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Green bits and bytes for Jan 27th 2011

Green bits & bytes

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Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

  1. This year’s annual Transmission & Distribution Europe and Smart Grids Europe conference will be held in Copenhagen from 12-14 April. More than 30 utilities, as well as utility experts, regulators and technology giants from all over Europe, as well as the USA, South Africa, Japan and Australia, will be attending. I hope to be there too!
  2. Synapse Energy Economics released a report this week which outlines in detail the enormous hidden health and water impacts of coal and nuclear power in the US.

    Some of the costs mentioned in the report include 200 billion gallons of water withdrawn from America?s water supply each day ? annual costs to society from premature deaths due to power plant pollution so high that they are up to four times the price of all electricity produced in the U.S. ? and four metric tons of high-level radioactive wastes for every terawatt of electricity produced by nuclear reactors, even though there is no long-term storage solution in place.

  3. Optimum Energy, maker of heating, ventilating and air conditioning software solutions, has rolled out a new partner program with enhanced project development tools and training resources. Optimum Energy’s software maximizes the energy reduction potential of high-efficiency, variable speed heating and cooling systems, leading to energy savings for customers and the ability to improve overall project return on investment.
  4. Tropos Networks, maker of wireless IP networks for Smart Grids, has added two new products to its portfolio – the Tropos 1310 Distribution Automation (DA) Mesh Router and their Directional Radio Systems to deliver economical long range, high capacity wireless communications for sparse suburban and rural areas or as backhaul for Tropos Mesh networks.
  5. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg launched an Urban Technology Innovation Center at Columbia university. The center brings together academia, the public sector and companies like IBM to design and deploy new technology that will help the city’s buildings save energy, water and other resources. The challenge is to use advanced IT systems – analytics software and powerful new hardware – to create facilities that reduce energy, streamline operations and optimise real estate use.

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Photo credit .faramarz