The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“What are the best new products in energy efficiency?”
Read several responses below:
1. Cree: Dimmable LED Downlight
To add longevity to lights, CREE has developed the high quality LR6- a light that uses a combination of Yellow and Red LEDs and create a warm incandescent look without wasting electricity. The LR6 consumes 12 watts of electricity while producing 650 lumens of light, the equivalent of a 75-watt incandescent. This dimmable light also actively manages the output of the LEDs, so the color and light intensity remains consistent during its expected 25-year lifespan.
2. Navien: Energy Efficient Water Heater.
Navien’s line of tankless water heaters relies on super-efficient condensing gas burners to create an endless supply of domestic hot water. Because condensing burners can extract 98 percent of the heat from the gas flame, its operating cost is less than one-half of an average tankless water heater and one-third of traditional tank heaters. Its exhaust being cooler, these heaters can be vented with plastic pipes.
3. Caleffi: SolarThermal Package
The heating of water with the sun offers the biggest bang for your money and saves you up to 90 percent on water heating costs. One such solar thermal package is CALEFFI. It offers complete, easy-to-install turnkey kits with panels, tubing, pump, and insulated storage tank.
4. Icynene: Sustainable Foam
Polyurethane spray foams are highly efficient insulators, but they’re made from petroleum or soyabean plants. ICYNENE has turned to a different seed to make a new, more sustainable LD-R-50 open-cell polyurethane: the Castor Bean. Castor-oil plants are easy on the environment—they require no irrigation, pesticides, or fungicides—and yield 23 percent more oil by weight than soybean plants.
5. GE: Compact CFL
For every CFL you install, you can save around $30 in electricity cost over the bulb’s lifetime. But the bulky ballast between the threaded end and the glass can prevent the bulb from being used in common fixtures such as recessed lighting and desk lamps. To resolve the issue, GE miniaturized the electronics in the ballast, bringing the bulb with the usual light bulb’s look and can be fit in regular incandescent sockets. Their new 15-watt bulb, with its light output equivalent to that of a 60-watt incandescent, lasts 8,000 hours.
6. Freeloader Solar Charger
How about using the Sunrays instead of using electricity to charge your gadgets, such as phones, laptops and gaming devices?
The Freeloader has an internal battery that can power the mobile phones for up to 44 hours, iPods for 18 hours, and PSPs for 2.5 hours, when it’s fully charged.
Source- http://www.uswitch.com/energy-sa...
http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/
Steve Blumenkranz, Mechanical Engineer:
Measured by the improvement multiple compared to what they aim to replace, LED light bulbs probably have it. An incandescent bulb produces about 15 lumens / watt. Cree announced a commercial bulb at 90 lumens / watt in Jan.2013 and lab samples of white LED at 276 lumens / watt in Feb.2013. So the multipliers are 6X and 18X respectively. Philips, Samsung and others are also in the game. There are few other examples in engineering with this remarkable an improvement in this short a time span. Anyone who remembers incandescent bulb flashlights with old fashioned dry cell batteries and has tried an LED flashlight with a Li-ion battery knows how tangibly dramatic the change is. Commercial lighting is a strong driver of air conditioning load in buildings so there is also a significant indirect energy savings coming from this as the efficiency rises above long tube fluorescents.
Automobiles are doing much better but the product life and failure to push hard enough are limiting the impact on fleet average performance. If one jumped from a Toyota 4-Runner at 17 mpg to a Toyota Prius at 50+ mpg you get a multiplier of 3X on the day you switched. However the improvement for an average driver and realistic ownership period would be a lot less.
We know that we can do a lot better with technologies already on hand. A hybrid with a small intermittent cycle turbo-diesel operated at its most efficient constant low speed high torque operating point and combined with a larger battery and electric motor to eliminate inefficient short cycle transient operation of the engine for acceleration could have a great deal better fuel efficiency than current models. You have to know how it is possible and want to and have the resources in order to do it and that combination still is not there.
Air conditioners are a fact of life and the coefficient of performance standard has been gradually increasing. To be fair this is a harder one to improve. Not sure how that looks on a wide basis.
Electric motors consume a large fraction of the electricity generated in the US. A firm called NovaTorque has developed some very efficient new motors which also offer the secondary benefit of reducing the waste heat load on surrounding equipment and personnel but industrial motors have a long installed lifetime. It would be interesting to see how the fleet average efficiency is trending for motors.
Energy is a fundamental requirement for economic and social development. Due to growing population and remarkable industrialization, energy demand is increasing rapidly. Traditional fossil fuel energy sources are declining meanwhile carbon emissions restrictions and environmental protection policies compelling countries to reduce their fossil combustions.
Reduction in use of fossil and increasing demand simultaneously might lead towards an energy crisis. There are following approaches to avoid that:
· Reduction in demand (Which is nearly impossible)
· Increasing renewable energy sources
· Increasing energy efficiency
Later two approaches are in trend and most of the countries all over the globe have started integrating Renewable Energy Sources (RES) into their main grid and incorporating practicing energy efficiency tactics at generation, transmission and consumption levels.
Here if I only talk about consumption level energy efficiency, then we can practice following methods:
· Use of smart meter
· Find efficient ways to cool/heat the housesuch as use of thermostat etc.
· Install solar heaters
· Use light-emitting diodes (LED) and compact fluorescent lamps(CFL) for lighting up the buildings
· Insulate house for better heating (cold places such as US and Canada practice this technique)
· Use of energy efficient electronic appliances
· Use smart cooking methods such as use of microwave oven instead of conventional ovens and use of pressure cookers.
· Efficient use of washers and dryers can save lots of money on energy bills if used at the time of low energy demand period of day.