CleanTechnica

Lighting Science Corporation has just announced a new breakthrough in high efficiency LED (light emitting diode) technology that outperforms existing LED streetlights, providing an even greater incentive for the nation’s roadways and institutions to make the switch from standard streetlights to more sustainable LED lighting.

The new LEDs, dubbed the PROLIFIC Series Roadway Luminaires, offer substantial savings over conventional HID (high intensity discharge) streetlighting.  Lighting Science also claims that PROLIFIC performs up to nearly 90 lumens per watt, giving it a big advantage over current LED technology, which performs at up to 60 lumens per watt.  To sweeten the payback even more, federal stimulus funds are available for cities to make the switch from conventional lighting to LED.

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A team of students at MIT has just developed a temperature sensitive roof tile that turns black and absorbs heat in cold weather, and turns white, reflecting heat away when it’s hot.

In cold weather, the polymer stays dissolved and the black backing shows through, but exposed to heat, tiny droplets form and scatter the light back to produce a white appearance. The tiles reflected 80% of the sunlight falling on them when white, and only 30% when black.

The cooling needs would then be reduced 20%.
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You knew you keep a fire in a box in your laundry room, right? Not only is that kind of a scary thought, but it’s an extremely inefficient way to dry clothes; lighting a fire every time you turn on the clothes dryer. Lint catches fire all the time. But even worse, that natural gas emits carbon dioxide and is likely the second most extravagant energy expenditure in your home after the fridge.

We can do something about the fridge by buying an Energy Star rated efficient one, but until now, inexplicably, clothes dryers have not been rated under the Energy Star program.

You have to wonder why there has been so little move to improve energy efficiency in the second biggest energy guzzler in most homes…in a nation that uses 25% of the world’s energy.

Here’s a company that can make a clothes dryer 50% more efficient with a heat exchanger. Hydromatic. So why has their idea not been incorporated into clothes dryers?
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Solar Decathlon 2009: The Construction Site

The solar capacity of the National Mall in Washington D.C. has increased exponentially in just a week as teams of college students from 20 international schools hurriedly reassembled their submissions for the fourth ever Solar Decathlon, a competition in which students must create “the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.” The three-week event kicked of yesterday with an opening ceremony that featured a speech from Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who announced an additional $87 million solar-targeted award for solar energy projects. Here’s a look at some of the impressive solar submissions and the opening day events.

“Decathletes,” as the decathlon participants are called, began construction on October 1, 2009, a full week before the start of the competition. Each house was designed to be deconstructed and then reassembled for the event. The components of each house travel from each team’s school and are reconstituted as the solar-powered homes lining “Decathlete Way” on the National Mall.

Image Credit: Stefano Paltera from USDOE on Flickr under a Creative Commons license

President Obama has just signed an Executive Order that compels the largest consumer of energy in the US economy to invest in energy efficiency improvements to get to huge reductions in energy use by 2020.

Every Federal agency must measure, manage, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet specific targets by 2020. They have just 90 days to lay out a plan to meet these targets:

1. Use 30% less gas by 2020. Federal agencies buy 750,000 new vehicles every year. In normal times that’s almost 1 in every 17 vehicles sold per year. This Executive Order creates a rock-solid certain market for fuel-efficient vehicles every year from now till 2020.

2. Design all new government buildings from 2020 to be net-zero energy. Wow! Jimmy Carter might have gotten just a few solar panels up on merely one government building; The White House. But this means every new government building goes solar to cut fossil energy use to zero.

And they won’t just want solar power. They’ll need efficient windows, geothermal ground heat exchanges, efficient air conditioning, solar hot water heating, radiant flooring, tankless water heaters, great insulation… (and all this will take retrained architects, and doing that will take new classes, and those will need new instructors, who’ll need new suits…this is going to be a green jobs boom!)

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Researchers are racing to develop sustainable lubricants made from plants, but there’s one big stumbling block: friction.  Biobased lubricants that are less effective than petroleum would result in more friction, meaning more wear and tear along with lower fuel efficiency and generally higher emissions.  Enter the new Superhard and Slick Coating, which just won an award from R&D Magazine as one of the top innovations of the year.

The high tech self-lubricating coating can be applied to almost any metal used in engines and machinery.  Compared to uncoated surfaces, in both lab and engine tests Superhard and Slick Coating cut friction by up to 80%, and it virtually eliminated wear and scuffing.  With the focus off of petroleum as a baseline for performance, researchers will have more flexibility to develop new alternative lubricants that are biodegradable, nontoxic and sustainable.

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China just awarded Bombardier Sifang a contract to build 80 “very high speed trains” for the country.

These are super progressive trains that are energy efficient as well as lightning fast. China intends to invest a total of $300 billion in high speed trains by 2020.

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The CPUC has just approved the largest energy efficiency program in U.S. history, authorizing $3.1 billion in consumer rebates and efficiency programs over the next three years, bringing the state closer to implementing AB32, according to Lara Ettenson, director of California Energy Efficiency Policy at the NRDC.

Ettenson told me that the funding comes from the part of the budget that California’s regulated utilities may use to invest in conventional electricity. This may include “negawatts”or energy efficiency measures. This is not just cheaper than building new plants and transmission, but also easier to implement, as it is not subject to the NIMBYism and transmission issues that has impeded development of utility scale solar and wind projects that California utilities must add to meet RPS requirements of getting 20% of its energy from carbon-free sources by 2010. Currently it is at 14%.

This giant leap in funding could jump-start the new low-carbon economy in California; helping grow all the businesses that create cutting edge efficiency in cooling and heating, lighting, building materials, windows, insulation, appliances and smart grid technologies that reduce energy use.

Ettenson gave me some examples of uses for the funding in practical terms:
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As a nation, we have been moving away from regions of the US with extremes of hot or cold, and towards the West and Southwest for about the last fifty years.

A new study has found that as a result, our average (per person) use of energy for heating and cooling has diminished, resulting in a reduction in combined energy demand over the last fifty years.

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From green gadgets and gizmos, to DVDs and loose-leaf teas, I get the occasional product sent to me for a review.  In most cases, I like to give it a thorough once-over before I’m comfortable putting a stamp of (dis)approval on it.

If I take a long time to review a product, it is usually because: the product stinks and the manufacturer wouldn’t want me to publish anything anyway; the product really stinks and I don’t want to waste my time or my readers’ time with it, or; the product is actually quite good and the length of time spending reviewing it is extended because I’m trying to find something bad to say about it — but can’t. In the case of the DOT-it LED lights Sylvania sent me, the reason for my slow turnaround is definitely the last one. These lights are great.

The first of the two lights sent to me by Sylvania was the DOT-it Golden Dragon (pictured top). The ninja-sounding Golden Dragon is the Cadillac of Sylvania’s puck-style LED lights. Read the rest of this entry »