Taiwan’s biggest power company, telecom operator and IT firms are designing metering and communication systems to link air conditioners and lighting systems with computers and mobile phones.
Efficiency gains from the scheme could save millions of tonnes of carbon emissions.
The technologies will enable property owners to set “energy budgets” for their buildings, send electricity price change updates to consumers via cable TV or mobile phone and let telecoms firms start providing power optimization services.
These systems are likely to be crucial to recently announced moves in the UK, the US and China to build “smart grids,” because Taiwan develops and manufactures many of the world’s electronic chips and components.
Taiwan Power (台電), the nation’s utility, will launch a small-scale research study of less than 100 homes that will be rapidly expanded to tens of thousands of homes in the next two or three years.
“Taiwan is the place to do this because we already have a strong information infrastructure and we can manufacture fast and at low cost,” a government official said.
She estimated that the country could save 10 percent of its energy simply by switching off idle devices and another 10 percent to 20 percent through better management of air conditioning.
“Human beings are lazy,” the official said. “If you make adjustments automatically, then you can save a great deal.”
In trials, Taiwan Power is experimenting with wireless devices so smart meters can communicate with all the devices in a house.
Ho Wu-chi of the Industrial Technology Research Institute said Taiwan aims to develop a two-way system of communication between electricity suppliers and users.
Consumers will receive frequent updates of price fluctuations so they can trim usage at peak times. While the UK aims to do this through dedicated displays in each house, Taiwan wants to do it more cheaply by using existing devices such as cable TV, mobile phones and computers.
“We are putting in place a smart meter policy. If we want to go into the international market, we have to show first that we can do it ourselves,” Ho said.
Within five years, he said that more than 5 million smart meters would be installed at a cost of NT$50 billion (US$1.55 billion).
In the international market, the business potential is enormous. For each of the next 30 years, Ho estimates the world will need 30 million meters, each retailing for between US$50 and US$100.
In Italy’s storied gold-making hubs, jewelers are reworking their designs to trim gold content as they race to blunt the effect of record prices and appeal to shoppers watching their budgets. Gold prices hit a record high on Thursday, surging near US$5,600 an ounce, more than double a year ago as geopolitical concerns and jitters over trade pushed investors toward the safe-haven asset. The rally is putting undue pressure on small artisans as they face mounting demands from customers, including international brands, to produce cheaper items, from signature pieces to wedding rings, according to interviews with four independent jewelers in Italy’s main
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
The global server market is expected to grow 12.8 percent annually this year, with artificial intelligence (AI) servers projected to account for 16.5 percent, driven by continued investment in AI infrastructure by major cloud service providers (CSPs), market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. Global AI server shipments this year are expected to increase 28 percent year-on-year to more than 2.7 million units, driven by sustained demand from CSPs and government sovereign cloud projects, TrendForce analyst Frank Kung (龔明德) told the Taipei Times. Demand for GPU-based AI servers, including Nvidia Corp’s GB and Vera Rubin rack systems, is expected to remain high,
RSS