Written by Trey Granger, courtesy of Earth911.org
The Fourth of July: summer’s most famous holiday. Fireworks, barbecues and a day off to enjoy the sunshine. But can you make America’s birthday Earth Day as well? Here’s eight steps for an eco-friendly Fourth.
1. Celebrate Outdoors
Whether you’re traveling for the three-day weekend (the Fourth is on Friday this [...]

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As far as green gadgets go, this little desktop computer will give Dell and (to a lesser extent) Apple a run for their money.

The CherryPal promises to be affordable, efficient, and powerful enough for the average PC user. At first glance, that stats on the system look modest, and for good reason. This design actually cuts out 20% of PC components to reduce energy usage. But fear not, despite being small (the size of a paperback), the CherryPal claims it can start up in 20 seconds, and cloud computing provides more power/storage when you need it. A Linux operating system (now more user friendly than ever), and cloud computing means you won’t need to worry about viruses or install protective programs that can slow down your PC.

On a more green note, the CherryPal is supposed to sell for under $400 (monitor, keyboard, etc. not included). It should hit the market on August 4th, 2008. For that price and low energy use, it will appeal to wallets as well as the environmentally conscious. Though there is some understandable skepticism, I’ll praise any manufacturer that lowers the bar on PC environmental impact.

I recently took a blow to all of my electronics in the same week (Murphey’s Law at work), so it’s nice to see alternatives on the market. I’ll definitely have my eye on this cute little computer that thinks it can.

Readers: What are your thoughts on cloud computing? What are CherryPal’s chances of becoming popular?

Image via Inhabitat

Related Topics:

Optimize your PC to be green

Internet and Energy Usage

Recycle your old Electronics

Reuse your old Electronics (but not in the way you think)

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As I waited in line on opening night on Friday to see Wall-E, I thought it would be something of a robotic version of Nemo.  Having loved Nemo, I was excited to detach from my work-week stress load and calmly watch the movie.
Little did I know I was in for one of the most moving, [...]

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Utah has been a second home to me for nearly 20 years. In fact, as I write this, I am looking forward to spending a week at our house near Park City for the upcoming holiday. The state has also long been home to silver mines that continue to taint the local water supplies and force residents to install double osmosis filtering systems just to have potable water.

Public lands within the Utah region and elsewhere have been a longtime target for oil drilling and government granted leases but always with the understand that wilderness and public lands in close proximity to national parks were typically off limits. That is, until the Bush administration decided to green light drilling near national parks in Moab, Utah in 2002. Although park scientists protested that the national parks could take decades to recover from the shock waves caused by local oil derricks, the administration claimed that parks would “barely notice changes,” according to a New York Times article published on February 8, 2002.

In February of this year, proposed oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake region was met with great resistance from residents and local and national environmental groups, such as The Friends of the Great Salt Lake and the Wilderness Conservancy who at the time I wrote this had received nearly 10,000 signatures in protest of the drilling from around the world.

By allowing drilling in this area, we threaten to harm and destroy wetlands that house over 6 million birds during migration season and more than 250 bird species that call the Great Salt Lake region home according to the Nature Conservancy. The wetlands are important to national scientists and the local economy, serving as one of the top places in the nation for bird watching and eco-tourism. Drilling would also potentially damage the “Spiral Jetty,” one of the most famous examples of the Land Art movement developed by Robert Smithson in the 70’s. A recent New York Times article discusses how the Dia Art Foundation is involved in talks to protect Smithson’s masterpiece and stall drilling in such close proximity.

Given the current oil crisis, US residents may wonder why we aren’t becoming more independent and drilling at home. In reality, oil prices are not entirely being driven up by supply/demand issues. I would highly recommend that those people spend more time educating themselves about the economic and market factors involved by visiting our sister site, Gas 2.0 for more information on the politics behind the high prices at the pump as well as read up on the dangerous environmental repercussions from drilling in our backyards.

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Cutting-edge sustainable fashion design house Nau sadly announced over a month ago that they were closing their doors. Those of us in the green community were shocked and saddened.  To learn more about this store, click here. To learn more about Nau’s commitment to sustainability, click here.
But NAU they’re open again– hurray!
They’ve been bought by [...]

