WebProNews

Tag: green tech

  • Google Touts Its Green Tech in “Story of Send”

    If you’ve ever wondered how your email gets from your computer to another inbox, you’re in luck. Google has created a simplistic video showing the basics of how email sent from Gmail travels to its destination. The video is more about how Google has taken extreme measures to lower its impact on the environment, especially at its data centers. There is also an interactive website where you can follow an email’s path, bit by bit, and click on photos and video describing Google’s green tech. The whole project has been dubbed the “Story of Send.”

    Erin Reilly, a member of the Google Green team, posted the video over on the Official Google Blog, where she touts Google’s commitment to mitigating environmental impact and describes the “Story of Send” interactive website. From the blog post:

    We’ve included videos and photos throughout the journey so you can explore certain areas more deeply. For example, if you’re curious what data center servers look like, we’ve included some photos. Or you can watch a video to learn about how we purchase clean energy from wind farms near our data centers. And because technology doesn’t always have to be serious, you might find a vampire or two lurking around or uncover other surprises on the journey.

    Google has evidently gone to great lengths to make sure it limits its impact on the environment. In the “Story of Send” video, Google claims that its data centers use 50% less energy than a “typical” data center. The company also uses “natural” methods to cool servers and, when possible, it purchases electricity from wind farms near data centers. Google also makes the bold claim that, “we are the only internet company to have eliminated our impact on climate change since 2007.”

  • Electric Car Pollution Worse Than Gas?

    Conventional wisdom tells us that berthing car exhaust is bad. It further tells us that electric cars would cut down on emissions and thus be better for the breathing population.

    But, some new studies focusing on China have brought up some challenging observations on that topic. What if electric cars were worse? How could that be?

    Findings from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers show that electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles.

    Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major Chinese cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. What Cherry and his team found defies conventional logic: electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars.

    “An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,” Cherry said. “Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions.”

    Particulate matter includes acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soil or dust particles. It is also generated through the combustion of fossil fuels.

    For electric vehicles, combustion emissions occur where electricity is generated rather than where the vehicle is used. In China, 85 percent of electricity production is from fossil fuels, about 90 percent of that is from coal. The authors discovered that the power generated in China to operate electric vehicles emit fine particles at a much higher rate than gasoline vehicles. However, because the emissions related to the electric vehicles often come from power plants located away from population centers, people breathe in the emissions a lower rate than they do emissions from conventional vehicles.

    The findings also highlight the importance of considering exposures and the proximity of emissions to people when evaluating environmental health impacts for electric vehicles. They also illuminate the distributional impact of moving pollution out of cities. For electric vehicles, about half of the urban emissions are inhaled by rural populations, who generally have lower incomes.

  • Solar Cells That Make More Power

    Scientists have developed a new kind of solar cell which could capture significantly more of the energy from the sun than current cells. These new solar cells could increase the maximum efficiency of solar panels by over 25%, according to scientists from the University of Cambridge.

    Solar panels work by absorbing energy from particles of light, called photons, which then generate electrons to create electricity. Traditional solar cells are only capable of capturing part of the light from the sun and much of the energy of the absorbed light, particularly of the blue photons, is lost as heat. This inability to extract the full energy of all of the different colors of light at once means that traditional solar cells are incapable of converting more than 34% of the available sunlight into electrical power.

    The Cambridge team led by Professor Neil Greenham and Professor Sir Richard Friend has developed a hybrid cell which absorbs red light and harnesses the extra energy of blue light to boost the electrical current. Typically, a solar cell generates a single electron for each photon captured. However, by adding pentacene, an organic semiconductor, the solar cells can generate two electrons for every photon from the blue light spectrum. This could enable the cells to capture 44% of the incoming solar energy.