A paper by Gary Marks of iP Solutions, “Opportunities for Demand Response in California Agricultural Irrigation: A Scoping Study” has just been published by the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC).
Category Archives: Agriculture
Frost Protection Collaboration with UC Davis
iP Solutions is collaborating with the Biometeorology and Atmospheric Science departments of U.C. Davis on a frost protection monitoring system. A system provided by iP Solutions has just been installed at the UC Davis Campbell test site. Temperature and humidity data correction is currently being conducted.
Raspberry Pi Weather Station
iP Solutions has created a Raspberry Pi weather station. The Raspberry Pi platform employs a Debian Wheezy Linux distribution. iP Solutions designed and fabricated an analog and digital I/O board to interface the Raspberry Pi to temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and wind-speed sensors. Additionally, iP Solutions created a separate proprietary temperature and humidity sensor module.
Emerging Technologies Summit Presentation
Gary Marks of iP Solutions was invited to speak at the Emerging Technologies Summit in Pasadena, CA on October 15th, 2012. He presented “Opportunities for Demand Response in California Agricultural Irrigation” to the session titled “The Untapped Resource, Demand Response for the Industrial and Agricultural Markets”.
The Power-point Presentation
Invitation to Join DRRC Industrial Controls Experts Group
Gary Marks of iP Solutions corporation has been invited to join the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) Industrial Controls Experts Group. On February 10th, 2011 the group met to consult on a study, “Assessing the Control Systems Capacity for Demand Response in California Industries”.
Precision Irrigation
iP Solutions announces the publication of “Precision Irrigation: A Method to Save Water and Energy While Increasing Crop Yield, a Targeted Approach for California Agriculture” by Gary Marks.
Crop irrigation requirements vary in time with weather and soil conditions. Precision
irrigation provides a means for evaluating a crop’s water requirements and a means for
applying the right amount at the right time. Often in the literature, precision irrigation is referred to as irrigation scheduling: That is scheduling based on environmental data, whether that data comes from local field sensors or from more global sources such as regional meteorological information.
Applying precision irrigation practices offers significant potential for saving water,
energy, and money. Further, it has the potential to increases crop yield. There is an
additional positive environmental impact from precision irrigation in that farm runoff, a major source of water pollution, can be reduced.
While precision irrigation has value for all types of irrigation in any region of the world, this paper focuses on the irrigation of California agriculture, which uses nearly 80% of the state’s water and more than ten billion Kilowatt hours of electricity annually. That is enough electricity to power one million typical American households each year. The approximate power plant capacity required to power California irrigation through the months of May through October is 2500 MW, which is equivalent to 250 Min-Nuke power plants running at an average of 10MW each. The carbon footprint associated
with the power is approximately six million metric tons of CO2 per year.