November 23rd, 2009

Solar powered airplane: ready for take-off?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 8:07 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, aviation & aeronautics, energy, engineering, green tech, renewable energy, research, solar

Tags: Monitoring, Plane, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Harry Fuller

A solar powered airplane has passed its first set of tests. On the ground. The “Solar Impulse” has been undergoing runway tests in Switzerland. It’s powered by over 11-thousand solar panels on its very long wings.

Here on the Impulse’s website you can see videos of the plane. The goal is to fly it around the world. Omega, Solvay and Deutsche Bank are the main corporate sponsors of the project.
Image courtesy of Solar Impulse.

So far the plane has not left the ground, but both engines definitely run. Says the website, “At the controls of the HB-SIA, Solar Impulse test pilot Markus Scherdel cautiously took to the runway under the watchful eyes of the whole team, with computers monitoring the plane’s behaviour online via the embedded telemetric devices.
“This inaugural day out on the runway allowed low-speed runway testing with the prototype going through a series of acceleration and breaking manoeuvres, checking that the calculated and simulated strains are not being exceeded.”

November 23rd, 2009

EPA reports positive news on vehicle emissions, efficiency front

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 6:40 pm

Categories: air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, environmental health, green tech, research

Tags: Carbon Dioxide, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Carbon Dioxide Emission, Heather Clancy

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is included carbon dioxide emissions information in its annual report, “Light-Duty Automotive Technology, Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975 through 2009.”

The news is relatively positive: Not only has fuel efficiency increased for the fifth consecutive year — to an average of 21.1 miles per gallon compared with 21 miles per gallon — the agency reports that average carbon dioxide emissions have decreased since 2005. Since 2004, average carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced by 39 grams per mile, which is a reduction of about 8 percent. This reverses a trend from 1987 to 2004, when carbon dioxide emissions increased and fuel efficiency decline, according to the EPA.

Here’s the trends report.

Try to tell me this is a bad thing.

November 23rd, 2009

Cleantech Open: And the award goes to ... EcoFactor

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 3:27 pm

Categories: conservation, energy, environmental health, green tech, venture capital

Tags: Clean Technology, EcoFactor, Adura, Heather Clancy

The business plan for a home energy management system from EcoFactor won the $250,000 grand prize at last weeks Cleantech Open, a business competition supporting start-up activity in clean technology.

Having interviewed several companies in this sector over the past few months, I can say with authority that the home technologies attached to the smart grid are what fascinate me most right now. As I glance over at my own woefully out-of-date thermostat — one that I doubt I will convince my husband we must replace anytime soon — I find myself wondering how we’re going to get that final piece of the puzzle to fall into place. This Green Inc. blog by The New York Times outlines where the Ecofactor technology fits and why its subscription pricing model might be the kick-in-the-butt that consumers need to adopt this stuff. AND my fellow blogger Harry Fuller has also blogged about the technology, as he just reminded me. Here’s his post from early November.

EcoFactor gets $250,000, including $100,000 in seed capital. (It already won $100,000 in the regional competition.)

Cleantech also organized a Global Ideas Competition, encouraging communities to submit information about project they’re working on at a grassroots level. The prize coffer was $100,000 in marketing services, legal advice and so on. The winner (selected by text message by the Cleantech Open Expo audience was Replenish Energy out of Puerto Rico, which is working on process to convert microalgae from saltwater ponds into biofuel. (The leftover stuff can be used in humus or feedstock.)

Here’s the video that helped win Replenish Energy the Global Ideas Competition.

Interestingly enough, a former Cleantech “alumni” company, Adura Technologies, won an award for the best progress made over the past year. Adura is featured in this video over at our Smart Planet sister blog network.

November 23rd, 2009

Video: Adura commercial lighting technology saves on power costs

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 12:02 pm

Categories: conservation, energy, green tech

Tags: Network, Blog, Video, Mesh Networking, Corporate Communications, Blogging, Networking, Marketing, Internet, Heather Clancy

November 23rd, 2009

GM: not doing well, but going back to the well anyway

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 11:37 am

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, European Union, cars & traffic, green tech, law & politics, renewable energy

Tags: General Motors, Opel, Volt, plug-in, electric car

General Motors tried to sell Opel. No deal. So now GM is asking for almost $5 billion dollars, less than 4 billion Euros, to restructure Opel and the rest of its European operations. Will the EU put up the cash?

