My Virtual Display
 Random thoughts and notes to self

From Institutional Investor:

Investors Want to Plug Into Chinas Smart-Grid Market

01 Apr 2010
Xiang Ji

Beijings massive conversion to a smart power grid could just one-up the rest of the world. Savvy entrepreneurs and investors are looking to get a piece of the green action.

When Beijing announced a $585 billion stimulus package in November 2008, Jeffrey Kang spotted an opportunity. The package’s vast investment mandates included one aimed at upgrading the country’s electricity distribution system to a smart grid that would use high-tech meters to precisely match supply with demand in households and offices. The energy savings would be an obvious boon for the planet — but savvy entrepreneurs and investors like Kang also wanted a piece of the green action.

China Electricity Council, a national power industry association, estimates that total spending on the smart grid will hit $40 billion by 2011, although the entire project likely won’t be completed until 2020. An estimated 300 million old electricity meters are to be replaced by smart meters that encourage lower energy use by displaying usage prominently. The meters can also track household energy patterns and adjust distribution accordingly.

The whole smart-grid system — comprising ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, sensors and smart meters, all connected through computer networks — enhances energy efficiency not only by matching supply and demand, but also by more efficiently managing intermittent renewable energy sources.

Entrepreneurs and investors see great prospects in the conversion to a smart grid. Kang, who is CEO of Nasdaq-listed, Shenzhen-based module supplier Cogo Group, signed a deal in April 2009 to acquire China’s Mega Smart Group, a supplier of parts for smart-meter makers. Kang estimates the deal will generate $20 million in sales in the first year, or about 7 percent of Cogo’s total revenue. And that’s only the start. “Smart meters will be a key driver in our growth going forward,” says Kang. Just last month Yale University said it had invested in Redwood City, California’s Silver Spring Networks, a smart-meter manufacturer planning an IPO in 2010.

SBI Energy, a Rockville, Maryland–based market research firm, forecasts that the smart-grid market will grow from $90 billion in 2009 to $171 billion in 2014. SBI says government and corporate mandates to convert to climate-friendly energy systems will drive the boom.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, a Menlo Park, California–based venture capital firm, predicts that the world’s electricity grid will eventually be set up “so that smart transformers are feeding information to smart way stations and talking to smart meters.” VC firms’ interest in smart grids emerged only recently, with investments as of last year totaling $414 million. By contrast, solar power has attracted $1.2 billion of VC funds, according to consulting firm Cleantech Group.

London-based VC firm WHEB Ventures not long ago made a capital injection of an undisclosed sum in PassivSystems, a Berkshire, U.K., company that makes energy management systems that fit into smart grids. “Though it’s still in early stages, smart grid represents a potentially vast global market,” says Megan Bingham-Walker, an associate at WHEB Ventures, which manages £114 million ($170.2 million). President Barack Obama last October granted $3.4 billion in stimulus money to develop smart-grid technology and install upgraded meters in the U.S.; utilities are to match these funds. Europe, meanwhile, has mandated that 20 percent of its energy must come from renewable sources by 2020.

Still, investors looking to plug directly into the smart-grid market may find it difficult to do so. For instance, Robert Metcalfe, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, a $3 billion, Waltham, Massachusetts–based private equity firm, has been screening energy-management software developers but has yet to write a check. “One of the challenges is that there is no standard to root for, making it hard to recognize the winner,” he laments.

I just released version 0.4 of the include_HTML plugin.  Nothing changed in how you use it, so if your installation already works, theres no pressing need to upgrade.  What did change, however, is how the plugin functions.

Prior to version 0.4, the plugin retrieved external data by using file_get_contents() function.  Some Web hosting companies, however, disable the use of this function on remote URLs for security reasons by setting PHP configuration directive allow_url_fopen to Off; consequently, include_HTML wouldnt work on systems configired this way.

The alternative, of course, is to use the Client URL (cURL) extension, which would work regardless of allow_url_fopen setting, but may or may not be available on a specific system.

Starting from version 0.4, include_HTML begins by checking if the cURL extension is available on the host system.  If it is, the plugin relies on it to retrieve external data.  If it isnt, the plugin falls back on the old file_get_contents() mechanism.

It is hoped that this modification would improve the plugins portability.  A big thank-you to VickiLH2 for suggesting and testing out the cURL data retrieval.

Just a note to self: to make a scheduled Windows XP task run invisibly, schedule it to run as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:

A great (and very accessible to the non-technical audience) summary of what the differences between saltwater and freshwater economics are all about The original is here.

September 6, 2009

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.

Read the rest of this entry »

In some instances, it is desirable to disable generation of RSS feeds by WordPress.  Akuna Matata presents a simple solution to this problem.  Just add the following to your themes functions.php:

/**
 * Disable Our Feed Urls
 */
function disable_our_feeds() {
	wp_die( __("<strong>Error:</strong>" .
		"No RSS Feed Available, " .
		"Please visit our <a href="".
		get_bloginfo("url") .
		"">homepage</a>."));
}

add_action("do_feed", "disable_our_feeds", 1);
add_action("do_feed_rdf", "disable_our_feeds", 1);
add_action("do_feed_rss", "disable_our_feeds", 1);
add_action("do_feed_rss2", "disable_our_feeds", 1);
add_action("do_feed_atom", "disable_our_feeds", 1);

From Business Week:

Equipment: a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437 laptop (AMD Turion 64 X2, 2,048 MB DDR2 SDRAM, 200 GB HDD, DVD SuperMulti optical drive, 802.11b/g wireless network card) running Vista Home Premium.

