What is the cost of your *free* gmail ?

A nice take on the real heavyweight in terms of cost. The bottomline is that the electricity costs are the main costs of storage or for that matter anything. Read more in Rajesh's blog.

Global Investments in Alternative energy

Currently, only around $20bn a year is invested worldwide in renewable energy capacity; mainly wind and solar, with some in biomass and biofuels. A further $5bn is spent on research each year, particularly into hydrogen and fuel cells. But that figure is bound to grow. New Energy Finance expects the figure to increase to over $100bn within a decade - a sustained compound annual growth rate of 15-20%. That means there will be opportunities to make money provided investors make the right choice. read more.

Startup sagacity

Rajesh in his usual direct style has some simple advice for product startup's here. They say common sense is the most uncommon of the senses :)

Honda's home hydrogen cogeneration

Honda motors has introduced a new concept car (hydrogen fuel cell based) that comes with a home hydrogen co-generation kit (it however uses natural gas so its not like it is beyond petroleum). It is however a good start. Detailed article on the internals here.

Can Jatropha curcas L. help India ?

The Jatropha plant is a dryland marginal crop that does not need the petro inputs that go into conventional bio-diesel crops. The Government of India has the following to say


THE GAZETTE OF INDIA: EXTRAORDINARY [PART I- SEC. I]

MINISTRY OF PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS RESOLUTION

NEW DELHI, 3RD September, 2002 No. P-45018/28/2000-C. C. -

With a view to give boost to agriculture sector and reduce environmental pollution, Government of India have been examining for quite some time supply of ethanol-doped-petrol in the country. In order to ascertain financial and operational aspects of blending 5% ethanol with petrol as allowed in the specifications of Bureau of Indian Standards for petrol. Government had launched three pilot projects; two in Maharashtra and one in Uttar Pradesh during April and June 2001 and these pilot projects have been supplying 5% ethanol-doped-petrol only to the retail outlets under their respective supply areas since than. Apart from the aforesaid field through pilot projects, R & D studies also were undertaken simultaneously. Both pilot projects and R & D studies have been successful and established blending of ethanol up to 5% with petrol and usage of ethanol-doped-petrol in vehicles.

Discussions were held with concerned agencies including the Governments of major sugar producing States. While the Society for Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has confirmed the acceptance for use of 5% ethanol-doped-petrol in vehicles. State Governments of major sugar producing States and the representatives of sugar/distillery industries have confirmed availability / capacity to produce ethanol. Government have set up an Expert Group headed by the Executive Director of the Centre for High Technology for examining various options of blending ethanol with petrol including use of ETBE in refineries. Considering the logistical and financial advantages, this Group has recommended blending of ethanol with petrol at supply locations (terminals / depots) of oil companies. In view of the above, Government have now resolved that with effect from 1-1-2003, 5% ethanol-doped-petrol will be supplied in the following nine States and Four contiguous Union Territories :

States & Union Territories 1. Andhra Pradesh 1. Damman and Diu 2. Goa 2. Dadra and Nagar Haveli 3. Gujrat 3. Chandigarh 4. Haryana 4. Pondicherry 5. Karnataka 6. Maharashtra 7. Punjab 8. Tamilnadu 9. Uttar Pradesh

Is ethanol really renewable ?

James at the Alternate energy blog has an interesting take on the true nature of the ethanol (corn based) economy here.
The key arguments is that there is a significant amount of fossil fuels that go into the production of ethanol and that the operation is not fossil fuel free. Worth a serious read.

India heading for a major energy crisis

Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Director-General, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) observes that:

With the international crude oil prices hovering around $ 65 per barrel and the oil import bill set for a jump of over Rs 55,000 crore, to reach over Rs 1,75,000 crore this year, India is heading for a major energy crisis. With a population of around 110 crore, we cannot afford to follow the high-energy consumption pattern of the West that has resulted in an indiscriminate exploitation of fossil fuels and high pollution levels.

Read the rest here.

CIA invests in reneawable energy

The christian science monitor is carrying this article about rapidly deployable poratable green energy generators using solar and wind power.

The US Energy act 2005

The extract below contains the key provisions of the new US energy act. It is progressive and rewards the right things (at least in the brief reading that i have given it). Surprising that this was passed in GB-2's administration :) We need something very similar in India as our current utilization is pathetic and the devices that we use are not constrained to conform to any kind of energy efficiency. Sometimes i think that this is a result of industrial lobbying and an unenlightened consumer class. An act like this will make genuine energy efficient products cheaper than their energy guzzling brethren inspite of having better technology. Something like what the Maruti did to the Ambassador. The government is contrast is withdrawing the subsidies that were granted for household energy generation and moved most of the subsidy support to industrial houses that invest in power farms. What we need is clear legislation that discriminates positively in favour of renewable energy devices. This will mark a return to policies that make sense in this energy hungry world.

Extract:

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (USA), includes many tax provisions to aid energy exploration, delivery, and conservation.

