I can’t quite explain how excited I am by the partnership between Toyota and Tesla. Not just because I’m a big fan of uberGeek EV cars, but because Fremont, CA is my hometown and the shutdown of the NUMI plant was devastating. Under the partnership announced late today, the two companies will develop electric vehicles and components, including a Toyota EV driven by a Tesla drivetrain. Tesla Motors also will invest “a couple of hundred million dollars” retooling a shuttered Toyota factory to build the Model S sedan.

The partnership gives Toyota — which until now has shown little public interest in EVs — access to proven EV technology and gives Tesla a crash course in engineering and building a mass-market car. That expertise will serve Tesla well as it scrambles to build the Model S, a car it keeps promising to have on the road in 2012.

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As data centers require ever more power to operate, they’re increasingly being located near existing power generation or cooling resources. One largely untapped source of energy, however, is the methane generated by manure on farms around the world. If released into the atmosphere, methane is 21 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide. But it can be captured and used to power electrical generators. The HP ASME paper shows how a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could generate 1MW of electricity, enough to power a typical modern data center and still support other needs on the farm.

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LED, or Light Emitting Diode, light sources have been all the rage recently. Advancements in LED technology have allowed engineers to make them brighter, lighter, longer-lasting, and far more eco-friendly than even the much-touted CFL (Compact Fluorescent Light) units that have become THE de-facto earth-saving, energy-efficient, user-friendly green tech of choice for the average Joe. However, though the CFL is undoubtedly more energy-efficient than its incandescent counterpart (replacing 10 standard 120 watt incandescent bulbs in an average American home with the equivalent of CFLs would save more than 20 Kilowatt Hours a day) there have been some serious drawback to the CFL including a toxic composition, reduced life in enclosed areas, light temperature and fragility. — A LED light, which uses even less power than a CFL, generates far less heat than any other lighting technology, lasts tens of thousands of hours and is incredibly durable while bypassing concerns about toxicity and light quality, would seem to be the answer to our eco-prayers.

Indeed, as the price of LED lighting has gone down, we’ve seen them used in more and more applications throughout the tech world. They’ve made a splash in everything from ambiance strips to car headlights to LCD backlighting. IT would seem that they’re the future of energy-efficient lighting… Except for one thing…

They cause DEATH

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From Wired: “Dutch airline KLM has made the latest step in what appears to be a rush by airlines to demonstrate the use of alternative fuels. The airline made what it is calling the first passenger flight using biofuel.” There are a few notable caveats to this story. First, this wasn’t a flight from the regular schedule. This was a short trip specifically setup for PR. Second, this was an exceptionally SHORT flight for a 747, usually used for long-haul routes. Third, only one of four engines was being powered by a mix of 50/50 bio/aviation fuel.

Yes, this is a publicity stunt brought about by the increasing volume of criticism upon the airborne industries that their business model depends on dirty energy, but that’s not necessarily bad. Any movement towards a use of renewable resources is a good thing.

For many Americans the recession means that we reduce or eliminate “disposable income” from our budget. For the most at-risk and vulnerable, the hard economic times have forced serious cutbacks even in the things that the majority of us would consider “needs” and not “wants.” For the most unfortunate of us, the recession has cost a job, a car, a home or perhaps made health-care unobtainable except in the most dire of circumstances.

Still, as hard-hit as some of us might be by the global economic meltdown, could it ever be so bad for us in this country that our lives might hang in the balance of what millions in another country throw away and wash down the drain?

I’m writing of soap… that’s right… soap. You know, that stuff that you squirt on your hands before you eat or after you use the restroom. The slowly dissolving bar of slippery stuff that helps you wash off the day’s grime and muck. The wonderful concoction of lard, lye, and perfume that is the very picture of clean. Having soap in the US, in whatever form it might be found, is a basic resource. We have so much of it that we throw it away a when the bar gets too small or because it had been used, no matter how briefly. But what if you lived in a part of the world where the lack of soap has caused millions of deaths from diseases that could have easily been avoided with just the soap we toss because our hotel stay has ended?

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It’s an oft-lamented fact in the tech world that the batteries which power our gadgets and gizmos have not followed Moore’s Lawand expanded their capacity to match the demand of an ever-increasing array of power-hungry devices. Quite simply, we’ve having a hard time squeezing more power into small spaces and what successes we do have in creating high-density batteries are tempered by side-effects like exploding batteries and heavy metals.

Well… what if the next battery for your device wasn’t actually a battery?

