Ford Ahead Of Schedule With Strategy For Low Carbon Cars

June 8, 2010

Ford is relying on its EcoBoost engine and sharp reductions in vehicle bulk to meet its low carbon goals – putting electrification into the back seat for now

The carmaker will report next week that it could surpass its 2020 goal of cutting CO2 emissions from its new U.S. and European cars by 30 percent compared with 2006. The greater confidence will be highlighted in its annual Sustainability Report, which will be released June 15.

Up to now, the Dearborn manufacturer has maintained that it is on track to reach the goal.

Ford's economical EcoBoost engine is one leg of the carbon-reduction stategy. Weight loss is the other.

The greater-than-expected progress is the result of a two-pronged effort to push its economical EcoBoost engine into existing models and take hundreds of pounds out of next-generation designs, says John Viera, director of sustainable business practices.

Ford sent the EcoBoost into production last year and the engine could be available in more than a million vehicles annually by 2013. Its greater fuel efficiency comes from the use of high-pressure fuel injection, which sprays cylinders with a mist of gasoline. Fuel economy gains can be up to 20 percent. Performance improvements allow V6 motors to be used in place of V8s, and 4s instead of 6s.

Ford is accompanying the EcoBoost with more modest steps it calls “1 percent” enhancements. A six-speed transmission might be installed instead of a five-speed, or electric power-assist steering might be used to cut down on resistance.

Major overhauls of production vehicles are done every four to six years, and new designs will see a big focus on weight reduction.The initiative could take 250 to 750 pounds out of cars, major steps for an industry that rejoices at taking 10 pounds from a current model.

Some of the weight reduction will come from the use of different materials, particularly aluminum and high-strength steel. The consequence is that less energy will be needed to power cars, and engines can be downsized. So a 1.7 liter, four-cylinder motor can substitute for a 2.4 liter.

As to greater engine efficiencies from breakthroughs in internal-combustion design, technology gains are difficult to project at this time. “I don’t necessarily see that on the horizon,” says Viera.

Ford claims its 30 percent emissions cuts are necessary to blunt the environment impact of global warming. Cars and trucks contribute 20 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, and if the danger line is 450 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, as some scientists believe, then the 30-percent target is what the company needs to do its part. The CO2 level is about 380 ppm today.

Vierra says the role of electric cars in climate change will be limited for the immediate future because of their comparatively small volumes. Electric cars and trucks will play a far more important role in the 2030 to 2040 timeframe, when the world will need to move away from fossil fuels for transportation, he says.

It is important to prepare for that shift today.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Will EPA Energy Star Label For Data Centers Spark New Debate?

June 7, 2010

The Environmental Protection Agency released its long awaited Energy Star label for data centers on Monday, likely sparking a new round of data-center energy-efficiency improvements.

The initiative should be well received by IT managers, who have long awaited a standard benchmark for energy consumption. “The industry will be happy with some forward movement,” acknowledges Coy Stine, director of data-center services at the engineering firm Bluestone Energy Services of Norwell, MA.

New Energy Star label could spark a new round of efficiency improvements at data centers

However, the decision will focus attention on the failings of the selected benchmark: the Power Usage Effectiveness, and will trigger a debate over how best to calculate efficiency.

The EPA decision has been expected for almost a year, and some data center improvements languished in anticipation. “The industry needed a little bit of a catalyst,” concedes Mark Harris, vice president of product marketing at San Francisco data-center software supplier Modius.

With the Energy Star label now a corporate goal, centers will compete with one another. The EPA’s plan is to award the label only to the top quarter of centers in a particular industry. It also put into place safeguards against gaming. PUE calculations need to be verified by licensed professionals and examined by the agency before accepted.

Data center experts say the EPA will need six to nine months to develop industry-by-industry benchmarks. The EPA didn’t immediately respond with a schedule.

The trouble is the PUE is not the only, or necessarily the best, method for calculating data-center energy use. The metric is a measure of how much data-center power goes directly to computing equipment, thereby a gauge of how much work is done. It is presented as a ratio of total power to compute power.

While it is relatively simple and easily understood, it falls short in a key area. It doesn’t assure that the energy accomplishes useful work – such as processing transaction volume. A server might be idling, not handling a request, and its energy would still be counted as effective power.

A more targeted benchmark under development – the DCeP – compares useful work to total power consumption, but has proved a difficult formula to derive. It is likely several years away.

