The 2008 Summer Olympic Games has started in China, and with a very impressive ceremony both in terms of scale and execution. But as well as the opening ceremony, the sporting events and the inevitable political commentary that will surround the games, this year there is also a focus on the environment.

Earth2Tech has a list of ten companies who have provided some eco-friendly equipment for the games. Everybody from LED lighting experts Cree, who provided LED displays for the swimming cube and the bird’s nest National Stadium, to companies like GE who are involved in all kinds of projects at the games, including wind turbines, solar lighting and even rainwater recycling.

(more…)

Lighting company Vu1 (formerly Telegen) announced a new technology for low power lighting this week: Electron Stimulated Luminescence™. The new technology is remarkably similar in principle to the old cathode ray tube TVs. The bulb generates a stream of electrons that excite a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb’s glass. That has the effect of making the entire surface of the bulb glow.

Incandescent bulbs run current through a filament, heating it to produce. CFLs send current through mercury vapour to generate UV light which excites the phosphor coating on the inside of the glass. LEDs use special semiconductors which emit light when excited electrically. Vu1’s technology does away with the filament (which is the achilles heel of the incandescent bulb, resulting in the eventual failure of the bulb when all the heating and cooling causes the filament to break), which should improve the lifetime.

(more…)

Anchorage, Alaska is joining the growing list of towns switching some of their street lighting to energy efficient LED lamps by joining the LED City program. The city will be converting about a quarter of its street lights to LED lamps at a cost of $2.2M. The savings from this investment could be as much as $360,000 per year.

The LED City program was started by Cree, a US-based manufacturer of LED components in 2007. They have a number of cities around the world already signed up for the program, including Raleigh, NC; Ann Arbor, MI, Austin, TX; Toronto, Ontario; Tianjin, China, and Torraca, Italy.

A simple change that everybody can make around their house is to change some of those old incandescent light bulbs into new, energy efficient ones. That not only helps the planet, but it will reduce the household electricity bill too. But how much difference does it make, and which option should I choose?

(more…)