Northern Power Systems

Northern Power Systems designs, manufactures, and sells wind turbines, and provides engineering development services and technology licenses for energy applications, into the global marketplace. The company was founded in 1974, and has since grown into a multinational corporation headquartered in Barre, Vermont, with European headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland and a significant presence in the United Kingdom and Italy.

History

Today's Northern Power Systems was started in 1974 in Warren, Vermont, as Northwind Power Company. Its founders hitchhiked to Colorado, Minnesota, and North Dakota to buy secondhand Jacobs wind plants. They trucked the wind turbines to Vermont where they reconditioned them for resale as the North Wind “Eagle.”

In 1978, North Wind was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy contract to develop a high-reliability 2 kW wind turbine for the growing telecommunications market. As a result of that work, North Wind developed its HR2 wind turbine, a three-bladed, horizontal axis up wind rotor configuration utilizing a slow-speed, direct-drive 2.2 kW alternator. This small wind turbine soon gained international market acceptance as one of the most rugged, high-reliability wind turbines available. Over 600 HR2 and its successor HR3 wind turbines were sold over approximately 20 years of production. Northern Power wind turbines have been installed in over 40 countries on all seven continents, with many still operational today.

Electric power system

An electric power system is a network of electrical components used to supply, transfer and use electric power. An example of an electric power system is the network that supplies a region's homes and industry with power—for sizable regions, this power system is known as the grid and can be broadly divided into the generators that supply the power, the transmission system that carries the power from the generating centres to the load centres and the distribution system that feeds the power to nearby homes and industries. Smaller power systems are also found in industry, hospitals, commercial buildings and homes. The majority of these systems rely upon three-phase AC power—the standard for large-scale power transmission and distribution across the modern world. Specialised power systems that do not always rely upon three-phase AC power are found in aircraft, electric rail systems, ocean liners and automobiles.

History

In 1881 two electricians built the world's first power system at Godalming in England. It was powered by a power station consisting of two waterwheels that produced an alternating current that in turn supplied seven Siemens arc lamps at 250 volts and 34 incandescent lamps at 40 volts. However supply to the lamps was intermittent and in 1882 Thomas Edison and his company, The Edison Electric Light Company, developed the first steam powered electric power station on Pearl Street in New York City. The Pearl Street Station initially powered around 3,000 lamps for 59 customers. The power station used direct current and operated at a single voltage. Direct current power could not be easily transformed to the higher voltages necessary to minimise power loss during long-distance transmission, so the maximum economic distance between the generators and load was limited to around half-a-mile (800 m).

IBM Power Systems

Power Systems is IBM's Power Architecture-based server line.

Before the Power Systems line was announced on April 2, 2008, IBM had two distinct Power-based lines: the System i running IBM i (formerly i5/OS and OS/400) - and the System p series running AIX or Linux.

History

IBM had two distinct Power Architecture based hardware lines since the early 1990s. Servers running processors based on the PowerPC-AS in the AS/400 (later iSeries, then System i) family running OS/400 (later i5/OS) and the POWER and PowerPC based servers and workstations in RS/6000 (later pSeries, then System p) running AIX and Linux.

They merged to use essentially the same hardware platform in 2001/2002 with the introduction of the POWER4 processor. After that, there was little difference between both the "p" and the "i" hardware; the only differences were in the software and services offerings. With the introduction of the POWER5 processor in 2004, even the product numbering was synchronized. The System i5 570 was virtually identical to the System p5 570.