ReadWriteWeb ponders the question are smart grids undermining user privacy? The story observes that “the energy fluctuations of home appliances are so unique that a smart grid can tell the make and model of a user’s refrigerator.” Maybe that’s not a big deal to you, but it’s not too hard to extrapolate from there to a variety of more Orwellian possibilities.

The issue at hand currently is that there are no clear guidelines on how to collect user data in a smart grid. Left to their own devices, history suggests that companies involved with smart grid technology will not necessarily keep the privacy of consumers in mind as they pursue their business objectives. But maybe this is all much ado about nothing, and end-user privacy will in some way be sanctified and protected as more and more people become aware of the issue. What do you think?

So what’s the big deal? Well, the bulb only consumes six watts of power and puts out light equivalent to a standard 60-watt bulb. Also, unlike standard light bulbs, this one’s got an estimated working life of 25 years. Imagine moving into a new house or apartment and bringing the lightbulbs over from your old place.

The lightbulb is made by Lemnis Lighting and will soon be available at Amazon — there are 40-watt versions currently available. According to the company, you’ll realize a return on your investment in power savings within three years.

[via CNET]

Microsoft^® is delighted to announce the availability of Microsoft^® Hohm™. You are invited to sign up for Hohm and learn how you can start saving energy!

Microsoft Hohm is a free online beta application that helps you save energy and money. With Microsoft Hohm you can better understand your home energy usage, get recommendations to conserve energy and start saving. As with any recommendation engine, Hohm will provide increasingly more accurate and relevant suggestions for energy conservation as its users contribute home energy input and feedback. One of the objectives during our beta period is to refine our tool and further increase the value our product can offer to you. We hope you will help us!

Sign up and start saving now. It’s free: www.microsoft-hohm.com

Yes, your refrigerator, washer, and dryer may be Energy Star certified, but any good you’re doing is offset by your DVD player, TV and computer. That’s the simplified version of a new International Energy Agency report that says white goods—refrigerator, washing machines, etc.—are a lot more energy efficient than they used to be, but that consumer electronics—computers, TVs, etc—haven’t made the same progress. And we’re all doomed for it.

If people don’t stop buying these inefficient electronic devices, electricity consumptions will triple by 2030. (And how much is your electricity bill now?) That’s because energy consumption has increased, worldwide, an average of 3.4 percent per year since 1990. Not too many of us had multiple laptops, HDTVs, video game systems, charging cellphones, etc. all plugged in simultaneously, did we?

You may remember that the state of California was looking to curb the use of plasma and LCD HDTVs because they use so much energy. It’s all related, folks.

Silver lining: if the recession doesn’t let up we’ll all be too poor to afford to leave the 50-inch plasma on all day long.

To my untrained eye, this looks like something lifted straight from a G.I. Joe storyline. Satellites in space — presumably using a geosynchronous orbit — will collect and store solar energy. They’ll convert it to radio waves and beam it down to Earth, where it will be collected by a station in Fresno, CA. There it will be converted to electricity and distributed out on the power grid.

The comments in the DailyTech article are worth a read, too. The original story — much like this one! — is light on details. The commenters fill in some of the gaps about the practicalities of this solution.

Oops. Apparently all the computers in the US that are rarely, if ever, shut down at night account for almost $3 billion in wasted energy costs and “may emit up to 20 million tons of carbon dioxide.”

According to Scientific American:

“A study released last week puts a finer point on this assertion, reporting that U.S. workers waste $2.8 billion annually in energy costs by failing to shut off their PCs at the end of the work day. What’s more, machines left on during off hours may emit up to 20 million tons of carbon dioxide (C02) this year alone, roughly the equivalent impact of four million cars.”

Apparently about 50% of people leave their computers on overnight for various reasons including forgetting to turn them off, not wanting to wait for them to shut down, and so they can receive software updates. Responses were collected “from 4,743 U.S. computer users over the age of 18, about half of whom were employed.” The study also found that Germany could save $1.2 billion and the UK could save $400 million by turning off their computers.

Me, I’m a standby man myself. I always thought that the boot-up process used more energy than letting the computer sit idle for a while. 

[via The Raw Feed]

Asura just opened the first-of-its-kind thermal energy plant in California, which should generate enough electricity to power some 3,500 homes. The best part is that this plant, which is named Kimberlina, is merely a proof of concept of sorts— the real plant, to be constructed by 2010, will generate enough electricity to power, like, 120,000 homes.

The idea is dead simple: you’ve got really long mirrors (1,000 feet, to be exact) which reflect the sun’s rays. These rays are reflected onto a series of tubes that are filled with water. The water heats up and turns into steam, which in turn spins power-generating turbines. Makes you wanna become an engineer, doesn’t it?

