Jagdish Sunday, 28th of February 2010 at 04:00:20 PM
While I write this blog post the serviceman came and took away the faulty Inverter from my home in Bangalore, the silicon alley of India. In this hitech city there are constant power cuts and in this month it has gone up to 4 Hours a day. The UPS with battery sells like hot cakes so that affluent home owners can get their fans running when the local utility BESCOM stops the power supply. Large IT companies use highly polluting and energy inefficient generator sets, guzzling huge amounts of fuel. I wish I could get off the public power grid and generate my own power and live happily ever after. That is still a pipe dream as the current technologies using clean energy sources like Solar and Bio are very expensive and also very inefficient.
When I saw the press release of BloomEnergy, a new Silicon Valley startup whose CEO Sridhar, an emigrant from India indicated that with his new Solid Fuel cell technology his Bloom boxes will help us get off that grid. The first customer trying his boxes is Google who has been using it for the last 18 months to power one of its data centers. So what is this new technology? How is it different?
Solid fuel cells have been used for a long time now in various space technologies by organizations like NASA, the difference being that this time around the technology does not use expensive metals or corrosive liquids but inexpensive sand. Yes, sand gets transformed into a ceramic sheet which gets coated and becomes the core of the solid fuel cell. The bloom box which is of the size of a refrigerator could power up to four houses in Bangalore.
One of the analogies I liked is bloom boxes could do what Laptops did to large computers and mobile phone did to landline phones. Literally make you self sufficient.
Watch this video as Sridhar demonstrates the use of his technology and the companies which are trying it out.
The technology is yet to be commercialized and I am hoping that Sridhar and team will be able to keep the costs down to the level people in Asian countries will be able to afford it.
sneha Wednesday, 24th of February 2010 at 03:43:34 AM
Companies today are realising that they need to be aware of how ‘Green’ they really are. There is consciousness among corporate that green is the way to go. All around us there is talk about companies not only looking at reducing their own carbon footprint, but also that of their clients. A number of IT leaders are introducing innovations in their products to ensure that they are low emitters of carbon. Well here is a simple solutions by one such company called ‘GREENTRAC’ that help you save your business energy cost and carbon emission.
Reduce PC Energy Consumption.
Meet Green IT Targets.
Save Money
An enterprise’s PC fleet generally accounts for between one-third and half of the IT energy use, with the remainder used by printers, PABX, servers and the data centre. Savings achievable from the PC fleet can be almost equal to the total data centre energy use!
Current generation power management tools generally do not recognize the individual as the most appropriate form of power management decision making and tend to be IT-centric.
Users and groups do not receive comparative information allowing them to understand and compare their PC energy efficiency efforts to others, as individuals or as groups.
Current generation PC power management tools tend to be driven by system administrators on a batch basis and not by the users in real time.
Users do not currently receive the necessary acknowledgment or feedback regarding their individual efforts in supporting the sustainability initiatives within their enterprise.
For many Greentrac users, even enterprises using PC shutdown products, the savings from the PC fleet represented 10% - 40% of total enterprise green initiatives last year and Greentrac almost always achieved the fastest payback of any initiative.
Here is how Greentrac Works
Step One: Deployment.
Greentrac appliance is deployed. This usually takes less than one hour.
Step Two: Install Client Software.
Desktop Monitoring Agents (DMAs) are deployed to all workstation PCs, laptops and Macs.
DMAs are ultra-light - less than 300KB compared with 20MB or larger for traditional agents.
Step Three: Get The Results.
Workstation DMA provides profile (CPU, speed, memory, disks, monitors) to appliance upon installation.
Subsequently the DMA provides summary operating data required to calculate energy use on a preset interval (e.g. every 1 minute) using almost no network resources.
Appliance calculates energy use based on PC profile and updates energy, energy cost and CO2 used by PC in real time. Information is available to users in real time from appliance portal.
