Get Smart, Get Going

GET SMART, GET GOING

Whichever way the wind blow

MIDLAND, Texas

Time for another news quiz: Which American state produces more wind-generated electricity than any other? Answer: Texas. Next question -- this one you'll never get: Which politician launched the Texas wind industry? Answer: Former Gov., now President, George W. Bush.

Yes, there are many things that baffle me about President Bush, but none more than how the same man who initiated one of the most effective renewable energy programs in America has presided over an administration that for six years has dragged its feet on alternative energy, used its regulatory powers to weaken efficiency standards for major appliances and stuck its head in the sand on global warming.

I'll wait for historians to sort that out. But here is some immediate advice I can give the president: If you want to salvage any positive legacy, it will not come from Iraq. There are only tears left there. No, the only way for you, Mr. President, to salvage any legacy is to get back in touch with your green Texas roots and devote the rest of your term to REALLY ending America's oil addiction, liberating us from dependence on petro-authoritarian regimes and making America the leader in renewable energies that combat climate change.

If this isn't the core of Bush's next State of the Union, he might as well go back to Crawford now. At least there he might be able to contemplate what went wrong with his presidency under lights powered by clean, wind-generated electricity that he promoted.

I came down to West Texas, the Saudi Arabia of wind, to find out how it all happened. Pat Wood, a friend of the president, was chairman of Texas' Public Utility Commission when the push for wind energy started.

"At the end of a meeting on transmission policy in mid-1996," he recalled, "I was on my way out the door of the governor's office, when Governor Bush said to me, 'Pat, we like wind.' He was at his desk. I said, 'We what?' He said: 'You heard me. Go get smart on wind.'"

Wood, his fellow commissioners and the Texas utilities did just that. They conducted polls and were stunned by the results: Texas electricity customers were ready to pay a little extra to get more clean renewable energy. So Bush instructed Wood to work on wind with the utilities and the environmentalists. Together, they created the Texas Renewable Portfolio Mandate, which Bush got passed by the Texas Legislature in 1999, as part of a power competition bill. The mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009.

What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines to meet the mandate -- so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So now the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015. Everyone knows they'll beat that, too, because all this investment has driven down the costs and made wind power in Texas competitive with clean coal, nuclear and natural gas, even without the temporary tax break. Wood says he thinks Texas could be producing 15 percent of all its energy from renewables by 2015.

An energy wiz, Wood now advises Airtricity, an Irish wind-power company that also entered the Texas market. He and I toured its new wind farm near Midland, which will provide enough wind electricity -- 125 megawatts -- to power 40,000 homes in Dallas, replacing gas, nuclear and coal. The farm consists of giant turbines that sprout like Star Wars machine-monsters from the hardscrabble plains around Midland -- amid the mesquite, rattlesnakes and oil-pumping jacks.

When Bush ran for governor, his motto was: "What Texans can dream, Texans can do." Just substitute "Americans" for "Texans," and he's already got the last line of his next State of the Union. What would the substance be? First, let's set a Texas-like renewable energy mandate for every state. Second, let's forge a national electricity transmission grid from the Dakotas to Texas to take wind electricity from where it is best produced to the big cities where it is most needed. Finally, let's create a long-term tax subsidy for building and buying plug-in hybrid cars. Wind energy is produced abundantly at night, when demand is lowest. Electric hybrids would be charged at night. That would mean hybrid electric cars, which emit virtually no carbon, could be powered by wind, which produces no carbon. If that scaled, it could be better than Kyoto.

You got something better to do, Mr. President?

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Philips Pushes Energy-Saving Bulbs: Why This Bright Idea Is a Hard Sell

Philips Pushes Energy-Saving Bulbs: Why This Bright Idea Is a Hard Sell
By LEILA ABBOUD
December 5, 2006; Page B1

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- Philips Electronics NV, the world's largest lighting maker, is wrestling with a riddle: How many marketing campaigns does it take to get consumers, companies and city governments to change a light bulb?

Over the past 20 years, Netherlands-based Philips has pioneered numerous ways to make lighting brighter, more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. But despite spending millions on research and development, most of its top-flight technology remains on the store shelves, while consumers instinctively reach for the older, iconic bell-shaped incandescent bulbs. Two-thirds of lighting technology used in homes and offices dates to before 1960, the company estimates.


London's Redbridge borough before (top) and after installing a Philips system
"There have been huge advances in lighting, but the old technology never fades away," said Harry Verhaar, head of energy efficiency at Philips's lighting unit.

