Coastal Water Security with Distributed Offshore Reverse Osmosis

10/30/19 • 29 min

California's recent drought has highlighted the need for a reliable source of water. Peter Stricker of SeaWell presents a reverse osmosis (RO) system to address climate-driven drought which is an entirely new approach to water supply. The SeaWell buoy is a self-contained floating vessel, moored to the sea floor, with seawater intake and brine diffusion outfall. It contains reverse osmosis equipment, electric power and water piping, and can permeate water at a rate of 950–3,800 acre-feet/year. The implementation plan is to deploy pilot SeaWell Buoys at a water cost already below the cost of State water,initially partnering with water districts to deploy five water portals. Landing sites could be chosen based in previously disturbed areas, such as decommissioned oil receiving facilities and sanitary district outfalls. These deployments will augment new water reuse projects, and share siting and infrastructure. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35163]

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Energy Efficient Software Development for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Increasingly, Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications require energy efficiency, low-latency, privacy and security of code and data, and programming support that simplifies IoT software development and deployment. UCSB Professor of Computer Science Chandra Krintz presents a new distributed software platform and programming model that addresses these requirements for the next generation of IoT applications. Her research lab (the UCSB RACELab) develops novel approaches to code portability for heterogenous devices and IoT tiers, energy efficiency for resource-constrained execution, privacy and security control, and integration of IoT services (e.g. data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc.), and automated, multi-tier application deployment and management at scale — which together enable write-once, run-anywhere software development for IoT. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35162]

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Cutting-Edge Modeling Tools to Enable Low Carbon Grids

Decarbonizing our electricity and transportation sectors will require large deployments of wind, solar, and storage. Ranjit Deshmukh develops models for planning and operations of low carbon electricity grids and analyzes tradeoffs between economic, environmental, and social objectives for regions in the U.S., India, and Africa. These models optimize wind, solar, and other generation, demand, and storage resources for region-specific conditions including spatial and temporal variability of renewable resources. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35165]