green tech
Latest
Nissan says its new electric car, the Leaf, gets 367 miles per gallon
Nissan's gotten into a bit of a bragging contest on Twitter -- possibly fueled by Chevrolet's recent, shaky claim that the Volt will get 230 miles per gallon. The company is now saying that its new electric car, the Leaf, will get an astonishing 367 miles per gallon... even though it's a 100 percent electric car, and runs on absolutely no fuel. So, isn't that zero miles per gallon? Well, yes and no: all these massive numbers are based on both the Department of Energy and the EPA's calculations for estimating equivalencies in electric cars. Why? Well, it seems that car companies are still giving us -- the prospective buying public -- MPG figures because they think that's what we understand best. Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for Chevy's Volt recently admitted to the New York Times that the miles per gallon matrix is "probably not the best measure of goodness" for a car that uses no gallons at all, but that it's "what people are accustomed to." We agree -- he's got a point -- but people were also accustomed to the hi-fi, the corded landline, and the steam engine. We assure you: people understand that a car that runs on zero gas (and therefore gets an astonishingly low amount of miles per gallon) is really, really awesome. So the MPG matrix is useless when talking about electric cars -- we'll adjust! Read - Nissan claims 367 miles per gallon for electric LeafRead - The Chevy Volt: mileage numerology
GE develops high efficiency incandescent bulbs
Incandescent is getting a pretty bad name in today's going-green society, but GE wants to salvage the tech with innovation before it's scrapped for the ages in laws that ban its use at home and abroad. GE's new high efficiency incandescent (HEI) lamp doubles the efficiency of today's 15 lumens-per-Watt incandescent bulbs achieving something closer to fluorescents -- which GE claims has the potential of saving supposedly hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, if adopted universally, of course. We doubt it's any coincidence that this announcement was made so shortly after the Australia's law and California's bill against incandescent bulbs, but the message is clear: save power, or Croc Dundee and the Governator will hunt you down and bad things will happen.[Via Slashdot]
150 LED bulb uses 9W, costs $65
You're a very special kind of person -- our kind of person -- if you're the type to drop a good $65 on a single light bulb only because it's made up of 150 warm white LEDs. The 308 lumen (and 594 lumen frosted glass version) bulb sips only 9.2 watts, but is said to be equivalent of a 70 watt incandescent, meaning even though you'll improve your energy consumption by roughly 87%, at 20 cents a kilowatt-hour it'll still take you about 4,600 hours of incandescent use to reconcile the bulb's. But you want one anyway, don't you? Like we said, our kind of person.
