GreenTech Pastures

March 20th, 2009

SmartSynch scores AT&T deal to jumpstart smart grid deployment

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 8:46 pm

Categories: conservation, energy, engineering, green tech

Tags: AT&T; Corp., Wireless Network, SmartSynch Inc., Wireless, Wi-Fi, Wireless And Mobility, Heather Clancy

SmartSynch has teamed up with wireless network provider AT&T to create a series of services that electric utilities can use to collect meter information securely. The partnership will help utilities and residential customers start realizing the benefits of the emerging smart grid infrastructure — without requiring the lengthy build-out of private wireless network infrastructure.

SmartSynch sells IP-based smart grid technology this is deployed at more than 100 utilties in North America.

March 20th, 2009

Obama visits electric car center in L.A.

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:02 pm

Categories: Blogroll, China, air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, global warming, green tech, law & politics, renewable energy

Tags: Car, Electric Car, Plug-in, Ford Motor Co., SCE, NOw SCE, Harry Fuller

I blogged earlier this week about China’s plug-in car, already in mass production at a sales price of about $20K each. The Chinese electric carmaker, BYD, hopes to sell about 350,000 this year. All in China.

President Obama and Southern California Edison (SCE) staged a press event to get a little publicity for the possible future of plug-in cars in America.

Ford has donated an all-electric protoype to SCE for test purposes. Ford sees a lot of electric in their future. Ford plans to bring four new electrified vehicles to market by 2012 including: 1) full battery electric Transit Connect commercial van in 2010; 2) full battery electric passenger car in 2011; 3) next generation hybrid in 2012 4) a plug-In hybrid in 2012. GM plans to bring out its Volt in less than two years if the company survives.

SCE has maintained an electric vehicle fleet and research center for nearly two decades. They were present for the birth and untimely demise of the GM EV-1. Here’s SCE’s webpage on electric vehicles. Now SCE maintains a fleet of 300 electric, plug-in vehicles…all the way up to bucket trucks. That’s a short step toward President Obama’s goal: he wants 1 million plug-in hybrid vehicles on America’s roads by 2015. That’s the equivalent of three years worth of BYD’s sales in China. We Yanks are so behind the curve….

Obama is trying two ways to push electric car sales in America, if you can find one. The federal government now offers up to $7,500 in tax credits for Americans buying electric vehicles. And Obama has begun $2.4-billion grant program, part of his recovery program. Winners would get grants (subsidies) to help increase the manufacturing of batteries in the U.S. Or else build other parts used in electric cars. Currently the high-cost batteries for hybrid or electric cars are all built outside the U.S.

Plug-in America says there are over $14-billion for electric cars in the recently passed stimulus plan.

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March 20th, 2009

Are you buying the greenest IT? It's all relative

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 6:25 am

Categories: green tech, research

Tags: Dell Computer Corp., Brand, Information Technology, Green IT, Survey, Recycling Program, Survey Result, Branding, Marketing Research, Marketing

Hewlett-Packard may currently be the biggest high-tech company on earth, but Dell is winning the mindshare battle (for now) when it comes to green IT, according to a new GreenFactor business survey.

The poll of CIOs and Senior IT Managers by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe covered close to 3,500 high-level executives in more than 11 countries. The biggest factor in Dell’s win, actually, was its extensive recycling programs. But there actually is a very small margin separating the No. 1 company (Dell at 30 percent) from the No. 2 company (HP at 26 percent). And, in fact, the two have simply flip-flopped their positions in the past year. IBM, Microsoft and Apple round out the top five.

The survey results reinforces something that I’ve been saying for a very long time about the whole green IT concept. That is, IT buyers will be influenced not only about what’s actually making up the products they’re selecting (the Procurement Factor) but they also care about the green business credentials of the company they’re buying their products from (the Corporate Responsibility Factor).

The new research likewise notes that IT buyers judge green IT according to  “Brand Products” and “Brand Operations.” Brand Product covers issues such as materials used in the product, energy efficiency, packaging and recycling programs. Brand Operations covers things the manufacturer is doing for its own business such as building green facilities, promoting green business practices and so on.

Brand Product factors get the edge in ultimate purchasing decisions, according to the research.

By the way, the researchers conducting the survey DID define “green technology” for the respondents. Attributes included design for reduced power consumption, recycling programs and the types of materials used to construct the equipment.

