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Towards low carbon living and clean air quality is CLP Power Hong Kong Ltd. (CLP)'s energy vision and to achieve this goal, the promotion of a cleaner mode of transportation in Hong Kong has been one of CLP's key green initiatives. Recently, CLP has successfully converted a few Toyota Prius hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) into plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). Different from the HEV, a PHEV allows the driver to plug into a socket to connect the vehicle to the electrical grid to charge its larger battery pack that replaced the original smaller one. The objective of the conversion exercise is to test the capability and gauge the benefits of the converted PHEV to run on electricity as much as possible, whilst keeping the capability to switch back to conventional combustion engine if required for longer trips. This paper addresses the conversion technical details and shares the operation experience of employing a PHEV in the corporate fleet as well as discusses the underlying business assessment...

The transmission and distribution networks of electric utilities normally consist of overhead lines and underground cables. For distribution overhead lines conductors are supported by poles which are usually made of wood, steel or reinforced concrete. The design life of these poles is in the range of 20 to 50 years. It is necessary to test and confirm that adequate levels of safety and reliability can be maintained throughout the remaining life when the facilities have been operated for more than 10 years. Safety to work on poles as well as public safety can be dramatically enhanced if all poles are periodically inspected and mechanically tested in order to prove that they are capable to withstand the worst operating conditions such as severe typhoon, hurricane, cyclone and the like.This paper describes an innovative and non-destructive approach, namely the ‘Mechanical Pole Testing’ (MPT) with partial load force, to evaluate the pole strength in a cost-effective manner. The Mechanical Pole Testing method ...

The obscuring structure surrounding active galactic nuclei (AGN) can be explained as a dust and gas flow cycle that fundamentally connects the AGN with their host galaxies. This structure is believed to be associated with dusty winds driven by radiation pressure. However, the role of magnetic fields, which are invoked in almost all models for accretion onto a supermassive black hole and outflows, is not thoroughly studied. Here we report the first detection of polarized thermal emission by means of magnetically aligned dust grains in the dusty torus of NGC 1068 using ALMA Cycle 4 polarimetric dust continuum observations ($0.07"$, $4.2$ pc; 348.5 GHz, $860$ $\mu$m). The polarized torus has an asymmetric variation across the equatorial axis with a peak polarization of $3.7\pm0.5$\% and position angle of $109\pm2^{\circ}$ (B-vector) at $\sim8$ pc east from the core. We compute synthetic polarimetric observations of magnetically aligned dust grains assuming a toroidal magnetic field and homogeneous grain alignment. We conclude that the measured 860 $\mu$m continuum polarization arises from magnetically aligned dust grains in an optically thin region of the torus. The asymmetric polarization across the equatorial axis of the torus arises from 1) an inhomogeneous optical depth, and 2) a variation of the velocity dispersion, i.e. variation of the magnetic field turbulence at sub-pc scales, from the eastern to the western region of the torus. These observations and modeling constrain the torus properties beyond spectral energy distribution results. This study strongly supports that magnetic fields up to a few pc contribute to the accretion flow onto the active nuclei., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures (Accepted for Publication to ApJ)