It appears that Google is getting ever deeper into the sun business. Stating that it is dissatisfied with the general lack of progress on achieving breakthroughs in green technology, the company wants to build better highly reflective and rugged mirrors — as well as the mirror substrate that the reflective surface is mounted on. By reflecting more light and more of the solar spectrum than ordinary mirrors these mirrors have the potential to reduce the cost of solar thermal systems by up to 25 per cent.
The sun can help coal fired power plants burn less coal by pre-heating the water used to make high pressure high temperature steam during periods when the sun is shining. In other words the sun would do part of the work of producing high pressure/ high temperature steam and in this manner the overall hybrid solar/coal power plant would use less coal than a coal only power plant would need to produce the same amount of electric power.
For our readers in the New York area who are interested in the subject of green data center design the Green Grid is hosting an exclusive high level industry discussion in New York, NY on October 2nd, 2009. The event will feature a prominent industry discussion and forum on green data center design.
The Green Grid is a consortium of many of the world’s leading tech and telecom companies with the goal of promoting efficient green data center designs and technologies that use less energy and water as well as recycle the computing and support equipment used by data centers.
Green roofs, green walls, green parking lots, shade trees, the greening of urban spaces in general, the restoration of urban waterways, wetlands and the re-greening of brownfield areas; can all be thought of as different techniques to nurture a green living skin over regions of urban development. While there are many important differences between each of these separate techniques as well as their underlying technologies they all share a common overarching goal of bringing an analog of the natural living green skin that characterizes the natural landscape back into our urban areas. They all promote the restoration and re-integration of these heavily populated areas back into the surrounding natural environment.
The great American car culture is literally running out of gas. Many leading petroleum geologists are warning us that the era of easy cheap oil is over and that we are facing a much steeper rate of depletion than commonly believed. There is nothing that can replace these vast stores of liquid fossil energy that is being pumped out of the ground and drives our car culture. Without cheap plentiful oil the American car culture will rapidly crumble. The impending demise of the car culture and the types of spread out low density living that it has fostered is perhaps the most profound socio-economic earthquake we will have faced in many decades. Will we wisely prepare and build out alternatives to this doomed way of life or we wake up one day unprepared and find that the pumps really have run dry? Talking about giving up on the car culture in America is quite the third rail — no one wants to give up their car — and discussion often veers off into irrational sound bite, talking point filled shouting matches. But the facts are the facts. Cars run on gas and the era of cheap easy oil is over… the world now stands at the top of the oil production curve… at the peak of production. It is like we are all sitting in some great roller coaster ever so slowly rolling perched right at the very top of the precipice. We do not have much time at all to begin re-inventing America and building a green economy that can carry us into the future; if we dilly dally and do nothing events will soon race ahead of us and force drastic sudden change upon us all.
This is an article devoted to the idea that a revolution in software design is needed in order to produce software –or as insiders often refer to it: the code – that is both greener itself and that is designed to help other systems and products become greener… i.e. more energy and resource efficient, less wasteful, more adaptive to current conditions.
There are two often intertwined paths to follow, both of which are important for this discussion. Code itself needs to become greener; using virtual resources more efficiently and thus using fewer hardware resources and less power to accomplish the same computing tasks. Code should also be designed with a feature set that enables other products, running the code, to use less energy and to be able to time shift their energy requirements to off peak periods.
The keystone of the green economy is a drastic increase in energy efficiency. Increasing our societies energy efficiency is the single most vital and important thing we need to do in order to have a green economy or in fact any kind of economy at all. It is also vitally important to throttle back the amounts of fossil fuel we burn in order to mitigate and diminish the rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change that is being driven by our fossil fuel habit.
Without much more energy efficient buildings and transportation systems nothing we do will be able to prevent an economic collapse brought about by the inevitable and rapidly approaching decline in the recoverable supplies of all forms of fossil energy. We cannot build out wind, geothermal, biofuel, or solar energy fast enough to sustain our civilization in the face of rapidly shrinking recoverable fossil energy reserves; unless we embark on an urgent and sustained drive to use energy (and other resources) with much higher efficiency.
Partly in response to the Department of Energy having placed interoperability high on its criteria for evaluating projects applying for some of the $3.9 billion in federal stimulus grants and also because the large utility and integrated energy companies prefer to work with fewer partners, there has been a fair bit of movement towards forming partnerships amongst some of the players in the Smart Grid space. Companies that have strengths in certain key sectors of the Smart Grid arena are linking up with players who are strong in different segments in order to be able to promote and market broader integrated solutions.
Algenol Biofuels, a Florida biofuels startup and DOW Chemical Company announced a pilot-scale algae-based integrated biorefinery that will convert CO2 into ethanol. The patented technology developed by Algenol Biofuels uses CO2, salt water, sunlight and non-arable land to produce ethanol, which can be used as a fuel or as a feedstock, replacing natural gas in the production of plastic. The algae is grown in long plastic covered troughs, called bioreactors that are filled with salt water that has been saturated with carbon dioxide gas, which provides the carbon the algae needs for photosynthesis.