From ars technica: “Schindall, who had spent some time away from academics, explained that during his first stint at MIT, a capacitor that could hold 350 Farads would have filled the whole stage. Before he returned, someone working on fuel cells had accidentally produced the first ultracapacitor. Now, with refinements, he was able to walk on stage with a 350 Farad ultracapacitor that was about the size of a D battery. The current generation of devices use activated carbon to hold charges, as its highly complex topology creates a lot of surface area across which charge differences can build up.

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Shuffling through my inbox I happened across a press release for some new Bar Speakers from iLive. I’m not much of a uberAudio geek, but there was something about the design and specs of these units that caught my attention.

The iT319B Live Bar Speaker is a all-in-one home audio/home theater system for those who are looking for multifunctionality in a small package. It includes a side-mounted, slot-loading optical drive that can read DVDs, CDs and JPEG disks. The iT319B includes an HDMI out to pump your digital audio and video directly into your TV with a minimal amount of fuss and signal noise, AND an upconverting chip that raises regular DVDs to high-def theater pieces.

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From Wired.com: Toyota’s third-gen Prius is already a huge hit in Japan, and the automaker plans to lease a plug-in version to corporate and municipal customers by the end of the year.

Just 200 are slated for release in Japan under a joint program with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry aimed at promoting the adoption of plug-in hybrids and EVs. Although the new Prius – like all those that came before – uses a nickel metal hydride battery, the plug-in features a lithium-ion pack. … We aren’t being left out of the experiment. Toyota plans to send 150 plug-in hybrids to the United States. Still more are slated for Europe.

From CNET: “What surprised us was that the carbon dioxide savings were so small,” Viviane Raddatz, vehicle expert at WWF Germany, said in a phone interview from Berlin.

In a best-case scenario, the WWF assumes that the 1 million electric cars or plug-in vehicles would be running on renewable electricity and used at maximum mileage. Electric vehicles do not yet have the range of regular cars.

The carbon dioxide emission reductions from these 1 million electrical vehicles in Germany’s transportation sector would be only 1 percent, according to the study, and overall national carbon dioxide emissions would only be cut by 0.1 percent. “That is not a very big deal,” Raddatz said, adding that “it is not going to help us out of the transportation emission mess.”

This might sound surprising, but it really shouldn’t be. The internal combustion engine has lasted so long as the primary power plant of our means of conveyance because of two primary reasons: efficiency and energy density. Simply put, having the convienence of a tank of fuel from which you can extract large amounts of energy on-the-fly (as opposed to batteries which must store that energy in relatively inefficience cells) is more efficient than the alternatives on the macro level. Sure, regenerative braking and an engine that runs in the sweet spot “power band” (as in the Prius) is more efficient on the micro level, but once you start thinking about fleets of such cars converting to plug-in or pure electric, that micro efficiency leads to a macro headache.

This isn’t to say that you SHOULDN’T own a more fuel efficient vehicle or even take the plunge and buy a hybrid/plug-in/electric, but you should understand that we still have a long way to go before we can say that our driving is clean.

From the Chicago Tribune: “More than 57,000 tons of spent fuel rods already are stored next to reactors, just a few yards away from containment buildings where they once generated nuclear-heated steam to drive massive electrical turbines. More than 7,100 tons are stored in Illinois, including at the Zion facility in Chicago’s northern suburbs.

The lack of a permanent solution poses a serious challenge to the industry’s plans to build more than 30 new reactors. Existing nuclear plants already produce 2,000 tons of the long-lived waste each year, most of which is moved into pools of chilled water that allow the spent—but still highly lethal—uranium-235 to slowly and safely decay.

But containment pools never were intended to store all of the spent fuel that a reactor creates. The idea was that the cool water would stabilize the enriched uranium until it could be sent to a reprocessing plant or stored in a centralized location.”

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For me, the most interesting tidbit about this stories and others like it isn’t the idea that Data Centers cn run off of alternative energy, we’ve know that for a while now… Rather, it’s that as we move towards taking these constant, high-power loads off the grid, it becomes cost-effective to invest in technologies that use less power to begin with. In other words, if you are going to invest millions of dollars in making your Data Center a solar/wind/hydro powered marvel, you’re probably going to first put a few hundred thousand towards getting the most energy efficient servers, switches,cooling, etc. — The trickle-down effect of that investment will go far beyond the miniscule number of solar powered D.C.s.

From Greener Computing: “The Observer in Rio Rancho, New Mexico reports that Intel is using an array of 64 Sharp solar panels to generate electricity for a demonstration data center. Marty Sedler, Intel’s director for global utilities and infrastructure, told the newspaper that the deployment will “potentially lead the way for a more aggressive solar program within Intel.”

