energy

Weeks after coming under fire from Greenpeace advocates for using excessive energy for cloud computing, Microsoft announced it will become carbon neutral across all of its operations starting July 1.

"It's the right thing to do. And it's also an opportunity to promote positive change, as the world transitions to new ways of using energy and managing natural resources," Microsoft's chief operating officer Kevin Turner said in a blog post yesterday. "That's why today, Microsoft is taking a significant step to further reduce our environmental footprint."

July marks the beginning of the … Read more

Honeywell today summarily denied counterclaims in a patent infringement suit it filed against thermostat startup Nest Labs.

In a court filing, Honeywell stood by its claims that Nest infringed on its numerous patents in programmable thermostats. The suit was first filed against Nest in February.

Nest responded to the suit in April, saying that Honeywell's seemingly broad patents are "hopelessly invalid" and said Honeywell is trying to stifle innovation.

In today's filing, Honeywell fired back, saying the thermostat heavyweight intends to vigorously defend its intellectual property. The filing said Nest Labs' counter claims are "irrelevant … Read more

It's time for your DVR to get as smart as your iPad. If designers get it right, energy use from household electronics will stay under control without sacrifices in features.

By necessity, mobile devices, such as tablets and smart phones, need to be clever about power, just like an efficient hybrid car uses many tricks, such as turning the engine off when idle, to sip less gas.

By contrast, always-on electronics devices, such as set-top boxes, DVRs or often game consoles, operate as if they were going top speed at all times. As more devices in the home, such … Read more

On the day Bloom Energy officially opened shop on the East Coast, the company's CEO confirmed Bloom will supply fuel cells to Apple's North Carolina data center.

Bloom Energy today is breaking ground on a factory in Newark, Del., to build its Bloom Energy Servers, or Bloom Boxes, which produce electricity from natural gas or biogas.

The facility, which was a former Chrysler plant, will have the capacity to turn out 1,000 Bloom Boxes a year, Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar said in an interview with CNET. Each fuel cell, which is the size of few … Read more

In a new twist on using waste for energy, Microsoft is designing a data center powered by biogas, the gas given off from landfills and other sources.

The company last week further detailed its Data Plant experiment, an idea to bring more reliability to its data centers and lower pollution from them.

Fuel cells would supply power to the data center and make it independent from the grid, said Christian Belady, general manager of Data Center Services in a blog post last week. In theory, having on-site power allows a data center operator to use the electric grid as bac … Read more

Here's something you can thank Steve Jobs for: a fatter electricity bill.

A dive into the data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) spells out what many of us intuitively know: the explosion in the number of computer gadgets and TVs has dramatically shifted the balance of household electricity over the years.

Even the rapid technology change of the Internet revolution can't compare to the always plugged-in lifestyle that's crept up on us through iPods, e-books, smartphones, DVRs, and the like. Electronics represented about 7.2 percent of household electricity use in 2001 and are … Read more

Laser weapons haven't exactly lit the world on fire yet. And that's a big part of what's holding them back.

That's one of the main conclusions of a new report, "Changing the Game: the Promise of Directed-Energy Weapons," just out from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on national security and military matters.

The report comes at a low ebb in the enthusiasm for directed-energy weapons -- futuristic gear that produces "a beam of concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles." That includes … Read more

A video from Altaeros Energies shows a novel vision for powering remote locations.

The wind energy startup released a video this week of its prototype airborne wind turbine during its first test run in Maine earlier this year. The donut-shaped blimp has a spinning fan at its center, and it's tethered to a base station by cables that carry electricity from the blimp to the local grid.

The turbine is designed for remote villages or industrial sites where there isn't grid power and for places such as military outposts that need to rely on diesel generators.

With the … Read more

Concerned about the Earth or just your electric bill? Verde is an iPad app that has you tally up the electrical appliances in your home, from your refrigerator and HDTV to iPods and lightbulbs. The app costs $4.99 but is being offered for free until Earth Day, April 22.

Launch the app, select your climate zone, and then Verde will either estimate your electricity rate or let you enter your own per kilowatt hour (kWh) figure, which you can find on your electric bill. After settling on a kWh number, you'll then want to walk through your home … Read more