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While adoption of solar energy steps up around the world, two key challenges remain: how to store the energy created during the day so it can be used through the night and how to dispatch the energy to where it is needed. Both of these problems may be solved by coupling molten salt with concentrating solar power (CSP), according to a June 26 article in Renewable Energy World.

You will recall from previous CleanTechnica postings that CSP technology concentrates the sun’s power to create steam, which turns a turbine to make electricity. But how did molten salt get into the picture?

“Terry Murphy, Chief Executive Officer for SolarReserve, who along with others helped develop the molten salt technology at Rocketdyne. ‘Molten salt is a heat storage medium that retains thermal energy very effectively over time and operates at temperatures greater than 1000°F, which matches well with the most efficient steam turbines. Second, it remains in a liquid state throughout the plant’s operating regime, which will improve long-term reliability and reduce operation and maintenance costs. And third, it’s totally ‘green,’ molten salt is a non-toxic, readily available material…..’”

Molten salt storage was a key component of the Solar Grand Plan, published in Scientific American in December 2007, which outlined a plan to supply 69% of U.S. electricity and 35% of its total energy by 2050. The Grand Plan, written by By Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis, proposes molten salt storage concentrating solar, among other proven technologies, and calls for an aggressive plan of government subsidies to allow solar energy to compete fairly with oil and other fossil fuels.

Related Posts on Solar Storage

Clean Energy Intro: Solar Thermal

Solar Power Goes to Extremes

Solar Thermal Electricity: Can It Replace Coal, Gas and Oil?

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Their science is impressive, but their timing is dead on. It doesn’t quite seem fair that California has been blessed with the perfect growing climate for some of the world’s best agriculture (and of course, wine) but saddled with a water shortage.

To help the Napa winemakers and wineries worldwide manage their crop irrigation and management, Sebastian Payen and Thibaut Scholasch, of Fruition Sciences have turned the science of hydration monitoring into an art. The business partners’ techniques come from the marriage of research and technology that they have developed over more than seven years working at prestigious universities and with premier vineyards.

Using a proprietary technology, Fruition Sciences is able to monitor real time viticulture information and deliver the statistics via a web-based application to the winemakers instantly. The ability to monitor the current vineyard status in real time, allows vintners to make decisions about irrigation and canopy management that can have immediate repercussions as well as a long term effect on the crop. The team is currently working with winemakers around the world in California, France and Spain to monitor vine conditions.

Implementing this technology at some of the large producers worldwide could have an interesting impact on water usage and vine care and maintenance by leaving a little less up to chance and putting a little faith in technology.

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Their science is impressive, but their timing is dead on. It doesn’t quite seem fair that California has been blessed with the perfect growing climate for some of the world’s best agriculture (and of course, wine) but saddled with a water shortage.

To help the Napa winemakers and wineries worldwide manage their crop irrigation and management, Sebastian Payen and Thibaut Scholasch, of Fruition Sciences have turned the science of hydration monitoring into an art. The business partners’ techniques come from the marriage of research and technology that they have developed over more than seven years working at prestigious universities and with premier vineyards.

Using a proprietary technology, Fruition Sciences is able to monitor real time viticulture information and deliver the statistics via a web-based application to the winemakers instantly. The ability to monitor the current vineyard status in real time, allows vintners to make decisions about irrigation and canopy management that can have immediate repercussions as well as a long term effect on the crop. The team is currently working with winemakers around the world in California, France and Spain to monitor vine conditions.

Implementing this technology at some of the large producers worldwide could have an interesting impact on water usage and vine care and maintenance by leaving a little less up to chance and putting a little faith in technology.

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It is estimated that the data storage sector consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5 percent of the U.S. total, or more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households. These numbers are only expected to grow.

The energy used by the nation’s servers and data centers is growing at an unsustainable rate. Not only that, but web servers are notoriously inefficient. For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities operate at roughly 65% to 75% efficiency, meaning that 25% to 35% of all the energy consumed by servers is wasted (converted to heat).

If we are to even consider reducing our energy consumption and carbon footprint, the growing demands generated by our web servers must be near the top of the list of possible improvements. And the Department of Energy agrees.

Researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Oregon and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado are hard at work figuring out ways to make our data storage infrastructure run at lower temperatures, therefore increasing efficiency. The technology exists to achieve efficiencies of 80% to 90% in conventional server power supplies. Moving this heat source away from the server allows the cooling efforts to be focused on the computing elements.

