Posted 06/05/09 at 04:59:53 PM by Andy Salisbury

Currently, power supply vendors are rewarded by having power efficiency of 80 percent. But, Enermax is taking this one step forward by boasting efficiency rates of 90 percent and higher.

In today’s PSU market, there are bronze, silver and gold labels for 80-Plus certification, with gold landing anywhere between 87 and 93 percent efficiency. Enermax is suggesting that there be a true 90-Plus certification, so that customers can identify premium power supplies easier. They also plan to take a majority of their power supplies above 90 percent by Q4 of this year.

If you’re interested in one of these 90 percenters, be sure to check out PSUs from Enermax’s Revolution series, which are available now.

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Posted 05/18/09 at 04:36:08 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google recognizes that there’s been a lot of talk about the energy needed to power the Internet, and they’ve decided to publicly throw in their two cents by boldly stating that the carbon emissions required to get a glass of orange juice is equivalent to 1,050 Google searches.

“Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide,” wrote Urs Hölze, Google’s Senior Vice President of Operations. “We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query.”

The blog post also noted that to do one load of dishes in an EnergyStar compliant dishwasher was equivalent to 5,100 searches, a give mile trip in the average U.S. automobile was 10,000 searches, a cheeseburger would run you 15,000 searches and just one month’s worth of electricity used by the average U.S. household clocks in with 3,100,000 searches. Sure makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Posted 12/23/08 at 04:03:56 PM by Andy Salisbury

Organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs have always had three different colors. There are red and green diodes, which currently have a very high efficiency, and then their blue friend, which is about as wasteful as they come.

Thankfully, some brainiacs at the University of Florida have been working nonstop to fix this problem, and they’ve recently re-set the record for efficiency with the diodes. Currently, they’re rocking blue OLED efficiency of 50 lumens per watt, which is halfway to their set goal of 100 lumens per watt.

Franky So, the head of the team has stated that the Gators have “achieved a new record in efficiency of blue organic light-emitting diodes, and because blue is essential to white light, the advance helps overcome a hurdle to lighting that is much more efficient than compact fluorescents.”

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Posted 11/05/08 at 04:20:08 PM by Andy Salisbury

With some news straight out of the “didn’t we just hear about something like this?” file (we did), some groundbreaking research has revealed that a near perfect solar panel has been created.

Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have allegedly found a process that allows them to trap nine out of ten photons that hit a solar panel, providing a 90 percent collection rate. A new anti-reflective coating for the panels provides grounds for creating solar panels that don’t have to change their angle in order to collect energy.

With current technology, the photon absorption rate stands at an already impressive 67.4 percent, with the variable of whether or not the sun is actually hitting the cells. But the new cells which according to Shawn-Yu Lin, the man responsible for the project, function like a “dense forest where sunlight is ‘captured’ between the trees.” This happens through a process that not only involves the new anti-reflective coating, but also the bending of the path of the sunlight to an angle that allows maximum capture of sunlight.

With all possible variables at their best, Lin claims that the cells can capture 96.21 percent of the photons that hit their surface.

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