Saw one of these today!
From Wikipedia ...
Dual flush toilets handle solid and liquid waste differently from standard American style toilets, giving the user a choice of flushes. It's an interactive toilet design that helps conserve water that has caught on quickly in countries where water is in short supply
Brilliant!
From Cade Metz … Google flushes heat from data center with toilet water:
Google is using toilet water to cool its data center in western Georgia.In 2007, when Google first opened its massive computing center in Douglas County, Georgia, it cooled the facility's equipment using the same water that's pumped into the pipes of local homes. But at some point, the search giant realized that the water used by its evaporative cooling system needn't be clean enough to drink.
On Thursday, Google revealed that it's now working with the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority to cool the facility with 100 percent recycled water. "When the residents of the county take showers and flush their toilets, they're helping to cool our data center," Joe Kava, the man who runs Google's data center operations and construction team, tells Wired.
The company may save some money in the long term with its recycled water. But according to Kava, that's not the primary aim. In partnering with the Sewer Authority, Google is no longer putting the same strain on the area's natural water supply—and it's making sure it can ride out a drought. "The finances make sense, but over a much longer period of time. It was really about being environmentally responsible and securing our supply if there was rationing of potable water," Kava says. "You don't want to contribute to any fresh water shortage."
There are many green ways to power your handheld, rechargeable electronic devices. Here are a few:
- A yo-yo charger. This keen device creates electricity to charge an internal battery that is then used to charge your device.
- A portable solar charger works great if you are at the park, on the boat or anywhere sunny. A little time in the sun will charge your device.
- A golf club is being developed that will generate power to charge an internal battery with every swing. Once charged, the battery is used to charge your device.
- A crank charger is very inexpensive and with a few minutes of cranking, your device will be charged.
- Another new development is a dance charger that charges a battery while you are dancing the night away. Later, you can use the battery to charge your device.
- A hand exerciser used for grip exercises is being transformed to a hand grip charger. A bit of grip exercises will charge your device.
- Mini Wind Generators can easily create enough power to charge your devices.
All of these chargers and more can be found in a brief web search.
Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.
Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity because too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.
I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet.
Unfortunately, we’re still not racing. It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star. Instead of a strategic response, too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we’re always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hat’s off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its ‘obstructionist tactics.’ All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.’s why they still belong to the chamber.
China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.
An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.
Modern datacenters gobble up huge amounts of electricity and usage is increasing at a rapid pace. Energy consumption has accelerated as applications move from desktop computers to the Internet and as information gets transferred from ordinary computers to distributed 'cloud' computing services. For the world's biggest information-technology firms, this means spending upwards of $30 million on electricity every year, by modest estimates.
Asfandyar Qureshi, a PhD student at MIT, first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm that would track electricity prices to reduce costs in a paper presented in October 2008.
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The researchers first analyzed 39 months of electricity price data collected for 29 major US cities. Energy prices fluctuate for a variety of reasons, including seasonal changes in supply, fuel price hikes, and changes in consumer demand, and the researchers saw a surprising amount of volatility, even among geographically close locations.
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The team then devised a routing scheme designed to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country. The resulting algorithm weighs up the physical distance needed to route information--because it's more expensive to move data further--against the likely cost savings from reduced energy use. Data collected from nine Akamai servers, covering 24 days of activity, provided a way to test the routing scheme using real-world data. The team found that, in the best scenario--one in which energy use is proportional to computing--a company could slash its energy consumption by 40 percent.
K-12 schools and higher-education institutions can recycle their used computers and peripherals from any manufacturer free of charge, under a new limited-time offer from Apple Inc.
All accredited K-12 schools, colleges, and universities with at least 25 pieces of recyclable equipment (limited to computers, printers, and displays) are eligible to participate, and there is no purchase required, Apple says.
In addition to the minimum 25 pieces, Apple also accepts all brands of the following electronic equipment: computers, monitors, laptops, printers, fax machines, scanners, desktop-size copy machines, CD drives, hard drives, TVs, VCRs, projectors, overhead projectors, networking equipment, cables, keyboards, and mice.
The program is available until July 31--meaning schools must register by this date--and extends to PCs as well, not just Macintosh devices.
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Using a cluster of the same processors that normally show up in netbooks and similar mobile devices, researchers have created a powerful server architecture that draws less power than a lightbulb.
