European industry has maintained its global market position thanks to relatively low energy intensity levels and high renewables penetration, according to a study into the continent’s competitiveness due to be released by the European Commission as part of its clean energy package today (22 January).
Renewable energies “help reduce fuel import costs and contribute to improving the energy trade balance,” says the report by the EU’s economic and financial affairs directorate (DG Ecfin), which EurActiv has seen.
The Department of Sanitation New York and Islington Council in the UK are respectively introducing systems that turn residents’ organic food waste and excess heat from the London Underground tube network into energy to warm households.
A startup called FINsix has developed laptop power adapters that are 75 percent smaller than their conventional counterparts. The technology employed could also be used to improve the efficiency of a wide variety of devices and appliances, including washing machines and air conditioners.
FINsix’s first product, which the company will unveil next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, replaces a conventional charging brick with a device just a little bigger than an ordinary plug. The 65-watt power adapter—which delivers more power than many laptops use—can charge multiple devices at once. It will be available by the middle of next year.
There are over four billion street lights in the world. Almost all of them are high-intensity discharge lights that use mercury vapor or some other toxic substance to create light. All of them require power, and most burn out every two years.
Now, what if all these could become nodes on a sensor network spanning the entire globe?
Bidgely, a startup that enables consumers to monitor and manage their household energy use, announced that it has raised $5 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures. The Sunnyvale, California-based company previously raised a $3 million seed funding round in November 2011 from the venture capital firm, which is known for investing in environmentally-friendly technologies.
Building Robotics, a startup that makes intelligent software systems for office buildings, has raised $1.14 million in a seed round led by Claremont Creek Ventures (CCV), Google Ventures, Formation 8, Navitas Capital, Red Swan Ventures and other angel investors. The Oakland, Calif.-based company says it will use the funds to add expertise in building management, development, back-end operators and user experience design.
A Seattle company called ClearSign Combustion has developed a trick that it says could nearly eliminate key pollutants from power plants and refineries, and make such installations much more efficient. The technique involves electric fields to control the combustion of fuel by manipulating the shape and brightness of flames.
The technology could offer a cheaper way to reduce pollution in poor countries. And because ClearSign’s approach to reducing pollution also reduces the amount of fuel a power plant consumes, it can pay for itself, the company says. The need for better pollution controls is clear now in China, where hazardous pollution has been shutting down schools and roads this week.
It’s hard to save electricity when you don’t know where it’s going. Qualisteo’s Wattseeker reads the fingerprints of electrical systems to make monitoring energy use easier and less costly.
When it comes to saving energy across an industrial or commercial site, the first step is figuring out how much is being used – and where. But monitoring the energy consumption of every appliance or system across such sites is no small feat. Qualisteo, winner of the ACES Energy & Environment Award, set out to simplify that task by developing a device that could measure and control electricity use from a single location.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed an internal combustion engine that emits less than half the CO2 compared to a regular engine without compromising performance. This corresponds to fuel consumption of less than 2.4l per 100km. This natural gas-diesel hybrid engine is based on a system of sophisticated control engineering.
The European Commission has succumbed to heavy lobbying from the electric heating industry and is set to approve an energy labelling scheme that misrepresents its appliances' true efficiency performance, according to environmental and consumers groups.
Around 20 million gas and electric heaters are sold in Europe each year and from 2016, the Commission wanted them to display colour-coded energy performance labels, which have bars ranging from a green ‘A’ to a red ‘G’ class.
