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Written by Hank Green
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Wednesday, 01 August 2007 |
Finally, after all the talk and speculation, the world has its first zero-emissions personal computer. We've been blogging about it for a while now, and I think it's safe to say that the Zonbu really is a fantastic idea. The machine runs on a Linux platform and contains no moving parts (not even a fan.) A four gig flash card is its only on-board memory.
But still, the 1.2 gigahertz processor and 512 meg of RAM are plenty to let this machine do everything you need to do. It can play music, movies, check email, and comes with the Open Office Suite. Really, 90% of users don't need anything more than this, and it consumes six times less power than a standard light bulb. Plus, it's the cheapest new PC I've ever seen, at $250 dollars.
Of course, there's a catch. In order to have any considerable storage space at all, you have to subscribe to the Zonbox service. This service provides you with free, seamless software and firmware updates, up to 100 gigs of storage space, and carbon offsets for your Zonbu usage. If you pay for two years in advance, the price of the unit goes down to $99. The cheapest plan (for 25 gigs of storage) is $12.95. But if you're switching from an older PC, you could literally save that much off your utility bill.
Handing over things like storage and maintenance to a remote location is useful for several reasons. First, you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes and data loss. Second, by consolidating information in data centers, information can be stored more cheaply and efficiently. The result is a computing experience that is simpler and cheaper for the user, and more sensitive to the environment.
Oh, and if you need one more reason, the look of the Zonbu is also completely customizable. Choose from one of a twenty skins, or upload and choose your own!
The only thing that remains to be seen: will anyone be willing to pay a subscription for their computer the same way they pay a subscription for their cell phones. Only time will tell.
Videos of the Zonbu in action after the jump
See Also:
-The 6 watt Linutop-
-The Enano E2-
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Written by Hank Green
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Wednesday, 01 August 2007 |
 One of the biggest barriers to switching over to new, cleaner fuels is that they're harder to find than good ol' unleaded. It's great if you have a truck that runs on E-85, but what if you want to drive two towns over and don't know where you can get any?
That's where mobile applications like Earth Comber come in handy. The application will run on any web enabled phone or PDA. It's simple and free and it'll let you know where you can find your alternative fuel of choice:
- BioDiesel
- E85 (Ethanol)
- LPG (liquified petroleum gas)
- CNG (compressed natural gas)
- Hydrogen
- Electric (hookups to recharge electric
cars and hybrids)
All are mapped into their system. Your phone knows generally where it is, and the application can even tell you how far away the nearest location for each fuel is. Pretty awesome.
See Also:
-GreenScanner-
-Cell Phones Know when Not to Breathe-
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Written by Hank Green
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Tuesday, 31 July 2007 |
Jonathon D. Colman is the Senior
Manager of Digital Marketing at The Nature Conservancy. As such, it's
kinda his job to understand the wild ways of the internet and then to
harness it's raw power for the forces of awesome. Of course, The Nature
Conservancy is one of the big players in the "International Alliance
for Awesomeness." He'll be giving us his take on the web, digital
media, and saving this world. We're excited to have Jonathon as this
week's EcoGeek of the Week.
EG: OK...lets get this out of the way...briefly, what do you actually
do...
JDC: Sure thing! As you know, the mission of The Nature Conservancy
is to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent
the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they
need to survive.
So I help the Conservancy accomplish
that vision by leading the strategic management, marketing, and promotion
of our flagship web site, www.nature.org. That means that I’ve got my fingers
in a number of cookie jars every day: web development, web traffic recording
and analytics, blog and online community outreach, search engine optimization,
online ad placements, and posting our stories to online social networks
and other “web 2.0” sites. Not to mention organizing a redesign
of our web site, developing an RFP for a new web content management
system, implementing a new web analytics system, and chatting with my
coworkers about how great LOST and Battlestar Galactica
are.
Now, if you’re like me –
and I am – then you’re a geek and would love all that stuff.
So I tend to think of my job as just a way of being paid to have fun
and work with the best and brightest.
EG: I've seen some resistance among big environmental organizations
to embracing online media. Do you run into that at The Nature Conservancy,
and, if so, how do you deal with it?
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Written by Nino Marchetti
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Tuesday, 31 July 2007 |
You don't have to cut the tree completely out of paper to make it green, though it certainly helps. But Xerox has figured out how to make more paper from few trees.
Xerox is unveiling a new process which uses more of a specific tree to make paper, thus cutting down on the total number of trees being used. Xerox is calling this paper High Yield Business Paper.