The architecture, dubbed a 'fast array of wimpy nodes,' or FAWN, offers a way to decrease by an order of magnitude the amount of power used by the computational infrastructure of Internet giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and others. If the predictions of its inventors are borne out, it could have a significant impact on both the bottom line and the environmental impact of cloud computing.
Power now accounts for up to 50 percent of the cost of operating data centers, and in the United States, its cost per kilowatt-hour is increasing. Even relative newcomers like Facebook use up to $1 million a month in electricity, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projects that by 2011, data centers in the United States could use up to 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, for a total annual cost of $7.4 billion, with an estimated emissions impact of 59 million metric tons of CO².
FAWN, which is described in an as-yet-unpublished paper by David Andersen and his team at Carnegie Mellon University, tackles this problem with a combination of relatively slow processors (the kind used in netbooks and other mobile devices) and flash memory (the kind that stores data in digital cameras and USB drives). The somewhat counterintuitive result is an architecture whose performance per watt of energy is a hundred times better than that of traditional servers, which use faster (but much more energy-hungry) processors and disk-based storage.
The exceptional performance of FAWN is limited to certain kinds of problems--random access of small bits of information--but this kind of input/output-intensive task is exactly what strains the existing infrastructure of Web companies like Facebook.
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FAWN is composed of many individual nodes, each with a single 500-megahertz AMD Geode processor (the same chip used in the first One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop) with 256 megabytes of RAM and a single four-gigabyte compact flash card. The largest FAWN cluster built to date, consisting of 21 nodes, draws a maximum of 85 watts under real-world conditions.
Each FAWN node performs 364 queries per second per watt, which is a hundred times better than can be accomplished by a traditional disk-based system working on an input/output-intensive task, such as gathering all the disparate bits of information required to display a Facebook or FriendFeed page or a Google search result.
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Harvard University plans to stop printing its course catalogs, faculty and student handbooks, and the Q Guide—which publishes the results of each year’s course evaluations—after this semester, The Harvard Crimson reports. Starting in the fall, these guides will be published exclusively on the Web.
The move will save ‘tens of thousands of dollars,’ according to The Crimson. Officials say it is also a practical decision that the university had been considering for several years before the recession prompted general belt-tightening. The course catalog, after all, ‘is significantly out-of-date before the first copy rolls off the presses,’ according to Barry Kane, registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Kyle Abney was a first-semester graduate student in building construction at the University of Florida when a class in sustainable development changed the focus of his career.
'It completely changed my life,' Abney said. 'It opened my eyes and made me see we needed to be doing things better in the construction industry. There was a lot of waste.'
Suddenly, building in a way that conserves resources and doesn't degrade the environment made sense.
Abney went on to become the first person in the United States to get a construction degree with a concentration in 'green building,' obtaining his master's in 2001. UF was the nation's first university to offer such a degree, and Abney was its first graduate.
Last year, the 33-year-old Abney founded his own company, Abney + Abney Green Solutions, a Palm City-based consulting firm. He and his wife, Harmony, are its sole employees.
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Abney works with both residential and commercial construction projects, guiding them through the nationally known Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification process or if clients prefer, the Florida Green Building Coalition's standards.
When the Sussex County Vocational-Technical School dropped the ''vocational'' from its name and changed it to the Sussex County Technical School in the mid-1990s, school leaders envisioned that computers were indeed here to stay.
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the Sparta school is jumping on a new trend -- the growing of the green industry -- as it prepares its students for the green-collar jobs of the future.
''This is the wave of the future. It's 21st century education,'' said superintendent Mark Toback. ''We're getting ready for a workplace that doesn't exist yet.''
The new emphasis, or ''general direction,'' as Toback calls it, on the green industry includes encouraging teachers to teach about more environmental issues and alternative energy sources in their classrooms.
The school will also explore ways to reduce its own dependence on oil, and make recommendations to the county freeholders about how an investment in new technologies would help save money in the long run.
Although it’s winter, local college campuses look greener than ever.
La Crosse campuses are promoting recycling and energy conservation initiatives this year. ‘In my eyes, the best place to set an example for everyone else in the community is at a university,’ said Matt Groshek, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse senior and environmental sustainability director for the UW-L Student Association.
