GigaOM » green building

Now you can simulate your world for (relatively) cheap in the cloud

Derrick Harris — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:09:02 +0000

What if high-end simulation software that used to cost up to $100,000 per year now cost a fraction of that and was actually more functional? What types of new products or techniques might arise from the ability to simulate, on the cheap, the flow of water through a system or stress-test new machines? Computer-aided design specialist Autodesk wants to find out, and has taken its simulation software to the cloud in a new offering called Simulation 360.

Autodesk has actually been moving various products and services to the cloud in some form for a few years, but the new product is different, said Grant Rochelle, the company’s senior director of manufacturing industry marketing. Most importantly, it’s cheap. Rochelle said traditional simulation software can cost between $20,000 and $100,000 per user per year, and that’s not to mention the high-performance systems necessary to run it. Many employees who need it don’t get it, and many companies are shut out from purchasing it altogether.

Simulation 360, on the other hand, costs mere thousands. For $3,200 a year, users can run a total of 120 jobs. For $7,200, they get unlimited access. For a limited time, actually, unlimited use is free. And rather than needing separate products for mechanical, fluid and thermal simulation, they’re all included in the new cloud offering.

Rochelle said the goal of Simulation 360 isn’t to move big-money customers such as large aerospace companies or defense contractors to the cloud service (“they will be the last bastion of adopting cloud for most things,” he said), but to attract entirely new users building innovative new products or doing interesting work. One customer, for example, is working to make hospital operating rooms as clean as the rooms in which microprocessors are fabricated. It’s simulating the spread of airborne germs through a hospital to prevent certain illnesses that patients contract while receiving treatment for something else.

Another customer, BioLite, has developed a product that turns the excess heat from a fire into electricity so, for example, campers or individuals in third-world countries can ensure their portable electronics are always charged. Rochelle noted that green building and heating and cooling, generally, are areas where the new cloud offering looks to open up a lot of new doors.

However, while offering this technology as a cloud service might be new, the value story is as old as cloud computing itself. Give innovators without huge IT budgets access to resources at a price point never before possible and see what happens. Maybe it’s Instagram, maybe it’s a new approach to climate modeling, maybe it’s a revolution in energy-efficient HVAC systems, but chances are we’re better off because of it.

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Cleantech Open announces winners

April Kilcrease — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:33:33 +0000

Twenty-one cleantech startups from across the U.S. competed for a grand prize of $250,000 in seed investment and services at this year’s Cleantech Open Business Competition. On Wednesday night, the not-for-profit organization awarded the national grand prize to the winner in the renewable energy category, Atmosphere Recovery, which makes laser-based gas analyzer systems for efficient manufacturing and advanced energy process control. Those looking to invest in cleantech would be wise to check out the grand prize finalists and category winners, listed below.

As Dan Reicher, the executive director at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, told the gathered audience, tens of trillions of dollars are going to be spent on energy infrastructure in the next few decades, and we need to have strong policy and finance to support a sustainable-energy future. He went on to say that startups need help bridging the technology valley of death, the gap between having a functional demo and being operational on a commercial scale, which sometimes takes decades to close.

Before announcing the grand prize, Jim Davis, the president of Chevron Energy Solutions, took a hopeful view and suggested that some of the event’s competitors were working on technologies that might have “the power to change the world.” And that although “developing these technologies to commercial scale remains a challenge, our collective challenge is to create solutions” that will meet the growing energy needs of the future — a future that in Davis’ projection includes 8.5 billion people who consume 40 percent more energy than we do today.

Here’s hoping that these entrepreneurs are on the right track.

Grand prize finalists (and category winners):

Air-water-waste: PK Clean, which converts landfill plastics into hydrocarbon fuels through a catalytic depolymerization process.

Energy efficiency: Indow Windows, which manufactures thermal window inserts that press into place on the inside of a window frame to deliver double-pane window performance at a fraction of the price. The startup also took home the sustainability award.

Green building: Whole Trees Structures, which manufactures structural building systems made from round timber, the waste product of sustainably managed forests.

