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Welcome to the March 2008 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
STORIES |
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So clearly HB LEDs are making their way into an ever-increasing variety of applications, from lighting to medical and even to toys. It is expected that HB LEDs will become a significant technology in home and industrial lighting in the next five years.
When given a little freedom to try new technologies, employees might find better ways of working that can mean more production for the company. One Intel employee created a collaborative online wiki that has since spread across the company as a tool for collaboration.
Companies that let employees use consumer devices are figuring out ways to let them experiment while minimizing security risks to the corporate network. It is of interest to note that some consumer and small-business products actually work better and are more cost-effective than corporate technology. Many companies realize that consumer technology will make its way onto their company's network. So the best strategy involves not banning employee use of consumer technology, but to figure out why employees are driven to use unauthorized technologies and find a way to let them do so securely.
The Israeli government announced a major initiative to push the nation's drivers toward electric cars. The move is meant to both lessen dependence on foreign oil and address the environmental and health hazards of gas-burning vehicles.
It is not the first time a government has tried to promote electric cars on a mass scale. A 1990 California mandate requiring automakers to sell zero-emissions vehicles famously flopped. But the Israeli attempt is far more sophisticated than anything that precedes it. It aligns policy makers and a major car company with an outfit prepared to build hundreds of thousands of electric charging stations across the country. In an interview with TIME, Israeli President Shimon Peres called the project, "an experimental lab, a pilot project, before it's applied to other, bigger industrialized nations."
Automaker Renault-Nissan will manufacture the cars and Better Place, a California start-up founded by former SAP executive Shai Agassi, will build the infrastructure, which may eventually consist of 500,000 charging points and up to 200 battery-exchange stations. A pilot involving a few dozen cars will start later this year in Tel Aviv. A few hundred vehicles are expected to be on the road by 2009, with production scaled to the mass market by 2011.
The field of green technology encompasses a continuously evolving group of methods and materials, from techniques for generating energy to non-toxic cleaning products.
The present expectation is that this field will bring innovation and changes in daily life of similar magnitude to the information technology explosion over the last two decades. In these early stages, it is impossible to predict what green technology may eventually encompass.
Some of the goals that inform developments in this rapidly growing field include:
First is sustainability - meeting the needs of society in ways that can continue indefinitely into the future without damaging or depleting natural resources. In short, meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Second is cradle to cradle design - ending the cradle to grave cycle of manufactured products, by creating products that can be fully reclaimed or re-used.
Third is source reduction - reducing waste and pollution by changing patterns of production and consumption. Fourth is innovation - developing alternatives to technologies, whether fossil fuel or chemical intensive agriculture. These have been demonstrated to damage health and the environment. Finally, viability - creating a center of economic activity around technologies and products that benefit the environment, speeding their implementation and creating new careers that truly protect the planet.
Hydrogen, the most abundant element on Earth, does not release carbon dioxide when burned, and its use as a replacement for fossil fuels is considered a key to halting global warming. But delays in the setting up of a hydrogen supply network are proving an obstacle to the wider use of hydrogen-powered vehicles. The government has so far built 12 hydrogen stations mainly in the Tokyo metropolitan area as part of a test project. Behind the delays in setting up hydrogen stations is the lack of cost-efficient and safe methods to transport and store hydrogen, which is highly combustible.
However, innovative technologies are on their way to solving this problem. For example, Tokyo Gas Co., Japan's largest gas supplier, is currently developing a technology to synthesize hydrogen from city gas. With the technology, suppliers would no longer have to worry about transporting and storing hydrogen because hydrogen can be made where needed. Tokyo Gas says that the technology may be put into practical use by around 2014.
The Smart Storage technology is a hybrid battery which combines an asymmetric supercapacitor electrode and a lead-acid battery in a single unit cell. Advanced materials used for the electrodes and current management absorb and release charge rapidly and at efficiencies well above conventional battery types. It is expected that the discharge and charge power of the Smart Storage battery will be 50 per cent higher and its cycle-life at least three times longer than that of the conventional lead-acid counterpart.
The Smart Storage battery technology aims to deliver a low cost, high performance, high power stationary energy storage solution suitable for grid-connected and remote applications, according to Director of the CSIRO Energy Transformed National Research Flagship Dr John Wright. The Smart Storage technology is based on CSIRO's 'Ultrabattery' which has been successfully trialed in hybrid vehicles.
Dr. Wright comments, "Too often new technologies simply aren't affordable and that significantly retards market uptake. We now have investments in two energy storage technology companies, V-Fuel which targets grid-scale renewable energy storage applications and now Smart Storage for smaller renewable energy systems." Investments in energy storage technologies have excellent potential for strong returns given the growing market demand and the lack of viable solutions.
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