Green Tech

After: The 6th Street Bridge after high pressure sodium streetlights were replaced with LEDs (See end of post for a before photo).

(Credit: City of Los Angeles/Bureau of Street Lighting)

Los Angeles is literally basking in a whole new glow.

The city has decided to replace its street lights and bus stop lighting with LEDs. The bus stop lighting will be solar-powered and off the grid.

LA's Bureau of Street Lighting has been actively testing out different types of energy efficient lighting to replace the public lighting that currently includes a combination of incandescent, mercury vapor, metal halide, and high pressure sodium lights.

In 2009, the agency began an LED street lighting energy efficiency program to actively replace its existing 209,000 streetlights. When complete, the city's energy consumption for public lighting should be cut by 40 percent and save 40,500 tons of carbon emissions per year, according to city statistics.

Now the city has decided on which specific lights to go with. Many of the street lamps will be LEDway streetlights from BetaLED. The solar-powered bus lamps are EverGen lights from Carmanah Technologies. Because the bus lights are self-sufficient, they will not need to be tied into the city's electric grid and will allow the city to remain lit even in the event of a blackout.

In a statement released Tuesday, Carmanah said its lights will also give the city more freedom to replace existing lights or introduce lights in new places without having to dig up sidewalks or tie into electricity poles, cutting down on installation costs.

But in addition to making the city more energy efficient, the switch from an abundance of high pressure sodium lights across the city's highways to LEDs is also drastically changing the city's look. Before and after photos provided by the city of the 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River illustrate a clear change in tint from orange to whiter lighting.

Before: The orange glow of high pressure sodium lights on 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River before they were replaced with LEDs.

(Credit: City of Los Angeles/Bureau of Street Lighting)

Is it time to make the leap to LED lights for the home? Perhaps, but only if you're willing to make a return-on-investment calculation.

Lemnis Lighting on Friday said that its Pharox60 LED light is now available in the U.S. online and soon will be for sale on Amazon. The dimmable bulb, shaped like a traditional incandescent bulb, consumes 6 watts of power and can replace a 60-watt bulb.

An LED replacement for an incandescent bulb.

(Credit: Pharox)

That dramatic drop in electricity use comes at the cost of $39.95. The premium can be recouped in three years, or as little as one year for consumers with time-of-day pricing tariffs, according to the company. The current price is a special offer; the bulb will cost $49.95 after the beginning of next year.

"Compared to the entry price for solar panels, we feel this is a more accessible energy saving investment," said Warner Philips, founder of the Netherlands-based company whose great-grandfather founded the Dutch lighting giant Philips.

The LED bulbs are estimated to last 25 years, significantly longer than compact fluorescent bulbs, which use more electricity for similar level of lighting output, or lumens. The Pharox60 bulb can be recycled with metal and glass materials, according to the company.

LED backers have long advocated solid-state lighting because it consumes one-tenth the power of incandescent bulbs and lasts longer. But the high price tag has meant that LEDs are mainly used for commercial applications.

Because there is concern that manufacturers will overstate the efficiency benefits or light output, the Department of Energy has set up a "Lighting Facts" Web site and label to guide consumers. Lighting Facts lists the Pharox bulb bulb among those that perform as claimed.

Researchers from Korea claim to have produced the world's first purely white LED (light-emitting diode).

Soo-Young Park, a professor of organic materials for photonics at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea, led the group, which includes researchers from the University of Valencia in Spain.

LEDs are much more energy-efficient than incandescent or compact fluorescent lightng (CFL), but the quality of light they can give a room is up for debate.

Soo-Young Park, professor at Seoul National University.

(Credit: Seoul National University)

Because LEDs do not naturally produce white light, getting them to look like they do adds to their production cost, making them much more expensive than your average incandescent or CFL. Many companies have been trying to come up with different LED recipes and components to produce a nice white light, while keeping the consumer cost down.

Park and his group claim to have engineered a molecule with one orange and one blue light-emitting material that produces a white light in the visible light spectrum when put together.

In other words, they say they've invented a white-light-emitting diode.

Repeated laboratory tests apparently showed that the new form of LED molecule is efficient, color stable, and able to be reproduced again and again, making it a legitimate candidate for use in LED lighting.

