Yule Heibel's Library tagged energy →  View Popular, Search in Google

I want smart windows on my house. I want a smart house.
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On Thursday, New Energy Technologies announced a new complementary conductive wiring system that will transport electricity over glass windows laid out in a fine grid-like pattern that’s virtually transparent. United States Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) scientists collaborated on the technology.

Architectural glass has can be found on many modern buildings. Apple has become renowned for encapsulating its stores in massive glass panels, and large glass windows have shrouded skyscrapers for decades. The business concept behind New Energy’s system is to retrofit these conventional glass structures.
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smartplanet windows solar_power energy glass

I need to read this book (loved Natural Capitalism).
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Lovins believes that most people in business are just waiting for Washington to tell them what to do, but that's not necessarily where the answers are. Business leaders might alternatively look to state and local government, which can implement the policies needed to speed the transition to efficiency and renewables. As we have seen, military leadership can also accelerate change in the civilian sector.
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amory_lovins energy environment

QUOTE It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job. You’d still consume more energy (“suburban single family green”) than an urban household without the latest green tech (“urban single family”). And that has as much to do with associated transportation emissions as the size and efficiency of your home.

The implication is that if more suburbanites opted to move out of their low-density detached homes and into walkable, mixed-use urban communities (or if we retrofitted suburbia to better resemble such places), right there we’d be on our way to taking a real whack at carbon emissions. UNQUOTE

cities suburbia housing atlantic_cities energy ecological_urbanism

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We need to focus, ironically, on ends, not means. For example, in passive solar buildings, focusing on the end goal (thermal comfort) rather than the means (heating air) changed the design approach dramatically. It turns out that human comfort has more to do with surrounding surface temperatures than with air temperature in a building, so massive walls that absorb and store the sun’s gentle heat also provide a more comfortable environment without all the hot air. Or, if lighting is the goal, electricity and bulbs are just one potential means; a building that welcomes daylight is the simple, elegant solution—even better than a complex system of wind farms generating green electrons for efficient fixtures. Likewise, the goal of transportation is access, not movement or mobility per se; movement is a means, not the end. So, bringing destinations closer together is a simpler, more elegant solution than assembling a new fleet of electric cars and the acres of solar collectors needed to power them. Call it “passive urbanism.”
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sustainability cities urbanism energy streetsblog peter_calthorpe climate_change

This article in Dwell relates nicely to the previous bookmark about Intel. The author's husband's company, Elan Home Systems, builds automated home monitoring and programming systems.

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The real gains of a smart home, however, are in energy conservation. HVAC and irrigation specialists aside, most of us would rather not expend brainpower on the nuts and bolts of heating and plumbing. Yet, at the same time, to neglect these seemingly prosaic matters risks ruining the planet by wasting precious resources.
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A smart home’s technological bells and whistles, software, algorithms, and networked systems enable people to be mindful about resources without always having them on their minds. In our own home, we have reduced our energy consumption by 15 percent, primarily thanks to the ability to automate and easily control how much lighting, air-conditioning, and heating we use, in addition to enabling us to make behavioral changes based on the system’s feedback.
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dwell_magazine energy management widgets

Very promising new approach that incorporates insights from ethnography, mainly around how to keep users engaged with energy management:

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The company has developed a home energy management console that comes with 1) a household clock and 2) an answering machine that stores and plays back video messages. The console also sports an iPhone-like interface with apps for checking daily power consumption, historical power consumption and other data. Nonetheless, the answering machine, and to some degree the clock (with the hours corresponding to peak power periods painted in red), represent the real breakthroughs.

Why? Home energy management companies admit that it has been tough to get consumers to interact with their consoles after the initial thrill wears off. By integrating an answering machine, consumers will inadvertently have to come in contact with their energy consumption all the time.

