Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down
Fujitsu Siemens announced last week new Eco Labels they are launching for their goods.
Eco labels are something I have written about previously on GreenMonk and I believe they are vital to helping consumers make informed choices when buying electronics.
I was interested in learning more so I invited their head of Green IT, Dr. Bernd Kosch to come on the show to discuss. He graciously accepted.
Save Energy Star before it becomes a Black Hole
The U.S. government’s Energy Star program is in trouble. Despite all the media references it garners, the program is failing the American public and, without serious intervention, will collapse in on itself to become a black hole of irrelevance and wasted resources.
The Energy Roadmap – Moving Toward Zero Energy Homes
The vision of ‘zero energy homes’ is to transform the residential built environment from a major consumer of energy, to a neutral, or net zero energy environment where the annual amount of energy produced and consumed is equal. More forward looking architects and energy system designers envision homes that are (annually) net producers of energy and able to push energy back into the grid, or fuel vehicles
The power grid today is wasteful, costly, inefficient and dumb – and ill-equipped to address many pressing energy issues, from the need to focus on climate change and carbon cost, to the demand for high reliability. However, the advent of distributed generation, distributed storage, and distributed intelligence will change power infrastructure into an intelligent and more nimble power web.
“Smart grid technologies, like advanced metering infrastructure and demand response services, will enable the transformation of the current grid to a more reliable and intelligent power web,” said Ying Wu, Senior Analyst at Lux Research.
Looks like he has been reading GreenMonk.net!!!
Coming Soon: Improved Lithium Ion Batteries?
A team led by Jaephil Cho at Hanyang University in Korea has now developed a new material for anodes, which could clear a path for a new generation of rechargeable batteries. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, their new material involves three-dimensional, highly porous silicon structures.
Solfocus, whose technology focuses 500x the normal strength of sunlight onto tiny bits of ultra-efficient (ultra-expensive) solar material has just released a new solar unit that it promises has “the highest energy density and energy yield of any photovoltaic system available today.”
Micro Fuel Cells Get Closer to Replacing Batteries
In a recent study, a team of researchers has developed micro-sized direct methanol fuel cells (microDMFC) that achieve significantly improved fuel efficiency and maintain a good power density while operating at room temperature. The energy density (measured in watt-hours per liter) of the new fuel cells is 385 Wh/L, which is superior to lithium ions batteries’ value of 270 Wh/L.
The research, led by Dr. Steve Arscott at the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN) in France, working in collaboration with SHARP Corporation in Nara, Japan, is published in a recent issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, and a second study has been accepted to the Journal of Power Sources.
Tom Raftery: ‘El futuro pasa por la gestión energética inteligente’ | elmundo.es
Tom Raftery no es un nombre demasiado conocido, aunque no para de dar conferencias por diversas partes del mundo, desde Berlín hasta Nueva York.
Su última parada ha sido Sevilla para debatir en el EBE (Evento Blog España) de un concepto relativamente nuevo, el GRID 2.0 (red de segunda generación), una idea nada fácil de definir, pero que podría traducirse como la redistribución de la energía eléctrica gracias a la tecnología, de un modo similar al que utiliza Internet para distribuir el conocimiento. Una especie de Electranet.
Said in the voice of Kent Brockman:
I for one welcome our new American overlord
This has to be one of the most hopeful pronouncements to come out of the US for decades.
I have been talking to a lot of Smart Meter and utility companies in the last few weeks and it has been fascinating. I have learned a huge amount about some of the challenges and opportunities involved in rolling our Smart Grids.
The first thing to say is that Smart Grids are coming. None of the utilities I have spoken to have given me feedback to indicate that they are rolling back on their Smart Grid projects – and they all have Smart Grid projects at some level, whether it is in planning, in trial or in roll out.
One of the questions I have asked and not received a satisfactory answer to yet is “What happens if I decide to change utility co.? Does my existing utility come along, take the Smart Meter off my wall and my new utility then needs to send an engineer to install their Smart Meter?” Unfortunately, so far the answer to this appears to be “Yes”!
In reality, this will probably be solved with some kind of cost or asset transfer solution.
As an electricity consumer (be that industrial or residential), ideally what I want is either an ‘unlocked’ Smart Meter, or one which is owned by the grid management company, as opposed to one which is locked into a particular utilitity.
In fact, for me the ultimate solution would be a neutral Smart Meter which can go out at all times, find the cheapest electricity at that time and pull from that utility!
I was speaking at the EventoBlog España conference on Saturday and I made the comment that electricity’s carbon footprint tends to increase as it becomes more expensive.
In follow-up questions, I failed to explain well what I meant so I will attempt to do so here.
Electricity pricing (on the wholesale market) is a function of supply and demand. When demand is high, electricity is expensive, when demand is low, electricity is typically cheap.
For weather based renewables (wind, solar, wave) – they produce power completely independently of the price of electricity, so they produce the same amount whether electricity is cheap or expensive.
Since weather based renewables are on average a constant percentage then they tend to have a higher slice of the market when electricity is in low demand/cheaper.
In other words, weather based renewables are independent of demand, therefore at times of low demand, they have a higher share of the market. This is even more so the case for wind which tends to blow more at night when demand is lower.
As there is a definite correlation between low demand and low price, it can be said by extension that the cheaper the electricity, the lower its carbon footprint!
Google.org is the not-for-profit arm of Internet search company Google.
After hearing about some of their initiatives, I was curious to learn more about Google.org. I contacted my friend Vint Cerf, Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist and asked him if he’d come on the show to talk about Google.org and Google’s sustainability projects.
Vint very graciously agreed to and so we have this video. Thanks Vint.
Climate Progress » Blog Archive » A new record for the hurricane season of 2008
This year is now the only hurricane season on record in the Atlantic that has featured major hurricanes in five separate months. The only year to feature major hurricanes in four separate months was 2005, and many years have had major hurricanes in three separate months
Windows 7: Extending Battery Life with Energy Efficient Applications | pdc2008 | Channel 9
A single application can accidentally halve battery life for the average laptop. This session demonstrates best practices for designing energy efficient applications and shows utilities for diagnosing common application battery life problems.
Energy Efficiency Tips – Computers and IT – DELL COMMUNITY
Dell has created a useful list of energy efficiency tips related to computer usage
I see from my good friend Salim Ismail, that his good friend Sonal Shah has been appointed to President-Elect Barack Obama’s Advisory Board.
According to her Wikipedia bio Sonal has:
temporarily taken leave from her current position as the head of Global Development Initiatives[1]for Google.org to help transition in President Elect Obama’s new government.
While the Changemakers.net tells us:
Shah has said she will be “getting the things ready for the team that will take over in the government and giving them the option and handing them what they can go do, so that they can do it . . . We talk about a 21st century government, but how do we create it?”
I have to say, it is really heartening to see someone with so much talent and with such a strong global sustainability background being added to the Obama team.