Published on October 23rd, 2009
Every industry is taking steps to adopt greener methods, and it’s become particularly important in businesses that provide transportation services to consumers because this is what people are looking for. Even if they can’t take big steps to make their own homes and businesses cleaner, they can help reduce their carbon footprint by making wiser environmental decisions. In order to address this shift in environmental perception and need, companies like the Green Tomato Cars Taxi Service in the UK are marketing their businesses to the more environmentally conscientious.
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Published on October 21st, 2009
A new Kansas-based company called EcoFit Lighting believes it can make the transition to LED street lighting not only much easier, but also much cheaper.
EcoFit’s design is a retrofit module that slides right into place in existing streetlights, eliminating the need to have a full replacement. The company claims using their product would bring down costs from $700 to $900 (for a complete replacement) to just $400. Savings also come in the form of energy efficiency and extended lifespan as EcoFit’s LED lights are 60 percent more efficient and last six times longer than sodium streetlights. Additionally, as it’s estimated that replacing street lights with EcoFit LED lights would take just five minutes (as opposed to taking up to 30 minutes to fully replace the head), labor costs are also expected to be reduced.
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Published on October 18th, 2009
Somewhere in the U.S. there is a justice of the peace who still refuses to perform inter-racial marriages, but Principle Power, Inc. has no such backward looking qualms when it comes marrying two different forms of sustainable energy. Last week the company won a $750,000 development grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to adapt its patented WindFloat platform to bring wave energy generating capability on board, along with the wind turbines for which it was originally designed.
Of particular interest to DOE is WindFloat’s innovative three-corner design, which stabilizes the platform against turbulence and enables it to be deployed in deep water where winds are more favorable to energy generation. In addition to its obvious use in the civilian world, the marriage of wind and wave power may also prove fruitful for its application to the U.S. military’s need for non-petroleum energy sources at remote bases.
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Published on October 17th, 2009
Big shifts seem to be stirring in the wind turbine market. Foreign companies are backing out of China due to China’s move to use more home-grown technology. At the same time, China is looking to expand its wind turbine sales into Europe.
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Published on October 16th, 2009
In an elegant piece of sustainable engineering, the company Renew Blue, Inc. will use wave power to run a desalination plant in Freeport, Texas, then bottle the results in corn-based biodegradable plastic for sale under the Renew Blue brand. The wave power system, called SEADOG, will employ a buoy-and-piston mechanism combined with a water wheel to generate electricity at an offshore platform, enough to power operations at the plant.
Though disposable bottled water is a thorn in the side of sustainability, the reality is that disposable bottles will be with us, at least for some limited uses, far into the foreseeable future. The Renew Blue solution offers a way to provide the convenience with a lower carbon footprint.
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Published on October 15th, 2009
A big factor limiting solar and wind power growth across the US is the current transmission network. It is disconnected. A new project proposed by Tres Amigas LLC in New Mexico would link the nation’s main power grids and, therefore, give hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of households links to already existing renewable energy sources.
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Published on October 15th, 2009
UK company AFC Energy claims to have developed fuel cell technology that can “generate and export electricity to a grid as efficiently as traditional electrodes.”
AFC tested its alkaline-based technology in Germany recently and found that its efficiency matched that of traditional platinum-based electrodes that cost more. This high efficiency moves the company one step closer to full-scale production of its fuel cell technology.
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Published on October 14th, 2009
Looking to create products for the real world as soon as possible, a new research center in the UK is aiming to speed up the development and installment of a variety of low carbon technologies to ensure a greener future for us all.
This new £50 million ($80 million) center hopes to do this through more coordinated and focused efforts from four universities and a regional development agency. The four universities that have teamed up are Hull, Leeds, Sheffield and Yorkshire, and they are working with the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward. The name of the new center is Centre for Low Carbon Futures (CLCF).
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Published on October 13th, 2009
Why Your Business Should Care About the Birds, the Bees and the Burrs
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” according to a well-known proverb. Those words seem particularly apt in today’s world of environmental, political, and economic pratfalls. Fortunately, Mother Nature holds many of the answers to our most basic questions regarding design and equilibrium. Internationally-known scientist Danya Baumeister will make the argument Oct. 15 at the BuildGreen Conference in Philadelphia that many savvy researchers, designers, and manufacturers would do better to leave the lab and look instead at the 3.8 billion years of evolution everywhere around them. Baumeister is hardly the first to view the world as an R-and-D goldmine – one that could bring us new products, designs, and services to help both our environment and economy – but she is one of today’s leading biomimicry proponents. And if you think biomimicry is a new idea, think again.
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Published on October 12th, 2009
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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