We’re still over 10 months from election day, but President Obama’s first major campaign advertisement of the 2012 cycle is already hitting the air . After three years of a term characterized by flailing finances and dissipating foreign wars, the ad touted the president’s record in a somewhat surprising area: green energy technology.
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green technology
This house is beyond cool. Those in Southern California should swing by the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles to tour a solar home nonpareil.
Known as the CHIP house, for “Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype Solar House,” the home was designed and built by students of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
The project won first prize in the Energy Balance division of the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition held in Washington, D.C..
On approach, the CHIP house looks as if it’s been turned inside-out. CHIP wears the heart of its green technology on its sleeve. Most of the home’s exterior is wrapped in insulation, a flexible, quilted vinyl membrane.
It’s this exterior insulation, combined with solar technology, that creates the high R-values necessary for a net-zero dwelling. The home looks a bit like a giant pillow topped with a solar panel hat.
CHIP is equipped with 45 solar panels, enough to provide three times the amount of energy the house consumes. The intention was not only to power the home, but to keep two electric cars up and running as well. As the primary sponsor for the CHIP project, Hanwha SolarOne, from their North American headquarters in nearby Costa Mesa, provided the panels.
It’s not the solar panels that make this 750-square-foot home so distinctive, but the way that the panels, and the entire home’s green technology, are operated. The CHIP home interface uses Apple iPad apps and an Xbox Kinect system as a master command center.
Residents not only can operate the home’s lights and electronic devices, but monitor the home’s energy systems by using natural gestures like pointing and waving their arms. The home is equipped with 3-D cameras, too, that signal light to turn on and off as residents move through the space.
The interior of the home features a single, open space, with living areas defined by a series of platforms, terraces that climb upwards and inwards into the home. Private areas occupy the highest platforms. The open floor plan is arranged around the natural flow of daily activities.
It took more than 100 students, two years and $1 million in funding to build CHIP, although the project team estimates that replicating the home elsewhere would cost about $262,000. You can take a look at the CHIP home, inside and out, at the California Science Center, through May 31, 2012. Free tours are available every weekday from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and on weekends from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Cleantech Disaster Relief: How Today’s Technologies Can Avert Tomorrow’s Disasters
written by Walter Wang
We all remember sights of people lined up for clean water in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010, or in Japan last year after the great tsunami hit with horrific consequences. Large scale natural disasters will unfortunately continue to be a global threat. Beyond the initial loss of life and home, they also wreak
In a good news / bad news press release, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced last week that its Green Technology Pilot Program would be extended for three months but “will soon draw to a close.”
Previously set to expire on December 31, 2011, the program is being extended through March 30, 2012
Geoff Cutmore, Squawk Box anchor for CNBC and host of Energy Opportunities highlights the thoughts of some of the key voices in energy innovation.
With a growing global population, growth in energy use is inevitable. Experts are grappling for the best way to manage resources, often adopting new
Sacred Power Corporation (SPC) was established in 2001 as Native American owned and operated small business that provides renewable energy solutions to government, commercial and residential customers. "Using the strengths of the Father to Protect the Gifts of the Mother" is our guiding principle, and it has
First, the bad news – China’s constrained rare earth supplies will be an “irreversible trend” and prices will remain at high levels, according to Zhang Zhong, general manager of Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co.
Zhang should know, as his concern is China’s
Ask Dr. Riccardo Signorelli, CEO of clean-technology company FastCAP Systems, what role the government may have had in getting his business off the ground and his answer is brief.
“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act made FastCAP possible,” Signorelli said. “Simple as
As readers of this blog are aware, there are a number of patent offices worldwide that currently offer expedited examination regimes for patent applications directed to inventions that promise to deliver environmental benefits.
As chronicled by this blog, the United Kingdom
TED, an organization whose motto is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’, is dedicated to generating high-level conversations led by visionaries in their respective fields. They talk about a variety of issues and green technology is often in the program as well.
The editors of a website called Online College
Germany responded swiftly to the Japanese nuclear crisis by announcing a decision to phase out its older nuclear stations. Japan followed a few weeks later saying that it intends to focus on renewable energy (although it won’t do away with nuclear power altogether). And now Switzerland is looking to
In a new article, Sarah Tran, a professor at Southern Methodist University School of Law, provides the first (to my knowledge) academic review and critique of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Green Technology Pilot Program (GTPP).
Entitled “Expediting Innovation: The Quest for a New
This finding will leave you breathless. A physiology professor at the University of Milan concluded that four men running, walking and riding bicycles emit more carbon dioxide than hybrid cars. He also compared it to gas and diesel cars, which beat the men in terms of carbon emissions.
David Muchow, the President and CEO of SkyBuilt Power, shared an article of his with me in which he lays out his vision of how the U.S. can foster green innovation.
Entitled “How to Bake the Green Technology Cake: The Missing Key to Technology Innovation,” the article analogizes the process of getting an invention