You can learn more about the study here.

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March 19th, 2009

Rackable infrastructure highlights new approach to power distribution

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 8:02 pm

Categories: conservation, energy, engineering, green tech

Tags: Power Management, Data Center, Rackable Systems, Barrenechea, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Heather Clancy

I had planned to provide oodles of specs today for the latest cabinet architecture from Rackable Systems, a product it is calling Cloudrack C2. But ZDNet’s gadget guy Andrew Nusca over at The ToyBox land beat me to the punch. (Serves me right for being on a plane coast-to-coast.) I’ll point to his post here, where you can read the details of the new technology the company announced this week.

Aside from Cloudrack 2’s ability to accommodate much higher ambient temperatures (allowing data center managers to accommodate temperatures of up to 10 degrees to 15 degrees Fahrenheit higher), I also want to amplify another theme in the Cloudrack 2 design that I discussed with Rackable CEO Mark Barrenechea earlier this week.

It involves a new feature in Cloudrack 2 called Power XE, which is a power distribution technology. Barrenechea says Power XE addresses “stranded power,” the 10 percent to 15 percent of electricity that essentially is wasted due to inefficient design. Power XE uses hot-pluggable N+1 redundant rectifiers to convert AC power into 12V DC power. Essentially, it eliminates the traditional power supply.

“If you’re wasting power that you’re already paying for, you can recapture it immediately,” Barrenechea says of the Power XE feature.

You will see this approach show up in other Rackable products. You’ll also see other server vendors continue to address their cabinet and chassis infrastructure to provide for higher and higher density with fewer moving parts. It’s another factor that reminds me that green IT is as much about how you place different technologies across the data center and provide for cooling as it is about any specific microprocessor tweak or power management philosophy.

March 19th, 2009

White House becoming Green House?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 7:07 pm

Categories: Blogroll, conservation, environmental health, federal government, green tech, solar

Tags: Kitchen, White House, First Lady, Food & Beverage, Corporate Communications, Manufacturing, Marketing, Harry Fuller

The First Lady is breaking ground on a major new White House project: a kitchen garden. The produce will go to the White House kitchen. A nearby elementary school class will also help with the labor, like planting and weed-pulling.

On a recent “Sixty Minutes” program Alice Waters, Berkeley “slow-food” crusader, said it was her dream to see a kitchen garden at the White House. You can see the video clip here. She’s happy tonight.

A combo of worries over pesticides, and the cost of groceries is driving a big increase in American gardening. One survey suggests double-digit growth in gardening, replacing hedge funds as the real growth industry in America.

My Depression-era hardened parents had a half-acre garden every summer. I hated the weed-pulling, but loved the grasshopper “harvest.” Bonus: I got to eat all the fresh peas right out of the pod. Best fresh food on earth. But in honor of recent St. Patty’s Day, I gotta add, garden fresh potatoes are hard to match. Ditto, a sun-warm, just-picked tomato. For many city-reared Americans this may be the greenest tech of all: working with a chlorophyll-rich environment. It’s renewable, and solar powered if you avoid the oil-based fertilizers.

My free hint to Mrs. Obama, get a few chickens, and then….

March 19th, 2009

Polar bear now has friends in high places

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 1:03 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Polar Bear, Government, Vertical Industries, Enterprise Software, Software, Harry Fuller

Map of polar bear range from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Five nations with turf inside the Arctic Circle are calling for action to save the polar bear. I do not believe Gov. Sarah Palin got to vote at this conference in Oslo.

The joint statement backed by both Canada and U.S. says, “Climate change has a negative impact on polar bears and their habitat and is the most important long-term threat facing polar bears.”

The bear protectors from the five governments also cited threats to the polar bear from manmade pollution and possible over-hunting. This is one more step toward the polar bear becoming a poster child for global warming activists. Expect photos of the polar bear to become a feature in alternative nergy ads on TV, in spots for electric cars, even part of any publicity on behalf of solar energy. The Arctic creature will be seen on posters from India to Australia, far from the bear’s natural home.

