LED Lighting — one step further

LED lighting is the future. This is going to reduce our electric consumption in a big way. We’re using LEDs in bike lights, flash lights and stop lights, but because of various challenges, we haven’t reached the point where we can use them everywhere in our houses. This article in the NYTimes shows and interesting concept to solve one of the challenges — heat.

Because LED light sources generate all their heat through the rear, manufacturers are adding heat sinks to dramatically increase the surface area and let the heat dissipate rapidly. Without them, the LED fixture would lose its color accuracy and have a dramatically shortened life.

I love the track lighting concept — it looks good.

Philippe Starck Wind Turbine

Designer Philippe Starck created a fancy looking wind turbine that will sell for as little as $750 this fall. You can be the talk of your neighborhood with this thing on your roof, as it actually provides energy to your home and saves up to 80% of your electric bill every month. Sniffs Starck:

“Imagine a Saturday afternoon, and a guy going stupidly to the supermarket to buy a useless gadget,” Mr. Starck said. “He sees a really sexy object. ‘Oh my God, it’s beautiful. How much does it cost? Five hundred euros? That’s almost what I’d spend on a useless gadget.’ He brings the windmill home, goes to his roof, and 15 minutes later he sees it turning and producing energy. Wow!”

These turbines come in stainless steel, bright orange or a transparent plastic that will be almost invisible on your roof.

Reducing Energy Bill to $0 a Month

Here’s a guy who is totally off the power grid, with all the modern day amenities, but living in a solar-hydrogen and geo-thermally powered home.

On sunny days, solar panels on the roof of Strizki’s detached garage generate more than enough electricity to power his home. The excess electricity powers a device inside the garage called an electrolyzer, which transforms a tank of water into its base elements – oxygen and hydrogen.

The final piece of the equation is “The New Jersey Genesis,” a hydrogen fuel-cell car Strizki helped design and now maintains for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. He can fill up the Genesis with hydrogen from his electrolyzer and drive it pollution free.

It’s so successful that Johnny Depp is using the technology to power his Caribbean Island.

Standby Power – leaky electricity

All those devices on stand-by, like your microwave, DVD player and TV, are idol using power even when they’re not in use. The typical microwave uses more power in stand-by then when in use. Sure, when it’s cooking something it uses 100 times the amount of energy that it takes to power the digital clock. However, you’re cooking only 1% of the time and the digital clock always running.

According to the Ecomomist

…(A) study which estimated that standby power accounted for approximately 5% of total residential electricity consumption in America, “adding up to more than $3 billion in annual energy costs”. According to America’s Department of Energy, national residential electricity consumption in 2004 was 1.29 billion megawatt hours (MWh)—5% of which is 64m MWh. The wasted energy, in other words, is equivalent to the output of 18 typical power stations.

It turns out that the 5% was an estimation. When they actually went into homes and tested the amount of power being used by devices in standby mode — the numbers ranged from 7% to 13% for a typical western household! Imagine that, up to 13% of the electricity in America is being used while nobody is using the devices.

Wind Farm Potential in America

Here’s a guy who believes wind can reduce our dependency on gasoline by 38% in the next ten years. The video on the front page of his web site outlines his plan. Basically, he’s pushing wind power to relieve the electric grid from using all our natural gas, and then using the (domestic) natural gas to power vehicles like cars, trucks and buses.

The Department of Energy reports that 20% of America’s electricity can come from wind. Look at how big that wind turbine is. They are 410 feet tall and the blades span 148 feet in length. In one year, a 3-megawatt wind turbine like this produces as much energy as 12,000 barrels of imported oil.

Wind power already accounts for 48 billion kWh of electricity a year in the United States — enough to serve more than 4.5 million households. That is still only about 1% of current demand, but the potential of wind is much greater.

A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over — even if only 20% of wind power could be captured.

His map shows that the wind is blowing hard right in the middle of the country, where the red is. These are the prime areas for capturing the electricity.

I’m not sure how realistic this plan is. Some people say that we’ll have to switch over to a DC grid to transmit wind power over long distances. I’m not sure this can be accomplished in the 10 years he’s outlining. Still, it does have some interesting statistics on that site.

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