$4,500 a month.

That’s the amount that Trent Ratcliff, the IT Infrastructure Manager for the Regional Transportation District (RTD) in Denver, says he will be able to cut his power bills once his agency replaces 800 desktop PCs with 800 thin clients and back-end servers.

“It’s over $50,000 a year,??? he says.

The agency has already installed 400 of the machines and the rest will go in in a few weeks. On top of that he expects to save close to $600,000 in hardware and maintenance costs over the next eight years. The overall network he oversees has about 1,000 notebooks and desktops on it.

Thin clients — which are essentially terminals that scrape data and information from...

The Wall Street Journal reported today that IBM hopes to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion dollars. The deal, if completed, will put to end one of the more enduring, and sometimes comical, rivalries in computing. Sun and IBM for years have competed against each other in servers, storage systems, consulting and other high-end computing markets. The comical part was how former Sun CEO Scott McNealy would try to characterize the rivalry as "humankind versus IBM Global Services." Somehow, that titanic battle occurred (on my behalf) without me even noticing. You too? But in any event, the deal will also have implications for the future of efficient data centers and the smart...

Here's a novel lab experiment, courtesy of Tetsuo Nozawa at Nikkei Electronics: it's an LED powered by candle flame. Check out the photo at the above link. The heat from the candle goes through a thermoelectric material and is converted to electricity, which powers the LED. Nozawa saw it at Nextreme Thermal Solutions. The LED actually shines brighter than the candle flame because most of the energy in the candle is dissipated as heat. In LEDs, most of the energy gets consumed in producing light. Thermoelectric materials like bismuth telluride have been studied for decades. Researchers, however, have begun to experiment with different types of materials (such as germanium) that...

On the eve of Macworld, the rumors are buzzing that Apple will release a new notebook that features batteries from ZPower, which makes a silver zinc battery. Ross Dueber, CEO of ZPower, declined to comment. ZPower has a deal with a notebook manufacturer, but it's up to the unknown manufacturer to make any comments, he said. (Ross is speaking at CES in Las Vegas on Thursday so we might get more there.) However, looking at all of the circumstances, I believe that the odds are pretty good, around 50 percent. Here's why: 1. ZPower has already said that they have landed a notebook win with a major manufacturers and that the deal will be announced in early 2009. Macworld is this...

We began tracking venture capital investment in Greentech in 2004 when the sector really didn’t have a name and represented only 1 percent of VC investment totals.

Companies like Nanosolar and Miasolé were just getting started and most VC investors were simply trying to get their heads around this relatively underinvested trillion dollar market.

A few years later, Greentech VC investment represents about 20 percent of the VC asset class -- 2008 finished with a total VC investment of more than $7.7 billion in more than 350 funding rounds, roughly one investment a day, with time off for Christmas and New Years.

Greentech Media just released the most recent quarterly data showing...

Have you had trouble keeping track of smart metering projects? So have we, which is why we're glad to see the Smart Metering Projects Map run by the Energy Retail Association in the UK. The map essentially pinpoints smart metering projects across Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia on a zoom-able Google map. If you click on one of the flags, a few paragraphs pop up explaining the scope and purpose of the project. Distrigaz Sud, for instance, is installing 1.1 gas meters in southern Romania to offset gas network balancing concerns. The meters in the trial utilize snap-on Zigbee devices to permit communication. In Kyrgyzstan, a utility will test out pre-paid gas meters....

P3 International (P3) is a New York consumer electronics company that makes the Kill A Watt electric power meter.  The Kill A Watt meter allows consumers to determine how much energy particular appliances are using.  You simply plug the meter into the wall, plug the appliance into the meter, and monitor the energy consumption of the appliance on the meter’s LCD display. The Kill A Watt meter is protected by U.S. Patent No. 6,095,850 (’850 patent), which is directed to an electric adapter (1) having a plug (2) on its rear side which can be plugged into an electric socket (7).  The adapter has an outlet socket with three holes (3a, 3b, 3c) on the front and a display (4) to...