And you thought that 1,000 megawatt wind farm planned for Lake Erie was going to be huge. Terra-Gen Power recently secured a staggering $1.2 billion in construction financing, which it fully intends to use on 3D projectors, PlayStation 3 consoles and parts necessary to build America's largest wind farm. Granted, only one of those points is actually true, but we suspect you're hanging with us. The latest round of cash will help build four wind power projects with a total of 570 megawatts of capacity at the company's Alta Wind Energy Center in Kern County, California. But when you put that with projects already in motion, you're left with a 3,000MW wind power initiative, which should be completed and operational "in the first and second quarters of 2011." So, anyone feeling up to topping this?

Continue reading Terra-Gen lands major funding, expects to complete America's largest wind farm next year

Terra-Gen lands major funding, expects to complete America's largest wind farm next year originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Plastiki, a 60 foot vessel buoyed by over 12,000 2-liter plastic bottles, sailed into the Sydney Harbor today, completing a 130 day, 8000 mile journey from San Francisco. A long way to travel for the coveted 10 cent deposit! More »

Fuel cell outfitter Horizon is now offering a personal hydrogen power plant for use with its MiniPAK and HydroSTIK products. Although it isn't cheap, the system will (cleanly!) charge all of your small devices using the same water you drink. More »

In May, Toyota stated its intention to invest $50 million in electric car maker Tesla Motors. Today, the companies announced that Tesla will produce an electric version of the Rav4 SUV for Toyota in 2012. More »

Today, GE has unveiled its long-awaited scheme for electric-car charging points, complete with a design by Yves Béhar's Fuseproject. The stations will drop the time required to charge a car down to as little as four hours. More »

Needlessly annoyed by how much energy is being wasted in your home thanks to vampire draw? Regrettably, it looks as if you'll have to just tough it out for the remainder of summer (or winter, depending on hemisphere), as the device you're peering at above won't be on sale until August. The USB controlled "Power USB" power strip is a rather unique device, housing a grand total of four universal power sockets (hello, travelers!) and a single USB port; as you may expect, the USB port links the strip to your computer, giving it the power to turn a given socket on or off. Two of the plugs are actually on at all times (a good thing -- trust us), while the other two can be turned on automatically when triggered by a software program or a print job, for example. There's no mention of a price just yet, but even more alarming is the omission of a 12 socket version for the hardcore users among us.

Universal USB controlled 'Power USB' strip turns on when your PC says it can originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are plenty of technical hurdles keeping the masses from decking out their roofs with solar panels, but their general ugliness doesn't help much either. Tegolasolare puts their photovoltaic panels second to the surrounding architecture, not the other way around. More »



Energy - Solar - Renewable - Business - Electric

Continue reading Belkin Conserve lineup will make you feel even worse about all the electricity you're wasting

Belkin Conserve lineup will make you feel even worse about all the electricity you're wasting originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just in time for the World Cup, the sOccket 2.0 offers an ingenious solution for illuminating developing nations. Kicking the induction coil-equipped ball around for ten minutes provides 3 hours of LED light. More »



World Cup - Sport - Soccer - Competitions - 2006

If you are curious to know the exact electricity cost of running your laptop or desktop computer all day long, here’s a quick guide.

Step 1: You first need to calculate the total power (in kilowatt) that’s consumed by your monitor, CPU, graphic card and other components of the computer.

Don’t worry – you don’t have to do these calculations manually. Joulemeter is a free software from Microsoft that can quickly estimate the power consumption of your computer based on the screen’s brightness, the microprocessor, etc.

Step 2: Now find the retail cost of electricity (commonly known as price per unit or price per kWh) in your part of the world. You can know the electricity cost per unit either from your last month’s electricity bill or check the official website of your power distribution company (search for electricity tariffs).

Once you have the two numbers, just multiply them to get an approximate idea of your computer’s electricity bill. I say approximate here because we are ignoring the power consumed by the modem, router and so on.

The Total Electricity Cost of Running a Computer

Let’s take a practical example.

Assume that your computer monitor has a power rating of 50W. It will therefore consume 50×1/1000 or 0.05 kWh energy if you use the monitor for one hour. Now if the price of electricity in your region is 10¢ per unit, the total cost of running that monitor would be 8 x 10 x 0.05 or around 4¢ for an average eight-hour workday.

The monitor is just one component of the computer – you can use the above-mentioned Joulemeter software to calculate the total power consumed by all the various components of the computer and then multiply that number with the price of electricity to know the average running cost of the computer.

PS: The Joulementer application may upload certain anonymous information about your computer such as type of CPU and utilization; applications running; hard disk size and type; memory size and type; or the name of the Internet service provider and the IP address of your computer.

How Much Electricity Does Your Computer Use?

     

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.