Problem: an atypical Black Screen of Death.  In most cases, the Black Screen of Death appears at boot; often, the mouse cursor is visible and draggable.  In this case, however, the Black Screen of Death would appear randomly during the computers operation, causing the computer to freeze, power button being the only way to regain control.  This would happen about once a day.  Typically, Vista would reboot in normal mode without a problem, but every once in a while it would have to go through a lengthy restore process before booting up (I think the behavior at reboot depended on whether the computer was doing anything sensitive when it froze).

Possible solutions that didnt work: (1) disabling event logging; (2) setting processor minimum to 100%.

Solution that worked: upgrading BIOS software to the latest version available from Toshiba Support.  So far, over a week without a single black-screen incident.

From International Tax Review:

Cayman Islands agrees to tax information exchange with Netherlands

The Cayman Islands signed a tax information exchange agreement (TIEA) with the Netherlands on July 8. This brings the number of TIEAs signed by the Cayman Islands to 11, one short of the OECDs requirement of 12 required to be recognised as being compliant with international requirements.

McKeeva Bush, the Cayman Islands new leader of government business and minister for financial services, has signed tax treaties with the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands since his election on May 20.

Bushs government is in the advanced stages of negotiation with several countries, including Italy, Mexico, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Canada.

There has been some indication that the OECD may look at the quality of the agreements rather than just the number in determining whether countries are removed from the grey list of those that have signed up to information exchange standards but have not implemented them.

I realise there are some concerns being aired regarding the possibility of the OECD moving the goal post so to speak or that the stated number of 12 agreements may be changed. However based on the discussions I have had with OECD officials, this is highly unlikely, said Bush.

Just a note to self  To install fonts (in this example, the Arial family) on a Fedora system:

1. Log in as root
2. Change to the font storage directory:
   cd /usr/share/fonts
3. Create a subdirectory to hold the Arial family of fonts:
   mkdir arial
4. Copy the Arial fonts into that directory.
5. Make the font files accessible systemwide:
   chmod 0775 -R arial
6. Run fc-cache on the new directory to cache the new fonts:
   fc-cache arial

That should be it

From Business Week:

In China, a Burst of Corporate Bonds

Thanks to streamlined regulations, more companies are issuing debt cheaply and fast
By Frederik Balfour

Hong Kong Heres a little-known fact: Chinese companies now issue more corporate debt than their counterparts in Japan, making the yuan-denominated bond market the worlds No. 3, after those for dollars and euros. In the first five months of 2009, mainland companies sold $82 billion worth of debt, vs. $51 billion for the Japanese. The growth in issuance has been phenomenal, says Liao Qiang, credit analyst at Standard & Poors (MHP) in Beijing.

Bond sales in China started to come to life when the mainlands equity markets headed south in late 2007. As sellers parked their stock proceeds in deposit accounts, banks found themselves flush with money they couldnt lend because of government limits on loans. To give banks somewhere to put their excess liquidity, regulators in April 2008 streamlined rules on bonds.

Before the changes, corporate bonds had to be listed on the stock exchange. That required approval by exchange regulators, which was costly, time-consuming, and subject to political whims. So most issues were enterprise bonds—money raised by state-owned companies to finance big infrastructure projects such as the Three Gorges Dam or new railways. These all had state guarantees and offered identical yields.

The new rules make things simpler. While all issues require a credit rating, they no longer need to be traded on the exchange. The market got an added jolt last September when Beijing halted new domestic stock offerings as Shanghai shares tumbled. That forced companies to look elsewhere for capital. And with interest rates down worldwide, bonds have become yet more appealing. In the first five months of 2009, corporate bonds accounted for 22% of all debt issued in China, including government debt, vs. 3% in 2007.

Corporate bonds will be crucial to Beijings efforts to make the yuan a global currency. For that to happen, the mainlands capital markets need to be far more sophisticated and better integrated into the international financial system than they are today. The government is pushing to make financial markets more broad-based and mature, and without debt you cannot say that is complete, says Frank Gong, chief China economist at JPMorgan Chase (JPM).

More than 100 companies have issued bonds. The largest offering to date came in May when Agricultural Bank of China raised $7.3 billion, priced to yield 3.3% for five years, vs. 2.4% on government bonds. Billions more are in the pipeline, including issues by International Commerce Bank of China, Bank of Communications, and Bank of China.

STILL QUITE THIN
But for cash-starved private companies the market is still hard to penetrate. The minimum flotation is $141 million, and issuers must have a AAA or AA+ rating from one of the five domestic or joint-venture ratings agencies that have been licensed. That precludes all but a handful of private companies from participating, so more than 80% of bond issuers are state-linked companies. And because most purchasers of corporate debt hold it until maturity, bond trading after issuance is still quite thin, says Frances Cheung, fixed income strategist with Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong.

The bond market could get a further boost once Beijing opens up the market in panda bonds—yuan-denominated issues by foreigners. So far, the International Finance Corp. and Asian Development Bank are the only organizations that have issued panda bonds, although HSBC (HBC) and Bank of East Asia have been approved to sell them in Hong Kong. And later this year locally incorporated subsidiaries of foreign companies may be allowed to issue panda bonds on the mainland. Among the first will likely be London-based Standard Chartered, which aims to raise some $500 million to shore up its mainland balance sheet. Although stocks are climbing and IPOs are set to resume, well still see strong demand for bonds, says Chris Zhou, director of debt capital markets at UBS Securities in Beijing. The bond market is a relatively easy and cost effective way to get money.