Linfox is well known for the “You are passing another Fox” sign on the back of its vehicles. But the company has also cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 9% in the last eighteen months, and is on track to cut its emissions by 15% by December 2010.

David McInnes, Linfox

I had the privilege of interviewing David McInnes, Group Manager Environment and Climate Change yesterday and being inspired about Linfox’s approach to the climate change challenge. It was refreshing not to hear the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme mentioned once in the interview. Linfox is reducing its carbon emissions because it wants to, not because its being forced to, and is quietly getting on with it.
[Click Here For Full Post]

Today I had the fortune to see Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place, talk about his vision for the electric car future. Shai calls himself an imaginer – “I imagine the future and engineer towards it”. His vision of an electric car future is elegant, simple, and achievable. Australia is a key part of his strategy to get the world to a tipping point which results in all cars becoming electric.

For electric cars to replace petrol cars they must be cheaper and more convenient. Yet the electric cars available now are more expensive and less convenient because of their short range and limited recharging options.
[Click Here For Full Post]

Virtual desktops provides large computer energy savings and are becoming easier to deploy. Great for schools, universities and offices!

Most of the time only a small fraction of a computer’s power is being used. If you took a office or school with say 100 PCs, with an average load of say 15%, in effect 85 of the PCs would be redundant if it was possible to take advantage of the full power of 15 PCs across 100 work stations.
[Click Here For Full Post]

General Electric is developing “smart” appliances that can integrate with “smart meters” and thus potentially schedule loads in a way that reduces maximum demand.

With time of use pricing in place, the GE system will use pricing information to schedule loads real time. So for example if a washing machine was running it might switch it off if the price of electricity increased, then switch it back on again when the price dropped.
[Click Here For Full Post]

I attended a workshop today in Melbourne run by iGrid, a consortium of universities and the CSIRO preparing a model of the intelligent energy grid of the future.

Its been identified that peak demand, which is rising faster than electricity consumption, is one of the most critical issues that a distributed generation network can address.
[Click Here For Full Post]