Alternative Cooling Approaches from PNNL’s Energy Smart Data Center

• Evolutionary progress is being made with conventional air cooling techniques that are known for their reliability. Current investigation focuses on novel heat sinks and fan technologies with the aim to improve contact surface, conductivity, and heat transfer parameters. Efficiency and noise generation are also of great concern with air cooling. Improvements have been made in the design of Piezoelectric Infrasonic Fans that exhibit low power consumption and have a lightweight and inexpensive construction. One of the most effective air cooling options is Air Jet Impingement.The design and manufacturing of nozzles and manifolds for jet impingement is relatively simple.
• The same benefits that apply to Air Jet Impingement are exhibited in Liquid Impingement technologies. In addition, liquid cooling offers higher heat transfer coefficients as a tradeoff for higher design and operation complexity.
• One of the most interesting liquid cooling technologies are microchannel heat sinks in conjunction with micropumps because the channels can be manufactured in the micrometer range with the same process technologies used for electronic devices. Microchannels heat sinks are effective supporting large heat fluxes.
• Liquid metal cooling, used in cooling reactors, is starting to be an interesting alternative for high-power-density micro devices.8 Large heat transfer coefficients are achieved by circulating the liquid with hydroelectric or hydromagnetic pumps. The pumping circuit is reliable because no moving parts, except for the liquid itself, are involved in the cooling process. Heat transfer efficiency is also increased by high conductivity. The low heat capacity of metals leads to less stringent requirements for heat exchangers.
• Heat extraction with liquids can be increased by several orders of magnitude by exploiting phase changes. Heat pipes and Thermosyphons exploit the high latent heat of vaporization to remove large quantities of heat from the evaporator section. The circuits are closed by either capillary action in the case of heat pipes or gravity in the case of Thermosyphons. These devices are therefore very efficient but are limited in their temperature range and heat flux capabilities.
• Thermoelectric Coolers have the ability to provide localized spot cooling, an important capability in modern processor design. Research in this area focuses on improving materials and distributing control of TEC arrays such that the efficiency over the whole chip improves

AC or DC?

For electricity flowing all the way from power plants to the wall socket, alternating current is far superior. But for the short transmissions inside those computers DC power prevails. The search for ways to convert AC to DC more efficiently is leading some data center companies to consider a DC-centric approach It’s easier to transmit AC over long distances; DC requires thick copper cables or bars, instead of comparatively lightweight wires. But DC becomes a more serious possibility for power once AC reaches a building.

Converting from one form of power to another in a computing environment may not be performed efficiently, especially at the server level, and even then the resulting waste heat may be deposited in the rack or computer room at a point that requires further effort to dispose of it with the air handlers. Unfortunately, there is disagreement in the community over how to address these inefficiencies.

• DC advocates argue that plugging servers into AC power is inefficient, and switching systems to DC would cut down on waste heat and component failure.
• The DC sales pitch puts the previously overlooked issues of electrical efficiency at center stage. But customers should be warned that some major server makers believe DC is mere marketing hype. Proponents argue that using DC outside the server removes some of the inefficiencies of power supplies that convert AC electricity to DC. Servers without such power supplies don’t have to contend with as much waste heat and attendant component failure.

But according to NPPL, substituting DC power in data centers as a replacement for conventional AC power has not yet made significant inroads into many data centers because the technology is unfamiliar to many facility engineers.

Despite the wide-spread use of DC power in telecommunications, there is reluctance within the computer industry to switch to new technologies without field experience showing that the switch could be done safely and would have operational and economic benefits without causing unanticipated problems.

Other Posts on Data Centers:

“Is Paperless Really So Green”:: Green Building Elements

“Don’t Forget to Turn Off the Servers”:: EcoPreneurist

Photos:1.© Eimantas Buzas | Dreamstime.com; 2. Versageek via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

Impact Lab

NREL

PNNEL

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With many cities experiencing a real estate “slump”, homeowners around the country are looking for ways to stand out from the slew of homes on the market, while improving their home’s resale value.  Other homeowners are planning for the future: a future of ever-rising energy prices.
Regardless of your situation, you may be asking yourself if [...]

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