City tries to cut energy bills with LEDs

Raleigh, N.C., wants to become LED City. The city is conducting experiments to see if it can cut energy consumption and maintenance costs by replacing conventional public light fixtures with ones based around light-emitting diodes. In December, Raleigh - in conjunction with LED manufacturer Cree - replaced high-pressure sodium lights in a downtown parking garage with LED lights. Although the LED lamps cost substantially more than regular sodium lamps, they require less electricity and need to be replaced far less often. "We are saving over 40% of the energy we would otherwise use," said Mayor Charles Meeker. "And the quality is better. With sodium lights, you get bugs in the cover, and the light is kind of yellowish."

If all seven municipal parking lots in the city were retrofitted, it could save the city $100,000 a year in energy consumption and decreased maintenance. The lights in stadiums, gyms, schools, parks and other public venues could be next. If successful, the experiment could ultimately serve as a showcase for something several LED manufacturers are angling to accomplish: maneuvering LEDs into the commercial and residential lighting market.

Approximately 22% of the electricity consumed in the United States goes toward lighting, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. LEDs can last 75,000 hours or longer and consume far less power than standard incandescent bulbs. Only about 5% of the energy that goes into conventional bulbs actually turns into light; the rest gets dissipated as heat.

The giant sucking sound, revisited

energybulletin.net -> news-views.renewwisconsin.org :

Remember the metaphorical "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot invoked in the 1992 presidential debates? Perot employed that image to characterize the rapid exodus of jobs to Mexico that would surely result from ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement. Fifteen years later, that vivid phrase could appropriately describe the increasingly desperate circumstances befalling Cantarell, Mexico's largest oilfield. The giant sucking sound you might hear at Cantarell is what happens when hundreds of oil wells begin drawing gas and water from the very reservoirs that used to yield copious quantities of petroleum. It's the sound of an oilfield rolling over its peak.

To unknowing American ears, the name Cantarell evokes a casual, Southwestern feeling, more suggestive of a dude ranch than the world's No. 2 oil field. By far the most productive oil reservoir in the Western Hemisphere, Cantarell was yielding more than two million barrels per day (bpd) as recently as 2005, outperforming all other fields save mighty Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. At $50 per barrel that level of production translated to $100 million a day. When a wealth generator of that magnitude starts to sputter and lose productivity, other oilfields must pick up the slack or else the Mexican economy is bound to take a hit.

Significant cut in gasoline use is decades away: automakers

energybulletin.net -> news.yahoo.com :

It will be decades before the world will see a significant cut in global automotive gasoline consumption, automakers and analysts said. While there have been major improvements in fuel economy and reduced emissions through the development of technologies such as hybrids and clean diesel, consumers are not adopting them quickly enough to make a serious dent.

Hybrids which can improve fuel economy by 20-60% currently make up less than 1% of global sales. Biofuels such as ethanol actually reduce fuel efficiency and there are questions as to when they will become widely available. Zero-emission hydrogen and electric-powered vehicle are still five to ten years away from becoming marketable and a hydrogen fuel delivery system still has to be developed.

But the biggest delay will come from the length of time it will take consumers to adopt new technologies and for automakers to shift the production systems away from traditional vehicles, said Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development. "There are 850 million internal combustion vehicles in the world today. No matter what you come up with you're going to have to let that global car park play out and that's going to consume petroleum for some time going forward.". About 66 to 70 million new vehicles are sold every year and it will take 12 to 15 years to replace the global fleet, Burns said.

(2007-02-15 12:36:43 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Biofuel is NOT "carbon-neutral"

peakoil.com -> ecoworld.com :

Biofuel today is produced, overwhelmingly, from oil palms and sugar cane, and overwhelmingly, these plantations stand where tropical rainforest recently stood. Over a year ago, a well-documented essay entitled "Worse Than Fossil Fuel," was published in the London Guardian by George Monbiot, an environmental activist and professor at Oxford-Brookes University in the U.K. In this article, Monbiot states "Between 1985 and 2000 the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia. In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia."

Here's another excerpt from Monbiot's essay:

"Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they've cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria."