There are other storage technologies that could banish intermittency. There are newer sodium-sulfur batteries that are more appropriate for storage at the building level, adding a whole new level of flexibility to a national renewable system.
Now add solar panels and solar hot water heaters on top of buildings to the national design. Make those buildings more and more energy-sipping by retrofitting them to retain heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, and we make the system even more resilient. Solar panels and hot water heaters are most efficient at the height of the day, when air conditioning needs often bog down an entire electric system and can sometimes lead to blackouts.
Much of the current electric system is composed of what is known as peak load generators, usually fueled by natural gas. Building-based geothermal energy can also add to the virtuous cycles within a renewable energy system. The least well-known clean energy source, geothermal heat pumps GHP , use the fact that the temperature of the ground, even 10 feet deep, stays at a constant temperature of 50 to 60 degrees throughout the year.
Since heating the air and water in buildings uses about one-third of both our electricity and natural gas, and since coal-fired plants provide 50 percent of our electricity, we could shut down all of our coal plants simply by installing GHPs under all of our buildings to fulfill their heating and cooling needs. The beauty of wind, solar, and geothermal, used together, is that each one complements the other. Wind can provide a baseload, constant supply, while geothermal heat pumps and solar water heaters can decrease the need for that baseload power.
Large batteries and CSP heat storage can be used to smooth out any remaining problems with intermittency. The final piece of the renewable puzzle is to create a national system to transmit clean electricity from one coast to the other.
Normally, these changes take place over millennia, allowing gradual adaptation -- sort of like taking the elevator down from the 10th floor. Our problem is that we're doing the biological adaptation equivalent of jumping from the 10th floor and when we get to the ground, it ain't gonna be pretty.
We don't see too many examples of positive feedback loops in buildings themselves, though they abound in building markets. Failure to enforce building codes can lead to growing non-compliance as developers see their competitors not being penalized and begin reducing their compliance. Prior to the emergence of LEED, 10 years went by between the and versions of ASHRAE's code-language green standard is releasing its third public comment draft with a goal of final publication in January What is interesting here is that driving a strong positive feedback loop in the adoption and improvement of LEED, ASHRAE and other standards affecting resource consumption in buildings can actually SLOW the positive feedback loop of unmanageable climate change by reducing carbon pollution.
Though it may sound counter-intuitive, we need to manage the positive feedback loop of green building growth. If we get too far ahead of the market's ability to supply material and talent, then there will be damaging negative feedback from economic and political interests that are threatened by the transition to New Normal. Gandhi explained the paradox this way: "When a leader is paces ahead of her followers, she is revered and called a visionary; when he is 1, paces ahead, he is stoned and called a heretic.
In typical academic fashion, each discipline tends to reinvent the methodology and rephrase the terminology, but the basic framework remains the same. Feedback loops are a common tool in athletic training plans, executive coaching strategies, and a multitude of other self-improvement programs though some are more true to the science than others.
Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don't often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst—personalized data—has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by.
As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn't really scaled. Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome.
Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It's just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction.
As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us. That's quickly changing because of one essential technology: sensors.
Adding sensors to the feedback equation helps solve problems of friction and scale. They automate the capture of behavioral data, digitizing it so it can be readily crunched and transformed as necessary. And they allow passive measurement, eliminating the need for tedious active monitoring.
In the past two or three years, the plunging price of sensors has begun to foster a feedback-loop revolution. Just as Your Speed signs have been adopted worldwide because the cost of radar technology keeps dropping, other feedback loops are popping up everywhere because sensors keep getting cheaper and better at monitoring behavior and capturing data in all sorts of environments.
These new, less expensive devices include accelerometers which measure motion , GPS sensors which track location , and inductance sensors which measure electric current. Radio-frequency ID chips are being added to prescription pill bottles, student ID cards, and casino chips. And inductance sensors that were once deployed only in heavy industry are now cheap and tiny enough to be connected to residential breaker boxes, letting consumers track their home's entire energy diet.
Of course, technology has been tracking what people do for years. Call-center agents have been monitored closely since the s, and the nation's tractor-trailer fleets have long been equipped with GPS and other location sensors—not just to allow drivers to follow their routes but so that companies can track their cargo and the drivers.
But those are top-down, Big Brother techniques. The true power of feedback loops is not to control people but to give them control. It's like the difference between a speed trap and a speed feedback sign—one is a game of gotcha, the other is a gentle reminder of the rules of the road. The ideal feedback loop gives us an emotional connection to a rational goal. And today, their promise couldn't be greater. The intransigence of human behavior has emerged as the root of most of the world's biggest challenges.
Witness the rise in obesity, the persistence of smoking, the soaring number of people who have one or more chronic diseases. Consider our problems with carbon emissions, where managing personal energy consumption could be the difference between a climate under control and one beyond help. And feedback loops aren't just about solving problems. They could create opportunities. Feedback loops can improve how companies motivate and empower their employees, allowing workers to monitor their own productivity and set their own schedules.
