Where do your gadgets really come from? The folks behind Sourcemap, a crowdsourced, open source project, hope to answer that question by cataloging where the components that make up our devices originate. It’s an effort to provide a measure of supply chain transparency, according to project founder Leo Bonanni (see his Greener Gadgets 2010 talk […]
Archives for May 2011
Solar field sprouts at GE Aviation in Durham, NC
Video: GE Aviation has released a neat, time-lapse video showing a 7.2-acre solar installation go up at its Durham, North Carolina facility. The project is the company’s way of practicing what it preaches, so to speak. Power from its 9,072 thin film panels is governed by GE equipment like its Brilliance Inverter. All told, the […]
Infographic of the day: 1 data center = 25K homes
Cloud computing is taking the IT industry by storm but behind the technology are massive data centers that consume a lot of energy. How much? According to some of the opening stats in an infographic cooked up by ABB, a utility and industrial automation firm, the energy requirements of the world’s data centers are large […]
Uptime Institute reveals IT’s energy cost blindness… Can accountants cure it?
Last week’s Uptime Institute Symposium 2011 event not only brought together data center experts, it also delivered the goods for stat monkeys in the form of the group’s first-ever industry survey results. After a bout of “excitement” from the techies in attendance (riiiiight), the group let loose with the findings, which include… 74% of respondents […]
Good Housekeeping: Consumers overwhelmingly care about green products
I know, as a green techie, your only exposure to Good Housekeeping is the doctor’s/dentist’s office. Why should you care what it says? If your cool, energy-saving tech is going to make any headway with mainstream consumers, Good Housekeeping provides a great window into how receptive they’ll be to your green goods. And fortunately, during […]
Violin, HP blast benchmarks, make case for solid-state storage in the data center
Flash memory is once again taking the performance crown by enabling Violin Memory and HP to claim bragging rights today on a TPC-E benchmark. According to the companies, a Violin Memory Array in conjunction with an HP Proliant DL380 G7 server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 set a record for a dual socket with a […]
Electronic medical records’ green potential lies in the cloud
Can electronic medical records (EMR) help hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices go green? Yes, but not right away. Kaiser Permanente, a health care giant, used itself as a test case and the results are encouraging. Transitioning to electronic medical records can cut CO2 emissions by up to 1.7 million tons a year. The New York […]
Today’s 10: Twitter Tuesday Edition – May 3, 2011
Here’s what’s making news today on the Green IT and cleantech (and social media) fronts: Verizon has a new new carbon intensity metric based on how many terabytes course through its platforms; IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign resonates online and in social media; and a 64-chip that consumes just one watt of electricity? Adapteva says yes. […]
EV 101: With V2G, your car is the battery
Besides reducing carbon emissions from car travel and ending America’s love affair with the fuel pump, electric vehicles (EVs) can perform another important function: energy storage for renewable energy sources. GE’s new Txchnologist website has an infographic that illustrates how your (future ?) plug-in can one day become a pivotal piece of the smart grid […]
U.N. to StEP up e-waste monitoring
The electronics industry’s dirty little secret is about to get more international attention thanks to a U.N. program to monitor where our discarded gadgets end up. The New York Daily News is reporting that a United Nations program called StEP (Solving the E-Waste Problem) will monitor ports in Asia and West Africa to help pinpoint […]
