LED Lighting to Capture 52% of Commercial Building Market by 2021
LED Lighting to Capture 52% of Commercial Building Market by 2021
NOVEMBER 30, 2011 BY ELIZABETH SMYTH LEAVE A COMMENT
“LEDs represent perhaps the most significant breakthrough of the last 130 years in lighting technology.” – Eric Bloom
Pike Research forecasts LED lighting will capture 52% of the Commercial Building Market by 2021 as the price of light-emitting diodes continues to decline. Furthermore, they expect the lighting industry to see more change in the next five years than in the previous 50, comparing the rise of LED popularity to the commercialization of the fluorescent lamp in the 1930s.
Currently, the market share for LEDs is quite low due to higher initial costs and a longer payback period. However, Pike anticipates the cost of LED solid state lighting products will be reduced by 80-90% over the next decade, making LEDs a more viable option for typical commercial applications.
Market share for LEDs will come at the expense of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), high-intensity discharge (HID) lighting, and general linear fluorescents. Research analyst,Eric Bloom believes that “incandescent and less efficient T12 and T8 fluorescent lamps will be almost completely eliminated over the next 10 years.”
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LED vs. CFL – Which Light Bulb is More Efficient?
Price of CFLs are rising fast
Photo: Precision Paragon
Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/14oQD)
Posted in green technology, Renewable Energy
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Peak (Cheap) Oil: How It Will Change Your Life (Micro-Doc)
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How To Get Through 1 Year of Tough Times
How To Get Through 1 Year of Tough Times
November 15, 2011 at 12:15 pm (PT)
The scenario: You want to get a few ideas of how you would handle ‘tough times’ for a year, if it were upon you. What should you do now, while things are relatively good, to prepare for tough times? First, let’s make a few assumptions…
Assumptions: You already have the basic needs and supplies that you need for day-to-day living, based on where you already live. In this case, our definition of ‘tough times’ will be mostly economic, e.g. someone has lost their job and money is tight (tighter), or perhaps you still have a job, but prices have been going out of control and there is turmoil (social and financial) in the streets.
FRUGAL WAY OF LIFE
The primary mode of operation during tough times is that of FRUGALITY. Actually, the time leading up to tough times should also be lived in frugality so as to enable acquiring more supplies.
Being frugal is a way of life. It is a thought process that occurs naturally whenever you are thinking about product purchases, or uses for existing or new supplies. Many people that are currently financially ‘wealthy’ are frugal themselves, and you might never know that they are ‘well off’. This is how they got there… IT WORKS. It all adds up.
Before a purchase… think… do you need it? Really? Are there alternatives? Are there multiple uses for the product? How long will it last? How long do you need it? Could you borrow it instead? Do you need to spend more for quality? (sometimes this is wise, while other times it is not) Is it practical? Lots of questions should precede any purchase.
Posted in prepping, Sustainable living
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Bamboo: Good or Bad for the Environment
Bamboo: Good or Bad for the Environment
BY CHRIS KEENAN
These days everyone is talking about bamboo. From walls to flooring, bamboo is regaled as the environmental answer to wood. Bamboo flooring is commonplace from showrooms to homes, and the building community expects that it will be used in plywood next. Just think, tomorrow your garage doors could be constructed with the renewable source.
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Getting Ready For ‘Peak Oil
Getting Ready For ‘Peak Oil’
While researching his 2004 book, “The End of Oil” author Paul Roberts was allowed to see the Shayba oil field in Saudi Arabia’s “empty quarter.” Full of pride, Robert’s Saudi engineer hosts boasted about the remarkable infrastructure built over the Shayba, rattling off a list of impressive production statistics. Saudi oilmen are usually very tight-lipped about their oil data, sanctimoniously guarding their data like state secrets. But this was a new post-911 world, and the Saudis found themselves in an unusual predicament: They needed to convince the US that they were a stable and dependable supplier of oil. Roberts shifted the discussion from his hosts’ presentation of the Shayba field, when he asked them about the Qhawar field some three hundred miles to the northwest. Ghawar is by far the largest field ever discovered. From the time it was tapped in 1953 it has contributed roughly one barrel out of every twelve consumed on the planet. Like a proud parent sensing their guest had not fully appreciated the work they had done; a moment of careless bravado took over the Saudi oilmen. Unable to contain themselves, an engineer began to brag about the Shayba while throwing a few pot-shots at the rival operations at Ghawar, “The Shayba is self-pressurized, at Ghawar they have to inject water.” He continued, “At Ghawar the water-cut is 30 percent.” The hairs rose on the back of Roberts’s neck. If true this means that the Ghawar field is much further along the road to depletion than previously thought. Their secret was out
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Post oil: Glimpses of life after fossil fuel
Americans like to imagine the future. From the world’s fairs of the early 20th century to futuristic magazine features in the 1950s to the 1980s “Back to the Future” films, we love dreaming up what might come next.
