Energy efficiency

MENLO PARK, Calif.--The global rise in power consumption isn't bad for all species, it turns out.

Sun Microsystems is seeing increased customer interest in its Sun Ray, a thin desktop client, as electricity prices climb, said Subodh Bapat, vice president and chief engineer in the Eco Responsibility office at Sun. Bapat's comments came in a presentation during Sun's global media day taking place Wednesday.

Thin clients like the Sun Ray consume far less electricity than conventional desktops, he said. A Sun Ray on a desktop might consume 4 to 8 watts of power. That's because … Read more

Blu-ray is finally getting some momentum in the market, and two secretive start-ups are already looking at ways to replace the standard, or at least retrofit it.

Kaai and Soraa are trying to develop lasers and LEDs that could, conceivably, replace conventional LEDs in the lighting market and serve as a standard for optical data storage, Ford Tamer, the newest partner at Khosla Ventures, said in an interview. The firm has invested in both companies.

Tamer didn't provide many details on the companies, but that's par for the Khosla Ventures course. The company is placing many investments in companies that are still in the exploratory and scientific discovery phase and thus wants to keep a lid on details. Tamer did, however, say that Kaai and Soraa are both interested in the lighting and data storage markets. (And if anyone can ferret clues out of the "aa" in both company names, send it along.) … Read more

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--Nuclear fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says.

"Within five years, large companies will start to think about building fusion reactors," Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, said in an interview at the Clean Tech Investor Summit taking place here this week. In three to four years, scientists will demonstrate results that show that fusion has a 60 percent chance of success, he said.

If van Lierop were some crazy guy off the street with an old stack of Omni magazines, you … Read more

WASHINGTON--Dell chief Michael Dell and other high-profile technology company CEOs descended on the nation's capital Wednesday with a message for policymakers: do more to encourage energy-efficient practices, but don't spell out specific standards for the products that companies like theirs build.

On behalf of a lobby group known as the Technology CEO Council, Dell, EMC chief Joe Tucci, and Applied Materials head Mike Splinter suggested the government should do more to "lead by example." They said it can do that by reevaluating its own power consumption, setting "high goals" for energy efficiency, awarding presidential … Read more

The coal industry isn't happy with the Department of Energy's cancellation of an ambitious clean coal project, and has issued a bulletin to correct what it considers inaccurate statements about the cost of the project.

Earlier this week, the DOE said it was pulling out of the FutureGen Alliance, a coalition of coal and oil companies banded together to create a coal-fired power plant in Mattoon, Ill., that injects carbon dioxide emissions underground. The cost, the DOE claimed, had become prohibitive. The budget for the 300-megawatt demonstration plant had ballooned to $1.8 billion because of price increases … Read more

A free flavor of GreenPrint software that enables people to waste less paper when printing became available Monday.

The new application, GreenPrint World, detects and highlights unwanted content, such as banner ads on a Web page, that tends to spill over onto extra pages. It also lets users delete images from the printed page and quickly create print-friendly PDF documents. The GreenPrint interface appears when users print from any program.

The software displays the amount of paper, money, and greenhouse gases users could be saving. GreenPrint estimates that regular usage may save up to $90 each year, the equivalent of … Read more

Luxim, which makes a long-lasting lightbulb that creates light with radio waves--has raised an additional $21 million, according to VentureBeat.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up has come up with a way to get rid of the parts inside of high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps that are often the first to fail. (Read our story from last year here.)

In traditional HID lamps, high voltage pulses pass between two electrodes. The energy creates plasma from the ambient gases trapped inside the bulb and you get light. The electrodes, however, degrade over time. Tungsten splatters off of them and blackens the surface of … Read more

Austin, Texas, wants to replace the cobra with solid state lighting.

The city, which has been experimenting with several green technologies and trying to encourage green companies to locate there, will evaluate the cost-effectiveness of replacing 250-watt high pressure sodium "Cobra-head" street lights with LED street lights, which consume far less energy. The city estimates it could save up to $500,000 a year in utility bills by inserting LEDs in 5,000 street lights alone.

Maintenance costs would also likely decline because LEDs last longer. Although LEDs cost more, advocates say that the total cost of ownership, … Read more

In the future, utilities will pay you to plug in your vehicle. Millions will plug in their electric vehicles (EVs), plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), and fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) at night when electricity is cheap, then during the day when energy is expensive, sell those extra electrons at a profit. Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology is a bi-directional electric grid interface that allows a plug-in to take energy from the grid or put it back on the grid. V2G helps solve the major problem that demand for electricity is high during the day when everything from industrial plants to air conditioning is running … Read more