Jeff St. John 01 06 09, 2:32 PM

• 0
• Email
  • Recipient's Email Your Email Send me a copy

  • Thank you!
    Your article has been sent.

  • Error
    There was a problem sending your article.

• Share

Pentagon Goes Green With Cree LEDs

The Pentagon — known for such money-saving ventures as the mythical $600 hammer and wildly over-budget weapons development projects — is taking a crack at saving electricity with energy-efficient lighting.

Cree Inc. (NDSQ: CREE) said Tuesday that it has a deal to install 4,200 of its light-emitting diode (LED) recessed luminaires in Wedge 5 of the Pentagon. The LEDs are expected to use 22 percent less power than the fluorescent lights they will replace, enough to pay back their extra cost in four years, the company said.

LEDs are power-sippers compared to incandescent and fluorescent lights, and they’re already in wide use for traffic lights, billboards and other outdoor applications. But their higher costs remain an obstacle in bringing them to indoor lighting.

Still, the U.S. Department of Energy says that LED lighting use saved the country about 8.7 trillion watt hours in 2007 (out of a 2001 estimate of 765 trillion watt hours used for lighting across the United States), and that bringing LEDs to wider use in indoor lighting and 11 other untapped markets could save the country 27 gigawatts of power (see DOE Says LEDs Can Shine in 12 Markets).

Cree is among the lighting companies eager to buy up promising startups that can serve customers looking for those kinds of potential energy savings. The company has spent $303 million on acquisitions in the last two years, including buying LED Lighting Fixtures for about $77 million in cash and stock in February (see Cree to Buy Firm Founded by Its Former Execs).

Philips Lighting is also spending big on fledgling lighting companies — $5.4 billion in acquisitions from 2005 to 2007 — and has launched a line of LED indoor lights.

Startups in the LED field include Luminus Devices in Billerica, Mass., which raised $72 million in venture capital in March (see Luminus Closes $72M to Light Up New Applications), and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based BridgeLux, which raised $40 million in April.

The Pentagon’s move to LEDs would appear to fit in with President-elect Barack Obama’s promise to make the federal government more energy-efficient.

Obama’s campaign called for retrofitting existing federal buildings to make them 25 percent more energy-efficient in the next five years, as well as a promise to make sure all new federal buildings were 40 percent more energy-efficient in the same time frame. The long-term goal is to decrease the government’s energy usage by 15 percent by 2015.

Michael Kanellos 01 06 09, 10:21 AM

• 0
• Email
  • Recipient's Email Your Email Send me a copy

  • Thank you!
    Your article has been sent.

  • Error
    There was a problem sending your article.

• Share

Apple Copies Mitsubishi, Skips Zinc in New Notebook

Well, here’s a surprise.

A lot of people, including me, thought Apple would adopt the zinc silver batteries from ZPower in its 17-inch notebook. ZPower, after all, is slated to soon announce a notebook win with a major manufacturer.

It turns out that Apple has rigged its notebook with a lithium-polymer battery that it designed itself (with probably a good deal of help from battery makers.) Lithium-polymer batteries don’t come shaped in cells, like standard batteries. Instead, they are sacks of electronic goo. Lithium-polymer batteries typically don’t share the same energy density that lithium-ion cell batteries have, but the amorphous shape allows notebook makers or others to fit battery material into various nooks and crannies.

Apple is not the first manufacturer to use lithium-polymer batteries, by the way, so if you are a Mac fan don’t get too sweaty yet. Back in 1998, Mitsubishi came out with the Pedion, a super-slim notebook in a metal case and a lithium-polymer battery. Sounds a lot like the new Mac, yes? Apple hopes not. The Pedion was a disasterm—consumers complained about the outrageously high price and poor functionality. That name also creeped a lot of people out. Hewlett-Packard sold a a model, but under its own brand name.

A few other Japanese manufacturers have released lithium-polymer notebooks since. Compaq also had a lithium polymer notebook in its (We are not men. We are D)Evo line of notebooks. They announced it at PC Expo, which is interesting because it’s an extinct notebook at a dead conference from a notebook maker that got gobbled up soon a few weeks after the notebook was announced.

On the upside, lithium-polymer batteries have improved quite a bit over the past few years. Apple, in fact, claims that its polymer battery can endure 1,000 charge cycles before dropping to 80 percent capacity, a lot better than the 200 to 300 on conventional batteries.

Sony has also been one of the big proponents of lithium polymer. Stan Glasgow, who runs Sony Electronics, told me back in late 2006 that notebook makers would likely start adopting polymer batteries.

And that ZPower announcement should come soon. CEO Ross Dueber speaks this week at CES.

