With two laptop-loving children and a Jack Russell terrier hemmed in by an electric fence, Peter Troast figured his household used a lot of power. Just how much did not really hit him until the night the family turned off the overhead lights at their home in Maine and began hunting gadgets that glowed in the dark.
Cell phones and laptops may seem like pretty minor offenders when it comes to energy guzzling. But as they become ubiquitous all over the planet, their growing power consumption is emerging as a major source of concern for those trying to conserve energy and stop global warming.
Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid.
Because of big screen TVs and home computers, utilities are seeing another peak power problem evolve–a second surge in demand that runs from about 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. That’s when people head toward the electronic entertainment devices.
These are boom times for wind power. T. Boone Pickens, the wildcatter turned oil baron, is building the world’s biggest wind farm, in the dry scrub of the Texas Panhandle.
As the age of cheap oil comes to a close, it’s springtime for gloomy futurists. Visions of a brutish world marked by violent squabbles over dwindling reserves, of junkyards littered with abandoned cars, of suburban slums overrun by weeds, of the collapse of industrial agriculture–none of this sounds as outlandish as it once did. Still, [...]
Towards the close of 1898 a systematic research, carried on for a number of years with the object of perfecting a method of transmission of electrical energy through the natural medium, led me to recognize three important necessities: First, to develop a transmitter of great power; second, to perfect means for individualizing and isolating the [...]
It’s difficult for us layfolk to gauge the real implications of breakthrough research announcements, but when the scientists start throwing around words like “nirvana,” it does catch the attention. And from the description of the latest work of MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy, it’s easy to get excited. Nocera and team [...]
British Telecom made a major bet on renewable energy last October, saying it planned to invest close to half a billion dollars in wind farms to meet 25% of the company’s U.K. power needs by 2016. Now BT’s clean energy goals are crossing the pond, to its U.S. headquarters. The company said today at a press conference in El Segundo, Calif., where company executives, Prince Andrew Duke of York and the mayor of El Segundo spoke, that it’s building a 500-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system for its North American HQ.
Expect more calls from startups promising to reduce the amount of energy your business consumes and fewer about getting your work done faster. That’s because venture capitalists say they’ll invest less in old standbys like software and semiconductors in 2008 and more heavily in environmentally-friendly tech.
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