Detractors will likely say, “That’s easy for California to do since it’s bathed in sunlight every day.” Granted, but should the technology prove efficient, what’s to stop the state from becoming an energy breadbasket of sorts to other states? Potatoes come from Idaho and Maine, electricity comes from California. Everyone wins.

via Inhabitat

Panasonic today announced [JP] it developed the world’s smallest fuel cell for use in notebooks, reducing the size of its predecessor by 50%. The new model is sized at 270cc, which makes it as small as existing lithium ion batteries used in notebooks currently on the market.

Panasonic says the fuel cell will be positioned at the underside of notebooks and provides about 20 hours of power with 200cc of fuel. The prototype weighs just 320 grams. The fuel, highly concentrated methanol, can be stored in bottles.

Panasonic also developed a paperback-size fuel cell for use in cellular phones and other mobile devices. The company claims that this model is powerful enough to run portable TVs and that it can charge two devices at the same time. Weighing 350 grams, it measures 360cc.

Both products are to be commercialized in 2012. Panasonic will present the new technology to the general public during next week’s Hydrogen Energy Advanced Technology Exhibition [JP] in Chiba near Tokyo.

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. For $22.99 you can charge four USB-powered devices plus another regular DC-powered device in your car. It’s only $22.99 – roughly the cost of one or two device-specific DC adapters. Since just about everything charges via USB nowadays, this is a pretty obvious choice for any gadget fiend who spends a lot of time on the road.

Car Charger with 4 USB Ports and 1 Cigarette Socket [usbfever.com via Ubergizmo]

Some feel-good news for your enjoyment, this time about how wind power can save the planet, or something. It seems that for the low, low price of less than two cents per day, the U.S. would be able to generate something like 300 gigawatts of electricity using windmills. That translates to an 11 percent reduction in natural gas consumption, saving 4 trillion gallons of water every year, and a 25 percent reduction of carbon dioxide omissions by 2030.

The rest is some anti-Bush talk about how the administration has ruined America and has slowed our adoption of such alternative fuel sources. Relax, he’ll be gone soon. And then all our problems will be solved, right, just like when the Dems re-took Congress two years ago? Politics is broken here.

Go downstairs and check out your power meter. It’s probably spinning frantically. Why? Because you’re blowing electricity out of your home theatre set-up and home office like a fiend. Don’t worry: I’m doing it to. We all are. It’s the cost of staying online and entertained these days and, sometimes when I’m in the basement, I kind of get a twinge of embarrassment that the woman who lived here before me, a woman who died at 92, used so little electricity that ConEd called me after we moved in asking me if there was anything wrong.

As a homeowner, I’m acutely aware of wasted energy. I feel it in my utility bills, mostly, and that’s one great way to gauge your usage. Another way is to go around the house with the P3 P4400 Kill A Watt electricity meter. I just ordered one in hopes of assessing what mess of electronics is causing my bills to be so high.

But we all know what it is, right? It’s all of the junk that leeches phantom power while we sleep. The TiVo, the XBox, the Blu-Ray player, the Fleshlight charger. That’s why my next purchase is the Belkin Conserve power supply with remote control. To shut down all the junk you don’t use, simply press the little magnetic button. Another tip? Unplug your junk when it’s done charging. Seriously. Your PSP doesn’t need any more juice.

Going further afield, I’ve done some research into getting solar panels on my roof. While Brooklyn isn’t known as the sun capital of the world, many solar panel experts believe that almost any home can benefit from a little sky juice. I checked out Sharp’s solar calculator and found that installing panels on my home would cost about $15,000 and net 73% savings. While this is a little expensive, it could potentially save me quite a bit in the summer months when our roof gets lots of direct sunshine. I found a $9,999 solution as well, but your best bet is to find an installer. Solar Home offers a free assessment, which I’ve just signed up for.

Finally, we can talk about food. We ‘merican’s eat crap and we geeks eat even worse crap. I’ll admit it: if I had my druthers I’d eat Doritos and drink Rolling Rock all day long. But this stuff requires gasoline and packaging and makes a huge mess. How about fairly farm fresh produce and a nice homebrew?

I currently make my own wine and beer with kits from Northern Brewer and Mr. Beer, respectively. Why? Because it makes great booze, you recycle your bottles, and you don’t have to buy Fraunch Wine (c) from Francia and have it shipped over in a messy plane or boat.

We also try to hit the farmer’s market as much as we can and buy lots of vegetables. Clearly you’re not going to pull me away from my bacon, but I got some ramps and baby potatoes today that are going to taste great and won’t have been shipped from California by truck. We’re efficient infrastructure hackers, aren’t we? Why can’t we treat this like a programming problem?

This advice is mainly home-based, clearly, but we all gotta sleep somewhere and by making things a bit more efficient we can keep from burning up the planet that holds most of our data centers.