Xerox High Yield Business Paper is made from a mechanical pulping process, which uses 90 percent of a tree for papermaking pulp by overcoming operational problems, such as curling and dust, that prevent this type of paper from being used in digital print situations. This is opposed to the more traditional chemical pulping process, which Xerox says only uses 45 percent of a tree to create paper. The end result of the mechanical process is a reported production of 10 percent more sheets per pound at a quality equal to that of the chemically produced paper.
Xerox added its mechanically produced paper is also better for the environment in that it "requires less water and chemicals and is produced in a plant using hydroelectricity to partially power the pulping process. This process reduces fossil fuel use and results in up to a 75 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions."
The Xerox High Yield Business Paper looks for now like it's only targeted towards the digital printing needs of those doing high volume printing needs like direct mail centers. But that's cool, since they certainly use way more paper than you or I ever will.
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Written by Jon Schroeder
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Tuesday, 31 July 2007 |
 Recently on EcoGeek, we told you about some breakthroughs in harnessing the tide to produce electricity. We also filled you in on the underwater turbines that were plopped into the East River, and about the good things to come below the surface of the San Francisco Bay. Now, two more developments can be added to the list of sea worthy power plants: giant sea snakes and EcoGeeky bobbers.
While the Loch Ness monster is still at large, sightings of Scotland's newest sea beast, the Isle of Lewis giant metal snake, have been confirmed. A Scottish company, Camcal, has riveted together three 450-foot wave-powered energy snakes in what they call the Pelamis project. As the hollow tubes slither across the surface of the ocean, they produce electricity via generators in their joints. The plan is to build enough Pelamis snakes to eventually generate 2.25 megawatts. This BBC article outlines the maiden voyage of the snakes on their way from the Isle of Lewis to Western Isles for Portugal.
Stateside, tidal pioneers in Oregon are opting to go with a large yellow bobber design. With a series of what they call permanent magnet linear generator buoys, professors at Oregon State University have implemented an elegant design that features a metal coil within a bobbing buoy surrounding a magnetic core that tethered to the ocean floor. As the coil jostles around the internal magnets, ocean electricity is zapped two miles to the Oregon coast.
In the wake of a recent study that bashes some renewable energy sources for using too much land, I say bring on the snakes and bobbers!
Thanks to Steven Christian of Portland, OR for the tip.
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Written by Hank Green
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
On a list of 'holy sh*t that doesn't really sound like a good idea' ideas, creating tornadoes to power cities has got to be pretty close to the top. But really, does it sound any more foolish than attempting to control the force of atomic explosions?
No, it isn't crazier than that, and we've managed to make nuclear power work (albeit with some unfortunate consequences) so why not try harnessing some other of nature's most powerful (and dangerous) forces. Like the tornado!
Louis Michaud can create tornadoes. Of course, right now he's creating very small tornadoes. But if he can make a one meter tall one that produces an excess of power, he's certain that he can create one that is "one to twenty kilometers high" and surrounded by wind turbines that produce 200 megawatts of continuous electricity. The only thing needed to keep the "weather pattern" (monstrous spinning cyclone of death) in place, is a source of heat. This could be geothermal or, more likely, excess heat from a coal or nuclear plant.
Right now the water from these sorts of plants has to be cooled in $20 million towers. Michaud expects to replace these towers with tornadoes by pumping the hot water to a far-away location, heating the ground, and then using the turbines as fans to start the tornado rolling. Quickly, a tornado would form, causing the hot air at the ground to funnel upward into the atmosphere, creating free cooling for the power plant and free power for the wind turbines.
The weather pattern would remain self-sustaining for as long as heat was supplied, and it would be unable to escape the plant unless the ground outside of the plant was the same heat or hotter than the pipes from the steam plant (which seems fairly unlikely...unless you're living in a Micheal Crichton book...in which case you will probably fall in love with Helen Hunt, and that's all that will really matter in the end.)
Michaud hopes to build a four, ten, twenty and thirty meter scale version of the plant before finally moving to commercial scale. This will require a lot of R&D funding, but as Michaud expects the plants to not only make nuclear and coal power cheaper (by obviating cooling towers) but also create extremely inexpensive and continuous wind power, he hopes that investors will be ready to take on the challenge.
As long as they don't build one in my back yard
Via The Star
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Written by Hank Green
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
PC World has just come out with a fabulous little top ten list of the greenest tech products out there. While there's room to dissagree with some items on the list, overall I'm quite pleased with what they've come up with. There's even some things I've never seen before.
While the old standards like HP's Long-life desktop, the Zonbox, the Asus Ecobook and the Solio solar charger of course make the list, I'd never heard of "green print" before. And EcoGeek is somewhat ashamed to have never blogged about the newly launched "greenest host" hosting services. We'll have to jump on that ASAP.