When we dream, it turns out, we dream without oil. The show-stealer at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 was a demonstration of alternating current – a massive generator that made it possible to snuff out household oil lamps and switch on a light bulb. Doc’s time machine in “Back to the Future” runs on garbage, and the “hoverboard” the hero in the film’s sequels hops on to outrun the bad guys flitted on whimsy, not oil. And no one in the ”Star Trek” franchise ever said, “Captain Picard, we need to swing by the gas station.”
With today’s volatility at the local pump, contentious debates about “peak oil,” and soaring global interest in biofuels, imagining how the world looks without oil isn’t just a fanciful distraction. There’s lively debate about how far away a post-oil world is – earliest estimates are around 2030, while many analysts say that, as technology changes to accommodate fluctuations in the oil supply, we’ll never technically see an end to oil. But advisory bodies such as the International Energy Agency and the US National Intelligence Council expect oil demand to spike, and supply to dwindle, over the next 15 years – which makes imagining a post-oil future an urgent task of the present.
Posted in green technology, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy
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Americans Drowning In Spin
I have come to the conclusion that Big Brother’s subjects in George Orwell’s 1984 are better informed than Americans.
Americans have no idea why they have been at war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa for a decade. They don’t realize that their liberties have been supplanted by a Gestapo Police State. Few understand that hard economic times are here to stay.
On October 27, 2011, the US government announced some routine economic statistics, and the president of the European Council announced a new approach to the Greek sovereign debt crisis. The result of these funny numbers and mere words sent the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to its largest monthly rally since 1974, erasing its 2011 yearly loss. The euro rose, putting the European currency again 40% above its initial parity with the US dollar when the euro was introduced.
On National Public Radio a half-wit analyst declared, emphatically, that the latest US government statistics proved that the recovery was in place and that there was no danger whatsoever of a double-dip recession. And half-brain economists predicted a better tomorrow.
Europe is happy because the European private banks, the creditors of the European governments, have agreed to eat 50% of Greece’s sovereign debt and to be recapitalized by public money handed to them by the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund. The President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, thinks that Greece’s debt is the only sovereign debt to be written down and that the debt of Italy, Spain, and Portugal will somehow be bailed out through other means, including a Chinese contribution to the EFSF rescue fund. Obviously, if all EU sovereign debt has to be cut by 50% as well, the rescue fund would not be up to the job.
For our corrupt financial markets, any news that can be spun as good news can send stocks up. But what are the facts?
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Geothermal Energy Could Power Entire U.S. (Maybe)
Google is dipping its toes in renewable energy – according to Science Daily, it provided a grant to SMU Geothermal Laboratory which indicates a pretty hefty amount of geothermal power lurking across the United States. The total amount of available power is claimed to be more than three million megawatts (current coal power plants produce 300,000 megawatts, for the curious). Maps are viewable on Google Earth (where else?) and SMU believes that they are accessible with current technology.
We Know More Than Before!
Traditional geothermal production in the U.S. is in the western part of the country, where there’s more tectonic activity, but the new research has refined the geothermal map. Using nearly 35,000 data points (twice the number in a previous survey, and primarily drawn from oil and gas drilling), more local variations were found for temperatures at depth. The eastern half of the country seems to hold much more potential than previously thought – through the Appalachians, for example.
The new data points were used for in-depth analysis (more information means a better overall picture, usually) to create heat flow maps and temperature-at-depth maps from
Continue Reading: Original Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/13DJ4)