A detailed explanation of the group's molecular work can be found in the current issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"An ideal material for a white-light source should be cost-effective, stable, robust, emit over the whole visible spectrum, not suffer from self-absorption, and its pure color should be easily reproducible. With this goal in mind, we have successfully synthesized and characterized, for the first time, a white-light-emitting single molecule dyad, consisting of two noninteracting chromophores showing excited-state intramolecular proton transfer," Park and his group said in their paper.

Light for Life uses ultracapacitor technology.

(Credit: 5.11 Tactical)

Last year, 5.11 Tactical, which makes clothes and gear aimed at law enforcement officers (but sells to civilians), announced a new high-tech flashlight called Light for Life. Only recently, however, has it become available to order.

What's special about it? Well, the flashlight uses three LEDs, but its key component is Flashpoint Power technology, an ultracapacitor energy storage system from Ivus Energy Innovations.

Light for Life recharges in just 90 seconds and shines at 90 lumens for 90 minutes per charge. The flashlight has three modes: bright (270 peak lumens), standard (90 lumens), and strobe, which is good for dance parties or scaring the neighbors' dog and kids (OK, I'm kidding, but you get the picture).

According to 5.11 Tactical, the 50,000-hour LEDs never have to be replaced and the flashlight is engineered to "offer 10 years of maintenance-free service under typical conditions." (You can recharge it up 50,000 times or one time a day for 135 years.)

I got a chance to play around with the thing at a recent event, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. It's lighter (16 ounces) than it looks, and it feels very durable. The one question I asked was: what happens when the power goes out and you have to recharge the thing? Answer: it comes with a 12V DC automotive charger, so you can use your car to charge it up in the event of a power outage.

The only drawback: Light for Life costs a whopping $169.99. But 5.11 Tactical says that when you add up the cost of all those D batteries over the lifetime of a battery-powered police flashlight, it's still a deal. And then there's all that good karma you get for not chucking those batteries into the garbage or landfill. It's hard to put a price on that.

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HID Laboratories is the sort of company you get when you cross IT pros from Silicon Valley with lighting experts.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company plans on Tuesday to officially launch and detail its light fixture, called the SmartPod Luminaire, which it says reduces commercial and industrial lighting costs by 40 percent.

High-intensity discharge (HID) lighting systems are typically used in street lights, warehouses, big box retail stores, sports arenas, and other industrial spaces.

HID Labs' SmartPod is a solid-state replacement for the ballast which holds the wiring and controls the current to lamps. The SmartPod's chip allows building owners to lower their electricity and reduce the significant amount of heat that metal ballasts generate, said HID Labs CEO Antonio Espinosa.

A replacement for traditional HID lamp ballasts can reduce energy consumption by 40 percent, according to HID Labs.

(Credit: HID Labs)

The lighting units can automatically dim lights based on set policies, such as turning a zone off at night. When used with sensors, lighting fixtures can turn on when somebody enters a room or dim to compensate for daylight. The replacement ballast also eliminates the long warm-up time for HID lamps, Espinosa said.

The company calculates that replacing the ballast in existing lights will give a building owner a return on investment within two years.

In the future, the company expects to introduce wireless networking, which would make centralized management of lighting and automated control easier, Espinosa explained. Right now, a person needs to connect a laptop to a light to adjust wattage across multiple lamps.

Better control and data gathering on performance, heat, and other factors will make it easier for utilities or demand-response companies to adjust the lighting load. Rather than fire up additional power plants, utilities are developing programs to lower electricity use, such as dimming commercial lights during peak times.

"When you can bring intelligence to the end point, now you can have a node on the smart grid. That's unheard of in the lighting industry," Espinosa said.

The trick to more efficiently managing the HID lamps is manipulating the frequency of the electrical signal, he explained. The company, which is less than two years old, raised $6 million in venture funding and now has about 15 customers.

There is growing interest in energy efficiency because it is often an investment that recoups the initial cost relatively quickly. But HID Labs faces the challenge of overcoming corporate inertia in adopting a new product. It also faces competition from compact fluorescent bulbs.

Espinosa said that the company's experience so far with customers is that they purchase the SmartPod to cut their utility bills. But because the ballast replacement gets more light from existing lamps, the benefit to workers becomes a selling point.

"People fall in love with the light. They had no idea that they were sitting in a cave. It quickly moves from energy efficiency and then the human element drives everything," he said.

Updated on June 16 at 8:10 am PT with corrected spelling.

A new breakthrough may change the attitude that the incandescent lightbulb has had its day.

Compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) have unquestionably gained popularity for their energy efficiency when compared to the traditional incandescent bulb. Millions of people around the world have been encouraged by politicians, governments, energy utilities, and even lightbulb companies themselves to phase out traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of CFLs (or even LEDs) to save electricity in the home.

But now researchers at the University of Rochester in New York say they've found a way to make an incandescent lightbulb more efficient.

Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester.

(Credit: University of Rochester)

A group led by Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, has been testing the effects of ultra-fast lasers on the properties of metals and decided to try a tungsten filament (the tiny wire in the typical lightbulb).

The group blasted the tungsten filament with an ultra-fast short-pulse laser for a femtosecond. A femtosecond is to a second "what a second is to about 32 million years," according to the researchers.

The blast changed the properties of the surface metal on the filament so that it formed nanostructures and microstructures that enabled it to shine significantly more brightly while still using the same amount of electricity.

"We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament. When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb's energy usage," Guo said in a statement.

The change in the filament has enabled the incandescent light bulb to shine as bright as an average 100-watt bulb, but consume less electricity than the average 60-watt bulb.

Full details of the project, which was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, will be published in the next issue of "Physical Review Letters."

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels

(Credit: City of Seattle)

The City of Seattle has partnered with Nissan North America to promote the development of an electric vehicle charging network in anticipation of Nissan's release of its highway-legal EV, Renault-Nissan Alliance and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced Tuesday.

Nissan's commercially sold EV will have a different look than its EV-02 prototype, but the same functionality. The Nissan EV is expected to have a range of 100 miles on a single charge and be able to be charged within four to eight hours via a 220-volt outlet. The City of Seattle is planning to work with its local utility to come up with a program for installing the outlets--already commonly used in homes for electric laundry dryers--in interested residents' garages. It will also work to develop electric charging stations throughout Seattle.

The announcement is just one in a list of many U.S. communities that have begun to develop electrical charging stations in anticipation of Nissan's commercial EV release in the U.S. in 2010.

Last week Renault-Nissan Alliance announced a program in Tennessee. In March and April, Nissan announced partnerships with local Arizona governments to development a corridor of electric charging stations that would encompass the 116-mile stretch between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz. as well as their surrounding areas.

That particular project includes a partnership with tech company Ecotality. Its CEO Jonathan Read has told CNET it will be building the Arizona stations to accommodate any EV that adheres to Society of Automotive Engineers standards for electric vehicles, not just Nissan's EV.

Nissan now has projects geared toward establishing electric charging stations in anticipation of its 2010 EV launch in the U.S. in Sonoma County and San Diego, Calif., Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., Oregon, and Tennessee.

But the Seattle announcement is unique because the power source for the electric charging stations will be from http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/light/Seattle City Light, the publically-owned utility who's claim to fame is that it's "net zero" for greenhouse gas emissions.

"From light rail to street cars to electric vehicles, we're reducing the impact of transportation on our climate. Electric-powered transportation is particularly attractive in a city with a carbon-neutral utility, generating clean electricity through hydropower," Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said in a statement.

The City of Miami announced a proposal on Monday to install 1 million two-way "smart meters" to all Miami residents over the next two years in what would be the most comprehensive smart-grid program in the U.S.

Mayor Manny Diaz outlined the Energy Smart Miami plan, which is anticipated to cost $200 million in its first phase, at a press conference at Miami Dade College. Joining Diaz were the CEOs of the key suppliers in the project: Florida Power & Light CEO Lewis Hay, General Electric CEO Jeffery Immelt, Cisco systems CEO John Chambers, and SilverSpring Networks CEO Scott Lang.

"To me these are prudent and smart investments that will easily pay for themselves," Diaz said. "It will show the nation how to address environmental, energy, and economic challenges all at the same time."

The installation of meters with a wireless Internet connection will allow consumers get detailed home energy usage information from the Web, according to Hay, the CEO of the Florida utility. With the up-to-the minute data, consumers are expected to take steps to lower their consumption.

About 1,000 consumers will get in-home energy display from GE, called an EcoDashboard, and have smart-meter-controlled appliances and thermostats. These people will also participate in a demand-response program that will allow the utility to adjust appliances to throttle down electricity use during peak times.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The project, which will total $700 million across the state, also calls for adding Internet connectivity to substations and other hardware along the distribution grid, which will allow the utilty to prevent or quickly fix outages, Hay said.