Check it out, the list is full of stuff that's already on my wishlist.
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Written by Hank Green
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Monday, 30 July 2007 |
Yes, it sounds impossible, but apparently they've done it. A washing machine that doesn't use detergent. It's patented, of course, and it would seem that this machine converts water into a kind of detergent. Any chemist knows that soap, really, is just a way of making water wetter. And by breaking water into H+ and OH- ions, the Wash2O is able to clean clothes with a slightly basic solution, and then sterlize them with a slightly acidic solution. Then, before dumping the water, everything is mixed back together to pH neutral.
It's a pretty fantastic idea. If you could get on in America, it would set you back about $1000, but remember that you'd never have to buy detergent again, and you wouldn't have to feel bad about dumping phosphates into the rivers.
Though, I think I'll wait to hear some first-hand reports.
Via Engadget
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Written by A Siegel
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Sunday, 29 July 2007 |
These are the Best of Time and Worst of Times for EcoGeeks. We know that Global Warming is already wreaking havoc, that snipping our hair is likely to show mercury, that plastics just don't go away. But, boy, it is truly the best of times. One can't pause for a moment without seeming to miss yet another breakthrough, yet another exciting development. And always, more of these are moving from the lab to deployment.
While still advancing, wind power is almost becoming blase. Exciting that it's displacing coal, but once you've seen a 1000 windmills, after all. Until we start producing gigawatts of power, how else will they get exciting?
Well, they could go underwater.
One way to look at tidal, wave, and river water power generation is to look at it about a decade behind wind power. Just now moving from the lab into power generation with breakout potential just over the horizon. This month should see installation of one of those exciting tidal power generation systems, a 1.2 mw system to be be installed in Strangford Lough by SeaGen. After years of testing smaller turbines, this is a production level system that is going in the water. This is the last phase of testing and development before large scale installations can occur.
There is a huge potential for inexpensive and predictable power by capturing tidal energy. Get ready for some massive growth in the industry.
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Written by A Siegel
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Sunday, 29 July 2007 |
Lou Grinzo, at The Cost of Energy, often has some of the best commentary on energy issues out there, succinctly catching key elements of major reports and articles from all over the spectrum. He also provides tools of interest, such as the Energy Clock. Want a real time running on your desktop, tally of electricity generation, natural gas usage, wind power generation, CO2 emissions, and much more for the US and the globe, Lou has the tool for you. |
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Written by Hank Green
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Friday, 27 July 2007 |
As wind turbines get bigger, wind power gets cheaper. But the economies of scale are henceforth being blown to new heights...and widths, and weights, with this gigantic maglev wind turbine.
The largest wind turbines in the world produce 5 megawatts of power. This monster would produce a full gigawatt...more than most nuclear power plants, enough to power 750,000 homes.
The turbine is colossal, with a footprint of roughly 100 acres. I can't find statistics onhow tall this thing is, but my guess is several hundred meters. It's huge, and it looks like it would be really quite expensive to build. But the owners of the patent are coming out with some astounding figures. Power could be produced at a price of as little as one cent per kilowatt, and investors would recuperate 100% of their money after just a single year.
Something tells me that these numbers won't be so astoundingly good after the design leaves the drawing board. But a 1 cent per kilowatt hour estimate leaves an awful lot of room before it becomes unmarketable.
The biggest problem, of course, is that it would be a huge addition to any landscape, and requires fairly significant wind speeds for maximum efficiency. We'll see if we can strike a compromise that allows people to have cheap power with a new two-hundred-meter-high neighbor on the horizon.
Via TreeHugger
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Written by Nino Marchetti
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Friday, 27 July 2007 |
As if FlexCar wasn't already green enough!. Green drivers in urban settings who prefer to use a shared-car program like Flexcar to get around town will be interested to know they can now go uber-green as a membership option. Flexcar has partnered with TerraPass, a provider of carbon offsets for consumers, on a Green Membership option to balance against the carbon footprint of Flexcar’s fleet.
This Green Membership, which will cost $9.95 a year on top of the standard Flexcar membership rate, reduces what Flexcar says is one ton of carbon emissions for each membership sold. TerraPass plans to use the money generated from this to promote clean energy projects certified to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those who join this plan will also get later supplementary benefits.
Flexcar also said it recently added some more sporty style vehicles to its eco-friendly fleet for those who want to drive something a little different. These new models include Mini Coopers, Scion tCs and the Lexus RX 400H luxury hybrid SUV. |
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