Convincing people to switch to more energy-efficient lighting is a problem that has bedeviled environmentalists and policy makers for years. Despite the energy-saving benefits, the high upfront costs of the lights put off buyers. And, though makers say the light from energy-efficient compact-fluorescent bulbs is indistinguishable from incandescents, some consumers still associate them with harsh office settings. These days, energy concerns are getting even more attention with oil prices high and concerns about global warming growing. Switching to compact fluorescents would cut world-wide electricity demand by 18% and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Now Philips is promoting energy-saving lighting with a massive marketing campaign. It has lobbied European city governments about the benefits of energy-efficient street lighting. Television commercials in Europe and China aim to educate consumers about how using compact-fluorescent bulbs can combat global warming. It has used direct mail and print ads in trade publications to reach architects who install lighting.

In the U.S., Philips and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures have teamed up with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on store displays for the DVD release of Al Gore's documentary on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Philips compact-fluorescent bulbs are displayed for sale alongside the DVDs, and the company offers coupons and mail-in rebates tied to the purchase of the DVD.

Philips isn't alone in this push. Its main competitor in the U.S., General Electric Co., also teamed up with Wal-Mart recently on a campaign to educate consumers about compact-fluorescent bulbs, with the aim of selling 100 million of them in the next year, doubling such purchases at the retailing giant. Germany's Siemens AG, the other big global player in the lighting industry, has offered rebates on energy-saving bulbs through Shaw's Supermarkets Inc., Lowe's Cos. and other U.S. retailers.


A Philips compact-fluorescent bulb
For light makers, it's not just about the environment. Promoting a shift to energy-efficient lighting is one way they see to increase their market share.

"There is more technology know-how that goes into these products, so there are fewer competitors. It helps us improve our margins," Theo van Deursen, chief executive of Philips lighting, said in an interview. "Energy-efficient lighting is an important piece of our strategy for the future."

Philips invented compact-fluorescent light bulbs in the early 1980s. Unlike incandescent bulbs, which produce light by running electricity through a filament wire, compact fluorescents feed electricity through a glass tube filled with gas and a small amount of mercury, creating ultraviolet light that turns visible when it hits phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb. The bulbs can be used in standard fixtures.

Though incandescent lights are inexpensive -- a 60-watt bulb costs as little as 25 cents -- they are inefficient. Only 5% of the energy they consume is converted to light; the rest is lost as heat. Halogen lights are in the middle on the energy-efficient scale, but many people like the warm bright light they give off. Meanwhile, compact fluorescents emit the same amount of light as incandescent bulbs but use 75-80% less electricity.

Philips's overall lighting sales of €4.8 billion ($6.4 billion) accounted for 16% of Philips's revenue last year. Lighting will become more important in the future, as Philips sold its semiconductor unit this year.

Two years ago, Philips decided to devise a plan to boost sales of 25 "green flagship products" -- including increasing sales of its compact-fluorescent bulbs to 300 million units this year, a target the company says it's on track to meet. It expects sales of compact-fluorescent bulbs to rise to 325 million pieces next year -- up from 65 million bulbs in 2001.

Over the past five years, Philips has spent about half of its annual lighting research-and-development budget of €250 million on developing energy-efficient products. It is investing heavily in next-generation lights that have computer chips in them, known as light-emitting diodes.

Many consumers are put off by the higher price of compact-fluorescent bulbs -- they can cost anywhere from $3 to $6 each in the U.S. and even more in Europe. Incandescent bulbs usually last six to 12 months, while compact-fluorescents last about five years or longer.

"People decide what to buy based on upfront cost. They don't calculate what they could save later in energy costs," Mr. van Deursen said.

Shopping for light bulbs in a Castorama store in Paris recently, Philippe Mintz, a 32-year-old teacher, chose a two-pack of 75-watt GE incandescent bulbs for €1.10, or about $1.50, passing over energy-efficient bulbs selling for €8.10 apiece. "The difference in price is just too big," said Mr. Mintz. "I don't think it's worth it."


Compact fluorescents also face an image problem. When they first came out, the light they gave off was colder than that of incandescent bulbs. Even Mr. van Deursen admits his wife refused to let him put them in their house because she didn't like the way the light looked. It was only several years later when Philips came out with smaller, better versions of the bulbs that his wife agreed to use them.

Alice Venot-Pian, a 42-year-old Parisian who uses compact fluorescents in her home, said she was initially afraid they would look cold and industrial. "But once I tried them, I realized that they look good. I can't tell the difference from the old bulbs I used to buy," she said.

