Even though the U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it plans to invest up to $8.2 million for hydrogen storage research, mass production of safe and affordable fuel cells for autos and energy storage is still a long way off.

The exception is the hydrogen fuel cell developed by Shanghai-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies. Their fuel cells won’t power full-sized vehicles any time soon, but their technology is on the market for sale in certain hobbyist R/C toy cars.

Today the company announced that it is selling a $1500 hydrogen fuel cell kit for the toy cars. The pricey kit comes with a hydrogen fuel cell power unit with a scaled down fuel storage system that can carry up to 30 liters of solid state hydrogen. The company, of course, claims the product is safe.

Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies’ hydrogen fuel-cell powered H-racer toy car received quite a bit of attention when it was put on the market last year. It was named one of the Best Inventions of 2006 by Time Magazine and it wonBusiness 2.0’s 2007 Bottom Line Design Award.

The $150 H-racer only runs for a few minutes on its fuel cell power. But the $1500 kit’s fuel cell provides about an hour of play, according to a company spokesperson. Also, unlike the cheaper H-racer, the R/C cars with the “H-cell” can be controlled with a remote control.

Is this a sign of the future? Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies is also developing fuel cells for real-size applications in portable power and transportation. But larger applications come with all the safety and cost problems that fuel cell proponents have been facing for years.

The plastic wires could one day be used in products such as military camouflage that changes colors, flexible displays, and medical sensors, claims an article in the April 7 issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

The inexpensive plastic wires can’t replace their metal counterparts, at least for the time being. But the low price and versatility of the plastic wiring could “lead to a variety of new consumer products in the upcoming years,” said Dr. Loo in a press release.

Samsung Electronics on Wednesday began shipping a hybrid hard drive that the company claims will speed up boot times and eat up 70-90 percent less power than traditional hard drive units. But some analysts said computer makers were hesitant to adopt the new technology until the Korean company could prove it was reliable.

Samsung’s hybrid hard drive combines a small flash memory chip with a traditional rotating disc drive. Incoming data is recorded on the chip and transferred to the disc drive only when the flash memory is full. That means the traditional disc spins less frequently and uses less power.

Computers will require a hybrid hard drive to run Microsoft’s Windows Vista Premium laptops, but uptake will remain modest in the short term. iSuppli analyst Krishna Chander expects hybrid drives to account for 1 to 2 percent of hard drive sales in 2006, growing to about 3 percent in 2007. Growth is seen to take off in 2008, when hybrids will account for 15 to 20 percent of the notebook sales, he said.

“There is a challenge to prove the reliability of this total drive that has both flash and hard drives integrated into one,” said Mr. Chander.

Seagate Electronics, leader in the hard drive market, is hot on Samsung tail and expects to roll out a similar offering in the near future. Chip giant Intel is also developing similar technology known as Robson that could slow Samsung’s push for market share. But Mr. Chander thinks there’s place for both technologies, noting that hybrid hard drives and Robson will likely see equal growth in the coming years.

Samsung’s hybrid launch comes as the notebook hard drive market is exploding. iSuppli said Wednesday that notebook hard drive shipments were set to hit $14.9 billion in 2010, up from $9.2 billion in 2006. Compare those figures to the desktop hard drive market, which took in $11.6 billion in 2006 and is expected to lose steam, shrinking to $11.2 billion in 2010.

Still, Samsung faces tough competition to maintain and grow market share in the crowded hard drive market. According to the iSuppli report, Samsung sold only 10 percent of the hard drives shipped in 2006, ranking fourth behind leaders Seagate Technology at 33 percent, Western Digital at 20 percent, and Hitachi at 16 percent.

TXU, the Dallas-based utility company that has riled up environmentalists and others by proposing to build 11 new coal plants, announced Monday that it will be purchased by a group of private equity firms for $45 billion.

The purchase was led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Texas Pacific Group, and Goldman Sachs & Co. GS Capital Partners, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley intend to be equity investors at closing.

Some environmentalists are hailing this buyout as a possible win because it comes with an announcement that the company has given up plans to build eight of the 11 proposed coal-fired plants. The scale-back represents a 75 percent reduction in new coal capacity, or 56 million tons of annual carbon emissions, according to a TXU statement on the sale.

“Today marks the beginning of the end of big coal’s dominance over America’s energy future,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) in a statement.

Executive Editor of GreenBiz Joel Makower said that the deal is a major development because the environment became a “top line negotiating point for utility acquisition.”

“I think it puts everybody on notice that carbon is an investment risk and that utility growth going forward needs to look beyond fossil fuels,” said Mr. Makower.

The proposed TXU coal plants, along with six other proposed plants that Texas governor Rick Perry has asked to fast track, have heated up controversy about coal as an energy source. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, but it has become a key player in energy production as countries strive for energy independence.

