Did some updating on the website today, also in the process of adding a 'Green Pages' Green Business Directory section.

-Reddog

ReLED Systems, introduced in 2007, emerged from over twenty-five years of experience developing pioneering lighting products. Continuing this tradition, Bartco Lighting’s new division has created a progressive line of LED-based components and luminaires for this fastest growing segment of the lighting industry. ReLED Systems offers contemporary, cutting edge products for the LED of today and will continue to engineer evolving products for future generations of diodes. Keeping pace with advances in solid state technology, our components and luminaires will continue to capitalize on LED’s improved performance and environmental advantages. ReLED Systems is focused on the rapidly developing and expanding realm of solid state lighting and dedicated to the creation of quality fixtures for display, architectural, task and general illumination.

The first ReLED Systems product offering is the Re-LT5 LED Component System. This solid state fluorescent replacement consists of high brightness diodes packaged in standard fluorescent lamp formats, coupled with a low profile driver. The durable, extruded aluminum Re-LT5 LED lamp conforms to the dimensions of a linear T5 lamp and installs into fluorescent G5 base lamp holders just as easily. Likewise, the electronic Re-DR Driver installs as simply as a fluorescent ballast. The strait-forward design of the components simplifies the utilization of LED technology into retrofit and new construction applications. Realize the benefits of solid state lighting such as low energy consumption, long lamp life, wide operating temperature range and no UV emissions with minimal effort.
[Submitted by ReLED Systems]

There are some personal wind turbines floating around, but they are very expensive, heavy and quite inefficient. Ben Storan, an Irish Industrial Design student, thought there could be more done. So he made something different. Something that has brought him the 2007 Sustainability Award, £3000 and a lot of publicity.

His wind turbine design adopts a non-standard, vertical rotation. This and the lightweight materials allow for a higher efficiency. What it does is that, by having a slow rotation, it can convert turbulent winds into energy. The conventional wind turbines can only create energy from constant, linear winds, less likely to be found in urban environments.

The inventor stated that his inspiration came from being born and living in Western Ireland, which has very windy weather. He the realised the great potential offered by it. The final idea was born after seeing a spinning clothes line.

Similarily sized conventional turbines claim to convert a 12m/s wind into 1kW of power, but usually only manage to squeeze out 40% of that. This turbine can realistically bring 1.2kW in similar conditions.



Let’s hope that all the publicity will help Ben turn his idea into reality, and that we’ll soon be able to get one (or more) of these. Via TreeHugger.

OSLO -- The world's first floating wind turbine could be generating electricity in the North Sea in 2009 under a research pact on Monday between Norwegian energy group Norsk Hydro and German engineering firm Siemens.

Floating wind turbines would represent a technological breakthrough for offshore power generation, which has had to rely on shallow sites for turbines installed on the seabed.

"It's attractive to have windmills out at sea, out of sight of land, away from birds' migration routes," said Alexandra Bech Gjoerv, head of Hydro's New Energy division at a signing ceremony to develop floating wind turbine technology.

"We want to build the world's first offshore floating windmill," Bech Gjoerv said. "We want to produce a lot of energy, out of sight."

Under the plan, Hydro will combine its knowledge of floating installations, such as North Sea loading buoys for oil tankers, with Siemens' expertise in building turbines, both on land and standing in shallow waters offshore.

Floating wind turbines are more costly than on land but could supply power both to offshore oil or gas platforms or to coastal cities, cutting emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and defusing objections that turbines are eyesores.

Hydro said a prototype, costing 200 million crowns ($33.64 million), could be in place in the North Sea in 2009 assuming the firm agreed funding this year. The timetable is two years' later than hoped when Hydro unveiled a floating design in 2005.

If tests of the 5 megawatt wind turbine were successful, a small offshore wind park could be built around 2013-14. Siemens said it would spend several million euros (dollars) on the research project, on which Hydro has already spent 30 million crowns.

DANISH PARK

A Siemens unit built the first offshore wind park in 1991, with turbines standing on the seabed off Copenhagen.

"Windmills standing in waters deeper than about 30 metres become prohibitively expensive," said Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology officer of Siemens' wind power unit. Hydro's "is the most elegant and simple solution we have seen."

Hydro's design is an upright steel tube with a concrete base about 200 metres (660 feet) long with 80 metres jutting above the water and three blades 60 metres long.

The wind turbine is tied to the seabed by three cables to keep it steady in seas where waves can be 30 metres (100 ft) high. Hydro reckons it can work in waters 700 metres deep.

Stiesdal said other models for wind turbines at sea relied on more complex designs such as giant tripods mounted on the seabed or turbines mounted on floating boat-like structures.

Bech Gjoerv said Hydro hoped that generation costs from a floating wind turbine could be cut in the long term to 0.6 crowns ($0.109) per kilowatt hour, comparable with wind turbines on land.

Source: Reuters

Today Google.org is launching an exciting project that offers a glimpse of a smarter energy future: cars that plug into an electric grid powered by solar energy. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (“plug-in hybrids”) can achieve 70 -100 miles per gallon, quadrupling the fuel economy of the average car on the road today (~20 mpg). As we demonstrated at today’s event, plug-in hybrids can sell power back to the electric grid when it's needed most through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology

As you may know, one of Google.org's core missions is to address climate change. In the U.S., transportation contributes about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions –- with more than 60 percent of those emissions coming from personal vehicles. By accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrids and vehicle-to-grid ("V2G") technologies, this new project, RechargeIT.org, aims to reduce emissions and dependence on oil while promoting clean energy technologies and increasing consumer choice. Linking the U.S. transportation system to the electricity grid maximizes the efficiency of our energy system. From these efforts, we believe the environment will benefit -- and consumers will have more choices to fuel their cars.

We've been working with Google engineers and Hymotion/A123Systems to build a small fleet of plug-in hybrids, adding an external plug and additional batteries to a regular hybrid car so that it runs on electricity with gasoline (or even better, biofuels) to extend the driving range for longer trips. Here's what it looks like:



Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a "safety net." Our goal is to demonstrate the plug-in hybrid and V2G technology, get people excited about having their own plug-in hybrid, and encourage car companies to start building them soon.

In the preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30+ mpg higher than that of the regular hybrids. In conjunction with Pacific Gas and Electric, we also demonstrated the bidirectional flow of electricity through V2G technology, and have awarded $1 million in grants and announced plans for a $10 million request for proposals (RFP) to fund development, adoption and commercialization of plug-ins, fully electric cars and related vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. (Here's the full release.)

As for Google Inc., today the solar panel installation we announced last October is now producing clean, renewable electricity for our Mountain View, CA headquarters.



The system will offset peak electricity consumption at the solar powered offices and the newly constructed solar carports have charging stations for the plug-in hybrids. At 1.6 megawatts -- with an electricity output capable of powering approximately 1,000 average California homes -- the Google project is the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S. to date, and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. To see how much electricity these panels are producing right now, visit our new performance monitoring site.

To learn more about the initiative, we encourage you to explore the rest of RechargeIT.org. And to see what others are saying about plug-in hybrids and V2G technology, be sure to watch this video.

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