June 30, 2009 Green building -- Is it growing faster than a the rest of clean technology?
By
Allan
Yogasingam
A lot has been said about the growth of clean technology, however, I think as a site, the Green SupplyLine has somewhat ignored the contributions of designers and engineers into one of cleantech's fastest growing sectors - green building.
With many governments offering incentives to make your house or building "greener" its no wonder that this facet of clean technology has grown so quickly.
Here is a very interesting video on green building I thought you might enjoy:
June 23, 2009 Inside the "Green" new iPhone
By
Allan
Yogasingam
I managed to get my hands on the new iPhone 3G S last week. Not for too long though, as I had to quickly tear it down for EETimes seen here. I had heard claims that the new iPhone would be 'greener' and I was hoping that peering inside would give validity to those claims.
From a component level, the ICs were all lead-free, so that's a definite plus but other than that, I couldn't see anything 'green' from visual inspection other than the color of the circuit board.
Ah, but just because you can't see it, doesn't mean you it isn't ecologically-friendly. Apple went to longer lengths to make this product environmentally sound as they had come under heat for supposed un-green practices (as seen here). With the new iPhone, Apple has incorporated the following measures; the phone is apparently free of many toxic chemicals that were removed from the production process, the iPhone itself is manufactured to feature a mercury-free LCD and be PVC-free. The head phones and the handset are also PVC free. It also packs bromine-free printed circuit boards too. Shipped in smaller packing, most of the packaging is shaped out of post-consumer recycled fiberboard and bio-based materials.
Not bad Apple, not bad at all. And for those who are curious, here's a look inside the iPhone 3G S:
June 16, 2009 Opinion: the Volt is not a dolt
By
Allan
Yogasingam
I had a chance to read EETime's writer Mark LaPedus' comments on the Chevrolet Volt the other day (Missing gaffes: the Volt is a dolt) and can't help but feel that Mr. LaPedus is a bit misguided in his frank criticism of GM's Hail Mary project.
Firstly, I'm never one to criticize something before it is introduced to the market. The world is littered with critics who have cited facts and analysis that a product was doomed to failure only to have the general public make them look like fools by telling them otherwise. Who could forget Herbert Hoover telling Herbert Ives that the concept of 'television' would never take off in Americaor a recent favorite of mine, a writer at the Register claiming the iPhone to be an unmitigated failure (Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly) equating it to the Pippin? I've always been of the "wait-and-see" approach to all things and I just can't see how one can call the Volt a failure yet when the first car hasn't come off the assembly line.
In my opinion, the Volt is already a success. Why? Because GM was finally able to do, and rally behind, something different, almost revolutionary, with the Volt. Because it brought the concept of an electrically-driven, mass manufactured car from fantasy to near reality. Because someone from the major automotive industry was daring enough to be the first. Being the first is never easy — typically, the first on any new product will be met with unexpected problems, that will always be the case. But for the Chevy Volt, the success lies in that being the forerunner in this field means that they have set the benchmark for all the other car companies to strive for. It means that subsequent entries in the electric vehicle (EV) market will aim to be better than the Volt, thereby, in theory, accelerating the technological growth of the EV market which subsequently could accelerate market acceptance.
The analyst from Gartner that Mr. LaPedus quotes, Jim Hines, seemed to indicate that this technological growth would be the X-factor of the EV industry and points to an arbitrary date of 2020 for the year that technology reaches a stage satisfactory to consumers. Personally, I believe that the creation of the Volt and any market share it achieves on launch (even if it is less than a percent) will immediately catch the attention of the ultra-competitive Japanese automotive companies. Can you honestly see them waiting until 2020 to reveal the cusp of their EV work?
Let me close by saying I'm not an eternal optimist here. The Volt, in terms of a one-off product, might be one of the worst received vehicles since the Ford Edsel. But the strongest key it its success is not the roadblocks of "limited by poor range, long charging times, costly battery replacement and reduced service opportunity for dealers" as stated in the article, but the primary factor that drives all market successes — price. If anything will be the downfall of the electric vehicle, it is going to be the Volt's starting price tag of $40,000. In 2010, in our fractured economy, will Americans be ready to spend $40k on a car that offers the same comforts of other much lower-priced sedans like the Honda Civic or the Toyota Corolla? Are people willing to spend the extra $15k on a car just because it's more "eco-friendly"? That's the biggest question that GM faces with the Volt. If the Volt was to feature a sticker price comparable to their gas-powered brethren, the worries of range anxiety and new technology would be greatly lessened.
To me, the success of the electric car will come down to having the technology be affordable, thereby making it a viable alternative to combustion-based vehicles. Hopefully, the launch of the Volt in 2010 rapidly accelerates the technology so the arbitrary date of 2020 that the people at Gartner point to as the tipping point, gets moved up five or six years. In my opinion, I think the people at Gartner should at least wait until 2010 before they make sweeping generalizations on the viability of a new technology. Especially when they don't even take into consideration the rising costs of fuel.
On a recent flight I was finally able to see the film, "The Watchmen". Many of you know that it's basically a look at the disturbed underbelly of the costumed superhero but one of the underlying themes of the film got me thinking.
In one of the film's many subplots, the main characters, a being of radioactive energy called Dr. Manhattan and the world's most powerful industrialist Adrian Veidt (him too, a former superhero) are combining their efforts in a furious attempt to create and harness a new source of power to combat the earth's energy crisis as it seems to be the root cause of the cold war in an alternate era 1985. The director Zack Snyder updated the original graphic novel's source story to be more "timely" with today. He felt that a global oil crisis would really be the origin of problems between nations.
As I watched the film and Dr. Manhattan work around the clock to create a new power source, the only thing that kept popping into my mind is why aren't we there yet? Granted, in our reality, there's no Dr. Manhattan walking around as a nuclear center but we're the people that managed to create the power of a nuclear explosion, we've put men, women and chimpanzees into space, and we've created a much smaller world because of computers and the internet. And yet here we are, in the year 2009, still dependent on fossil fuels - a finite source of energy. It seems laughable that we can't figure out a mass-marketable way of harnessing that giant globule of solar energy above us yet, or figured out something that doesn't require fossil fuels at its core, doesn't it?
I know I can't look at cartoons, science-fiction and comic books to give me an idea of the future. I mean, if I did, we'd be in flying cars that run on garbage like on the Jetsons and giant transforming robots would have been living amongst for almost a decade, but I honestly thought we'd be further along than where we are today with respect to energy harvesting. Don't get me wrong, I think in the last 5 to 10 years, we've made great steps, but in my opinion, we should have been taking those steps 20 years ago.
Fantasy has always been to writers a way of expressing desires through imagination. That's why Gene Roddenberry dreamed we'd be exploring space as a global initiative in April of 2063 because we'd have the energy technology to do it. According to my watch, that would make me 83 years old. Hopefully, between now and then, we go warp speed towards making that technology a reality. Til then, its back to my comic books.
