Imagine a glass worktable, kitchen countertop, retail display or even an autonomous vehicle’s windshield that can supply power without all the cable spaghetti showing. Cohda Design Ltd. in Gateshead, England, has figured out...
Houses are being 3D-printed, and electrical contractors need to anticipate their role in this brave new world. The inevitable question that industry observers will ask is, “If building contractors can 3D-print entire houses...
“Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City” goes the Broadway tune from “Oklahoma!” In terms of de-icing and snow-melting sidewalks in wintry cities, Kansas City, Mo., is beyond up-to-date. As snow fell on city streets in...
It’s a wireless world: our phones are mobile, we can take our laptops anywhere and building design programs are now tablet-accessible. Heavy data demands, however, can often make wireless less nimble. Think of slower service...
The need to solve the problem of intermittency when it comes to wind and solar electricity generation has led to a boom in battery-based energy storage that has continued unabated through the COVID-19 pandemic. But a...
Job sites of the future are going to be better connected, with more tasks taking place off-site, while on-site robotics will be taking some of the most mundane and hazardous tasks. Workers on site will learn to navigate and...
Technological sensors on roads and intersections gather more data and enable more intelligent responses to conditions than ever before. Increased numbers of motorists, aging infrastructure and the growing digitalization is...
Intuition is something that denies scientific explanation. It’s a feeling and an assumption of what may be coming next based on past experiences and human behavior. A computer vision technique unveiled by the Columbia...
While we are told about the need for a “smart grid,” we don’t hear as much about what’s actually being done to make it smarter. Advanced distribution management systems (ADMSs), a leading technology being explored at the...
The electric grid faces many challenges as renewables and other technologies transform energy generation, distribution and consumption. The growth of electric vehicles (EVs), for example, raises many questions about the grid...
Like the Energizer bunny himself, the quest to improve large-scale battery efficiency never winds down. The search for breakthrough materials has led to some surprising possibilities. A few years ago, researchers at the...
There is a market on the horizon expertly tailored for the electrical contractor. Welcome to the rebooted all-electric home, where “clean electricity” takes on a new meaning. Today’s “all-electric” homes represent a...
Everyone in electrical contracting will confirm that the industry has evolved immensely over the last several decades in new and nontraditional ways, from controls and low-voltage technologies to wireless systems that make...
Until recently, a marina visit might have meant fueling up your boat, buying a bag of ice and heating up a snack in a microwave. Finding a place to dock the boat was a matter of searching the slips for space and boaters just...
The “empowered edge,” a phrase coined to indicate the shift of computer processing from servers to devices, is bringing new possibilities in gathering data for heightened, proactive security awareness. Technology is...
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., released a software tool designed to help utilities and utility customers (and the electrical contractors they hire) “assess the economic value of installing an energy storage...
A Brooklyn startup has found a way to recover otherwise-wasted kinetic energy from passing vehicles, so it could be put “back to work” in the form of regenerated power. RoadPower Systems Inc., New York, has developed “smart...
Retail food stores are undergoing critical shifts initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic that may affect the size and use of facilities, where they are built and how they are staffed long after the world returns to normal. Many...
Selling physical security is not about hawking hardware and trying to convince the client that one product is better than the other. Customers are looking for ways to leverage technology to solve their challenges and a single...
The digital transformation was on full display at CES 2021, held Jan. 11–14 in Las Vegas. It turns out the pandemic, now more than a year old, has become a proving ground for innovation, accelerating digital platforms and...