They could lead to lower consumption of precious resources and more productive use of what we do consume. They could allow people to set and achieve better-defined, more ambitious goals and curb destructive behaviors, replacing them with positive actions.
Used in organizations or communities, they can help groups work together to take on more daunting challenges. In short, the feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades. A modified traffic sign can have a profound effect on drivers' behavior. Here's what happens. First comes the data—quantifying a behavior and presenting that data back to the individual so they know where they stand.
After all, you can't change what you don't measure. Data is just digits unless it hits home. Through information design, social context, or some other proxy for meaning, the right incentive will transform rational information into an emotional imperative. Even compelling information is useless unless it ties into some larger goal or purpose.
People must have a sense of what to do with the information and any opportunities they will have to act on it. The individual has to engage with all of the above and act—thus closing the loop and allowing that new action to be measured.
In , Shwetak Patel, then a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech, was working on a problem: How could technology help provide remote care for the elderly? The obvious approach would be to install cameras and motion detectors throughout a home, so that observers could see when somebody fell or became sick. Patel found those methods unsophisticated and impractical. So I wondered what would give us the same information and be reasonably priced and easy to deploy.
I found those really interesting constraints. The answer, Patel realized, is that every home emits something called voltage noise. Think of it as a steady hum in the electrical wires that varies depending on what systems are drawing power. If there were some way to disaggregate this noise, it might be possible to deliver much the same information as cameras and motion sensors. Lights going on and off, for instance, would mean that someone had moved from room to room.
If a blender were left on, that might signal that someone had fallen—or had forgotten about the blender, perhaps indicating dementia. If we could hear electricity usage, Patel thought, we could know what was happening inside the house. A nifty idea, but how to make it happen? The problem wasn't measuring the voltage noise; that's easily tracked with a few sensors. The challenge was translating the cacophony of electromagnetic interference into the symphony of signals given off by specific appliances and devices and lights.
Finding that pattern amid the noise became the focus of Patel's PhD work, and in a few years he had both his degree and his answer: a stack of algorithms that could discern a blender from a light switch from a television set and so on.
All this data could be captured not by sensors in every electrical outlet throughout the house but through a single device plugged into a single outlet. This, Patel soon realized, went way beyond elder care. When a stimulus changes one of these internal variables, it creates a detected signal that the body will respond to as part of its ability to carry out homeostasis.
Homeostasis is the tendency of biological systems to maintain relatively constant conditions in the internal environment while continuously interacting with and adjusting to changes originating within or outside the system.
Many medical conditions and diseases result from altered homeostasis. This section will review the terminology and explain the physiological mechanisms that are associated with homeostasis. We will discuss homeostasis in every subsequent system. Many aspects of the body are in a constant state of change—the volume and location of blood flow, the rate at which substances are exchanged between cells and the environment, and the rate at which cells are growing and dividing, are all examples.
For example, blood flow will increase to a tissue when that tissue becomes more active. This ensures that the tissue will have enough oxygen to support its higher level of metabolism. Maintaining internal conditions in the body is called homeostasis from homeo-, meaning similar, and stasis, meaning standing still.
But if you think about anatomy and physiology, even maintaining the body at rest requires a lot of internal activity. Your brain is constantly receiving information about the internal and external environment, and incorporating that information into responses that you may not even be aware of, such as slight changes in heart rate, breathing pattern, activity of certain muscle groups, eye movement, etc.
Any of these actions that help maintain the internal environment contribute to homeostasis. We can consider the maintenance of homeostasis on a number of different levels. For example, consider what happens when you exercise, which can represent challenges to various body systems. Yet instead of these challenges damaging your body, our systems adapt to the situation. At the whole-body level, you notice some specific changes: your breathing and heart rate increase, your skin may flush, and you may sweat.
If you continue to exercise, you may feel thirsty. These effects are all the result of your body trying to maintain conditions suitable for normal function:. Feedback loop is defined as a system used to control the level of a variable in which there is an identifiable receptor sensor , control center integrator or comparator , effectors, and methods of communication. Terminology in this area is often inconsistent. For example, there are cases where components of a feedback loop are not easily identifiable, but variables are maintained in a range.
Such situations are still examples of homeostasis and are sometimes described as a feedback cycle instead of a feedback loop. Feedback Cycle is defined as any situation in which a variable is regulated and the level of the variable impacts the direction in which the variable changes i. With this terminology in mind, homeostasis then can be described as the totality of the feedback loops and feedback cycles that the body incorporates to maintain a suitable functioning status. Air conditioning is a technological system that can be described in terms of a feedback loop.
The thermostat senses the temperature, an electronic interface compares the temperature against a set point the temperature that you want it to be. If the temperature matches or is cooler, then nothing happens. If the temperature is too hot, then the electronic interface triggers the air-conditioning unit to turn on. Once the temperature is lowered sufficiently to reach the set point, the electronic interface shuts the air-conditioning unit off. For this example, identify the steps of the feedback loop.
Cruise control is another technological feedback system.
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