46 posts tagged with efficiency.
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District heating systems: The greenest energy is the energy we don't use
Oil Frackers Hold a Crucial Piece of the Net Zero Puzzle [ungated] - "Technology used to produce bad old fossil fuels is now being turned to clean renewable purposes. What matters is how companies manage the risks." [more inside]
How Clean is Hydrogen, Actually?
How clean is hydrogen really - worse than methane? Robert Llewelyn from Fully Charged on a podcast with David Cebon from the Hydrogen Science Coalition about the "colours of hydrogen", the lobbying process in play at the moment and the relationship with the underlying science. Its an in-depth, but informative discussion, I found.
The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle
Imagine a personal heating system that works indoors as well as outdoors, can be taken anywhere, requires little energy, and is independent of any infrastructure. It exists – and is hundreds of years old.
But, above all, we need on-line capacity
A big move. But think about what this means. All this effort, all those cancellations, all those people staying away from emergency departments and the health service is only just below the 85 per cent line – what was once considered its normal operating capacity.In The NHS at capacity Chris Cook looks at how the last few decades have left the NHS overstretched even in normal times because it had to choose efficiency over spare capacity for a crisis.
Better living through caffeination
Systematically Improving Espresso: Insights from Mathematical Modeling and Experiment — Considering a 25% reduction in coffee mass (i.e., $0.025 saving), and considering the daily coffee consumption in the United States (124,000,000 espresso-based beverages per day), our protocol yields $3.1 million savings per day, or $1.1 billion per year.
Green Public Housing Act
“Through a 10-year mobilization of up to $172 billion, the bill would decarbonize and upgrade more than 1 million units of public housing. (To put that in perspective, if those homes formed a single city, it would be the country’s fourth largest—more populous than Houston, slightly smaller than Chicago.) The legislation gives a glimpse of how a Green New Deal could improve lives, attack inequality, and slash emissions. We would know because our think tank, Data for Progress, researched the damn bill.” Green New Deal for Public Housing (The Nation) “ For more details on where new jobs would be created nationally, view our data tables. For more details on where jobs would be created in New York City specifically, see the NYCHA report.” (Data For Progress)
more from less: dematerialization versus degrowth
Economic Growth Shouldn't Be a Death Sentence for Earth - "But it does mean learning how to do more while using fewer resources."[1,2] (thread-reader) [more inside]
Little Green Houses For You And Me
"In a theoretical Green New Deal, both zero-energy and passive-house standards could be implemented to ensure that all new construction would be ecologically sustainable. Advancements in architectural thinking and building construction—limiting the use of unsustainable, energy inefficient, and carbon-intensive building materials such as glass curtain walls, concrete, and building materials derived from petroleum, and increasing the use of consumer technologies like composting toilets—could further reduce architecture’s carbon footprint. Architecture already has the means and technology to make this happen. It also happens that the results look good." How A Green New Deal Could Transform Our Homes (Curbed)
Spaces Built For A Different Kind Of Person
“Like Modernism itself, it came from Europe, and it changed everything. You might not have heard of the Frankfurt Kitchen, but if you have neatly organized cabinets, an easy-to-clean tiled backsplash, and a colorful countertop, in a sense, you already cook in one.” How The Frankfurt Kitchen, designed by architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Changed How We Cook—and Live (City Lab)
SO COOL, they're hot!
Thought y'all might enjoy some cookstove theory from the Aprovecho Research Center. (pdfs)
Edible extremophiles
“These extremophiles learned to be extremely efficient in using their resources,” he said. “They are very relevant at a point in time when humanity already uses tremendous amounts of resources to support the highly inefficient animal-protein model.”
