via Inhabitat
Check out some of the pictures on Inhabitat of the carbon neutral city, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Theres some more here as well. This city is planned to house 40,000 residents and hundreds of businesses and will house state of the art clean technologies and architecture. This place probably cost a fortune to build out so it is no surprise that it is located in the UAE.
8 comments May 3rd, 2011 Alex
This is a pretty neat video showing how one of Google’s datacenter works. I like how they have their own hard drive destruction tools to destroy the data on the hard drives as well as their own machines to crush hard drives into pieces.
via Gizmodo
2 comments April 28th, 2011 Alex
Here is a great recent article about lighting and pros and cons of each type of lighting when it comes to CFL, LED, Halogens, and Incandescent.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/25/HODL1EAQIE.DTL&type=living
Add comment July 27th, 2010 Alex
Bloom Energy is a Silicon Valley startup that unveiled on Wednesday its Bloom Energy Server which is a collection of fuel cells that can generate electricity at a low cost. A box the size of a pickup truck is made up of mainly sand and uses a electrochemical reaction between oxygen and natural gas to produce electricity.
This can be an innovative advancement because it only uses solid oxide fuel cells and does not require any sun or wind and is twice as efficient as burning natural gas. The company was founded in 2001 and has about $400 million from venture capitals. The servers can provide electricity at 9 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour compared to 14 cents for power from the grid. This can give you back your return on investment in three to five years which is extremely good compared to the other green alternatives. Solar and wind technologies take a lot of up front costs and investments and makes it hard to justify the costs. Even with government incentives, solar power for homes still requires too much upfront costs especially since it takes at least 10 years to recouperate the costs. This can be a useful tool to provide portable electricity and also be useful to help bring electricity to poverty places that dont currently have electricity.
via SFGate
Add comment February 25th, 2010 Alex
Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, IBM, and Alcatel-Lucent got grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for projects on improving energy efficiency in the IT and communicatio technology industries.
Yahoo got $9.9 million to design a data center that uses outside ambient air cooling.
Hewlett-Packard got $7.4 million for testing a data center design using alternative current and water cooling components.
Alcatel-Lucent got $1.8 million to test heat-sink structures and device-level liquid cooling technologies and another $300,000 to test methods to synchronize telecom network energy demand.
IBM got two grants totalling $4 million to develop liquid metal thermal interfaces for data centers and to develop software based cooling tools.
Add comment January 7th, 2010 Alex