Jeff St. John 01 06 09, 10:13 AM

• 0
• Email
  • Recipient's Email Your Email Send me a copy

  • Thank you!
    Your article has been sent.

  • Error
    There was a problem sending your article.

• Share

Samsung Plugs Solid-State Drive for Green Cred

Samsung Electronics Co. is the latest company to promote solid-state data storage systems for their power-saving credentials.

Samsung’s new 100-gigabyte solid-state drive for data centers, introduced Tuesday at the Storage Visions 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, isn’t just fast. It also uses one-quarter to one-eighth of the power that competing hard drives use in active mode, the company said.

That will save companies on power costs, as well as the costs of upgrading power infrastructure to upgrade data centers at the limits of their capacity, Samsung said.

Solid-state drives, which rely on flash memory, have been touted as a replacement for standard spinning hard drives for the past few years. Solid state drives can retrieve relatively static data, like a Web page, faster than conventional drives and consume far less power.

The problem has been price: a gigabyte of storage in a solid-state drive costs twice as much or more and solid-state drives typically don't hold as much data. But with the cost of flash drives falling by about 60 percent a year over the past three years, using them to replace enterprise drives is starting to make better financial sense for certain applications.

Although originally targeted at notebooks, data centers have been warming up to these drives because they can save energy in two ways. One, the servers use less power. Two, with these drives, data center managers can also turn down the air conditioners, which use about half the power in a data center. Solid-state drives, however, only represent a very small fraction of the market.

Samsung isn’t the first company to look to solid-state memory to save power costs. Sun Microsystems Inc. (NSDQ: JAVA) in November unveiled a new line of storage systems that it said will need about a quarter of the power of competing, hard drive-based systems (see Sun Shoots for Power Reduction in Data Storage).

EMC Corp. launched its Symmetrix line of data storage products that use flash drives to improve performance and energy efficiency in early 2008. Researchers at IBM have discussed using solid-state data drives in data storage, and the company has replaced drives with flash in a slim blade server.

The power-saving benefits of solid-state memory are becoming a bigger concern for data storage manufacturers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last year that data centers, along with servers, will double their energy consumption to 100 billion kilowatt-hours by 2012, costing data-center owners as much as $7.4 billion a year (see Data Centers Could Hit 'Resource Crisis').

Meanwhile, Spansion and Viridient Systems are touting technology for replacing standard memory, the chips that hold data temporarily inside servers (versus forever, how a drive does it), with flash (see Spansion to Google: We Can Save You Money).

Michael Kanellos 01 06 09, 7:54 AM

• 0
• Email
  • Recipient's Email Your Email Send me a copy

  • Thank you!
    Your article has been sent.

  • Error
    There was a problem sending your article.

• Share

California to Pass Energy Efficient Rules on TVs—But Don’t Worry

The California Energy Commission wants to pass regulations that will place limits on the amount of energy consumed by televisions starting with TVs coming out in 2011.

But don’t be alarmed. The regulations will be a lot easier to comply with than you might think.

The regulations would effectively bar retailers from selling TVs that don’t meet power requirements set by the CEC, according to the Los Angeles Times. Electronics makers are already up in arms and plan to object,  but the regulations will likely pass and everyone will be happier.

First, television makers are actually already competing intensely to reduce the power consumption on their sets. In October, the big Japanese manufacturers—Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, etc.—showed off a number of energy efficient TVs at Ceatec, the Japanese version of CES. Sharp, for instance, has a 65-inch LCD TV that uses about 26 percent less power than an earlier, smaller model. Granted, the size of the TV means that it probably consumes a lot more power than your TV, Sharp among others also has smaller TVs that use less power. It also showed off an experimental 26-inch LCD that consumes only 40 watts, or less than many light bulbs. (The image shows a solar-powered TV that Sharp showed off at Ceatec.)

A number of these TVs will go on display for Americans at CES later this week.

Second, roughly 87 percent of the TVs on the market today will already meet the standards that the CEC is contemplating, said Art Rosenfeld of the CEC, according to the L.A. Times. More stringent ones will be released two years later.

Third, history shows these regulations work. Rosenfeld, a physicist by training, championed efficiency regulations for appliances back in the ‘70s. Appliance makers vigorously opposed him. The regulations passed nonetheless. The result? Appliances like dryers use about 60 percent less power now than they did then, they perform better (today’s fridges have far more room) and they cost about the same in real dollars.

In some cases it only took minor changes. Have you noticed that the top of your new dryer isn’t nearly as warm as the old one or the one you had as a kid? That’s because they insulate them far more efficiently now. For his work, Rosenfeld has been hailed as national hero in energy circles and even by appliance execs.

Fourth, this will save money. The CEC estimates that consumers will save $18 to nearly $30 a year in their power bills.