The solar powers will be used to power data center containers, rather than a traditional data center. The containers use much less power than traditional data centers.”

This is a natural, no-brainer decision… Take an idea from the “greenest” (as in efficient tech) state, roll it out in the “geeniest” (as in tropical) state and see if we can’t make something happen.

With Hawaii, the technology and the plan get a much smaller geographical location, a guaranteed “in bounds” car population and a relatively well-developed electric grid. — I for one am ready to see how this will work.

From the NYTimes: “The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.

The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an effort to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and limited availability.

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, he thinks his company, Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.”

From TheDailyGreen: “California is on pace to recycle nearly 80% of the glass introduced into commerce in 2008, according to the latest statistics — up from 71% in 2007.

Meanwhile, while the U.S. rate of glass recycling is increasing — to 28% in 2007 from 25% — it lags far behind the rate in California.

Why?

According to the Glass Packaging Institute, the industry group for glass container makers, it all has to do with those nickle and dime deposits some states place on glass containers. (That, and targeted initiatives in some states, like Colorado and North Carolina, to require bars and restaurants to do a better job recycling their customer’s detritus.)”

While I welcome the news that California is far-outpacing the recycling efforts of the other states in the union, I have to call BS on the reason that the article presented for the difference. — Having lived in California for most of my life, I know that the deposit on the bottle has very little to do with the 80% recycle rate. Most of us don’t know about or don’t care about the deposit. Rather, it’s a mindset that “recycling is good” that drives us to be green.

Now before you start salivating about hydraulic hybrid technology, it really only works for UPS because they have big truck that are loaded with a bunch of weight and they typically spend all their time in city-traffic.

From Gas 2.0: The UPS hybrid hydraulic truck is a standard-looking 24,000 pound package car, with an EPA-patented diesel series hydraulic hybrid drive attached to the rear axle.

In a series hydraulic hybrid, the conventional drivetrain is replaced with a hydraulic system that stores energy by compressing gas in a chamber using hydraulic fluid. It works in much the same way that a hybrid electric car does — a small, efficient motor generates power which gets stored for later use — only, the way energy is stored in a hydraulic hybrid is in a pressurized chamber rather than in a battery.

Not too long ago “the greens” demonized nuclear power as the ultimate insult to mother nature. Now we’re seeing that the power of the atom may be exactly what the world needs to provide the bulk of our power until we can figure a way to develop alternative energies to the efficiency required. — Shall we learn from the Fins?

From the NY Times: “No one is certain when the plant, which has been plagued by construction delays, will be finished. But whenever it does go into operation, the reactor will be a new cog in the works of Finland’s national energy policy, which seeks to diversify the country’s sources of energy and reduce its historical reliance on Russia for cheap electricity.

The plant is also part of a global trend, as nuclear power’s prospects rise amid concerns about the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions to generate electricity.

The Finns are going first class, building what is called a European Pressurized Reactor, the world’s latest model, which is billed as the safest and most powerful nuclear reactor ever designed. It is the product of a consortium of French and German engineering companies.”

This isn’t a new technology and it definitely isn’t the most high-tech method for cooling a data cente, but it makes up for it’s lack of “ooh and ahh” with a simplicity that is sure to make it better for long-term greening of the data center. Anybody who has an abnormal amount of gear in their home or office knows that often the air outside will be cooler than the exhaust inside. However when dealing with sensitive electronics, especially when that random collection of gear blossoms into a data center filled with millions of dollars worth of technology, just throwing open the window isn’t an option. The “Heat Wheel” is a way of using outside air to cool a data center without having to worry about things like airborne contaminants and humidity.

From DataCenterKnowledge.com: “Proponents of the heat wheel say it improves upon air-side economization (free cooling), the use of outside air to cool servers in the data center. Rather than introducing exterior air directly into the server room, the heat wheel briefly mixes the outside air and exhaust air to creates an “air-to-air” heat exchanger.

“The inside heat from the IT room is still removed via the heat wheel, but there is minimal air transfer between the ambient and the computer room,” explains Uptime Technology BV of the Netherlands. “This system has all the benefits of Airside Economizing, without the exposures of airside economizing like contamination and humidity control.”

Heat wheels have been used for many years in industrial air conditioning, but never in data centers. Like air-side economization, heat wheels could produce significant energy savings by reducting the need to use power-hungry chillers for air conditioning.”