Greg Galitzine : Green Blog
Greg Galitzine
| Helping environmentally-conscientious business leaders choose environmentally-friendly solutions.

December 2009

You are browsing the archive for December 2009.

To Go Green (In More Ways than One) Go Virtual...and Bus and Rail

December 31, 2009

Want more proof that going green by virtualizing offices i.e. teleworking and locating those functions that need people to interact with each other and with equipment inside energy-efficient buildings at high-transit-accessible locations is the smart way to go? Why it will save green in more ways than one.

A new report by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010 covered on TMCnet  illustrates why staying or locating in traditional suburban sprawl office buildings is a bad financial idea.

Keeping the Desert Green By Banning Solar Plants, Wind Farms

December 22, 2009

One of our blog's readers, Sally, sent me a Dec.21 New York Times story on legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein to protect some 1 million acres of the Mojave Desert in California for two parks, the Mojave Trails National Monument and the Sand to Snow National Monument. Yet doing this, said the paper, will scuttle some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for these lands via leases.

The newspaper reports that a fair-sized portion of that land had been donated to the federal government a decade ago by an environmental group, which had purchased the property from Catellus Development with private and federal money. The rest has been protected in some form or another.

UPI, Green Approaches Work in Unison to Achieve Sustainability

December 15, 2009

With more companies looking to migrate and ensure seamless operability, thoroughly following the development cycle and increasing interoperability testing to maximize efficiency are paramount for today's smart data centers.   Panduit Corp., a leader in unified physical infrastructure-based solutions, announced this month it is partnering with IBM to implement portable modular data center designs that minimize energy use and provide cost-effective and flexible solutions to meet data center capacity. This is a prime example of deploying sustainable technology infrastructures that meet evolving business requirements and managing costs across the data center life cycle.   A recent Gartner report confirms that green IT tops the agendas of data center and IT managers, despite the economic downturn.

Making Solar More Reliable

December 14, 2009

Solar power is in theory fairly straightforward: sun to panel. Yet there are many factors affect solar performance including cloudiness, dust and dirt, shade, obstruction shading, and inter-panel-row shading.

Moreover it is often difficult if not impossible to accurately tell which electricity-producing mechanisms i.e. in this case modules are failing without costly added service visits to detect the issues on top of the amounts charged for fixing them. Solar is not like wind, local hydro or wood/biomass-fed generators where there are visual, aural, and in the case of the last one olfactory clues as to problems. 

Homeowners and small businesses can ill-afford such added expenses. If solar was going to be this much hassle then why go solar? 

Premier Power Renewable Energy has an answer: panels made with microinverter technology that pinpoints which specific modules are failing so they can be identified and replaced on a regular service call. The devices, made by Enphase allows homeowners to maximize their solar energy harvest and reduce their utility bill by selling more solar electricity back to the utility i.e. net metering thus, says the firm, "substantially reducing their utility electricity bill."





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