Green Tech

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.

Hewlett-Packard announced plans Wednesday to advance technologies to slash power use in data centers, while building software and an open online community to support manufacturers seeking more sustainable consumer products.

The efforts reveal the company's five-year strategy for the sustainability arm of its HP Labs, revamped in March.

HP would not disclose the budget for the efforts, but said in 2007 it invested $3.6 billion in research and development.

New research includes the Sustainable Data Center project, established to reduce the carbon footprint of building, operating, and dismantling data centers by 75 percent.

And HP's Photonic Interconnect project would work to replace copper wiring in servers with laser-based communication.

"We want to dematerialize the data center," said Chandrakant Patel, HP fellow and director of HP's Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab. "Imagine circuit boards in close proximity that communicate with light."

Optical laser connections within server equipment would be more flexible and 20 times more efficient than standard copper wires, he explained. And the range of the laser connections could span 100 nanometers to 100 meters.

"Because of our history of nanotechnology, we have the ability to build these kinds of things," Patel said, referring to work at HP in building lasers into chips. "We believe we can scale to data center scale, which is easily 100 to 200 racks."

Patel also hopes to lead the creation by 2009 of a Web-based "sustainability hub" that would would pool research and data from engineers, scientists, and other experts around the world.

He wants that to help create models of the carbon emissions and energy involved in creating myriad consumer products, building upon Lifetime Exergy Advisor software developed by HP Labs and the University of California at Berkeley.

Current tools to measure the carbon footprint of electronics and other consumer goods don't take every aspect of manufacturing and disposal into account, Patel said. For instance, extracting aluminum to make a laptop may involve as much energy as operating the machine for two years.

"How do we come up with an irrefutable metric that says what we are doing is sustainable?" Patel asked. "We look at the life cycle of a product, from the time material is extracted from the ground to the time it is reclaimed or recycled. How do we use appropriate materials so we don't create environmental headaches?"

Patel said he wants to convert each step of making a product, from mining to powering a factory to disposing of toxic materials, into joules, a measurement of energy.

HP Labs researchers are also analyzing how commercial printing and publishing could use digital printing and electronic paper to use fewer resources and less energy, with results they hope will extend to other industries.

CORONADO, Calif.--There's more than one kind of "green" in the eyes of the world's corporations.

Mark Turrell of Imaginatik and Prith Banerjee of HP Labs listen to Steve Di Biase of JohnsonDiversey (left to right) discuss sustainability at FIRe 2008.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

More and more companies are starting to realize that they can enjoy the PR benefits of turning "green," by reducing their carbon footprint through energy savings or changes to their products. But every CEO always has another shade of green somewhere in the back of his or her mind. Companies need to reduce their impact on the environment, but that doesn't mean they can afford to implement every single green idea, or that they even know where to start, according to panelists at the Future in Review conference.

The goal should be "sustainability," or the idea that individuals and organizations should be working on ways to make sure any environmentally friendly improvements or changes they make to their businesses should be sustainable over the long term, or they shouldn't be done at all. But developing and implementing sustainable ideas is harder to accomplish in real life than it is to discuss in luxury resort hotels yards from the Pacific Ocean.

That's where "innovation software" companies like Invention Machine and Imaginatik come in. Mark Atkins, president and CEO of Invention Machine, helps manufacturing companies develop clever ways to make their products more environmentally friendly without killing their cost structure. Some of his clients are starting to realize that they'll have to overhaul as much as 70 percent of their products within the next five years to meet sustainability goals, he said.

Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell described a project his company did for Wal-Mart helping it unlock sustainable ideas from its own employees. Wal-Mart is notorious for its laser focus on cost reduction, and has started to realize that it can save money by reducing energy consumption in its stores. But the company was having trouble recognizing simple, achievable ideas suggested by employees.

After adopting tools developed by Imaginatik, Wal-Mart was able to collect thousands of ideas from employees that were getting lost in the old "suggestion box," and wound up implementing $38 million in cost savings from just four days of idea gathering, Turrell said.

Hewlett-Packard is using Imaginatik's software to help make improvements to the company's Labs division, said Prith Banerjee, the new director of HP Labs. Sustainability research is one of the new core components of HP Labs' research, and it shows up in products that help HP and its customers reduce cooling and power in their huge data centers.

This is a classic example of sustainability: reducing the amount of power used in data centers helps conserve energy, but it also reduces the costs to operate those data centers. For all the talk thrown out there by corporations as green thinking has become trendier, everything still comes down to the bottom line, said Steve Di Biase, senior vice president and chief scientific officer for JohnsonDiversey, a cleaning products company.

"If you can't be profitable, sustainability doesn't make sense," Di Biase said.