Nevertheless, major challenges remain. As electricity bills are paid by the tenant, building owners have little incentive to install efficient lighting systems, with their higher upfront costs. "They are just looking to keep costs down, not install the best product," said Isabelle David, a lighting designer for offices and stores in Paris.

Philips has stepped up its efforts aimed at lighting offices and other public buildings, which account for 43% of electricity consumption globally per year. Philips has courted architects with a newsletter called "Lamps and Gears" and a road show in which a shipping container was decked out with new lighting.

Philips staffers began making rounds of city governments, including those in Madrid, Stockholm and Glasgow, Scotland, touting a street-lighting system called CosmoPolis, which is 30% more efficient than the 1930s-era street lamps commonly in use. CosmoPolis uses a metal-halide technology, producing light by passing an arc of electricity through a mix of gases in the bulb.

But governments often don't have budgets to replace out-of-date street lighting. In each city, Philips staffers had to crunch the numbers to convince authorities they would soon get a payback on the new lights in a lower overall energy bill.

In the London borough of Redbridge, lighting project manager Mick Trussler decided to replace the 20,000 low-pressure sodium lamps that had long lit the streets with CosmoPolis lamps. Using an annual budget of £250,000, or about $500,000, he's installed 600 lamps with CosmoPolis bulbs since 2004.

Redbridge has been able to hold electricity spending steady despite rising energy costs, and the streets went from being bathed in a feeble light to bright white, Mr. Trussler said. "It just looks better."

How to eliminate that one-word page that trails a print job

How to eliminate that one-word page that trails a print job

Thursday, December 07, 2006

By Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

In the digital world, all the hype and attention paid to flashy products and services often drown out simple solutions to smaller, but still important, consumer needs. Yes, it's great that we can listen to music on iPods or post and view videos on YouTube. But why do we still have to waste paper when printing Web pages?

You know what I mean. You pull up a Web page, and you decide to print it out for easier reading, or for filing. But you wind up with one or more wasted pages, usually at the very end, consisting of mostly blank space with just one line of useless text -- perhaps just a copyright notice. Or, you waste a lot of ink printing images on the Web page that aren't germane to the article.

There are ways to minimize this. You could use the "printer friendly" option on many Web sites. That may eliminate some unwanted graphics and text, but not all, and it doesn't solve the problem of the wasted page at the end. Or, you can use a print preview feature, hope the preview is accurate, and then manually try to adjust the range of pages printed. But this doesn't always work and it's time consuming.

Now, a start-up company in Portland, Ore., has come up with a software product that aims to solve the wasted-page problem. It's called GreenPrint, and it automatically detects these unnecessary pages and eliminates them from your printouts. The company, GreenPrint Technologies, promises that its simple software not only will save you money on paper and ink, but also will help the environment by saving trees -- thus, the name.


GreenPrint inserts itself between your Web browser (or any other program that prints) and your printer. It takes the form of a faux printer. You print to this virtual printer, called GreenPrint, as if it were real. Then, it analyzes the document, identifies and eliminates wasted pages, and hands the document off to your actual printer, which prints it.

The product also has some other nice features. It can save any Web page as a PDF file, which can be called up later in the free Adobe Reader program. It can also show you a detailed preview of a Web page, or any other document you're printing, and allow you to manually eliminate pages from the printout.

GreenPrint costs $25 after a 14-day free trial (it goes to $35 after the holidays) and works only on Windows XP and Windows 2000 for now. A Macintosh version is planned for next summer. It's available from the company's Web site, printgreener.com.

I tested GreenPrint on two Windows computers. Each was connected to my home printer, an HP DeskJet 5850 model, which automatically prints on both sides of the page.

In my tests, GreenPrint worked well, correctly identifying and eliminating wasted pages and properly creating PDF copies of Web pages. I tried it with both the Firefox and Internet Explorer Web browsers, and also with Microsoft Word, for non-Web documents.

After you install GreenPrint, it adds two new entries to your list of printers. One, called GreenPrint, is the virtual printer you use to eliminate the extra pages. The other, called GreenPrint PDF, is used to directly save Web pages and other documents as PDF files. GreenPrint doesn't erase your actual printer from the Windows printer list. You can still select your regular printer and bypass GreenPrint, but you won't get the benefits of GreenPrint. In fact, while it makes sense to make GreenPrint your default printer, you don't have to do so.

GreenPrint can work automatically in the background. But, if you want to make sure it's only eliminating unimportant pages, or if you want the opportunity to cull the printout manually, you should use its preview feature. This presents a very nice print preview, better than the one in the new IE 7 browser.

