The Cleantech Era

Last year's green highlight-the Copenhagen Summit- was a flop. But 2010 marks

the start of a new and greener decade. The jury is still out on global warming.

But green tech is driven by economics and, in India, by acute power shortage.and

the high cost of backup power. Here are three key trends for the twenty-tens.

The Green Cloud: Cloud computing serves the public at large, which

probably doesn't even know the term when it uses Gmail, online storage, or other

web services. And it's evolving into a simple, pay-per-use way to get services

on tap, just like electricity, for businesses. But the cloud is also the

greenest way to go. Organizations don't need to set up server banks running

complex apps-they pay for what they use from the cloud. The provider services

many users from one set of equipment. The green spinoff: this cuts energy use

per user sharply. The cloud is a more efficient, and greener, way to use

technology. For a small business, cloud-based services cut equipment and energy

costs.

The author is chief editor and green evangelist at CyberMedia, publishers of PCQuest. You can reach him at pkr@cybermedia.co.in, or twitter.com/prasanto

Green Buildings: Once a novel experiment, green features are creeping

into office buildings. And house-owners are using green techniques for cutting

power use, such as high-albedo reflective paint (drops rooftop temperature 20

degrees), CFL lamps, natural light use, and more. 2010 will see a ramp-up of

solar heating, motion sensors, and LEDs. Newer housing projects, such as those

in Gurgaon, are building in green features: large double-glazed glass areas for

natural light, VRF air-conditioning, water harvesting and recyling. The need for

lower power consumption is driven by the high cost of backup power, a necessary

evil in power-starved Gurgaon.

Sleep Mode: Most electronics and appliances are mostly in standby or

sleep mode-plugged in but not in use. They all consume power. For instance, a

laptop draws 16W in sleep mode, and 8W when switched off but plugged in. Even

the power supply on its own-plugged in, but no laptop attached-draws 4W (see

bit.ly/standby).

There's global pressure to cut this standby power draw, which is over a tenth

of household energy bills. Just a reduction of a half watt in a phone charger

means a drop of 83 megawatts for India, if one-third of India's 500 million

chargers stay plugged in. A simple master switch to turn off an entire console

or power strip can kill wasted power. This year will see the first universal,

ultra-low-power phone chargers with near-zero standby power, and TVs and

electronics that draw less than a tenth of a watt on standby power.

Other notes: The battery remains the last frontier for personal tech,

and despite improvements, it can barely keep up with the modern smartphone with

GPS and all those apps. Things will get worse with 3G, keeping the “balance of

power” steady at a one-day runtime on a charge. But battery tech is jumping

ahead, and I'm hoping for a two-day charge on mobile phones by year-end-even

with active 3G. And cheaper electric vehicles that last a day on a six-hour

charge.

But the biggest impact on energy efficiency will come not from electronics

and hardware but from smarter software. Software that controls the electrical

grid, uses sensor data to smartly control building lighting and cooling,

improves the efficiency of car engines, and runs power management for computer

networks. It's software that will really rule 2010's cleantech.