Smart power: GridMobility, whose Color of the Electron™ signal technology enables business, industry and consumers to choose electricity sources based on their personal preferences.

Regional winners

Overall winners for each of the six competing regions — California, Northeast, North Central, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain and South Central—were also named.

California: b2u Solar, which makes solar heat systems.

Northeast: Arctic Sand, which manufactures power converter chips designed to reduce the amount of electricity used by data centers.

North Central: FortEco Lightweight Structures, which creates lightweight composite framing systems utilizing light gauge steel, insulation decking and concrete.

Pacific Northwest: Indow Windows, which makes window inserts that turn windows into efficient double-pane windows for cheap.

Rocky Mountain: Veritek Coal Processing, which uses a technology process to extract mercury, sulfur, heavy metals and other impurities from precombustion coal.

South Central: cycleWood Solutions, which makes biodegradable and compostable thermoplastic that can be used in a variety of commercial plastics, including cups, plates and bags.

Global ideas prize finalists

Biofiltro (winner), Chile, waste water treatment.

Biométhodes, France, “integrated biotechnology, renewable chemistry, and energy.”

Black Silicon Solar, Denmark, nanotechnology to increase the absorption of light in silicon solar cells.

Cambridge Nanotherm, UK thermal management for LED lighting systems.

ReformTech, Sweden, “strives to professionalize the catalytic heater and mobile/stationary hydrogen reformation market through best practice development and collaborative business system.”

Resolute Marine Energy, U.S., wave-driven power solutions.

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Nest and the Apple-ification of the thermostat

Erica Ogg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:47:10 +0000

The Nest burst onto the tech scene in the last few weeks, making waves unheard of for a product you’d never guess anyone would care about: the home thermostat. But there’s a reason the device sold out in 72 hours: the creator, Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod, took a page from the design and usability gurus at Apple to create a good-looking, efficient and easy-to-use device. At GigaOM RoadMap on Thursday, Fadell talked about how he and his team are rethinking a 50-year-old industry with lessons from the king of consumer-friendly electronics.

Fadell looked at an industry that was badly in need of innovation. Not just in the technology under the covers, but in terms of usability and design. “Thermostats looked like PCs from the 90s: square, beige, nothing innovative, and very expensive,” he said. So when he was contemplating home heating and cooling, he wasn’t inventing something new so much as rethinking and improving an established product — much like he did with the iPod in 2001.

Here’s how he consumerized an otherwise boring, staid product:

Make user interfaces as simple as possible. The Nest is styled like a dial. Fadell said this design was inspired by what you actually do with a thermostat. “Ninety-nine percent of the time you’re turning it up or down,” he said. Hence the dial and a single button.
Embrace proven technologies. The Nest is basically a smartphone on the inside, with the same computing power. It has two types of wireless connectivity, five sensors for temperature, humidity, light and two activity sensors to detect when people are in front of the device. And it has a removable — and therefore user-serviceable — battery.
Use technologies that will delight users. Fadell and team did something you wouldn’t be surprised to see from Apple with regard to how the device blends into its environment — something they call “chameleon design.” There’s a mirror inside with “a special edge that picks up incident light”, and through internal reflection it picks up the color of whatever’s around it. “So we didn’t have to make a specific color, we could just reflect back the color around it to make it blend in,” he said. It also uses sensors to passively learn about the owners of the home where Nest lives. It can learn about the heating and cooling patterns in your house, knows your activity, like how often you walk in front of it — and therefore how much time you spend at home — and can learn your patterns of how you like your temperatures. All of that means the thermostat can self-adjust its energy use to save money and resources.
Keep standards high. Of all of it, the most difficult thing was to handle this as a startup and not as a company with billions of dollars in the bank. And Fadell cautioned not to think cheaply or cut corners with the excuse that you’re just a startup. At Apple, he said, you have “a huge sandbox of technologies, capabilities and resources. You can’t go back [after that] to the startup way. You want to do it the best way possible.”

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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The exurbs: The natural habitat of the telecommuter?

