November 25th, 2009

Are small cars doomed to fail in the American market?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 6:05 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, biofuel, cars & traffic, conservation, energy, engineering, federal government, fossil fuel, green tech, law & politics, mass transit, petroleum

Tags: Car, Harry Fuller

Some auto industry analysts are warning that small, fuel efficient cars are NOT going to dominate the U.S. market. Does that mean failure for the GM Volt, Detroit’s first plug-in car, next year? Here’s a look at the potential for success or failure of smaller cars in the U.S. market. There seems no questions that the single most important factor in determining how big we drive: gasoline prices.

November 25th, 2009

How Adaptec is trying to make your private or public cloud greener

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 6:31 am

Categories: conservation, green tech

Tags: Adaptec Inc., MaxIQ, Ip storage, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Heather Clancy

Adaptec is targeting data centers supporting hybrid storage arrays that include both solid state drives and traditional hard disk drives with a high-performance SSD caching system called the MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution.

Its solution is being offered in partnership with Intel. It also is the first expression of the company’s overarching green cloud technology development strategy, called the Adaptec Data Conditioning Platform.

MaxIQ combines an Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD with the Adaptec MaxIQ SSD caching software. The company claims the technology can help deliver up to five times the I/O performance while offering significantly reduced power consumption over infrastructure that uses HDD-only storage arrays. Each kit is priced at $1,295.

Here’s a press release detailing the results of an independent benchmarking test of the architecture, which is being pitched as an infrastructure alternative for either private data center clouds or public cloud infrastructure. And here’s a link to the data sheets for Adaptec’s MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution.

November 24th, 2009

East Anglia hacking: is this the ultimate litmus test on environmental politics?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:18 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, climate change, conservation, environmental health, global warming, law & politics, research

Tags: Hacking, Global Warming, Harry Fuller

It seems the response a group or person has to the East Anglia climate center hack job is a good indication of moral and political values.

The right-wing John Birch Society calls the revelations from the email “global warming fraud unmasked” and “ideology masked as science.”

Rush Limbaugh declares the emails were made public by “a whistleblower.” In Rush’s world the science of global warming is a hoax. “the whole global warming — manmade global warming movement is a fraud. It is a hoax. It’s made-up lies.”

One Fox news commentator says, “Usually academic research is completely ignored by the general public but in this case proposed regulations, costing trillions of dollars, are being based on many of these claimed research results. This coordinated campaign to hide scientific information appears unprecedented.”

Unprecedented? Guess he chooses to overlook the tobacco companies’ efforts to cleanse records connecting cigarettes and various cancers. And then there’s the usual claim that cleaning up the atmosphere is too costly. In fact, like scrubbing the gases that were causing acid rain, cleaning the air often creates more jobs and more profits as well as makes the planet healthier.

On the left there’s already a call for one scientist prominently represented in the emails ro resign, and a call for the data to be re-analyzed.

That scientist granted his first interview since the theft. He says there is no conspiracy. “That the world is warming is based on a range of sources: not only temperature records but other indicators such as sea level rise, glacier retreat and less Arctic sea ice.”
It’s likely there’ll be a United Kingdom government investigation, not just of the theft, but the actions of those at the East Anglia climate study center. Says one British scientist, “The selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages has created the impression of impropriety, and the only way of clearing the air now would be through a rigorous investigation. ”

The BBC quotes one American climate scientist on the issue of transparency:
“The need for public credibility and transparency has dramatically increased in recent years as the policy relevance of climate research has increased.”

That’s shorthand for “We’re asking countries to make the kind of effort that usually goes for war or hosting the Olympics, so let’s be careful.”

That opinion in favor of transparency coincides with the majority of ZDnet blog readers repsonding to our poll on the hacking affair.

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There’ll no doubt be much palaver in the U.S. Congress with Republican global warming skeptics there already calling for an investigation.

So far there’s no indication the hacking and publication of the docs from East Anglia will have any material effect on the Copenhagen talks.

November 24th, 2009

Climate scientists saying global warming trend is worsening

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:00 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Kyoto Protocol, air pollution, climate change, conservation, environmental health, global warming, law & politics, ocean, research

Tags: Scientist, Climate, Global Warming, Harry Fuller

Today a 64-page “Copenhagen Diagnosis” was released by a group of climate scientists from several nations. They say now it looks like the average global temps couldclimb more than ten degrees Fahrenheit this century. Sea levels could increase more than three feet.

This report concludes that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are near the top of what the IPCC thought was possible when they issued their most recent report in 2007. The group says work on reducing man-caused greenhouse gasemissions must begin now.

“Our available emissions to ensure a reasonably secure climate future are just about used up,” said Matthew England, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The 26 scientists from eight countries also say the polar ice caps are melting faster than expected. That the need for international action is “urgent.”

The group urges international action at the Copenhagen talks that begin December 7.

November 24th, 2009

Schneider Electric is latest to draw link between building and network energy controls

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 1:17 pm

Categories: building, conservation, energy, engineering, green tech

Tags: Schneider Electric, Network, Physical Security, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Heather Clancy

Facilities infrastructure giant Schneider Electric has adopted an architectural approach to intelligent energy management that it has dubbed EcoStruxure.

The effort will better integrate the company’s technologies across power distribution and protection systems, data centers (where the company’s sells the APC by Schneider Electric InfraStruxure line), industrial controls, building controls and physical security technologies. The company has positioned these technologies as vital to corporate-wide energy intelligence. The connections between these various components, through open IP and Web services, is also seen as critical.

Most of the pieces of the EcoStruxure approach exist already. What’s missing is the business practices and reference architectures that businesses can use to apply an integrated approach. Look for related training and documentation to emerge throughout 2010, according to the company.

November 24th, 2009

Intel encourages green tech at the university level

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 5:50 am

Categories: China, Russia, climate change, conservation, green tech, research

Tags: Team, Green Technology, Intel Corp., Team Management, Management, Heather Clancy

Spoke with one of the teams that participated last week in the Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. Although not strictly a green technology competition, there were a number of teams focused on solving environmental issues through innovative applications of technology.

One great example was the team I interviewed, which represented AMIREco, a year-old Russian venture that has developed a phosphate material that can be used to remove oil from soil or from other materials.

Igor Rozhdestvensky, senior partner of the venture from St. Petersburg, says the company recently earned a contract to test its idea at a site in Russia in conjunction with a large Russian company in his company’s target customer demographic. Rozhdestvensky and several other AMIREco partners traveled to the challenge event in order to gather ideas for how to develop and market their idea, as well as how to produce it in scale and not just small test batches. “Intel gave us an excellent course on entrepreneurship,” he says.

They also walked away from the event with some suggestions about how to overcome certain potential challenges with the materials, says the company’s research and development manager Oleg Rozhdestvensky.

Two other green-techie ideas represented during the competition were Treems from Technical University Munich, which is pitching a way of identifying, selling and managed protected trees or other forestry resources, and the New Green team from Shanghai, which was pitching cards (sort of like the ph tests you would do on the pool in your backyard) for detecting the presence of pesticides and bacterias in Chinese food products.

Here’s a link to more information about the winner of the challenge, a Chinese student development team called Ihealth that is working on biodegradable bone screws. The team was awarded $25,000 by Intel to help fund it idea. Here’s a list of all the teams that participated.

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

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.