The PUE, “is a good first step,” says Harris. “The issue is that five years ago we had nothing.” Now there is something.

But the debate is sure to continue. And it will spread publicly, instead of remain confined to the Green Grid, which proposed the use of the PUE. Now that companies have an incentive, they will take an interest in how the calculation is performed. The EPA also may find itself under pressure to come up with best practices.

Without detailed guidelines, the PUE can be gamed, asserts Stine. Every center needs to report total power in the same way, for instance.

Clearly, the new Energy Star label has broad consequences. Data centers are significant consumers of energy and together account for 1.5 percent of U.S. electricity use. Energy consumption, already $4.5 billion, is expected to nearly double over the next five years.

Up to now, data centers have been addressing energy efficiency piecemeal. Blade servers might replace dedicated boxes and old routers swapped out for new ones. IT managers may choose to slow fan speeds in their chillers. But many did not calculate their PUE rating – despite the attention Google brought to the measure by publicizing its own rating. (Google claims its PUE is 1.21. A rating of 1 is perfectly efficient.)

Now there is an incentive to view data-center energy management more holistically. It comes not a moment too soon.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Are Fuel Cells The Next Big Thing For Phone Companies?

June 7, 2010

Solar and wind-powered cellular base stations are finally taking off. Next up: hydrogen fuel cells, compressed air storage and lithium ion batteries.

A push for renewable-energy base stations appears to be gaining momentum in the telecom industry, with routers and other network-access gear likely to follow suit and go green someday.

The adoption of solar and wind powered cellular base stations seems to be picking up as solar prices fall.

The market acceptance is fueled by lower costs, particular after last year’s sharp fall in solar panels prices. But system engineering is making great strides as well, translating higher solar and wind energy efficiencies into higher overall product performance.

The expanding market is the reflection of a multi-year push by the telecommunications industry for alternative power – and in that sense it mirrors the initiatives of other industry trying to grasp the energy realities of the 21st Century.

But the story has a unique twist. The industry has an obvious starting point: the remote cellular base stations springing up in hard-to-reach developing communities, where trucking in fuel for diesel generators is expensive.

Until recently, solar and wind energy were the two technologies mature enough for deployment. Still, high costs caused the market to evolve slowly, with only a few hundred solar base stations sold a year.

That changed last year. With the dramatic price reductions in solar panels during 2009, the market accelerated. As many as 5,000 solar powered based stations now operate around the world, and, by 2012, this is estimated to balloon to more than 100,000.

“We see a dramatic shift in the market,” says Frederic Wauquiez, a marketing director for alternative energy programs at Alcatel-Lucent. Low-cost electricity from the grid is holding back buying in developed countries, but places such as India, China and Africa are showing growth.

With that success, new technologies are coming to market. Among the leaders are Motorola, which in the past year more than doubled the base stations using hydrogen fuel cells for back-up power at its SINE network in Denmark. More than 100 are in service.

Sprint also employs at least 250 hydrogen fuels cells for back-up power at its cellular towers with technology from ReliOn of Spokane and Altergy. The company received a $7.3 million Energy Department grant to boost its back-up power capability to 72 hours from 15.

Alcatel-Lucent is working with fuel cells in limited trails and says the technology will be the next it introduces. The company’s position is that fuel cells will never be the sole source of base-station power, Wauquiez says. The economics are not there when hydrogen must be carted into a remote site, he says.

At the same time, the French company is working with compressed-air energy storage, advanced vertical-axis wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries. Compressed air will come, Wauquiez says, but the efficiency is low. Advanced turbine designs are “interesting,” and Alcatel-Lucent has battery manufacturers trying to develop the right battery for its needs, he says.

Alcatel-Lucent finds the alternative fuels market important enough to mention in the Corporate Social Responsibility Report it issued last week. The company estimates it has as many as 340 alternative-fuel energy base stations in the field, a 40 percent increase in a year and a more upbeat achievement than the report’s 30 percent target.

So what is this year’s objective? Wauquiez won’t say. It is still being hashed out, he said, but it will be more ambitious than in 2009. Perhaps this confidence is a sign renewable energy products really do have a foothold in the industry.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Offshore Wind Farms A Political Tinder Box As Turbines Get Taller

June 4, 2010

The 130-turbine Cape Wind farm continues to stir controversy on Cape Cod, where opponents vow to tie up the project for years in the courts.

