Σωσιγένης ο Αλεξανδρεύς is the website of Ivan Dimitrijević, an independent consultant. Heuristics have been implemented with success in ventures past and present. Have a true partner, advisor and catalyst that you can trust to challenge your assumptions and change your stereotypy in order to ensure that you always stay one step ahead of the competition.
Focus: Fundamentals.
Crude Oil, Gold and Cash. Crude Oil futures are falling since May. European central banks are swaping gold at a record rate to raise cash from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
A single line of data in a note in a report released last week by the BIS shows it has absorbed more than 340 metric tons of gold since December allowing banks to obtain more than $13 billion in cash.
Reminds me of a line from Woody Allen's 1979 movie "Manhattan":
"What does money have to do with it? I've got enough for a year if I live like Mahatma Gandhi. My accountant says I lost my job at a very bad time. My stocks are down. I'm cash poor, or something. I've got no cash flow. I'm not liquid!"
China has amassed a mountain of reserves of US Treasury bonds. It believes they are delivering security, liquidity and market depth with low transaction costs. Nevertheless it doesn't favor gold even though it increased its gold reserves.
Focus: Electric Cars.
Watch out for the electric carmaker Tesla Motors. Their stock price jumped more than 40% on First Day of Trading.
Tesla is the first IPO by an American automaker since Ford’s debut in 1956 amid heightened interest in electric cars and various types of battery-powered vehicles, including plug-in hybrids.
Toyota bought shares in a private placement.
Focus: Slow PACE?
The Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing system is suposed to help US homeowners install solar panels and other energy improvements, payed for over time on their property tax bills.
But the recently rescued Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (half of the residential mortgages in the US) disagree and fear a loss in mortgage default that uses PACE. How best to discourage the housing market than by sending contradictory signals?!?
Focus: German approach.
A premium price on solar and other alternative power sources? Germany launched a renewable-energy plan on an unprecedented scale a decade ago.
Anyone able to build a renewable-power plant, or install rooftop solar panels, is guaranteed predictable profits by feeding energy into the country's energy grid, utilities companies buying it at premium prices.
The higher costs would be passed on as monthly surcharges to ratepayers, spread out among all homes and businesses. The German grid now gets more than 16 percent of its electricity from these sources, and the system produces new jobs. As for the job-creation benefit, it may turn out to be ephemeral. Solar panels and wind turbines can be manufactured nearly anywhere in the world.
But the spending on photovoltaics is especially cost-inefficient in a cloudy country. On the other hand, 41% of all new installation worldwide are in Spain, but buying all that high-priced power became a burden to the utilities.
Germany can be compared to early adopters of new gadgets, who often pay outrageous prices even though they know that others will get improved technology for much less a few years later.
Consider the changes in the market for wind power. By 2006, Germany had by far the largest wind-power base in the world, with 20.6 gigawatts of capacity.
The massive scale brought the cost down, and wind began approaching grid parity in many parts of the world.
In 2009, the United States and China were able to surpass Germany in capacity, but at far more attractive prices.
Thanks in part to the Germans, the same thing now appears to be happening in solar, with prices of photovoltaic panels plunging 40 percent last year alone.
Many economists favor either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system in which electricity plants buy permits to burn fossil fuel.
Phasing out coal should be the main goal, and pursuing that goal by putting a price on carbon allows the market to decide which renewable sources are most cost-effective.
But what Germany did was prime the global markets, showing that renewable technologies can be a big business worthy of investment.
Focus: Maglev Trains.
The Chinese have an operational maglev train that connects Shanghai to its Pudong International Airport.
This maglev railway line will be further expanded linking Shanghai and Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province.
These trains are produced by the Transrapid consortium comprised of German engineering giants Siemens and ThyssenKrupp.
Oddly enough these technologies are not in public use in Europe. The trip between Geneva and Lausanne would take 10 minutes using a maglev train.
Focus: Wireless Electricity.
In the late 19th century, the realization that electricity could be coaxed to light up a bulb prompted a mad dash to determine the best way to distribute it.
At the head of the pack was inventor Nikola Tesla, who had a grand scheme to beam electricity around the world.
Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go.
He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island.
Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up.
Instead of pursuing a long-distance scheme like Tesla's, the trend is to look for midrange power transmission methods that could charge--or even power--portable devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops.
The choice fell on the phenomenon of resonant coupling, in which two objects tuned to the same frequency exchange energy strongly but interact only weakly with other objects.
A classic example is a set of wine glasses, each filled to a different level so that it vibrates at a different sound frequency.
If a singer hits a pitch that matches the frequency of one glass, the glass might absorb so much acoustic energy that it will shatter; the other glasses remain unaffected.
Magnetic resonance is a promising means of electricity transfer because magnetic fields travel freely through air yet have little effect on the environment or, at the appropriate frequencies, on living beings.
Researchers built two resonant copper coils and hung them from the ceiling, about two meters apart. When they plugged one coil into the wall, alternating current flowed through it, creating a magnetic field.
The second coil, tuned to the same frequency and hooked to a light bulb, resonated with the magnetic field, generating an electric current that lit up the bulb--even with a thin wall between the coils.
So far, the most effective setup consists of 60-centimeter copper coils and a 10-megahertz magnetic field; this transfers power over a distance of two meters with about 50 percent efficiency.
Scientists are looking at silver and other materials to decrease coil size and boost efficiency.
While ideally it would be nice to have efficiencies at 100 percent, realistically, 70 to 80 percent could be possible for a typical application.
Other means of recharging batteries without cords are emerging.
Startups such as Powercast, Fulton Innovation, and WildCharge have begun marketing adapters and pads that allow consumers to wirelessly recharge cell phones, MP3 players, and other devices at home or, in some cases, in the car.
This technology might one day enable devices to recharge automatically, without the use of pads, whenever they come within range of a wireless transmitter.
The U.S. Department of Defense, which is funding the research, hopes it will also give soldiers a way to automatically recharge batteries.
In today's battery-operated world, there are so many potential applications where this might be useful.
Focus: Recent Battery Advances
Battery improvements should lower costs and improve performance for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.
Like a new approach to high-power lithium-ion batteries for stabilizing the electricity grid in order buffer changes in supply and demand of electricity, something that's becoming more important as more variable sources of electricity are introduced, such as wind and solar power.
Challenges for battery researchers are making batteries that can cheaply store vast amounts of energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines, so that electricity from these sources is available when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
The DOE goal for such batteries is less than $100 per kilowatt-hour, less than half its goal for electric vehicles. Complete car battery packs today cost between $800 and $1,200 a kilowatt hour, and store about 100 to 120 watt-hours per kilogram.
To make electric vehicles practical and affordable, the DOE would like to see costs drop to $250 per kilowatt hour and increase storage capacity to about 400 watt hours per kilogram.
Or a lithum-air battery, where one of a battery's two electrodes is replaced by an interface with the air, a technology that has recently attracted large amounts of government funding and interest from companies such as IBM.