UW-L students voted last year to tag an additional $5 per semester onto tuition for a Green Fund for renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects.
Chancellor Joe Gow also signed the Talloires Declaration, a 10-point plan committing the university to environmental issues. One point was to set up practices of resource conservation, recycling, waste reduction and environmentally sound operations.
The Warren school district broke ground Monday on the first wind turbine to be installed at a public school in Michigan.
The 30-foot Windspire turbine will be used to help power the Macomb Mathematic Science Technology Center.
According to the district, the turbine will also offer students the chance to research wind technology and study the future of using wind power to generate electricity for residential or commercial use.
'We're going to set up a computer to monitor the wind speeds and how much power we're actually getting from it,' said senior Lizzy Buchanan. 'So hopefully we'll inspire other schools.'
The students have already built a solar water pond.
They are teenagers who love science, who support alternative energy, who know old ideas about natural resources have to change.
With the installation this fall of a wind turbine next to the Henderson Community Stadium, the members of the Hood River Valley High School Earth Club not only turned their beliefs into practice but also learned a valuable lesson in community involvement.
The project, part of the curriculum for the school's alternative energy resources class, inspired the club's dozen members to brainstorm ways to make Hood River's famous wind really work for the local good.
To these teens and many of their generation, understanding and promoting alternative, renewable energy is a given. They want more recycling bins on school grounds and energetically embrace other green projects. Not to mention, they know they can play a bigger role for the environment by teaching their elders.
Jenkins High School is harnessing the power of the sun with a new solar panel. The new solar panel not only saves the school money, but gives students a learning tool.
Georgia Power executive Mike Joyner was instrumental in getting the panel ready for Jenkins.
'Green energy has become more relevant in the county and a lot in school systems are trying to save money,' he said. 'Part of what we are doing is providing solar panels in classrooms to give students hands on application, something they can learn from look at and it promotes green energy.'
In the computer lab at William R. Sullivan Elementary School, Joy Louis reached under a bank of computers to turn on a 'smart' power strip that will shut off electricity when the desktops aren't in use.
In another classroom, Doug Northway installed fluorescent tubes designed to use up to 30 percent less energy than those he was replacing.
The roof sports new solar panels, intended to save the school thousands of dollars and reduce carbon emissions.
In the courtyard below, students used crayons and markers to create drawings with their visions of energy sustainability.
Suffield High School recently became the recipient of a $20,000 grant awarded by Connecticut Light & Power in its 'Live Green, Win Green' contest.
The competition, which was open to all high schools in CL&P's service area, was developed to encourage high school students to conserve energy and protect the environment.
To enter, students had to submit a two-minute video and a 1,000-word essay demonstrating their school's 'green' programs and new initiatives they would like to use the grant money for. The Earth Science Club entered the competition for Suffield High School.
'It really seemed like a good way to get all these guys to think about these issues,' said teacher and club mentor Justin Kaput.
"How bright is the future for green technologies in the coming year? On the whole, the picture appears positive but still susceptible to swings in energy prices and political sentiment.
With an incoming administration that intends to spearhead a comprehensive energy policy and reduce carbon emissions, many expect to have a favorable policy environment for clean-tech businesses.
Consumers and business, too, continue to gravitate to all things green even in the face of greenwashing.
Driven by these forces, many clean technologies are already starting to crack into the energy industry, which is dominated by huge corporations.
For example, solar technologies, including solar thermal power plants and thin-film solar cells, are starting to be commercialized. Electric cars, too, have come to market with many more in the works that target mainstream consumers.
But at the same time, the wave of green-tech companies and initiatives formed over the past four years face some serious head winds."
Among other findings from a survey released today by the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry group representing computer and gadget manufacturers, 89 percent of consumers said that energy efficiency would be a factor in choosing their next television — even as less than half of the 960 people surveyed said they’re generally able to make sense of the environmental attributes attached to electronics on the market.
“One of the greatest challenges certainly is consumer confusion about what ‘green’ means,” said Parker Brugge, the C.E.A.’s vice president of environmental affairs.
Mr. Brugge said the lack of a universally recognized means to measure a product’s “greenness” makes it difficult for consumers to find information at the point of purchase.