Tempers exploded on the other side of the Atlantic after a consortium of three companies, including Siemens, came together Friday to build one of the United Kingdom’s largest wind farms off the Welsh cost.

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Siemens joined forces Friday with RWE and a Munich utility to build a one of Europe's largest offshore wind farms in Wales.

Wind farm politics remain a fiery affair. This is especially true as the size of turbines and farms grows larger Government officials push hard to find renewable energy in the shallow, coastal waters of the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Great Lakes. Many residents object, fearing they will lose something they can’t regain.

As wind towers begin to stand 400 feet or more above sea level, they create a greater threat to the panoramas that have defined ocean-side living for centuries. The result is that projects become more controversial and difficult to site.

This is the case in north Wales, where Siemens, German-based RWE AG and Munich’s municipal utility formed a $2.4 billion partnership on Friday to install 160, 492-foot turbines 10 miles off the coast. The farm is to be completed in 2014 and will be one of Europe’s largest.

Residents complain jobs will be created in Germany instead of Britain. But mostly they worry at the way views of the sea will be changed at the resort community.

Similar complains sound off in Cape Cod. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the 130-turbine project last month. Residents complain the 440-foot towers will interfere with air traffic. But they direct most of their complaints at the way the farm will alter views of the sea and Nantucket.

Similar complaints confront farms planned for the Great Lakes. On Friday, New York added an additional project to the mix, saying it would chose among five proposals for large farms on lakes Erie and Ontario expected by 2015.

Expect more controversy as nations balance change and energy independence.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Modern Wind Turbines Not Cleared On Bird Deaths

June 4, 2010

A government-sponsored study examining bird and bat deaths from wind turbines found that newer, slower spinning turbines don’t necessarily ease the killings.

The report by the National Wind Coordinating Collaborative and funded by DOE may not end the controversy surrounding older turbines and the fear they are to blame for more than their share of deaths. But it will sound the call for more study.

Study finds modest number of bird deaths - fewer than 14 annually per MW hour of electricity.

The report found that wind farms in total are responsible for relatively few deaths – fewer than 14 bird deaths annually per MW hour of electricity. Many farms have fewer than four.

This is lower than deaths from other sources, such as vehicles, transmission lines, windows and cats.

More uncertainty appears to exist about bat deaths. Some farms report a relatively high death rate while others find few fatalities.

But perhaps its most significant observation is that taller turbines with wider blades are no pancea. The potential impact on birds and bats is uncertain, the report stated.

In the past, many blamed the high level of bird deaths at older wind farms, such as Altamont Pass in California on the outdated turbines that spin there.

The study, by in large, should ease the worries of some environmentalists. As wind energy expands in the U.S. and massive killing of wildlife isn’t expected. But that doesn’t mean continued technological efforts to reduce collisions aren’t needed.

This is especially true when considering that most birds killed at wind farms in the United States are smaller songbirds – three-quarters of the total. The most dangerous times of the year are spring and fall, when the birds are migrating. Often they fly at night and above the reach of wind turbines. It is believed they are most vulnerable when they land.

The most at-risk bats are tree-roosting species, such as the Eastern Red Bat and the Hoary Bat. The most dangerous periods are in the late summer and fall, again when migrations occur. But direct collision with a turbine blade isn’t the only danger for a bat. Some likely die from the trauma of suddenly having a spinning blade alter nearby air pressure.

In the past, Altamont Pass in California was often thought of as the killing for birds, in particular predators, such as hawks and golden eagles that hunt there. This was believed due to the older turbines and the large bird populations.

But newer towers aren’t off the hook. Today’s wind turbines stand 260 feet tall with blades that stretch 260 feet in diameter. Older turbines were no more than 80 feet high and blades only 60 feet in diameter.

While these monster turbines spin slower (20 or so revolutions a minute) their span is huge, sweeping more than a acre of sky. In three years, the sweep will expand to 1.5 acres. This broader reach increases blade tip speed to 150 miles a hour or more.

As it turns out, this may be no deliverance for birds and beasts.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Symantec To Open Its Consumer Cloud Platform Shasta (video)

June 3, 2010

The Shasta Architecture: Symantec's Consumer Cloud Platform

Shasta is Symantec’s “uber” consumer cloud platform on top of which the security company is building it’s current and future cloud services like Safe Web, Download Insight, Anti-spam, Facebook scanner application, Norton DNS…

Symantec plans to open access to Shasta’s API to third parties so they could integrate some of the company security services in Twitter clients, Web Mails or browsers.

