BID’s International Star Award for Quality to RAO “UES of Russia” in Geneva

The Vice-Chairman of the Board of RAO “UES of Russia”, Sergey Dubinin, received the International Star Award for Quality from the President of BID, Jose E. Prieto.

RAO “UES of Russia”, provider of 70% of the electricity in Russia, owns 96% of the high voltage power lines and 70% of the transmission lines. With 600,000 employees, RAO is one of the three largest companies in Russia by sales. RAO’s net profit amounted to US$ 28 billion in 2007, and on March 31, 2008, its market capitalization was US$ 79 billion. The Vice-Chairman of the Board of RAO “UES of Russia”, Sergey Dubinin, received the International Star Award for Quality from the President of Business Initiative Directions, Jose E. Prieto, at BID’s Quality Convention in Geneva.

Russia

Russia

Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country extending over much of northern Eurasia (Europe and Asia together). It is a semi-presidential republic comprising 83 federal subjects. Russia shares land borders with the following countries (counterclockwise from northwest to southeast): Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (via Kaliningrad Oblast), Poland (via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia is by far the largest country in the world, covering more than an eighth of the Earth’s land area; with 142 million people, it is the ninth largest by population. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning 11 time zones and incorporating a great range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world’s greatest reserves of mineral and energy resources, and is considered an energy superpower. It has the world’s largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world’s unfrozen fresh water.

The nation’s history began with that of the East Slavs, which emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a noble Viking warrior class and their descendants, the first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus’, arose in the 9th century and adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus’ ultimately disintegrated and the lands were divided into many small feudal states. The most powerful successor state to Kievan Rus’ was Moscow, which served as the main force in the Russian reunification process and independence struggle against the Golden Horde. Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and came to dominate the cultural and political legacy of Kievan Rus’. By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which was the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland eastward to the Pacific Ocean and Alaska.

Russia established worldwide power and influence from the times of the Russian Empire to being the largest and leading constituent of the Soviet Union, the world’s first and largest constitutionally socialist state and a recognized superpower. The nation can boast a long tradition of excellence in every aspect of the arts and sciences. The Russian Federation was founded following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but is recognized as the continuing legal personality of the Soviet Union. It has one of the world’s fastest growing major economies and has the world’s eighth largest GDP by nominal GDP or sixth largest by purchasing power parity with the eighth largest military budget or third largest by purchasing power. It is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the world’s largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Russia is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a member of the G8, APEC and the SCO, and is a leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Electric potential energy

Electric potential energy

Electric potential energy aka “electrostatic potential energy” is a potential energy associated with the conservative Coulomb forces within a defined system of point charges. The term “electrostatic potential energy” is preferred here because it seems less likely to be misunderstood. The reference zero is usually taken to be a state in which the individual point charges are very well separated (“are at infinite separation”) and are at rest. The electrostatic potential energy of the system (UE), relative to this zero, is equal to the total work W that must be done by a hypothetical external agent in order to bring the charges slowly, one by one, from infinite separation to the desired system configuration:

In this process the external agent is deemed to provide or absorb any relevant work, and the point charge being slowly moved gains no kinetic energy.
Sometimes people refer to the potential energy of a charge in an electrostatic field. This actually refers to the potential energy of the system containing the charge and the other charges that created the electrostatic field.
To calculate the work required to bring a point charge into the vicinity of other (stationary) point charges, it is sufficient to know only the total field generated by the other charges and the charge of the point charge being moved. The field due to the charge being moved and the values of the other charges do not need to be known. Nonetheless, in many circumstances it is mathematically easier to add up all the pairwise potential energies (as below).
It is important to understand that electrostatics is a 18th-19th-century theory of hypothetical entities called “point charges”. Electrostatics is categorically not a complete theory of the charged physical particles that make up the physical world, and are subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and other laws of quantum mechanics.