Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Everyone has got very excited by the claim this week from Siemens Gamesa, that is has a new form of storage, one well known, but mostly seen as impractical, based on heating rock – a form of Electrothermal Energy Etorage system or ETES. It has opened a pilot plant in Hamburg-Altenwerder which it says can store 130 MWh of energy for up to one week, and says it will gradually raise this above 1 GWh. Before we get too excited, recent white papers from Siemens Gamesa show that this technology is fine if you want to go from heat to heat, where it is able to retain 98% of heat. But the round trip from electricity to heat back to…
The Energy Web Foundation has launched its EW Chain blockchain, to somewhat muted response, after spending the past two years in development while much of the blockchain hype died out. Based on Ethereum, EW Chain will launch with 17 applications, migrated over from the test networks, and support from some pretty influential names, but the question remains whether it can go mass-market, or whether it will remain niche. We are still very optimistic about the potential for blockchain technologies in the utility sector – much more so than in the financial services world, where the vision of a decentralized platform has been thoroughly gutted, thanks to adopters creating islands. Instead of a new global currency, we have insurance firms and…
While it is clear that Vestas has paid GE an unspecified amount of cash to close down the patent legal action due to come before a US court this summer, it is unlikely to be of the size that will make any difference to either company’s finances. What GE has done is try to protect its home market by drumming up an insignificant patent, which it almost certainly would never have been awarded in any other country other than the US. The patent relates to keeping a wind turbine attached to the grid when a power surge or low voltage dip happens. Both companies clearly had applied for very similar patents – one in the US and the other in…
Legal and General Investment (LGIM)management has dropped out of investment and sold stocks in a number of companies, which are refusing to engage with them over preparation for climate change. These include ExxonMobil, Hormel Foods, Korean Electric Power, Kroger and Metlife and LGIM quite simply won’t hold their stock. The two which affect us at Rethink Energy are ExxonMobil and Korean Electric Power (KEP). ExxonMobil has made it perfectly clear that it will not be transparent about what it spends its money on, and not bow to climate change pressure from investors. It has funded climate change denial research and has failed to mitigate its position by taking a strong position in renewables or battery storage. KEP has kept South…
It is perhaps no surprise that Denmark’s Ørsted has been awarded the contract to build the New Jersey Board Ocean Wind project 15 miles off the coast of Atlantic City, the largest US offshore wind farm to date at 1.1 GW capacity. Ørsted and Denmark generally, was a pioneer of offshore wind and a trip to its capital island of Copenhagen will see it surrounded with offshore wind. Ørsted will work with local energy management company Public Service Enterprise Group and the energy will be used to power more than half a million New Jersey homes. Work will start in 2020 and is expected to be complete by 2024 and should create 3000 direct jobs while it is being built…
Ajit Pai, chairman of US regulator the FCC, announced in a blog post that the agency is veering towards opening up underused portions of the 2.5 GHz band for 5G. He has circulated an order to this effect, calling this the “single largest band of continuous spectrum below 3 GHz”. The vote will take place at the next FCC meeting on July 10. Sprint owns over 110 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum in most markets and has demonstrated the ideal balance between capacity and moderate coverage that it provides for high speed mobile broadband. Sprint has used some of its airwaves for 4G and will deploy others for 5G, having successfully driven a bid to makes its particular band a…
Google has been toying with the Rich Communications Service (RCS) platform for a few years now, and represents the GSMA-initiated technology’s only real chance of relevance. RCS was supposed to rescue mobile operators’ voice and messaging revenues from the rise of over-the-top alternatives like Skype, WhatsApp and WeChat, by allowing MNOs to launch added-value services that relied on their cellular networks and provided differentiation against OTT offerings, and so could be charged for. This seemed like a vain hope against the free services, outside of some high value enterprise voice and messaging requirements. Limited operator uptake and even slower moves to make different MNOs’ services interoperable did not help to stem the tide of Skype and WhatsApp. Then Google stepped…
Vodafone and French cable/mobile player Iliad are among the backers of Facebook’s latest ambitious bid to infiltrate every area of a consumer’s daily life, its Libra Network payments system. The launch of Libra is another sign of the death of the MNOs’ old dream of dominating the mobile payments industry. Mobile money, especially in developed markets, is in the hands of the big consumer brands – Apple, PayPal and so on. Facebook has its eyes on those rivals as it goes a step further, moving from payments to its own currency, a tactic which Amazon is expected to emulate. Facebook says it will launch its currency, and associated services, in 2020, allowing its users round the world to make online…
The old cliché that ‘life is a journey not a race’ should certainly apply to 5G. The technologies that are currently being deployed are not ‘full 5G’ but the first step in a platform evolution which will take place over the coming decade, encompassing continual change in the RAN, core, service architecture, spectrum and use cases. Meanwhile, vendors, operators’ marketing departments, and (unfortunately) governments are turning it into a race – who can be first to deploy even half-baked 5G, not because there is an urgent need for a new network, but for bragging rights over rival MNOs or countries. The artificial race can be seen as a relatively harmless bit of self-promotion, except when it damages the operator’s choices…
Everyone has got very excited by the claim this week from Siemens Gamesa, that is has a new form of storage – one well known, but mostly seen as impractical – based on heating rock – a form of electrothermal energy storage system or ETES. It has opened a pilot plant in Hamburg-Altenwerder which it says can store 130 MWh of energy for up to one week, and says it will gradually raise this above 1 GWh. Before we get too excited, recent white papers from Siemens Gamesa show that this technology is fine if you want to go from heat to heat, and is able to retain 98% of heat. But the round trip from electricity to heat back…
