Archive for May 25th, 2010

With a significant portion of items in our houses, the key to getting the most out of them – and being ecologically responsible – is keeping them and using them as long as possible. One exception, of course, is anything that uses electricity. When most people think of energy-efficient appliances, they usually imagine the obvious ones – refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, hot water tanks. But where most households – and most businesses – fail to spot significant potential for energy savings is in their computer equipment. According to some reports, PC ownership worldwide is expected to grow four-fold by 2020, with similar growth expected in ownership of other personal computing devices: smart phones, e-book readers, music players, and tablet computers. On the enterprise side, data centers are growing like weeds, as our business, consumer and personal lives become increasingly digital, and still-developing countries like India grab bigger shares of the business marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

As reported by the Detroit News, Wayne State University will be the site of nation’s first graduate program to train electric car engineers.  Launching in fall 2010, the program will offer a master’s degree in electric vehicle drive engineering, which will support automakers as they transition from traditional combustion engines to electric and electric hybrid engines. Students will learn how to power, put together, design, develop and promote electric and electric hybrid engines, school officials said. The program was developed in partnership with Macomb Community College and NextEnergy, a Detroit nonprofit agency that promotes energy technologies, and was awarded $5 million in federal money from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the stimulus package.