Ron Lloyd: Modeling Problems in the Green Economy

Published: 23 November 2016
on channel: HarveyMuddCollegeEDU

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2010 HMC Mathematics Conference on the Mathematics of Environmental Sustainability and Green Technology

Ron Lloyd (Fat Spaniel Technologies)

Any problem that requires new ways of thinking in order to be solved, also requires breakouts in the analytical models used to evaluate potential solutions. A green economy challenges engineers with converting one form of energy—sunlight, wind, waves, heat—into useful forms with reliable and economically viable transformation technologies. This talk will focus on three examples from the green economy that require new analytical models to properly evaluate their technical and economic viability.

1. Electric vehicles—Conventional internal combustion engines operate at 20–25% efficiencies, with a tremendous amount of waste heat to shed. Battery electric vehicles, while more efficient, have very limited on-board energy storage and most ancillary systems are a load on the vehicle's battery system. Vehicle energy use models need a major overhaul to support electric vehicle development.

2. Energy data load and storage—The confluence of Smart Grid, telematics, distributed energy, wireless technologies, and increasing capacities for network traffic and data storage create an explosion of time-sequenced data to be stored and mined in the current and future economies. Predicting storage requirements and system load from data transfer and user mining is an increasingly difficult challenge.

3. Sustainability—Macroeconomics focuses on large-scale societal systems driving the economy. On a global scale, this presumes that economic health is predicated on growth. Constant growth, if predicated on resource consumption, is inconsistent with most views of “sustainability”—a steady state energy system, with finite resources in the biosphere. Reconciling these two fundamental viewpoints is one of the most important macro problems of 21st century society.

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