The Metal and Engineering Industries Bargaining Council (MEIBC) started its 2014 industry wage negotiation process on Wednesday with the aim of having a new agreement in place by July 1.
The current three-year wage agreement – which had been contested in court by the National Employers Association of South Africa (Neasa) for being detrimental to small business and not being valid, as it believed that the bargaining council did not represent the substantial industry majority required by law – would expire on June 30.
This agreement provided for staggered wage increases, from 8% to 10% for skilled and unskilled employees respectively.
MEIBC general secretary Thulani Mthiyane explained that the first part of the wage negotiation process was the prebargaining conference, which was taking place on Wednesday and Thursday, where employers and unions had the opportunity to motivate their demands
“This is to ensure that when we start with the negotiations, [on April 16], both parties understand what each demand means and [thereby] provide a proper response to that demand,” he said.
"The results of the Combined Power Plant 2 project demonstrate that network reliability can be guaranteed even when relying purely on renewables," says Dr. Rohrig. Fraunhofer IWES offers the relevant control mechanisms and forecasting systems for a variety of applications, including the Wind Power Management System and Regional Virtual Power Plant for the energy industry..
Dynamic energy management systems.
More and more companies are generating energy themselves, using solar installations or systems that recover energy from manufacturing waste, in an effort to cut costs. Now, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF in Magdeburg have developed dynamic energy management systems that manage distributed energy providers, storage and current energy consumption efficiently. Installed in a company, such a system determines whether enough renewable energy will still be available to charge the fleet of electric company cars once power has been supplied to the HVAC system. So that the system can operate fully automatically, the amount of energy required and the amount of power expected to be produced on a given day are measured at first for general planning. In the detailed planning stage, data are supplied for the next fifteen minutes. The researchers use neural networks trained specifically for the particular complex infrastructure to make a forecast, which the system then uses to optimize energy use in the next quarter of an hour automatically.