Digital Trends
Check out Part I and Part II in our series about life in the year 2020.
Our cities are a mess. Based on grids of pavement for devices of transport that pump poisonous fumes into the atmosphere, they and their inhabitants are slowly but inexorably being choked into submission. Many of them are rotting from the core – their eroding downtowns often unattainable in heavy traffic from the distant, sprawling suburbs that surround them.
China potentially could be a $500 billion to $1 trillion a year market for environmentally sustainable "green technologies," a group of businesses and experts said in a report Thursday that urges governments to ease the way for such initiatives.
The report by the China Greentech Initiative, a group of more than 80 leading technology companies, non-governmental organizations and policy advisers, pinpointed opportunities from 300 potential green technology options for China, spanning energy, water, buildings, transportation and industry.
But government support is key, said Richard Gledhill, global leader of Climate Change & Carbon Market Services in London for PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy that helped head the research.
A Swiss company developing zinc batteries for electric cars has chosen Portland, Ore., as its U.S. headquarters and manufacturing center.
ReVolt Technology also announced Tuesday it’s applying for $30 million in research grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to answer the government’s call for technology that drives energy independence.
ReVolt says zinc-based batteries deliver more than twice the energy of lithium-ion batteries, and they’re cheaper to produce.
The company plans to start with 75 Oregon workers and later add 175 more.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski (koo-luhn-GAH’-skee) says the state’s effort to attract "green" industry has been an effective way to create jobs.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) is warning the technology industry that the amount of power consumed by household electronics and communications gear could double by the year 2022 and triple by the year 2030 to 1,700 terawatt hours—basically equivalent to the entire residential electricity consumption in the United States and Japan today. The increased electricity consumption fueled by consumer electronics, of course, places greater demand on energy generation systems, which in turn increases carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses, accelerating human-induced global climate change.
Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross thinks computers could be greener. He’s been researching how much energy they use, and his results are, well, a little surprising. He’s found that undertaking two Google searches produces 14 grams of CO2, about the same amount produced by boiling an electric kettle.
He says the carbon emissions come not only from the computer itself, but from the data centers that produce the information for that search, several data banks at once, he claims.
Fear not, environmentalists. CES may be a sea of neon, flashing video displays running 24 hours a day, and taxis idling in bumper to bumper traffic, but LG is doing it’s part to go green by… charging a couple cell phones with renewable energy.
Yes my friends, the grid is safe, for now, from an additional 1.8 kW of electricity being drained because LG has set up it’s very own Skycharger, an outdoor kiosk that uses wind and solar energy to charge 104 mobile phones at a time. Hand your phone to an attendant, who will lock it up in a locker with the right cable, and come back in an hour to a fully charged phone. I can imagine getting the warm fuzzies from this already.
Inverness, in the North of Scotland, is definitely going to be part of 21st century computing. IT firm Alchemy Plus is partnering with Microsoft to build a cloud computing complex in the city’s harbor area.
Why Inverness? Basically, because it never gets too warm there, which means less energy will be needed to cool the huge number of computers, cutting down on the need for refrigeration. As it stands, the 20,000 square foot building will generate plenty of heat, and waste energy will be used to heat nearby buildings.
Computer maker Dell has announced that it has reached its goal of being a carbon-neutral company a full year ahead of schedule. “We’re driving ‘green’ into every aspect of our global business,” said Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell. “This includes setting new standards for energy efficiency and green power, delivering environmental and cost savings for customers and aligning key growth priorities with our focus on preserving our shared Earth.”
We know it’s tough to get excited about the raw spreadsheet-crunching power of a middle-of-the-line business PC, but with the skyrocketing price of energy, Dell’s new, lean and green Vostro 410 might just set a (small and efficient) fire in your heart. Dell claims the machine’s Energy Smart technologies could cut your computer-related energy costs nearly in half without sacrificing performance.
If that sounds like a familiar claim from machines that end up packing enough computational horsepower to rival your TI-83, Dell seems to actually be backing it up with the Vostro 410. The machine gets Intel’s latest Core 2 Quad processors, up to 4GB of 800MHz memory, and even a selection of high-end Nvidia GeForce or ATI Radeon graphics cards.
Some kids (and parents!) probably think they’re doing themselves a favor by spending quality time with so-called “active” video games like Wii Sports rather than sitting down to another round of Halo or World of Warcraft. And a new study from the UK finds that active games do burn more calories than traditional video games…just not enough to make much of a difference.
The results of a new study published in the British Medical Journal finds that kids who play active video games burn at least 51 percent more calories than kids playing so-called “idle” video games, but the overall impact on hourly energy expenditure is less than 2 percent.
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