Straight out of the University of Texas at Austin comes the world’s most powerful laser. I just assumed that most lasers were very powerful, but apparently the great state of Texas has the best one until someone else can come along and build an even more powerful laser or mounts this same laser to a shark’s head.

According to Gizmag.com,

“With greater than one quadrillion watts of laser power, the level of output achieved on March 31 by the Texas Petawatt laser is equivalent to more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States and brighter than the Sun’s surface, according team leader and physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Todd Ditmire.

The one quadrillion watt laser burst, which lasts just a 10th of a trillionth of a second (0.0000000000001 second) will be used to study the secrets of the universe by enabling examination of gases at extreme temperatures solids at pressures of many billions of atmospheres – even creating mini-supernovas and exploring energy made by controlled fusion.”

That sounds very nice (impossible, but nice). Maybe, though, we could use the beam for energy since it’s more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States. I’m all for studying the universe, but maybe we could eradicate everyone’s home energy bills and then I’ll personally promise to donate half of what my bill used to be to this project. Everyone wins! Also, if you could make a laser that does the same for natural gas, my Comcast bill, the wife’s cell phone bill and car payment, and maybe even my rent somehow, that’d be really cool too.

The Texas Petawatt Project [University of Texas]

What’s more, the technology has been licensed to Japanese laptop battery manufacturer Toda Kogyo, so we might actually see these batteries in notebook iterations relatively soon.

Here’s how it all works, according to MIT’s Technology Review…

The Argonne researchers have improved the performance of the positive electrodes by increasing the chemical and structural stability of the materials already used in laptop batteries. In conventional lithium-ion batteries, which have cobalt oxide electrodes, a small amount of overheating, caused by overcharging the material or by electrical shorts inside a battery, can lead to rapidly increasing temperatures inside the cell and, in some cases, combustion. That’s because, as the material overheats, the cobalt oxide readily gives up oxygen, which reacts with the solvent in the battery’s electrolyte and generates more heat, feeding the reactions. The Argonne researchers addressed this problem by replacing some of the cobalt oxide with manganese oxide, which is chemically more stable.

Ah, so that was it all along — we just needed to replace some cobalt oxide with some manganese oxide. I have a whole jar of low-fat manganese oxide in my fridge.

In the 1960s most of America assumed that by 2008 we’d be driving nuclear-powered cars around. Even in Back to the Future the Delorian was powered by Mr. Fusion. But alas, anyone can tell you that we’re still chained to oil-powered internal combustion engines, just as we have been for 100 years.

But a new material scienticians have developed might pave the way for nuclear-powered cars in the near future. The material takes nuclear decay and can convert it to electricity far more efficiently than ever before. Spacecraft have been using this type of “nuclear battery” for decades to propel them through space, but it’s never been effective enough for terrestrial use.

More tests are needed, but the nano-tech based polymers could be adapted to be more energy efficient, enough so that they could drive a standard-sized American car. And it would do so cleanly.

The scienticians say we’re still at least a decade out from utilizing the technology, but it’s entirely possible we can hang up the pumps by then.

I said “cable-laying,” get it? Anyhoo, if you’re in the market for a huge remote controlled submersible robot that weighs 50 tons and can bury oil and gas pipes at the bottom of the ocean, look no further than the Ultra Trencher 1 by a company called SMD. It uses propellers to submerge itself to depths up to a mile and then uses ninja-like high-pressure “jet swords” to cut a trench in the ocean floor. Pipes can then be safely buried out of the way of shipwrecks, fishing equipment, and currents.

A Deeply Impressive Bit of Kit; World’s Biggest Subsea Robot [RedOrbit] via ZDNet

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline will conduct a test flight at the end of the month wherein a Boeing 747 will fly from London to Amsterdam using an 80/20 blend of conventional fuel and biofuel, respectively. The plane will carry no passengers but will be “the first time a commercial aircraft has flown on biofuel,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Branson announced this little experiment last year and analysts posited that it could be done by the end of 2008. With this experiment, Virgin announced that it’s about 10 months ahead of schedule. How do you like them apples? Not only is something in the technology happening ahead of schedule without being delayed, but a full ten months ahead of schedule.

Here’s more…

From the business perspective, the airlines are under great financial pressure because of soaring fuel costs; the price of crude oil is consistently flirting with $100 per barrel. On the environmental side of things, aircraft represent up to 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. transportation sector, according to the Environmental Protection Agency…

…To get it done, Virgin Atlantic is teaming with Boeing and GE Aviation, maker of the engines that power the airplane. The airline said the GE Aviation CF6 engines used during the flight will not require modifications to burn biofuel, nor will the biofuel have negative effects on the engines.