"If the Lord is good enough to send me wind on a Sunday"
"Do improvements in energy efficiency actually lead to energy savings? At first sight, the advantages of efficiency seem to be impressive. For example, the energy efficiency of a range of domestic appliances covered by the EU directives has improved significantly over the last 15 years. Between 1998 and 2012, fridges and freezers became 75% more energy efficient, washing machines 63%, laundry dryers 72%, and dishwashers 50%. " [more inside]
Joseph Heath on the benefits of risk-pooling and the social safety net
Privatization and demutualization. A concise explanation of the efficiency gains of health insurance and public pensions, from Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath. Heath points out that the "social safety net" provides tremendous gains from risk-pooling, completely separate from redistribution or reduced inequality. [more inside]
Dignified housing at an affordable price
"For over a decade, architecture students at Rural Studio, Auburn University's design-build program in a tiny town in West Alabama, have worked on a nearly impossible problem. How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want—while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it?" Now Rural Studio has a prototype it's trying to bring to market, and it's hitting its biggest challenge yet: how to fit its small, efficient, inexpensive houses into an infrastructure that has no place for them.
The Social Construction of Money (Wealth/Capital in the 21st Century)*
The political economy of a universal basic income: "your view of what is feasible should not be backwards looking. The normalization of gay marriage and legalization of marijuana seemed utopian and politically impossible until very recently. Yet in fact those developments are happening, and their expansion is almost inevitable given the demographics of ideology... UBI — defined precisely as periodic transfers of identical fixed dollar amounts to all citizens of the polity — is by far the most probable and politically achievable among policies that might effectively address problems of inequality, socioeconomic fragmentation, and economic stagnation." [more inside]
Utility, welfare, and efficiency
- Welfare economics: an introduction
- The perils of Potential Pareto
- Inequality, production, and technology
- Welfare theorems, distribution priority, and market clearing
- Normative is performative, not positive
Why Choreographed Airplane Boarding Might be a Good Idea
Basically, it would be faster. The best part about the article is the short, embedded videos showing simulations of different boarding processes. There's the standard method, the Southwest pick-your-own-seat method, and the dehumanizing Steffen method.
Lights Out, Luthor. I said...LIGHTS OUT!
January 1st, 2014 ushers in a new era for the U.S. population, as 40 and 60 watt incandescent lightbulbs will no longer be produced nor imported into the mainland. This turnaround follows the demise of non LED/CFL 75w bulbs on January 1st, 2013, and 2012's phaseout of 100 watt bulbs under the revised provisions to the National Energy Law of 1978. The ultimate catalyst for the greening of America? The 1973 Oil Crisis.
Incommensurable values
Economists and the theory of politics - "why unions were often well worth any deadweight cost" [more inside]
You would download your car data
"You probably don't think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did."
the dawn of a Star Trek generation
In Praise of Leisure - "Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week. They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called 'Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.' Its thesis was simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all... He thought this condition might be reached in about 100 years — that is, by 2030." (via) [more inside]
The Failure of Judges and the Rise of Regulators
The Control Revolution And Its Discontents - "the long process of algorithmisation over the last 150 years has also, wherever possible, replaced implicit rules/contracts and principal-agent relationships with explicit processes and rules."
you may say I'm a dreamer
-Only an 'energy internet' can ward off disaster
-We must electrify the transport sector [more inside]
-We must electrify the transport sector [more inside]
Open Compute Project
Facebook's Open Compute Project aims to share with the public the social network's efficiency design improvements to its compute nodes. [ via ]
ending corporate welfare
Get the Energy Sector off the Dole - Why ending all government subsidies for fuel production will lead to a cleaner energy future—and why Obama has a rare chance to make it happen.
Nukes, schmukes
How Business Can Lead us Beyond Fossil Fuels: a Techonomy presentation by Amory Lovins, followed by comments from Chevron CTO John McDonald and audience questions.
Happy 115th, Mr Fuller!
When he was 32, his life seemed hopeless. He was bankrupt and without a job. He was grief stricken over the death of his first child and he had a wife and a newborn to support. Drinking heavily, he contemplated suicide. Instead, he decided decided that his life was not his to throw away: it belonged to the universe. Buckminster Fuller embarked on "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." If the architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller were still alive, he would be 115 years old today. Though he died in 1983, his legacy grows on through recordings of his ideas and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. [more inside]
Doing more with what only seems to be less.