So ready to go green and make a difference to the world?
praveen Monday, 22nd of February 2010 at 10:52:13 AM
Wanted to share with you about a recently conducted awareness campaign for Rural School students in the dense forest region of Karnataka; Biligiri Rangana Forest Range which I was lucky to be part of. Ashwin who heads the “Growing Wild” organization came down to Injoos and spoke to us regarding this awareness campaign and the Injoos team members got kicked and decided to join hands for this noble cause.
Belive me, those 3 days that I spent at the the awareness camp among the rural school students was one of the best days in my life. We split up into 2 teams 4 in each to cover wider area. Talking about the response from the students, it was unexpected. We had a plan to cover over 50 schools that was in and around the Biligiri Rangana Forest range and spend around 15 minutes at each school to convey our thoughts but, seeing the response from the students and their willingness to save our forests we could not stop ourselves from spending more time with the students interacting and answering their questions and queries. We were amazed to see and hear from students the amount of information that they knew about the forests and the animals living within those forests and not to mention their willingness to save the forests.
“We have got a strong response from various other school children around other sanctuaries like Nagarahole Forest Range, Bandipur Forest Range etc to which the information is being conveyed in the same way from past few years.. “This was the 1st strong and successful effort to convey information on the conservation of forest around the Biligiri Rangana forest range..” shared one of the ‘Growing Wild’ member enthusiastically.
As per the latest state of forests report by the Forest Survey of India the actual forest cover of India is 19.27% of the geographic area, corresponding to 63.3 million hectors. In the absolute term, out of the 63 million hectors of forests an area of around 3.73 million can be presumed to be affected by fires annually. This figures are alarming as 3.73 million hectors of forest cannot be regrown in few years.
Early this year a strong roar across the country was sounded to save the national animal of our country, for the lovers of the wild and the creatures living within it, this news was a bolt of fire that had hit their life as if a huge forest fire had burst out. Until 1970 poaching was legal across India and Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 was enforced to ban hunting. Until a century back there were more than 40,000 odd tigers roaming across India alone which was around 60% of the complete world’s tiger population and now the count is less that 1400. Alarming isn’t it.?
pramodh Monday, 15th of February 2010 at 09:39:53 AM
A news item appeared in Times of India on Feb 1 about a green initiative by Assystem, a company in 19 countries and with 10,000 employees. The first line screamed about being the change that people wanted to be. Well, looked like there were lot of motivated employees, who took initiative to “change our system not by just talking about it but by doing something,” and “a simple approach to contribute to the society by doing things which are well in our control.”
The initiative has:
Got people to take oath,
Demonstration of e-bike,
Designing an eco-friendly car
Rarely take print-outs,
Awareness on e-waste,
Established an e-waste bin,
Quodos to all who are involved in this initiative. I am with you. Being inquisitive, I searched for the Company website and started looking for more information about the green initiative. Well it was a shock to me. The News page was “Under Construction.” Could not believe that an organisation with 10,000 employees did not have one to update their best “Online Asset” they had, and in-turn loose an opportunity to capitalize the event.
In this era of interactive media like the internet, this was one big opportunity that Assystem missed.
The reason for writing about this event is that most of the times, employees are ready for change. Not just ready, they embrace change. But it’s the leadership that takes it’s time, and stays put in comfort zones.
Let’s look at what more could be done for a green earth.
Use less paper,
Travel less,
Yes two simple things. We can save a lot of greenery.
If businesses start doing these two things, there may be substantial efforts that they would have put for a green initiative. Not to say about the revenue saved from these. You may ask what’s are alternative ? There are new ways of working.
How ? The key to today’s businesses is having the right information at the right time. Putting the information contextually, and making it available for people across the globe, in one seamless way for accessing from the internet can make a lot of difference. Whether it’s the news, blog posts, events, meetings, documents and library resources, project management and real-time web conference, having access to all these from one online place is important.
Sunday, 28th of February 2010 at 04:00:20 PM
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