Key provisions of the Act include:

* New tax credits for the purchase of hybrid, fuel cell, advanced lean burn diesel and other alternative power vehicles. The size of the credit varies depending on the weight class of the vehicle and the rated fuel economy. The credit applies to vehicles placed in service after 2005, with termination dates varying with the type of alternative power vehicle. Additionally, (current law deduction for certain clean fuel vehicles and refueling property) sunsets after 2005 (instead of after 2006, as under current law).
* New 30% tax credit for the purchase of qualifying residential solar water heating, photovoltaic equipment, and fuel cell property. The maximum credit is $2,000 (for solar equipment) and $500 for each kilowatt of capacity (for fuel cells). The credit applies for property placed in service after 2005 and before 2008.
* New 30% business tax credit for the purchase of fuel cell power plants and a 10% credit for the purchase of stationary microturbine power plants, effective for periods after Dec. 31, 2005 and before Jan. 1, 2008, for property placed in service in tax years ending after Dec. 31, 2005.
* New 10% personal tax credit for energy efficient improvements to existing homes. The lifetime maximum credit per taxpayer is $500 and applies for property placed in service after Dec. 31, 2005 and before Jan. 1, 2008.
* New business tax credit for the construction of new energy efficient homes. The credit is either $2,000 or $1,000 per home, depending on the type of home and the energy reduction standard it meets. The credit applies to homes whose construction is substantially completed after Dec. 31, 2005, and which are purchased after Dec. 31, 2005 and before Jan. 1, 2008.
* New deduction for energy efficient commercial buildings meeting a 50% energy reduction standard. The deduction (generally $1.80 per square foot, but 60¢ per square foot in some cases) is effective for property placed in service after Dec. 31, 2005 and before Jan. 1, 2008.
* New manufacturers' tax credit for energy efficient dishwashers, clothes washers, and refrigerators manufactured in 2006 and 2007.

Middle class :)

I was reading Paul Krugman's syndicated column in the hindu this week, when i ran into an interesting issue. The columnist was (with ref to US auto workers) refering to the auto industry employment pattern and observing that it allowed "industrial workers to enjoy a middle class life style". What is interesting is how " middle class" is defined. If the class is defined by its energy consumption, the western middle class is probably on the apex of the consumption charts. If the rest of the world aspires to the same level of energy consumption, i guess we need 10 more earth's to supply the materials.

Where does IT spending go ?

Where do individual users and corporate spend their IT buck ? From my experiences the following are functional areas where people invest in IT.

SOHO/Individual:
1. Personal productivity (letters, documents, spreadsheets etc)
2. Accounting (tally etc)
3. Liesure (DVD rippers et al)

Corporate:
1. Automation
2. Transaction processing.

The rest of the market is blurred and does not bunch up. The key here is that if one were to assign an arbitrary weightage to each function and calculate the cost per function as a ratio of the speed of the processor and memory installed, the optimum point was reached maybe 5 years back. The cost of running tally on modern hardware (P4) vs older hardware (p2) is higher per transaction. Which begs the question as to when some one will create a purpose built system (using say VIA or transmits) that runs off a broadband connection and runs say 3 applications.

Cross basin hydro transfers

This is a tricky issue. Ultimately the geography of a region should dictate its population and economic prospects. When i say geography this includes the residual energy of the system. The indra gandhi canal has brought its sent of woes to the command area including waterlogging and salinity. Cross basin water transfer is very dangerous and creates only short term relief. All irrigation projects only project the good. No project in india has taken drainage costs into the initial costs as this would make the whole concept financially unviable. In spite of all the intellectual thought that goes into it, humans behave like any other animal in the ecosystem (at least in countries like india) and follow the S curve of population growth. Unsustainable growth will cause huge pressures in the ecosystem and ultimately end like all S curves starvation, death and a reset to the bottom of the curve. If this appears exaggerated, observe the empirical example of India's green revolution. A population jump from 400 million to 1 Billion + in 50 years due to wide availability of cheap cereals via public distribution. Pound for pound cereals are the best energy source for the population with the possible exception of tubers. Providing the building blocks for population explosion without requisite checks and balances is shortsighted.
All in all my point is that any natural system has an intrinsic amount of energy available to it within the natural framework. Harnessing excess sources of energy and water energy is pushing us to the brink. (even cross border movement of concentrated energy resources like oil has this impact, as all our conversions, crude oil to motive power or coal to electricity are highly inefficient in absolute terms in to 30 - 50 % range)
Maybe the solution is the traditional one. Water must be caught and stored where it falls. Some NGO's line TBS (http://www.tarunbharatsangh.org/) have done amazing work here and are indeed more sensible than politicians who dream of linking rivers, and destroying the nation in the process. In fact TBS has worked extensively in rajasthan and shown how barren lands can be regenerated with commonsense and local participation. Why should our populance depend on the government and bureaucracy that fundamentally believes in central solutions for a problem that is a legacy of central thinking ? Cross basin water transfers will *not* benefit 'amm aadmi'!

The drivers make the difference

A number of LED products are hitting the stores. Some are excellent but most are poorly designed and have a huge failure rate. The key problems seem to be heat sinking and power supply. LED's are phyiscally robust and electrically fragile. A small voltage change in driving the led's cause huge current changes in the diode causing failure. Heat as in any other electronic component must be extracted and dissipated for it will also cut down life of the lamp. Most of the plug and play LED solutions suffer from both these problems. LED's must be driven with constant current drivers to ensure the best illumination and life for the lamp.