"For many riders, a Ninja 250 is the bottom rung of a sport bike ladder, a necessary first step in pursuit of high horsepower race replicas. I can’t begin to recount the myriad times I’ve been asked about getting a bigger bike, generally with the suggestion, express or implied, that I’m ready for a 600cc super sport. With over 17,000 miles behind the bars of my mighty 250, I’ve no apprehensions about moving up." - A blog documenting and occasionally rhapsodizing about day to day living with a bike that is usually looked down on as a underpowered, beginner's bike.
Urinal Protocol Vulnerability
Ideas for Environmentally Sustainable Living
Eartheasy is about sustainable living. It offers information, activities and ideas which help us live more simply, efficiently and with less impact on the environment. [more inside]
Fuelly tracks your gas mileage.
Fuelly tracks your gas mileage over time, helping you save fuel and expenses as you drive.
Sustainability
Our Decrepit Food Factories. Michael Pollan on what sustainability is really about. [Via Gristmill.]
Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys
The Case for Resilience. How Efficiency Maximizes Catastrophe.
Smallist: Better living through Smallistry
Better living through Smallistry at Smallist. Gadgets, spaces, beverages, fetishes:
ultra-niche blogging at its finest. [via mefi projects]
YMMV
Long live the Flusher King!
Ever wonder how toilet efficiency is tested? With pictorial goodness of the, errr, test subjects. (mildy NSFW)
Beyond Sustainability
Designing the Next
Industrial Revolution [google video], an inspiring talk by William McDonough on design and ecology, beyond sustainability. Starts a little slow, but builds a powerful vision of a possible future. [transcript, via, see also]
Wait, what's really more efficient?
A new study suggests that, over the course of its lifetime, a Hummer H3 has a lower energy cost per mile than all currently offered hybrid vehicles.
Good and Bad Procrastination
There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. (via slashdot)
Intelligent Design by Trial and Error
A more efficient microbe genome. A more efficient sorting algorithm. A more efficient keyboard layout.
Drive ten thousand miles on a gallon of petrol?
Shell Eco Marathon UK is coming up in England (6-7 july). It is a race not for the swift, but for those who can drive immense distances in super-efficient vehicles. Two years ago, the current world record of 10,706 MPG was set at one of these events. The lessons learned are useful in development in other fuel-efficient cars, such as the 100 MPG Honda Insight. Interesting in these times of high oil prices, then, when considering that despite tactical driving, normal petrol cars rarely get better than 45 MPG. Diesels are slightly better, as illustrated on BBC Top Gear, where Clarkson drives an Audi A8 from London to Edinburgh and back on a single tank of diesel. That's 800 miles.
The Future of the Car
Obsession: Mr. Singh’s Search for the Holy Grail American visionaries, cranks and con men have long sought the simple key to boosting the efficiency of the gasoline engine. Now a barefoot tinkerer in India believes he has unlocked the door. Is he for real?
Turn off the lights when you leave.
The end of the light bulb? E. Fred Schubert, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute "claims to have invented a 99-percent efficient reflector that promises to speed the replacement of light bulbs with LEDs." According to researchers, this could happen within the next five years. The current prototype is bankrolled by the ARPA and The National Science Foundation "recently award Schubert's team a $210,000 grant to create in three years a commercial version of his patented omnidirectional reflector."
"Schubert claimed that lighting accounts for 25 percent of U.S. electrical energy consumption. Since white LEDs emit more light per dollar and generate less unwanted heat, they are potentially a major energy saver." (see EE Times link)
Meanwhile, some of the oldtimers seem to be pretty refractory.
"Schubert claimed that lighting accounts for 25 percent of U.S. electrical energy consumption. Since white LEDs emit more light per dollar and generate less unwanted heat, they are potentially a major energy saver." (see EE Times link)
Meanwhile, some of the oldtimers seem to be pretty refractory.
Hyper-efficient living space.
347 square feet? Hyper-efficient living space.
meta meta meta
Gizmodo + Cool Tools + Whole Earth Catalog = Meta-efficient -a "guide to the most efficient things in the world."
He gives a whole new meaning to the word
He gives a whole new meaning to the word "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." NY Times
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