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:25 +0000

The impact of more remote work on the built environment is an occasional and fascinating subtopic of the whole connected work discussion. Will office spaces shrink or need a radical overhaul as more people dial in? Will roads and rail plans be affected by a decrease in commuters?

Now, halfway around the world in New Zealand, a ZDNet Australia writer is asking whether the ongoing shifts in the way many of us work are going to encourage denser city cores or more spread out population patterns. Writer Darren Greenwood notes that though environmental activists and design enthusiasts often call for denser city cores that demand fewer resource-gobbling cars and encourage us to live in smaller spaces, the connected future of work might actually lead to more people moving further out from these urban cores.

In recent decades, New Zealand has seen a drift from the provinces to large cities like Auckland, mainly due to better job prospects. However, this has made Auckland extremely crowded and expensive, just like many a large Australian metro area.

People just might find that the costs of living in Auckland are no longer worth it, especially if the extra pay is not enough to compensate for loss of quality of life, never mind if you want that garden that the planners are so keen to use on housing.

Employers, too, will soon realize that if you can get people working from home in the exurbs for a bit less, or they can have branch offices in cheaper, neighboring towns and cities, then why be in the city centre?

Thus, one of the main impacts of UFB [Ultra-Fast Broadband] could well be on the shape of our towns and cities.

Commentators have had plenty to say about the possible advantages of greater uptake of remote work for rural areas, as well as how coworking spaces might benefit out-of-the-way communities, but the idea that remote work might be a boon for the exurbs – bane of green campaigners – isn’t one you hear too often.

Of course, there are lots of factors at play when it comes to how our cities and town evolve, including energy prices, climate change and how our collective interest in greener living develops, or fails to. But nonetheless, Greenwood’s insight is an interesting thought to add to the pot.

If you could work from anywhere, where would you live?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Worker101.

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Green building firm Project Frog raises $22M from GE, VCs

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:11:52 +0000

Despite the seemingly downward short-term trend for cleantech investing, corporations and investors continue to back the green building sector. On Wednesday San Francisco–based energy-efficient building company Project Frog announced that it has raised $22 million from GE, as well as venture capitalists including RockPort Capital and Claremont Creek Ventures.

GE showed its interest in Project Frog back in June, when it revealed the second group of startups that had won funds from its Smart Grid Challenge program. Over the past year through its Smart Grid Challenge project, GE has identified dozens of startups in the building energy, power grid and energy software space and has made a variety of small investments of several million dollars in these firms.

Project Frog designs and makes buildings that are prefab, and it uses control systems and software to make the buildings far more energy-efficient than a traditional building. Because its designs are manufactured off-site and assembled at the construction zone via a building kit, Project Frog says its buildings can also be built far more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional buildings.

Frog says a typical design and construction project can take 6 months, and on the energy front Frog says its buildings use 25 percent less energy than a standard building. The company targets its building kits and designs for schools, stores, museums, commercial workplaces and health care. GE says it has started building a Frog Design building at its Learning Center in Ossining, New York.

Image courtesy of Project Frog, in San Francisco at Crissy Field

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LEED To Embrace Demand Response

Jeff St. John — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:36:59 +0000

Green buildings, meet demand response. The U.S. Green Building Council is studying ways it can count demand response — turning down power to help utilities shave peak power demand — as part of its LEED rating system. That could open up new incentives for big commercial buildings to install technology that connects their LEED buildings to smart grid systems, and open up new markets for demand response providers around the country.

The USGBC expects to publish its first “Demand Response LEED Pilot Credit” later this spring. Next up will be a series of pilot projects that will bring existing LEED buildings into demand response programs, said Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED technical development at USGBC.

While the pilot projects haven’t been named yet, Owens said they should be able to take part in this summer’s demand response season, to help the USGBC and its partners figure out just what weight to give demand response credits in LEED’s Energy & Atmosphere Credit system.

As for just how many LEED points could be attached to demand response, he said it’s too early to say. While building energy efficiency and onsite renewable energy are currently counted for LEED ratings, “this is the very first time we’ve deliberately gone to the other side of the meter,” he said.