I blogged recently about GM using its Volt tech to put some electric spark into other GM brands, including stodgy Opel. The Volt, a GM plug-in, is due to launch in the U.S. in about one year.

November 23rd, 2009

Could global warming be self-limiting?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 10:46 am

Categories: Antarctic, Blogroll, air pollution, climate change, conservation, environmental health, green tech, ocean, research

Tags: Global Warming, Carbon, Harry Fuller, Antarctic, melting ice, glacier

Some recent research on the disappearing Antarctic ice sheet examined what happens AFTER the ice goes away. The conclusion: more water exposed to more sunlight means more phytoplankton and zooplankton absorbing more carbon. In other words: a natural, living carbon sink.

The scientists estimate the Antarctic Peninsula has lost nearly 24-thousand square kilometers of ice cover in the past half century.

November 20th, 2009

Holiday LED redux: E-store will accept Home Depot coupon

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 2:35 pm

Categories: conservation, energy, green tech

Tags: Coupon, Home Depot Inc., Light-emitting Diode, Engineering, Heather Clancy

Are you holding an expired Home Depot LED holiday light exchange coupon? (The promotion ended Nov. 15.) Or were you unable to use it because your local Home Depot store ran out of LED lights by the time you brought your old incandescent sets in for recycling?

You could use the Home Depot LED coupon against a purchase from HolidayLEDs.com. You can redeem up to five of the Home Depot coupons, with a minimum purchase of $15 required for each coupon. The program will last from Nov. 20, 2009, through Dec. 31, 2009.

If you have more lights to recycle, you can take part in the HolidayLEDs.com program, which is explained here.

November 20th, 2009

Science of better fuel cells

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 11:58 am

Categories: Blogroll, energy, engineering, green tech, housing, renewable energy, research, water

Tags: Fuel Cell, Fuel Cells, Emerging Technologies, Harry Fuller

An MIT energy and chemistry researcher is working on better ways to produce energy on a personal, household level. His goal: workable fuel cell tech that is efficient. Today he explained on NPR how his group has found a new catalytic process that takes water and through hydrolysis releases hydrogen which is then burned in the fuel cell to produce electricity.

The MIT hydrolysis process uses a catalyst consisting of cobalt metal, phosphate. Then add an electrode.

November 20th, 2009

Spice up your power management

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 5:12 am

Categories: conservation, energy, green tech

Tags: Power Management, Spiceworks, Plug-in, Heather Clancy

Intel and Spiceworks have teamed up to develop a plug-in that is intended to help IT managers connect some of their routine network and systems management tasks to better power regulation and management capabilities.

Spiceworks claims something close to 800,000 users worldwide; if just half of those users deployed the new plug-in, the company believes they could collectively save more than $500 million in annual electricity costs. There are more than 28 million desktops, notebooks and servers currently under management by the Spiceworks IT Desktop, according to the company.

Among the features enabled by the plug-in:

• Remote power consumption management (you can use wake on LAN or Intel vPro to power up or down devices)
• Power management dashboard that provides a visual map of what’s on and what’s off
• Estimated dollar savings view, based on the actions that managers take

The plug-in can be found at this link.

November 19th, 2009

Peoplesoft exec pops up at eMeter

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 6:53 pm

Categories: energy, green tech

Tags: Software, PeopleSoft Inc., Tools & Techniques, Corporate Governance, Management, Business Operations, Corporate Law, Heather Clancy

Craig Conway, who guaranteed his name in the software industry history books with PeopleSoft and who also sits on the board of Salesforce.com, has just joined the board of smart grid player, eMeter.

eMeter sells smart grid management software — think of it as energy resource planning instead of enterprise resource planning. The company has a hand in a number of large-scale deployments and counts Accenture, IBM, Logica and Siemens among its strategic partners.