If you double-click on any page in this preview, it turns red and won't be printed. You can also right-click on any page to have GreenPrint eliminate images or text before printing. From this preview screen, you can also save the document as a PDF file.


You can tweak how GreenPrint works. For instance, you can specify how few lines of text a page must display before it's considered worthy of elimination. Or you can add or subtract other factors GreenPrint uses to decide if printing a page would be a waste, such as whether a page has nothing but a border, or nothing but a single image.

If you want, you can set the program to analyze and eliminate only the final page in a document, or to only display its preview if it finds a wasted page.

There are some rough edges, however, and the product is something of a work in progress. At first, GreenPrint wouldn't allow my printer to print on both sides of the paper. I asked the manufacturer about that and the company quickly sent me a new version of the product that fixed the problem. GreenPrint also crashed several times in my tests after I changed configuration settings. The company says a new version that avoids those crashes will be available for download by the time you read this.

Overall, GreenPrint is a good product -- a simple solution to an annoying and wasteful problem.

SunPower Buys PowerLight as Alternative-Energy Market Revs Up

SunPower Buys PowerLight as Alternative-Energy Market Revs Up
The Wall Street Journal
Thursday Nov. 16, 2006
By Jim Carlton

In a deal that shows how the market for alternative energy has grown, SunPower Corp., a maker of silicon chips for solar power, said it has agreed to acquire PowerLight Corp., a seller of solar-energy systems, for $332.5 million in cash and stock.

SunPower's focus on solar power has made the San Jose, Calif., company one of the fastest expanding firms in Silicon Valley. Two years ago, the company, which is majority owned by Cypress Semiconductor Corp., reported sales of $11 million. This year, analysts project sales will reach $235 million, amid increased demand for solar power that has been fueled by rising prices of conventional energy and expansion of government subsidies for solar power in places such as California. SunPower also does much of its business overseas, including Europe and Asia.

PowerLight, a closely held firm in Berkeley, Calif., which also operates extensively outside the U.S., doesn't publicly report its sales. Analysts say it probably rivals SunPower in size, since SunPower officials estimated in a conference call yesterday their combined company would post sales of $600 million next year following the merger.

The deal is expected to be finalized in 2007's first quarter.

Industry experts said deals such as this will help drive down the cost of solar power, which is about twice that of conventional electricity prices per kilowatt when subsidies aren't included.

"At the end of the day, the larger SunPower gets, the cheaper it can make its solar panels," said Jigar Shah, chief executive officer of SunEdison LLC, a large installer of solar systems in Baltimore, MD.

Demand for solar power is running so strong that SunPower and other makers of solar-energy panels order backlogs that can stretch for months. The backlogs are expected to ease next year as more supply of silicon to make the solar panels comes into the market.

SunPower and PowerLight have collaborated on a roofing-tile product, called SunTile, which is less bulky than standard solar panels. By acquiring PowerLight, SunPower officials say they will be able to collaborate even more closely on designs of solar products to bring down their overall costs. "Solar power needs to become more economical, and the way you do that is you integrate operations more like this," said Tom Werner, SunPower's chief executive.

Report: Sweden Tops Climate Efforts -- U.S. Is Near Bottom

Report: Sweden Tops Climate Efforts -- U.S. Is Near Bottom
By Elizabeth Kennedy
The Associated Press

NAIROBI, Kenya-- Sweden, Britain, and Denmark are doing the most to protect against climate change, but their efforts are not nearly enough, according to a report released Monday by environmental groups. The United States--the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases-- ranked 53, with only China, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia doing worse.

"We don't have any winners; we only have countries that are better compared to others," said Matthias Duwe of the Climate Action Network Europe, which released the data at a U.N. conference.

The index ranks 56 countries that were part of the 1992 climate treaty or that contribute at least 1 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. The countries make up 90 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The calculations by the environmental group German watch took into account emissions levels, emissions trends and climate policy.

About 25 percent of the energy consumed in Sweden in 2003 came from renewable sources-- more than four times as much as the European Union average of 6 percent.

The country with the worst ranking was Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter. Duwe said the kingdom's policies generally clock attempts to reduce greenhouse gases. "If you try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you will also reduce oil consumption," Duwe said. "So Saudi oil will be in less demand."

Christoph Bals, political director of Germanwatch, said policy had an enormous effect on the rankings. The U.S. could move up 30 sports if its policies were akin to Britain's, he said.

The United States and Australia are the only major industrialized countries to reject the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which calls for mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases.

The Bush administration's policy on climate change focuses on voluntary emissions cuts by industry and long-term development of clean-energy technology.