Global coal consumption is expected to nearly double from 5.4 billion short tons in 2003 to 10.6 billion short tons in 2030, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environmental Information Association (EIA) International Energy Outlook for 2006.

In the U.S., coal supplies about 52 percent of electricity. It also generates 84 percent of the electricity emissions, according to the EIA. Coal emits twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, according to environmental nonprofit Environmental Defense.

“Up until now the coal industry believed that through their sheer marketplace power they could keep building coal plants forever,” said Mr. Makower. “I think this is a wake up call.”

Here’s a list of companies you don’t often see holding hands: Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, AMC, SprayCool, Rackable Systems, VMware, and Sun Microsystems.

But in the first joint effort of its kind, a consortium of IT companies a launched an initiative called the “The Green Grid” that aims to develop standards, measurement methods, processes and technologies to improve the energy efficiency of high technology products.

Not everyone, however, believes the Green Grid is an environmental initiative. “Green is the color du jour,” said Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz. “Everything that’s more efficient these days is green. At the end of the day I don’t think we’re going to be saving energy here. We’re just going to be using it much more efficiently to serve even more bandwidth, but in the process use much more energy.”

Energy usage is a growing concern as chips get more powerful, and power hungry, and server farms continue to grow in size. Half of the world’s data centers will run out of power by the end of 2008, according to a Gartner report released in November. Server farms sucked up 1.2 percent of the total electricity consumption in 2005, according to a recent survey by Dr. Jonathan Koomey commissioned by AMD (see Study Exposes Server Energy Costs).

“If I can make such a strategic part of my business more efficient, it’s going to turn into dollars,” said Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing with Sun Microsystems. “If I don’t, because of the rising price of energy, it’s going to be a real detriment to my business. Green is green, conservation and efficiency equal profits in every case.”

Initiatives to measure power consumption of servers are popping up as concerns about global warming have hit the mainstream. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy are expected to release a complete report on server efficiency in June. Servers could soon be subject to federal energy usage limits, similar to those imposed on household appliances, said Mr. Koomey.

IC Insights analyst Brian Matas credits the chips industry for its environmental perspective. “Making sure they’re not contributing to environmental wastes or hazards that way is an issue that has been swept under the rug,” said Mr. Matas. “The semiconductor (industry) is at the forefront of keeping things clean and (they are) doing a lot to make sure they’re meeting the government standards.”

In addition to chips manufacturers, companies selling virtualization software such VMware and Microsoft are key players in reducing server power demands. Advanced cooling systems from companies such as SprayCool also make power reduction a key part of their business.

In the quest for efficient ways to directly convert heat into electricity, University of California at Berkeley researchers announced Thursday that they have generated electricity from heat using organic molecules and metal nanoparticles.

If the method of electricity creation using waste heat can scale up to mass production, the technology could open up significant business opportunities to developing new sources of energy.

“Clearly any time you turn a waste product into a valuable energy product, that’s a great business opportunity as well as something that syncs with all our climate and energy independence goals,” said Joel Makower, principal with Clean Edge.

Ninety-percent of the world’s power today is created turning heat into electricity. “If you can generate power from waste heat, this could reduce the amount of fuel we have to use today for power and it will free it up for other applications. It will also reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” said Pramod Reddy, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Applied Science and Technology Program and co-lead author of the paper.

The dominant method is burning fossil fuels to create high-temperature heat that is then turned into electricity. However, in this process, approximately two-thirds of the heat created is wasted because it is too cool to be turned into electricity.

“Generating one watt of power requires about three watts of heat input and involves duping into the environment the equivalent of about two watts of power in the form of heat,” said Arun Majumdar, UC Berkeley professor and principal investigator of the study, in a statement. “If even a fraction of the lost heat can be converted into electricity in a cost-effective manner, the impact it would have on energy can be enormous, amounting to massive savings of fuel and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.”

Researchers have long been experimenting with ways to turn the wasted lower-temperature heat into electricity. Methods using inorganic materials have proven both expensive and inefficient. The new UC Berkeley study marks the first time organic molecules have been used for thermoelectric materials. The method creates electricity by joining two different metals at different temperatures.

“Since organic molecules have so much variety, we believe there is so much more we can do,” said Mr. Reddy.

Still, the technology is at the “science project stage,” said nanotechnology consultant Scott Mize, explaining that it will likely take a while to bring the technology to market. But that’s normal for the energy sector, he said. “A lot of the technology that we see today is information technology which tends to be developed very quickly, but when you’re talking about energy, it takes a lot longer to get that into the marketplace.”

While the timeline of getting the technology to market is an unknown, for UC Berkeley, the discovery is another notch in their energy innovation prowess.

“What’s important is that more and more companies are looking to UC Berkeley as a place where innovations happen and turn into market opportunities,” said Mr. Makower.