March 19th, 2009

A pending environmental disaster, and how we humans got it right

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 12:36 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, conservation, engineering, environmental health, law & politics, research

Tags: Ozone, Government, Harry Fuller

Remember the ozone hole? It was real despite all the poo-poohing from those who didn’t want to face its implications. Like global warming denial today, an alliance of ozone-hole-deniers tried to stave off any regulatory action in the 1980s, saying it was not valid. They protrayed the ozone hole as a stalking horse for a liberal political agenda. Fortunately the science prevailed and led to global political action which banned further use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Now American scientists have looked at what would have happened if the CFC ban had not been enacted and enforced by governments around the world. The planet would have suffered an ultraviolet radiation disaster.

Though we’re not making and releasing CFCs in large quantities, much of the CFC residue from the last century will remain in the upper atmosphere for decades longer, contiuning to “eat” ozone which protects us earthlings from UV radiation.

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March 19th, 2009

Fancy a little water over lower Manhattan?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 12:27 pm

Categories: Antarctic, Blogroll, climate change, global warming, ocean, research, water

Tags: Harry Fuller

At one extreme there’s the possibility that warmer oceans will melt the entire ice sheet along Antarctica’s western edge. Scientists say that would raise the global sea levels by five meters, that’s about sixteen feet. That’s above the front door on many Manhattan office buildings. Not to mention what would be the former site of Venice, either Italy or California.

The new research indicates a 5 degree Centigrade ocean temperature increase would likely lead to the disintegration of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet. Past fluctuations of the earth’s tilt in relation to the sun have caused meltdowns or freeze-ups in Antarctic. That provided the basis for this new projection of possible future events.

To read the whole article on Nature.com you will need a subscription or make a payment.

March 18th, 2009

A solar-powered sailboat: Counter-intuitive or just good design?

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 11:14 am

Categories: conservation, energy, engineering, global warming, green tech, renewable energy, solar, wind

Tags: Autodesk Inc., PlanetSolar, CAD, Telecom & Utilities, Software, Heather Clancy

One of the reasons Autodesk became such a dominant provider of computer-aided design software was its decision early on to seed its software in architecture schools and universities. Now, the company is angling to position itself in the field of green product design.

Its latest awareness/marketing project is sponsorship of a project by PlanetSolar to design and construct a solar catamaran that will be used to circumnavigate the globe during a 25,000-mile, 120-day journey in 2010. The company, based in Germany, will use stops during the trip to promote renewable energy and solar power.

At first I wondered, why does a sailboat need solar power? After all, sailboats under sail are the ultimate green vehicles. But then the words “dead calm” leapt into my mind. And, when there’s no cloud cover it certainly is pretty sunny on the ocean.

PlanetSolar is using several products from Autodesk to design the boat including Digital Prototyping features in Autodesk Inventor that will help visualize the impact of design changes. The engineers are also using AutoCAD Electrical and Autodesk Productstream.

Here’s a YouTube video about the project.

March 18th, 2009

Chinese electric car maker thinks green and Go America

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 9:22 am

Categories: Blogroll, China, air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, green tech, renewable energy

Tags: Car, Electric Car, BYD, F3DM, Harry Fuller

We’ve read about many Chinese manufacturers cutting back, laying off, feeling the pinch of reduced consumption in the U.S. Bucking the general trend: BYD. They are a Chinese car maker and plan to introduce their plug-in electric car in the U.S. in 2011. Of course, one of Warren Buffett’s companies owns 10% of BYD.

BYD’s already selling the F3DM, the world’s first mass-produced plug-in hybrid sedan, in China. They also make a battery-powered e6, a mid-size five-passenger vehicle with a range of up to 250 miles on a single charge. When BYD gets its cars into the U.S. threy are expected to meet competition from Nissan, also possibly Chrysler and GM if they survive. All three promise to bring some electric cars into the U.S. market next year.

The F3DM’s on sale now in China have small gas engine used to recharge the battery, which can also be recharged at a standard home power socket. Unlike the usual spiel on electric cars, BYD maintains they are far easier and CHEAPER to build than standard gasoline cars. Far fewer parts to deal with, easier to engineer. Who’da thunk it?

PRICE?

BYD’s car may sell for about $22K while the Chevy Volt is expected to hit the market next year at about $40K. At the start BYD’s cars will be imported, though the company has indicated it would like to have enough sales to justify American-based assembly plants.

Here’s YouTube video of a BYD vehicle at a Chinese auto show. You can see more pictures of the BYD cars here.