CCFL's can fill the gap

While LED's are already in good shape to change the way the world looks at lighting another interesting technology that can find applications in general lighting is CCFL or cold cathode fluorescent tube technology. These are the lamps that are used to backlight LCD displays like those found in notebooks. While the light output is good, these devices are almost as low powered as LED's. Products using a combination of LED's and CCFL's will hit the Indian general and accent lighting market very soon.

Solar powered thin clients for mass computing

Our experience in setting up thin clients for lock down computing and the interest in non conventional energy for all human activity produced a vision for network computing (or nightmare depending on your point of view :) A small thin client with an LCD monitor can be easily driven by a 100 W solar PV module for about 4 - 6 hours a day. With good wireless broadband connectivity this diskless node can actually be the network computer of the masses. Think of a google like backend that even provides the OS at startup. Should be doable... Of course M$ will probably put out a "supari" on the creator of this system :)

LTSP Rocks

Our setup of LTSP for our office went off rather well. We have one P4 "server" that provides terminal sessions for 6 machines now and can easily support upto 20 odd terminals. Since our CRM system (SugarCRM) is web based and externally hosted, the employees needed no training to get to work. In fact a couple of them did not even realize that they were on linux.
Configuration:
1. Terminal Server: p4 1.8 G, 512 MB ram, 40x2 GB ide, FC4, LTSP (latest)
2. Nodes: p1, celerons et al, 64 MB ram, decent SVGA, PXE enabled ethernet

The total cost of providing 6 computing stations was so small that it is embarrassing to mention it :) We set it up in about 3 hours including tweaking the LTSP configuration and gettting the firewall settings right.

Its the content, stupid

The constant debate in software circles on various development models and which are better is rather passe. What is more important (IMNSHO) is for the vendors to forget the release cycles, the new "features" and other such currently irrelevant marketing ploys and look at the core functionality. Maybe Microsoft's talk of restructuring the company is good and will be applauded by the industry pundits and wall street mavens. (Who rave at anything M$ will do irrespective of how much sense it makes), but its really a question too little too late. The smart pack in IT has already moved beyond applications and unnecessary features to CONTENT. Goggle, Yahoo! And for that matter most web based guys have figured out that interface can only take you so far. They have also figured that people use the applications because of the content available! Goggle maps and the new digital library are spot on. Open standards, great functionality (as opposed to stupid paper clips dancing around as "features") simple interface, attention to detail and REAL CONTENT. This is the new mantra. The graphical user interface is still around as the primary mode of access simply as work on natural language processing has not yet hit critical mass. Who wants to point and click when you can "tell" the machine what to do ? you want to use the monitor to "see" things not for absolute control. The web model has to an extent thinned down the visual user interface and the only reason goggle will use flash or similar vector based rendering platform is if the content type requires it, not to provide eye candy.
In this the IT world has matured. From being mere number crunchers and word processors usage of computing has now moved to the next level where the utility is innovative content presentation.

Products that conform to renewable energy standards

A number of solutions are already available in using LED's for general and task lighting from Alternate lighting, that specializes in LED and CCFL based lighting solutions. While Alternate is focused on the rural market for bulk of its products, the current trend indicates that there is a huge uptake from urban areas as well. Goes to show that our grid based networks leave enough room for even the so called AEH homes to invest in Solar LED lighting systems. Alternate can be reached at info@alternate.co.in

Power to the people

The debate on how the empower rural populations is as convoluted as a plate of pasta. On one hand it is clear that to expand the grid to cover the current unserved population is a slow and expensive process for many reasons including the cost of putting up the network as well as the environment damage of virtually all forms of power generation. The solution from this perspective is to concentrate populations (in a urban setting) and provide infrastructure that is paid for by the population. On the other hand the congestion in cities clearly indicates that urban migration has to be slowed if not reversed for many more reasons. Clearly decentralized power production at the community and household level is one bright ray of hope that can address both the issues above and provide urgently required resources to the unserved rural population. The challenges are manifold starting with rural affordability and government will. All governments exist for control and the thinking from Neheruvian days has been on centralized control of all vital resources. For India to break out of this a new thrust in decentralized power generation and management using Solar, Wind and biomass is required. Lets hope that need will force the political class to pass legislation in this direction given the limited hydro power capacity available and the problems India is already facing in coal fired generation.

What are LED's ?

Light emitting diodes are semiconductor devices that have been around for decades. The last 5 years has seen dramatic increase in the amount of light the led's put out and hence have entered the world of general lighting with a twinkle. There are already led's available widely in the Indian market that emmit 9600 mcd ! These led's go into arrays that are widely being used to replace focus lamps as well as general lighting lamps. And for the rural market these devices are manna from heaven. A small rural houshold can be lit up very effiectively using a small solar panel coupled with led based luminares for about Rs 7000. And this is an investment that will pay off for 10 years which is the rating of the lamps ! The dream to light up homes in india economically, ecologically and reliably is finally being realized with the potent combination of renewable solar energy and LED lighting.