August 6, 2008 - What do you do if you're a large US telecommunications company and you want to reduce the power consumption and resulting energy costs of your network equipment? An easy first step is to mandate the purchase of ENERGY STAR compliant equipment. But what if ENERGY STAR specs don't exist yet for most of your equipment?
July 11, 2008 - My trusty Windows-based desktop PC, its RAM maxed-out and aged microprocessor struggling to keep up with more advanced graphics and video programs, just isn’t the capable machine it was when I first flipped the switch a few years ago. It’s never easy to say goodbye to an old friend, but I figured this would be a good time to upgrade performance and take advantage of all of the energy efficiency work targeted at computers that has occurred over the last few years.
June 23, 2008 - Mention Brazil and one might think of Rio de Janeiro, Carnaval, soccer (the country has won the World Cup four times – more than any other country!), or the Amazon River, the world’s mightiest. Not many people would equate Brazil with having an aggressive energy efficiency program.
June 11, 2008 - To paraphrase the central theme from that popular baseball movie, Field of Dreams: Publish a standby power efficiency spec and they will come.
But what do you do if they don’t? That was a question that Mr. Yung-Rae Kim from Korea Energy Management Corporation’s (KEMCO) had to answer a few weeks ago, during his presentation at the 2008 International Standby Conference held in
New Delhi, India.
April 21, 2008 – I realized that flying from California to India could be an adventure. But not long after claiming my luggage, I found that the “real” adventure began with the taxi ride from the Delhi airport to my hotel. While I should have been thinking about the upcoming international standby energy conference, my only thought was whether my life insurance payments were current.
March 24, 2008 – Granted, desktop computers have traveled a long way down the green highway over the last few years, thanks to efficiency programs like 80 Plus and ENERGY STAR’s 2007 computer efficiency spec. Those programs focus on power supply efficiency, standby (off) power consumption and power management (i.e. putting your computer into sleep mode after a certain period of inactivity). But what about computer efficiency when the computer’s wide awake?
March 11, 2008 – Raleigh, North Carolina, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Austin, Texas: what do these cities have in common? Well, they’re all engaged in ambitious programs aimed at replacing municipal infrastructure lighting with LED systems. All participate in the LED City project, which aims “to evaluate, deploy and promote LED lighting technology across the full range of municipal infrastructure.”
March 4, 2008 – You may have noticed your electricity bill taking a bigger bite out of your paycheck. It’s not the kids leaving more lights on around the house; recent studies show that our newest must-have “electronic appliance”—a big screen TV—uses as much energy as another must-have home appliance, namely the refrigerator! ENERGY STAR wants to put big screen TVs on a power diet with their latest TV efficiency specification, so you won’t have to start looking for a second job to pay the utility bill.
February 12, 2008 – 
Buried in Section 655 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, there are prizes! “Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prizes,” to be specific. The U.S.
January 28, 2008 – Even late in the year, when the nights are cold and the days cloudy, Ispra, Italy is a pleasant place to spend a few days. That’s where I found myself at the end of November, attending the European Commission’s Code of Conduct (CoC) working group meeting on Energy Consumption of External Power Supplies (EPS). The meeting’s goal was to update the current CoC, adopted in 2004.
