the #5 state in the union in receiving funding from this program.

I call that astute statesmanship.

We do have a number of entities such as Oak Ridge National Lab and Y-12 that are always on the government funding list, but we have also scored some other significant projects that are being funded with money our government has or will borrow, funded by many outside our country.

This year is not a good one to predict the strength of the recovery.  WE will have a much better picture by 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2010 to see what is really going to happen here.

Stay tuned!

Economic Development Strategy Leverages Knoxville-Oak Ridge Innovation Valley Assets | Reuters.

I never cease to be amazed at what comes out of the ORNL area.  The level of knowledge and technical expertise is quite high and I see the area becoming more collaborative in the work that they are doing.

I’ll also be curious to see how the Nuclear option is taken up by others.  There is a strong anti-nuclear faction in our country and they will exert a great amount of energy to oppose any escalation of the user of Nuclear power.

The Daily Beacon.

Mercury is a highly poisonous substance and this  article talks about ways that UT and ORNL have collaborated to use bacteria to eliminate or reduce mercury content.

This kind of research is very useful and I find it fascinating!

Nvidia: Next big supercomputer player? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com.

Nvidia announced its next-generation GPU architecture and announced a win with ORNL.

Graphics are becoming a bigger issues in scientific issues and the ORNL supercomputer under development will be used for energy and climate change research.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory – News.

This is an interesting overview that describe what ORNL is and compares them  with Y-12 and the old K-25 facility.

This is especially useful for those wanting a quick overview of these key facilities and their place in the Oak Ridge environment.

Top 10 Supercomputers in 2009 – Bookmarks.

For those of you who wondered “where are the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world” , here is your list.

Read with interest that the second fastest is at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  I viewed part of this machine while in Oak Ridge last month.

It is hard to grasp that kind of speed.  The usages are very unique and people from many different areas submit projects that are either accepted or rejected based on their merit.

In this case, speed doesn’t kill-it helps!

I find this to be an interesting, but troubling, article on the process that led to the landing of the two Polysilicate facilities here in our state.  My challenge is that the “arm-chair” quarterbacks are now sitting back and picking on the arrangements and the processes that will be used to produce the panels that will produce the energy of the future.

It would be great if we could live in a perfect world (impossible) where there is no carbon emission and with out usage of coal to produce electricity.  It will take time, effort and money to make the transition from current sources of electricity to the perceived cleaner processes such as solar.  As one of the comments to this article commented, there is no “free lunch”.

I also find it troubling that this group of critics thinks that the other investment in education and training is not useful.  We spend millions ever year in this way with dozens, if not hundreds, of employers.

I applaud our legislators for putting Tennessee squarely on the map in the solar technology area.  No deal is perfect, but we are way ahead of many others states and regions and it is time for us to pull together and not to criticize the ingredients of a successful recipe!