Overview of the Shasta platform:

Evolution of the Shasta platform:

The Shasta platform could scale beyond Twitter!

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Posted by TechPulse 360

Symantec Bashes McAfee Artemis Reputation, Cloud Strategy (video)

June 3, 2010

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Posted by TechPulse 360

McAfee Antivirus Update Fiasco Will Happen Again, Symantec Predicts (video)

June 3, 2010

According to rival Symantec, McAfee antivirus update problems are not over yet.

At a media meeting dubbed “Next @ Norton” today, the Mountain View, Calif.-based security company warned that McAfee’s faulty signature update fiasco might happen again despite using cloud technologies to mitigate future risks.

“They say they are going to use the cloud to stop from ever happening again. And that concerns me a little,” explains Kevin Haley, product manager of Symantec’s Technology and Response group, comparing McAfee’s cloud solution to a warehouse!

Symantec faults McAfee “cloud” response

For Haley, McAfee will still be using “rushed out” signatures, but this time, it’s sitting in the cloud and will get faster to the user.

“It doesn’t do anything to mitigate false positives. In fact, probably, it’s going to do the opposite,” adds the Symantec executive who contends that this could not happen with Norton Antivirus.

“There are some critical systems files that if removed are going to cause something bad. And if anytime we have the urge of removing them, there’s a fail-safe mechanism in the [Norton] product that will not allow it to be removed.”

In the video below, the Symantec executive found McAfee explanation for the fiasco lousy and suggests his version of what he thinks “really happened:”

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Suntech Stumbles With Pluto

June 3, 2010

Suntech Power Holdings said Thursday it has run into difficulties making its high-efficiency Pluto solar cells, raising the possibility of a delay in this next-generation technology.

The Chinese solar giant said the problems arose in ramping manufacturing beyond its present monthly pace of 4 MW. As a result, the company said it decided to maintain this relatively modest production level – probably two factory lines – until it works out the technical kinks.

The move is a blow for Suntech as it begins to transition to this key technology and catch more efficient solar developers, particularly mass-market efficiency leader SunPower. It also could be a setback to Suntech’s hope of pushing Pluto beyond it present 19 percent average efficiency to a 20 target.

Like the distant planet, Suntech's Pluto remains a difficult target to reach

On a first quarter conference call with analysts, Suntech Chief Technology Officer Stuart Wenham described the hang-ups as “small glitches” common when transferring a new technology to large-scale module production.

“In the course of ramping Pluto production to levels well above the current 4 MW a month, we have identified process control challenges to module production,” Wenham said. He added: “We have gained a great deal of experience since we began producing commercial quantities of Pluto cells.”

Suntech says it remains pleased with the cell’s performance and claims nothing is wrong with the Pluto design. Yet Pluto’s average mono-crystalline cell efficiency remains at 19 percent, with the best yielding cells reaching 19.5 percent. Both are well above the market average of 17.5 percent, but the company first achieved 19 percent efficiency as far back as early 2009.

Suntech is “fully confident Pluto will become our core product and the industry benchmark for high-performance and cost-effective solar panels,” Wenham says.

The Pluto design is based on the PERL, or passivated emitter with rear locally diffused, technology developed at Australia’s University of New South Wales, where efficiencies of 25 percent have been achieved in the laboratory. It has low reflectivity to capture more sunlight and thinner metal lines to reduce shading.

While the technology remains promising, Suntech said in a difficult to interpret announcement that it recently began a new solar research initiative with the University of New South Wales and Silex Solar to improve the efficiency and cost of cells. The research received a $5 million grant from Australia. The company also kicked off a collaborative effort with Swinburne University of Technology on nanoplasmonic cells. Suntech describes both efforts as complementary to its work with Pluto.

Because of its high efficiency, Pluto commands a premium price in the market and customer demand appears to be high.  Yet production is far from the 450 MW Suntech plans for the middle of its fiscal year. When the problems are resolved, the company promises production will increase rapidly and engineers are reportedly convinced they can meet the target.

On the conference call, Suntech said a weak Euro contributed to a 14 percent fall in average product prices in its first quarter. The prospect of continued weakness led its shares down 3 percent.

Suntech does 68 percent of its business in Europe.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

PLATO Creator Reflects Back At Invention (video)

June 2, 2010

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Posted by TechPulse 360

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