GreenTech Week in Review

The news this week in the greentech sector is all about monitoring and connectivity. New products, applications, and business plans are providing extra capital, more control, operational insights —and cutting-edge, click-through convenience.  

If you’re drowning in water bills, now there’s a free app for that! California-based Cyber-Rain, a provider of Smart Sprinkler controller systems, recently launched a green home (and green lawn!) automation tool, called XCI Cloud. With millions of gallons of water wasted annually because plants get drenched when they don't need to be, this Internet-based smart sprinkler controller system reduces landscape water usage by as much as 70 percent by automatically adjusting for local weather conditions. Or take the controls yourself, through a dashboard-based portal or an iPhone (News - Alert) app, to create efficient watering schedules, and determine how much water (and money) you are saving.

Did you leave some lights on when you left the house?  No need to worry or even remember! Now that Smart Lighting networks are coming to market, even “dim bulbs” like us can flip the on- or off- switch – remotely – from our smart phones, tablets, PCs, or TVs. The new GreenChip smart lighting solution from NXP Semiconductors, based in The Netherlands, can assign every light bulb its own unique Internet IP address.  And now, the possibilities are endless: If you can connect to the Internet, you can also connect to dozens, even hundreds, of lights (or appliances) – for energy savings, to check on power consumption levels, or to monitor your household for any problems. The consumer-ready, Internet-enabled solution was showcased by NXP and its two partners, Ohio-based TCP and Singapore-based GreenWave Reality, at LightFair International, from May 17 through 19 in Philadelphia.

Be an office hero by cutting the overhead, literally.  Lighting control systems are a good investment because they can save energy automatically when offices are vacant. But more than 60 percent of U.S. commercial buildings have not installed these systems—mainly because retrofitting a lighting control system into an existing building can be expensive, requiring new wiring and high labor costs. To overcome this challenge, light technology provider Hubbell has launched the wiHUBB Wireless Distributed Lighting Control System—a peer-to-peer, self-organizing and self-healing mesh network of fixture modules, occupancy/vacancy sensors, daylight harvesting sensors, and switch stations designed specifically for indoor and outdoor lighting applications. It has wireless control technology built in at the factory, with no field installation required.

Say happy birthday to JouleX, a year-old enterprise energy management firm based in Atlanta. The company has just launched a Data Center Manager solution, specifically aimed at the energy needs of data center operators . Many data centers waste as much as 50 percent of the energy they consume, largely because about one-third of today’s servers consume 80 percent of their rated power but process at less than 30 percent of their capacity. That’s significant waste that can be turned into hard dollar savings. How does Joulex deliver such savings? By offering a network-based system that does not require unwieldy software end-device agents. Joulex solutions operate as a network-attached device and monitor the entire network for energy consumption. Such solutions allow companies to monitor individual devices and the company to run things on or off.

New York-based Pall Corporation has unveiled a new monitoring system of another type: It tracks emissions from single metals, such as mercury, or multiple metals in on-stack and ambient applications such as incinerators, coal-fired power plants, smelters, cement kilns, and air quality monitoring units.  Equipped with a micro porous filtration membrane, the Xact system uses nondestructive, energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence to quantify heavy metal particles deposited on the membrane. The data produced enables the demonstration of environmental regulatory compliance, research of health effects from ambient metals, and the location of sources of metals in specific air sheds.

You can monitor the progress of a risky shipment of rare earth ore from Mongolia to South Korea via live satellite feed on the websites of California- based Green Technology Solutions and its partner, Rare Earth Exporters of Mongolia. Mongolia possesses substantial deposits of ores that are valuable to the United States and its allies because they are needed for the production of defense systems and weapons, flat-screen TVs, Apple (News - Alert) iPads, wind turbines, mobile phones, and more. Currently, China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earths. However, over the past year, it has radically reduced exports, creating fears of a shortage. Such concerns have prompted companion bills in the U.S. Congress to boost the country's rare-earth industry. However, GTSO CEO John Shearer has stated, “We are not waiting … to help solve this worldwide supply crisis.” He says he’s taking on the perilous project “at a deliberate, but quick, cadence to both solve and capitalize on the current crisis conditions in the rare earth supply sector.”

If you’ve been monitoring the daily news, you’ve heard about the proposed carbon tax in Australia. On May 16, four eco-activists from Rising Tide scaled the walls of Australian Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Greg Combet’s electorate office in Canberra, to draw attention to issues related to the carbon tax and how resulting revenue will be spent. The Rising Tide activists who climbed Combet’s walls unfurled a banner saying ‘‘Make Polluters Pay, Fund Renewable Energy.’’ They also placed solar panels on the roof. Police said the protest lasted about two hours and that the activists complied with orders to remove the banners and leave the premises.  No arrests were made.

And finally, we’re all monitoring the recovery in Japan in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11. With abysmal first quarter results and a disrupted supply chain, the Panasonic Corp. is planning to trim its workforce by about 17,000 jobs. But the company’s outlook remains optimistic—and it has a brand-new business objective, according to President Fumio Ohtsubo: To become “the number -one green innovation company in the electronics industry” by 2018. If Panasonic (News - Alert) sticks to producing audiovisual and white goods, then “our future growth will be limited,” Ohtsubo told reporters in Tokyo. The new thinking on energy represents a “big chance” for the company, Ohtsubo said.