Still, there’s good reason for green building standards to take peak power reductions into account, he said. Utilities are desperate to cut their peak loads, which otherwise have to be met with expensive “peaker” power plants, usually gas-fired turbines, that sometimes only run for a few hundred hours every year. Keeping peak load growth in check can thus have an outsized effect in reducing the overall carbon footprint associated with electricity generation.

To date, demand response hasn’t had as much success in the commercial building market as it’s had in the industrial sector, Owens noted. Factories have lots of energy management and power system systems in place that can be tapped to shave power. Commercial buildings can have a harder time turning down air conditioners or lights to meet demand response calls, both because they lack technology to automate the process and because they don’t want to displease building tenants.

Indeed, the new program could be a key way to expand the share of commercial buildings interested in participating in demand response, he said. USGBC has identified about 4,400 LEED-certified buildings that could be targets for demand response, and LEED-certified buildings add up to some 6 billion square feet, with 1.5 million more square feet per day in new buildings registering for certification, he noted.

LEED building owners — the kind of energy-aware, ratings-motivated customer base — could provide a significant opportunity for utilities and demand response providers trying to expand their markets. Big demand response aggregators such as EnerNOC, Comverge and Constellation Energy will likely be looking at ways to approach the LEED opportunity, as well as big building control players such as Honeywell, Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric that have been making moves into demand response technologies.

In fact, Schneider is on the USGBC committee that’s working on the new demand response credit, and will be playing a role in the pilot projects set to start this summer. Ross Malme, former director of Schneider’s demand response resource center who recently left to become a new partner at consulting firm Skipping Stone (another partner on the project) told me last month that companies are looking forward to being able to market their demand response programs as “sustainability services,” rather than just ways to shave energy use to make money.

Another partner on the USGBC project committee is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Demand Response Research Center, home of the technology known as Open Automated Demand Response, or OpenADR. Owens said that the council would prefer participating buildings to have technology in place to automate the way they turn down power in response to demand response signals, though it won’t be required, and having Berkeley Labs on board probably means that OpenADR will be given a chance to fill that role.

Image courtesy of Logan Sakai via Creative Commons license.

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Sustainability and Design: The Key to Efficiency

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:22:28 +0000

Trying to re-engineer buildings and other objects for sustainability and environmentally friendly materials after they are built — even as a prototype — is expensive and time-consuming, says Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. Which is why the design software company is pushing the idea of using its software earlier in the process, he told the attendees at GigaOM’s Green:Net conference: to identify materials or ways of constructing a building that could make it more environmentally efficient, before a prototype is even created.

Bass said that decisions about sustainability and other considerations “are best made at the beginning of developing a project.” In most cases, designers come up with a design and then build a physical prototype, then refine the design, build another prototype, and so on — but “at some point you’re going to run out of time or energy or money to test any more,” the Autodesk CEO said. “With digital prototypes, you can explore those options a lot further before you actually have to build a physical prototype.”

Autodesk is working with a design company called Granta to help designers make some of these decisions, particularly when it comes to the materials they choose, earlier in the process, said Bass. There are thousands of different types of plastic alone, with different qualities and engineering aspects that determine how and where they will be used. With the new features in its software, “we’ve enabled people to do better material selection as part of their design — the earlier in the process you can make decisions the better off you will be,” Bass said.

Designers are constantly being asked to take more of these kinds of questions into account, the Autodesk CEO said, but “the only asset that is getting cheaper over time that you can deploy towards these kinds of questions is computing, and it’s getting exponentially cheaper — I can rent an hour of computing time for a nickel.” When a designer needs to model what the impact will be of rotating the building on the lot to reduce energy use, or using triple-pane windows instead of double, Autodesk allows them to do that, Bass said.

The company has also set up a cleantech partner program, which donates up to $150,000 in software to environmental startups, and Autodesk is also involved with efforts such as Green Building XML, which is designed to help exchange information about environmental aspects of building construction and design.