“We realize energy can get boring,” said Mary Murphy-Hoye at Intel Labs. “We’ve got to give people reasons to interact with it.”
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energy management intel widgets

A February 21/10 interview with the inventor of The Bloom Box, an alternative energy generation system.

bloom_box fuel_cells futurismo eco alternative_energy energy video

IBM has developed an "on-chip water-cooling system" that allows high-performance computer clusters to heat buildings and provide hot water. The technology also addresses data center energy use (currently very high) because it cools the computers themselves, while providing energy for other uses. Looks like a perfect win-win.

mit_techreview energy heating computer_clusters

Description of $3m billboard in Times Square/ NYC, to be powered by wind & solar energy, at a savings of $12-15K per month. This is one of those big, wrap-the-building electronic billboards that resembles a giant TV screen.
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Fitted with 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, the sign will be a first for Times Square.
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By generating its own electricity — enough to light six homes for a year — the sign could save as much as $12,000 to $15,000 per month, according to Ricoh, which estimated that the sign would prevent 18 tons of carbon from being spewed into the air yearly.

The 'passive' sign is not studded with light-emitting diodes like so many others in Times Square, but will be lighted by 16 300-watt floodlights. It will feature custom-printed opaque vinyl sheeting bearing the red-and-white Ricoh logo. The sign will be green, nevertheless, a message 'to customers, other companies and the world that resources and energy can be used creatively,' Mr. Potesky said. 'The point is that there are ways of being environmentally friendly to the planet, even on a billboard.'
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renewables rudi advertising billboards energy times_square

Fascinating report on how a new mechanical device, which "mimics how fish harness energy from water flow," could contribute to the sustainable energy toolkit.

(Since the device is based on mimicking how fish do it, I'm adding the "biomimicry" tag to this article.)

mit_techreview hydropower energy biomimicry vivace vortex_hydro_energy

Video demo of how VIVACE works (the device developed to mimic how fish harness energy from water currents).

mit_techreview vivace biomimicry hydropower video energy vortex_hydro_energy

"A new fiber-optic laser system can measure wind speed and direction up to 1000 meters in front of a wind turbine, giving the massive machines enough precious seconds to proactively adapt to gusts and sudden changes in wind direction. The device, developed by Catch the Wind, a startup based in Manassas, VA, could improve the efficiency of wind turbines and keep them from breaking down. "

wind_power turbines energy

Technology breakthrough with big implications for energy-use in hotter climates: a new valve that cuts air conditioners' energy use by 25%. MEMS = microelectromechanical systems.

energy air_conditioner mems

Fascinating article about Daniel Nocera's work on biomimical process similar to photosynthesis, except in this case it's sunlight turning water into hydrogen. If the process can scale, it has revolutionary implications for energy supplies.

biomimicry daniel_nocera photosynthesis energy hydrogen fuel

Among other things: "The Twitter stream is an exercise in using the data from home automation feeds, and the hope is that, by making energy usage data transparent and easy to digest, it will change consumer behavior and reduce energy consumption." As I noted in bookmarking the related Wired Magazine piece, this relates to Wired Mag's earlier article on "Peak Water," too, where we learn that many London homes don't even have water meters. Actually, it's the same here in Victoria & Oak Bay. Not good.

twitter earth2tech andy_house energy consumption infrastructure

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/).

Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08).

All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

twitter infrastructure data architecture housing consumption energy wired_magazine

"The annual time change has long been sold as a way to save energy, but the opposite might be true." I wouldn't mind if we stayed on one time all year round, although I admit liking daylight savings for the longer evenings. But then I don't live in an area that uses air conditioning -- the main reason why electricity use goes way up in DST and therefore there's a net increase in fuel / energy consumption (vs any sort of energy saving).

I dislike changing from standard time to daylight saving time and vice versa, the silly business of spring forward or falling back -- it feels like jet lag without any of the benefits of actual travel.

daylight_savings_time dst energy environment

- one of many pages on "Innovations for the Built Environment" conference coming up in London, Feb. 26-28/08. This page is from the "seminars" section, which lists many sessions over those 2 days. Other sections include links to the "exhibit," "attractions," "the arena," "conference," and more.

built_environment conference ecology energy london reference skyscrapers tall_buildings urbanism

NYT article on the problems around "the other oil crisis," triggered not in small measure by our (West's) desire to circumvent fossil fuel dependence by relying on biofuels.

crops energy ethanol food fuel geopolitics oil palm_oil

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