Florida Power & Light is applying for a matching grant from the federal government, which would allow the utility to complete the program in two years rather than five, he said. About 100,000 people in FPL's Miami territory already have smart meters equipped with wireless networking card from SilverSpring Networks.

In addition, municipal facilities will invest in solar power at schools and universities, and FPL will buy 300 plug-in electric vehicles and 50 charging stations. With the smart-grid infrastructure, the utility can better incorporate distributed renewable energy generation to make the grid run more efficiently.

"We have 100,000 of the meters deployed already and customers are seeing real savings," Hay said. "It's an open-architecture-based system that will allow new applications to be developed" to automate home energy monitoring.

Stimulating the stimulus
The project altogether involves about 10 technologies, from the power generation station to people's homes, said Immelt.

As such, it would be a showcase for how information technology can upgrade the power grid and lower people's bills, he added. It also will serve to "stimulate the stimulus" plan.

"The most important word to come away with from today isn't 'green,' it's 'now.' The technologies are available now, the investments need to take place, the jobs need to be created now," Immelt said. "This is the kind of project the country should be doing."

Diaz said that the project would create between 800 and 1,000 jobs and pump between $5 billion and $7 billion into the general economy by 2015 from the energy savings of consumers. It's fitting that Miami would be at the forefront of cleaner energy technologies and environmental sustainability because a rise of several feet from global warming would put much of the city, including Diaz' current home, under water, he said.

Cisco will provide the networking infrastructure to transmit information from meters and other devices to FPL. Cisco CEO Chambers said that countries around the world recognize the importance in investing in an automated power grid.

Both governments and businesses need to invest in the grid, much the way the Internet was built. "This is an instant replay of the Internet," he said. "Instead of moving zeros and ones, we're moving electricity."

This illustration offers a glimpse of what the planned city of Babcock Ranch might look like.

(Credit: Kitson & Partners)

One of the world's biggest photovoltaic projects is planned for southwest Florida. Florida Power & Light will spend $350 million to build a 75-megawatt photovoltaic solar plant at a planned city, Babcock Ranch, near Fort Myers, the company announced Thursday.

Construction could begin late this year, subject to state regulatory approvals.

Eric Silagy, the ultility's chief development officer, said at a press conference that the company's photovoltaic project is larger than any previously announced.

"We are extremely excited to be building one of the world's largest solar photovoltaic projects, once the state legislative and regulatory authorities have taken the necessary actions for us to move forward," said Silagy.

A 60MW photovoltaic solar plant in Spain has been in operation since 2008, according to PV Resources. But the Babcock Ranch plant could be the largest if it reaches 75MW output--before somebody else does. Photovoltaic cells convert sunlight into electricity.

The developers, Kitson & Partners, hope that Babcock Ranch will be the world's first city to get all its energy from renewable solar energy.

"The FPL solar plant will be inside Babcock Ranch. Along with solar panels on the roofs of buildings citywide, it will be a revolutionary leap forward in clean energy for an urban area," said Syd Kitson, CEO of Kitson & Partners, in a statement.

The Sierra Club's national clean-energy representative and the World Wildlife Fund support the project and hope that it will influence other U.S. cities.

Babcock Ranch will be wireless-enabled using an ultrahigh-capacity "digital pipeline" that will support the use of current and emerging technologies, plus clean-tech efforts, according to press materials.

(Credit: Kitson & Partners)

"Electric vehicles, able to plug in for recharge at convenient community-wide recharging stations, will glide along avenues beneath the glow of solar-powered street lamps. Ingenious, revolutionary Smart Grid technologies will monitor and manage energy use while Smart Home technology will allow residents to operate their homes at maximum efficiency, thereby reducing energy costs," Kitson & Partners writes on the Babcock Ranch home page.

Florida Power & Light also hopes that the solar-powered city will generate so much power that it will be able to serve the grid with additional electricity. Kitson & Partners hopes that the Babcock Ranch will become a test bed for clean-tech companies. "Babcock Ranch will be a living laboratory for companies, workers and families ready to reap the rewards of innovation," said Kitson in a statement.

The city of Babcock Ranch will include 6 million square feet of retail, commercial, office, civic, and light industrial space. The entire project is expected to cost $2 billion. Projected prices for the planned 19,500 homes were not provided, but the homes should be "affordable for workers and families across the economic spectrum," according to Kitson & Partners.