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Soladigm Grabs $30M For Self-Tinting Glass

Jeff St. John — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:00:30 +0000

Stealthy startup Soladigm has landed a $30 million series C investment to help bring its self-tinting windows to commercial-scale production by early next year. The Khosla-backed startup wants its Mississippi factory to be up and running by 2012, and with rival startup Sage recently landing an $80 million investment to build its own electrochromic glass factory, the race is on.

Soladigm’s $30 million round was led by DBL Investors and Nano Dimension and included existing investors Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners. It also included a small, undisclosed investment from GE, which named Soladigm as one of 12 winners of GE’s first round of ecomagination investments last month.

Soladigm previously raised about $30 million, as well as a $3.5 million stimulus grant from the Department of Energy. The Silicon Valley company, with technology licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has also landed $44 million in Mississippi state loans and incentives to build its factory, which is expected to cost $130 million.

While Soladigm expects to produce its electrochromic glass from pilot lines in 2011, full-scale commercial production from the Mississippi factory is expected in 2012, CEO Rao Mulpuri said in an interview on Friday. Soladigm is also working on financial arrangements to fund the remainder of the factory construction cost, Mulpuri said, but wouldn’t go into more detail.

“All of that money is really being used to launch the commercial high-volume operation, as well as drive the sales and marketing channels to drive this into the market,” Mulpuri said. Soladigm is working with window manufacturing and installation and sales channel partners, he said, though he wouldn’t disclose which companies were involved.

Soladigm will have to line up some heavyweight partners to compete with rival Sage Electrochromics. The Faribault, Minn.-based company was awarded a $72 million DOE loan guarantee, and recently landed an $80 million strategic investment from French glass and construction giant Saint-Gobain to help build a $135 million factory in Minnesota. That gives it both financial backing and a clear path to market, as well as a potential buyer for the company’s technology in the future.

Mulpuri wouldn’t discuss technical details of Soladigm’s electrochromic glass, which can lighten or darken to block light and heat to keep buildings cooler during sunny, hot days and cut up to 20 percent from a typical building’s HVAC energy use.

But according to experts familiar with Soladigm’s technology, the company is working on two lines of self-tinting glass. For its upcoming commercial products, Soladigm is using tungsten oxide, a well-known material for smart windows that darkens when a voltage is applied to absorb more light, Delia Milliron, a nanoscience researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in an August lecture.

Soladigm is also working on a Berkeley Labs technology using magnesium as an electrochromic layer, Milliron said in August. That reacts with hydrogen gas to become magnesium hydride, which reflects light rather than absorbing it — a difference that could make the windows even more efficient at keeping buildings cool, since it would avoid having the glass itself heat up.

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Image courtesy of Soladigm.

Best Desktop iTunes Controller: iTunes

Josh Asch — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:57:47 +0000

There are many Mac applications which will sit on your desktop, displaying cover art and other information about your currently-playing song in iTunes, and give some controls such as play/pause, next, etc. But since the recent release of iTunes 10, one application does this far better than any other, and that’s iTunes itself.

Apple must have realized just how many people use a third-party iTunes controller, because it has added the functionality directly into the latest version of its media application. The feature is built on top of what was just an album art viewer back in iTunes 9.2.1, adding Quicktime X-esque controls.

Launching the Controller

Getting the controller which is built into iTunes 10 running is simple enough; in the bottom left of the iTunes window is an icon which looks like a triangle inside a square. Click that to slide up the Now Playing pane, which shows the album art of any currently playing media.

Now all you have to do is click the Now Playing pane once. A new pop-out window will appear: simply a square containing the album art you just clicked on.

This window can be resized to as big as you like. It might not look anything special, but it’s a different story when you hover over this image while the song is playing. The name and artist of the song are displayed in the small title bar, and all the iTunes controls you could think of are shown near the bottom in the same way as when you watch a video in iTunes or QuickTime X.