Bloomberg New Energy Finance has published its New Energy Outlook 2019, but it continues to have a skewed, US position on coal and gas, and while the executive summary offers some real insight to energy markets, we get the feeling it is out of kilter with the global Zeitgeist – it fails to accept that the current political scenarios will change – the US will not always be controlled by the Republican party – and fails to gauge the effect of a growing urgency from the public on climate change. For the most part it thinks along all the right dimensions, but tends to reach some of the wrong conclusions. One reason for this is because it fails to take…
5G dominated the airwaves as much as cable issues at the recent Anga Com show in Germany, but without that much clarity or insight. A few notable points did emerge, such as a tendency to point east towards China and other leading Asia Pac countries rather than west to North America in the context of 5G leadership. At the event’s CTO panel for example, Elmar Grasserhad from Sunrise, the second largest Swiss telco after Swisscom, argued that Europe was lagging behind the leading Asian countries not just over 5G mobile infrastructure but also the associated advances in what he called data-centric thinking. He then praised his own country for enlightened roll out of 5G even though it will be dominated…
The non-profit Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has unveiled what it calls the “world’s tiniest” Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Called Radicle, the prototype was demonstrated at a TCG members meeting in Poland, recently, and aims to bring the hardware-based root of trust (RoT) capabilities enjoyed by servers and PCs to the IoT world. Founded by AMD, HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, way back in 2003, the TCG was a successor to the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA). Since its creation, the TCG developed and standardized the TPM design in 2009, as ISO 11889, looking to bring TPM capabilities to the world of mobile devices, expanding from the TCPA’s focus on larger computers. Now, the Radicle prototype design is going to be…
The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act 2019 is headed for a vote in the US congress, in the same week that Mirai has reared its head again and Telstra has found that 88% of European organizational cybersecurity risks are internal, with employees being the biggest threat. Taken together, you get a strong flavor of where the world is headed, and, unsurprisingly, IoT security still has a very long way to go. This isn’t just a problem confined to specific markets, such as connected cars or smart homes. As businesses undergo digital transformations, or facilities upgrades, they will suddenly find themselves with much greater attack surfaces that need to be protected. There is going to be a difficult collective period between companies…
The German auction may not have reached the sky-high prices envisaged for India’s upcoming spectrum sale, but there was still plenty for the country’s MNOs to grumble about – fees totaling €6.5bn ($7.4bn), indicating steady inflation in Europe’s 5G spectrum costs; and further pressures on the business model from coverage targets, a new entrant MNO, and spectrum earmarked for private and industrial use. The three established operators, Deutsche Telekom (DT), Vodafone and Telefónica O2, said they had been forced to overpay for their licenses, because the regulator introduced new competition into the bidding, and that would impact on their resources to invest in 5G. Vodafone’s group CEO, Nick Read, said pointedly: “We believe it is important to have a balance…
We haven’t written about Helium in quite some time, but the unlicensed spectrum LPWAN challenger has just unveiled its new LongFi wireless networking offering. Essentially, it’s a direct challenger to LoRaWAN’s campus approach, as it seems to be focused on covering one specific geographic area, rather than a country. To this end, the LoRa types should be concerned, as it makes some big claims about its affordability, but while the LoRaWAN ecosystem is friendly with the MNO community, something like Helium is going to be chasing the systems integrators side of things – on projects rather than national rollouts. The 5kbps bandwidth means that this is suited to low data applications. However, Helium does have a plan to use a…
The German auction may not have reached the sky-high prices envisaged for India’s upcoming spectrum sale, but there was still plenty for the country’s MNOs to grumble about – fees totalling €6.5bn ($7.4bn), indicating steady inflation in Europe’s 5G spectrum costs; and further pressures on the business model from coverage targets, a new entrant MNO, and spectrum earmarked for private and industrial use. The three established operators, Deutsche Telekom (DT), Vodafone and Telefónica O2, said they had been forced to overpay for their licences, because the regulator introduced new competition into the bidding, and that would impact on their resources to invest in 5G. Vodafone’s group CEO, Nick Read, said pointedly: “We believe it is important to have a balance…
Intel is to buy Barefoot Networks, in a bid to fill a gaping hole in its portfolio, for strong Ethernet switch-chips. The company was clear, in conversations at Mobile World Congress this year, that it needed to assemble an end-to-end platform if it was to dominate cloud infrastructure and, in particular, the increasingly cloudified 5G network. It has been putting together many elements, through internal development or acquisition, for this 5G infrastructure play, including the purchase of Altera for its FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and of eASIC. Both of these provide technology to surround the core x86 processors and accelerate specialized and highly demanding cloud and 5G workloads. But Intel identified one of its main weaknesses, in this end-to-end…
There may already be more commercial 5G networks in the world than anyone had expected by mid-2019, but none of these, not even the wildly popular SK Telecom network in Korea, stands up to our definition of ‘true 5G’. All early adopters have led off with the 5G New Radio Non-standalone (NR NSA) platform, which means they can accelerate progress by deploying a 5G RAN, but retaining the LTE core. In most cases – with some exceptions in the South Korean operators’ heavily customized networks – the operators are rolling out conventional base stations, not Cloud-RAN, and even if their LTE cores are partially virtualized, they are certainly not cloud-native. To claim a ‘true 5G’ network – rather than a…
While we have gone on record suggesting that EVs will effectively gut the established order of car manufacturers, that does not mean that the existing leaders should simply lay down and die. What we mean is that given the low number of moving parts in an EV, the process of making them has to be simpler, cheaper, and more streamlined and will not suit distributed manufacture in quite the way a conventional car is built using multiple factories and just in time planning. That means a huge reduction in factory numbers, and a consequent reduction in the parts businesses which make up all of the car maker’s dependent suppliers. Any car company that is willing to reduce in size quite…