Earlier this month, UC Berkeley received a large portion of a $500 million grant from British Petroleum (BP) for its Energy Biosciences Institute, focusing on development of biofuels and other alternative fuel sources.

Total power used by servers, cooling and auxiliary infrastructure amounted to 1.2 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005, according to a Lawrence Berkeley Lab study released Thursday.

Commissioned by chip manufacturer AMD to promote its dual-core Opteron processors, the study was led by Lawrence Berkeley Lab staff scientist and Stanford University Consulting Professor Jonathan Koomey.

It set out to quantify the energy costs associated with servers—a feat that has proven difficult over the years due to a lack of measurement tools for the energy usage of servers and associated infostructure.

The last study on the subject was conducted in 2002 by IDC.

The Lawrence Berkeley Lab study reported that the total electricity bill for sever operation and associated infrastructure in 2005 is estimated to be $2.7 billion in the U.S. and $7.3 billion globally.

Mr. Koomey said that the most surprising finding from the survey was that aggregate electricity use for servers doubled from 2000 to 2005, both in the U.S. and worldwide.

He hopes the findings of the study will encourage the government to put out Energy Star specifications for energy-efficient servers.

The Environmental Production Agency (EPA) and the U.S Energy Department along with Lawrence Berkeley Lab are preparing a complete report for congress that is due in June 2007.

Government specification of energy efficient servers could fuel industry growth for virtualization technology, efficient server redesign, and energy-efficient cooling technology, said John Fruehe, worldwide business development manager for AMD Opteron.

While saving the environment might be the spark to the energy efficient trend, in the end saving energy is good business for AMD.

“We need to be much more responsible about the products that we’re designing to make sure we can allow companies to grow,” said Mr. Fruehe. “The last thing you want to do is put them in a situation where they can no longer afford to grow their business because you’ve artificially limited them with the amount of power they consume.”

In a citywide initiative to reduce costly energy consumption, Raleigh, North Carolina officials announced a deal Monday with local LED-lighting company Cree.

Raleigh considers itself a “living laboratory” for Cree’s light-emitting diode lighting. While LED lighting is not new to city streets in the United States, Cree’s goal with its “LEDCity” initiative is to show city officials that for certain lighting needs, such as parking garage lighting, the technology is ready today for implementation and energy savings.

“Nobody [else] has stepped forward with this direct partnership to move this technology to a mass market,” said Raleigh Assistant City Manager Daniel Howe.

Cree boasts that in parking garages alone, the LED lighting will be 40 percent more energy efficient than conventional lights. Still, installation of the lighting is expensive up front, and it remains to be seen whether the company will get a boost from sales outside of Raleigh.

If the lighting technology takes off, though, Cree is certain to see fierce competition from big names in lighting such as Philips, in addition to dozens of startups that want to get in on the game.

LEDs, light semiconductors traditionally used to light liquid crystal displays (LCDs), are set to compete with fluorescent lighting and other lighting alternatives for outdoor and indoor lighting. That is, if LEDs can produce bright enough white light and if the bulbs can come down in cost enough to financially benefit consumers. That, however, might be light years away.

Proving the Cost Savings

Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda knows that sales success depends upon proving the significant long-term savings of LEDs.

“We already know we can build LEDs from an efficiency standpoint,” said Mr. Swoboda. “The real question is, where does the economics come in? Great technology without an economic benefit doesn’t drive anyone to convert.”

For now, cost savings can be found when LED bulbs replace conventional metal halide lighting in locations where the lights are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to energy savings, the reduction in maintenance can also cut costs because LEDs can last about 10 years.

In exchange for being Cree’s guinea pig, the city of Raleigh has received discounts on installation. The city paid only 40 percent of the installation costs for the first parking garage light test.

There are plans to replace 33,000 streetlights, fixed lighting on city vehicles such as fire trucks and police cars, and flashlights for firefighters with LED lights.

Indoor office LED lighting has yet to prove efficient enough to merit replacement of conventional lighting, but Raleigh’s Mr. Howe remains optimistic.

“We’re hoping the technology will move forward on office lighting,” said Mr. Howe. “We’re not going to go with anything that doesn’t prove itself. It wouldn’t be prudent to buy something that’s LED if it’s going to cost citizens more money.”

Banning the Bulb

The announcement comes less than a month after California assemblyman Lloyd Levine proposed a California-wide ban on conventional incandescent lighting by 2012 (see Could California Ban the Bulb?). The proposed ban reflects California’s energy-aware political climate in which environmental laws are often tested out before they appear elsewhere in the country.

Nearly 3,000 miles removed from California’s politics, Mr. Howe said city officials are aware through the grapevine of what California is doing. In response to the conventional-lighting ban proposal, Mr. Howe said the ban will be unnecessary when LED technology takes off.