The fuel used in the flight will be a blend of 80 percent conventional jet fuel, which is essentially kerosene, and 20 percent biofuel. Although the exact type of biofuel to be used has not been disclosed, the airline said it is a form that does not compete with food and freshwater resources.

Exciting, no? We’ll keep an eye out for an exact flight date and update everyone.

Virgin jet to use biofuel blend in test flight [San Francisco Chronicle] via Boing Boing

Man oh man, do I miss Snickers. When I worked in an office, I used to eat one (and only one) each day. Yum. Now that there’s going to be a Snickers bar infused with caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins, I’m going to have to seriously reconsider starting up my Costco membership again.

So how does it taste? Let’s check in with Candy Blog.

It smells much like the regular Snickers, has the same texture … same crunchy peanuts, chewy caramel and super-sweet nougat with a hit of salt. And then it comes along, the caffeine kick. And when I say kick, I mean in the mouth. It’s a bitter aftertaste that sits high and in the back of the mouth. It just kind of lingers there, like maybe it’s not something you ate but something you smelled (sometimes strong skunk will do that to me). And it stays with you, probably as long as the caffeine is in your system. I clocked my aftertaste for eating one half of a bar at 90 minutes.

I’m willing to put up with the strong-skunk aftertaste but I’m somewhat of a buzz junkie. You’ll probably have a hard time trying to get “regular” people to eat these but, at the same price as a regular Snickers bar, you won’t be out too much if your grandma doesn’t like the taste.

I’m not sure if these are available yet, as Candy Blog got some samples directly from Mars, Inc. but I’ll be checking my local convenience and grocery stores like a hawk.

Snickers Charged [Candy Blog] via BB Gadgets

Oil prices are getting out of hand. Wind and solar power are somewhat unpredictable and apparently they ‘cost too much’. A few weeks back I saw Southland Tales and the movie was about the end of the world and all this other crazy stuff. What was intriguing about the film other than Sarah Michelle Geller being a porn star was the fact that alternative energy was being pumped from the ocean. It’s not rocket science (or maybe something close to it), but I’d imagine building a huge turbine of some sort would produce massive amounts of free energy, right?

Well, Finavera Renewables has this thing called the Aquabuoy that’s a buoy connected to an underwater piston. Can you figure out how it works? No? Ok, fine. As swells roll through, the buoy goes with the flow and goes up and down. This in turn gets the piston running, which pressurizes a chamber that’s inhabited by seawater. Said pressure gets the turbine running, which if you haven’t figured it out by now produces electricity. That’s cool but so what?

Well, Finavera just scored a deal with PG&E in Nor*Cal. The power purchase is for a wave farm that will produce 2 megawatts of juice and said wave farm will be built 2.5 miles off the coast of Humboldt County. It won’t actually be up and running until 2012, but it will offset 245 tons of carbon dioxide each year and if all goes well, Finavera hopes to build the wave farm into a 100 megawatt producing rig.

But all is not well with this glorious idea. It’s more expensive to run than coal and natural gas, but it’s cheaper than offshore wind turbines and solar. A recent test run off the coast of Oregon was a bust when the buoy sank when it took on water. My alma mater has been working on this for quite some time and the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab is a world class facility where they study tsunamis and anything else going on in the ocean. Someone told me the head of the center surfs in the wave pool after hours, which is rad. Anyway, things are looking up for renewables, but we’re a long ways away from seeing anything actually happen on this front.

Wave power to go commercial in California [news.com]

Continuing with Biggs’ “down with Big Oil” mantra from earlier today, check out this suspicious (and yes I know, old old old) video that I originally heard about on Opie & Anthony. It’s a news report of a man who supposedly invented a water fuel cell capable of powering all sorts of vehicles. The catch is, he was mysteriously poisoned before he get his device on the market.

Think of how different the world would have been if this invention came to light (if it were ever real to begin with). Powering your car and heating your home with a couple gallons of water? Oh, what could have been.

Maybe we should change our name to ConspiracyGear.

Water fuel cell [Wikipedia]

As someone who sits at home in front of a computer all day every day, I can — like Richard to Tommy in Tommy Boy — actually hear myself getting fatter.

So the thought of sitting all day every day in an apparatus that forces me to expend energy in order to provide power to my lifeline to the outside world and device by which I earn money for food, shelter, and clothing is intriguing to me.

Such is the "pedal-powered laptop" being developed by a group of MIT students. I live near MIT and every time I’m over near the campus, I like to look at all the people and try to figure out who’s legitimately an insane homeless person and who’s a genius that’s been working on a project like this and hasn’t slept or showered in a week. If you’re one of the latter, nice work!

The students "predicted that a bicyclist should be able to produce up to 75 watts continuously–far more than the 30 watts needed to power the laptop."

Students get charge out of pedal power [MIT News]