Why this is better than a third-party application

For a start, using iTunes itself negates the need to run another application, which often takes up a space on your Dock, and uses considerably more CPU. Another reason I prefer to do it this way now is the fact that the pop-out window has standard window controls, so you can minimize or close the window as you would any other. All the dedicated controller applications I’ve seen require quitting the software to hide the album art.

While some may argue that this method isn’t as feature-rich as it could be — other applications offer the ability to rate songs — I find that once I’ve started iTunes playing, I leave it be until I want to pause or skip a song. I don’t rate my songs, and I certainly don’t need to be able to turn shuffle on or off once I’ve started the music. There’s also no control over the window’s appearance other than its size, but again, that’s something that doesn’t concern me too much.

The only niggle I have is that the window doesn’t like sitting in the very bottom corner of the desktop. When you click on it or when the song changes, it automatically floats up above the height of the Dock for some reason.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so post in the comments the application you favor to control your iTunes content consumption.

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Tips for Handling Information Overload: Too Much Content

Dawn Foster — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:00:09 +0000

The biggest problem with information overload for most people is that it is cumulative and it comes in from a variety of sources. In my past two posts, I provided some tips for managing information overload coming in via email and social media. Another source — and probably the one most people think about when you mention information overload — is the huge amount of content that we consume online.

We all want to keep up with the latest news and trends in our industry along with learning more about other areas of interest, like our hobbies. With only so many hours in the day, people often struggle with finding the information they need to be successful while not spending too much time sorting through massive quantities of data. Here are a few tips to help you whittle the information down from a fire hose to a trickle of only the most relevant content.

RSS Readers

If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you should find one, since this is the best way to get only the information that you want pushed to you while being able to easily see which posts you have read and which you have not. Google Reader and Netvibes are good places to start. For the rest of you who already use RSS, there are many ways to make it more effective.

Firstly, change the way you think about RSS; it’s more like a newspaper than email. If you fall behind on the daily newspaper, you aren’t going to keep trying to catch up and read papers that are months old. RSS is just like a newspaper, so don’t worry if you don’t get to everything, and don’t feel like you need to catch up. Right now, I have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, but I am OK with it. If that big number of unread items bothers you, simply take advantage of the “mark all as read” feature once a week if it makes you feel better or, better yet, use an RSS readers that lets you hide the number of unread items.

Secondly, do some pruning and get rid of the dead wood. Spend a couple of hours looking at which feeds give you the most value and get rid of the rest. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, you are probably oversubscribed. Some RSS readers even have tools to help you find feeds that you rarely read or are rarely updated.

Third, spend as little time as possible in your RSS reader by prioritizing your feeds. I use folders in Google Reader to group my feeds, and I put the most critical feeds right at the top. I make sure that I read through those high priority feeds first to spend more time on what I need to know while hopefully having some time left over to read a little extra. I also encourage you to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your RSS reader, since this can shorten your RSS reading time.

News Aggregation

While RSS readers are great for the things you know you want to read, they are not the best way to find new sources of information or news from unexpected sources; this is where news aggregators really excel. My favorite aggregator is Twitter Tim.es, since it takes the links from the people that I follow on Twitter and displays them in newspaper-like format, with the links that have been posted by more of my friends appearing as headlines on my Twitter Tim.es page. I also use Techmeme to find the topics that people are discussing online. Depending on your interests, you might be able to find other news aggregation sources focused on your areas of expertise.

Filtering

Filtering RSS feeds takes a little work, but it is worth it in the long run if it helps you find only the information on the topics that you want to see. While there are many filtering tools, my tool of choice is Yahoo Pipes. I use Yahoo Pipes to find out when people are talking about me or the topics that I am most interested in. For example, I have Pipes that comb through industry analyst feeds looking for a few specific keywords, which allows me to find the reports from analysts on those topics while ignoring the rest.

The best thing you can do to avoid overload is to stay focused on the most important information while not worrying about what you might be missing. If you can become more efficient at finding and consuming the right information for your needs, you can easily stay informed while minimizing the feeling of being overwhelmed. Read what you can and don’t stress about what you don’t have time to read.

What are your tips for managing content information overload?

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