"A New Industrial Revolution"
Posted by Elizabeth English on Wed, Jan 06, 2010 @ 07:28 PM
In an article from the Register about government financial contribution to energy efficiency research, the Obama administration's Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, mentions his call for "a new industrial revolution."
What his department is doing about the situation is giving $47 million to fund research to improve energy efficiency. They've given a number of different companies portions of the money - big companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard, as well as smaller organizations like Yahoo and Columbia University. They're focusing on three areas of improvement: cooling (of course), reworking systems and software, and re-engineering power supply chains in data centers.
Several interesting experiments are taking place, like the passive-cooling data center Yahoo is building in New York, with power conveniently provided hydroelectrically by Niagara Falls.
It's good to see something cool that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is doing for us.
-Elizabeth English
photo by Day Trips Canada (www.day-trips.ca/) under flickr creative commons license