For weeks, there’s been a growing chorus — from the incoming Obama team to community-welfare campaigners and environmental bloggers — pushing for building the economic revival around “green jobs.” So far the focus seems to be mainly on rebuilding physical infrastructure: insulating leaky low-income housing, building wind turbines, improving the clunky electrical grid and the like. These are, by almost any measure, logical starting points for an effort to cut America’s energy bill and carbon dioxide emissions while restoring prosperity.The Promise of Algae - Green Inc. Blog
But for such an initiative to be green at a scale sufficient for the atmosphere to notice, my sense is it will need to focus just as much on rebuilding the country’s intellectual infrastructure. I’m not quite sure I’ve heard any leader yet describe the sustained, aggressive “energy quest” that would be required to lead the world toward a future with non-polluting energy choices sufficient to empower more or less 9 billion people — and how that quest would have to extend from the living room to the boardroom, from the laboratory to the classroom, to be transformational.
As our ongoing Energy Challenge series and plenty of independent studies have made clear, the country and world are still not engaged seriously in advancing non-polluting energy technologies, from solar cells to the elusive notion of capturing carbon dioxide from power plants at a large scale and stashing it somewhere.
Algae have gotten short shrift in the decade or so since the Clinton administration axed its research funding at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. But could these tiny, ubiquitous plants, which come in a rainbow of colors and varieties, get us off of foreign oil some day?Taking Flight on Jatropha Fuel - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com
“One of the big challenges — price, price, price,” said Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas. Right now, he said, algae could make fuel for around $10 a gallon, whereas the objective is to get the price down to $1.
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Algae — whose predecessors helped make oil tens of millions of years ago — are already used in vitamins and other nutritional supplements. But the price is too high and the scale too small to meet the nation’s energy needs.
Fly to Paris on fuel made of algae and jatropha plants? That day may be coming.
Virgin Atlantic already ran a test from London to Amsterdam with fuel mixed with coconut oil and babassu oil earlier this year. Now Continental Airlines, in partnership with Boeing, is planning a test flight of a 737-800 aircraft partially fueled by biofuels. The test is scheduled for Jan. 7 in Houston.
The plane, which will not carry passengers, will be outfitted with a right engine running on a 50-50 blend of traditional jet fuel and a mixture of biofuels including algae and jatropha plants.
The jatropha is a family of plants, shrubs and trees native to Central America but found in many tropical and subtropical areas. It will be the first time an American airline has attempted such a test.
American research firm SRI International and Japan's Hyper Drive Corporation today are testing the latest generation of their jointly developed buoy-mounted, ocean wave-powered generator off the coast of Santa Cruz, Calif. As the generator bobs up and down, an accordion-like device inside, made of artificial muscle called Electroactive Polymer Artificial Muscle (EPAM), stretches and contracts, creating mechanical energy that is converted into electricity.
SRI is hoping to demonstrate its ability to generate at least 10 Watts of power in waves about 3.3 feet (one meter) in height, a stepping stone to the 100-Watt capacity the researchers hope to be able to generate within a few years. One of their goals is to replace the 25-Watt batteries that navigation buoys use today with a source of renewable energy that can power additional equipment such as cameras and storm warning sensors.
Once the EPAM buoys are each efficient enough to generate significant power, SRI may try to link dozens of them to create a wave energy farm that might be an option for delivering electricity to landlubbers. "You could put [a wave farm] on a seawall to power a factory," says Roy Kornbluh, SRI's principal research engineer.
the incandescent bulb will soon be a thing of the past. As part of the Clean Energy Act of 2007, the bulbs will begin to be phased out in 2012 and be a thing of the past two years later.
The Sunshine state is starting to live up to its name on the energy front. Today Florida Power & Light, the state’s biggest utility, broke ground on what it says will be the first utility-scale solar investment in the state — and the second-largest of its kind in the country when it is fully turned on in 2010.
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This solar thermal plant, which is located on the Atlantic coast just north of Palm Beach County, will consist of 180,000 mirrors, spread over 500 acres. It also matches solar power with an existing combined-cycle natural gas plant, so that when the sun is not shining, the natural gas can take over the work of powering the turbines.
GOOD Magazine has a story about a really innovative method for environmental monitoring. The story describes the River Glow project. Architectural firm The Living and Eric Forman (not Eric from That 70's Show).
