Olympic village to save electricity in Beijing- Green games

Echelon Corporation today announced that the Olympic Village in Beijing is using Echelon's LonWorks([R]) technology to create an energy efficiency lighting control system. Lighting typically consumes as much as a third of the electricity used in a building, making it a prime target for energy efficiency for the Olympic Village during the Games. The smart LonWorks based control system integrates all lighting subsystems to optimize energy usage while maintaining a safe and aesthetically pleasing environment for the athletes - contributing to the government's pledge to stage a "green Olympics."
Beijing is committed to reducing energy and water consumption per unit of GDP by five percent this year as part of a push for a 'recycling economy' in time for the Olympics.
"Only LonWorks technology was able to fulfill the unique needs of this project," said Vincent Wang, General Manager, of Lang Meng Technology, Inc. "There are vast numbers of devices scattered across a large area, serving the many needs of the Village from beautification, to safety, to energy efficiency. It is extremely important to China that the Village be seen positively by the tens of millions of viewers that will be watching the Olympics on television. Because the LonWorks products from our various suppliers integrate easily, we were able install and configure the project in less than two months, helping to ensure that the Olympic Village will open on schedule."
Echelon's LonWorks control technology is incorporated in the Chinese national standard for building automation, intelligent residential community construction, and in the national standard for control applications.
The Olympic Village is the largest non-competition venue in Beijing, and will accommodate over 23,000 athletes and team officials for both the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Village has over 370,000 square meters of apartment space, including 22 six-floor buildings and 20 nine-floor buildings, and facilities such as general information centers, meeting rooms, medical clinics, religious centers, multiple restaurants, a library, parking areas, and entertainment and leisure activity centers.
The smart lighting control system integrates lighting subsystems for the apartments, public areas, car park areas, and all landscape and beautification lighting. In addition to increased energy efficiency and safety, the system is designed to enhance the beauty of the Village by illuminating architectural details on the buildings and entry arches into the Village, as well as various landscape features such as water fountains.
"Beijing is making substantial, if not historic, efforts to produce the first 'green Games' that impact not only the Olympic venues, but the entire country," said Anders Axelsson, Echelon's senior vice-president of marketing. "The Olympic Village is essentially a city within a city and a great example of how Echelon and its partners can bring solutions that can enhance the quality of life in a city while at the same time making it more energy efficient

Link Echelon

Top climate scientist blasts G8 climate pledge

One of the world's most respected climate scientists on Tuesday slammed the G8 summit's goal of halving global warming emissions by 2050 as "worse than worthless."
Leaders of the world's richest nations, meeting in Japan, "are taking actions that guarantee that we deliver to our children climate catastrophes that are out of our control," US expert James Hansen said in an e-mail to Agence France-Presse.
Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, was one of the first climate scientists to sound an alarm about the threat of global warming.
In a landmark study published in 1981, Hansen predicted that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activity would accelerate climate change far more quickly than previously thought.
At their summit in the resort town of Toyako, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- agreed Tuesday to "consider and adopt" the goal of achieving the 50-percent cut in worldwide emissions by mid-century.
But they made no targeted pledge for action next decade, nor did they mention specific action against coal, which Hansen characterized as the greatest peril.
"A statement of any goal for percent reduction is worthless. Indeed, it is worse than that: it is a pretence that they understand the problem and plan to take needed actions," said Hansen.
The only way to avoid climate catastrophe, argued Hansen, was to halt the emissions of coal, the most abundant and highly polluting of all fossil fuels.
He reiterated a call for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants and for existing ones to be fitted with technology to capture the CO2 and store it deep underground.
"Otherwise we are sending a death sentence to uncountable species and are leaving our children with an ungodly mess," he said.
Sky-rocketing oil prices have spurred energy-efficiency plans in many countries but at the same time have intensified the use of coal around the world, especially in developing juggernauts China and India.
Testimony by Hansen on June 23, 1988 -- a day of record-breaking heat -- before a US Congressional committee made headlines around the world when he said "the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements."
His intervention helped spur the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Nobel-winning committee of climate scientists.
His now-famous "hockey-stick" graphic predicting a sharp rise in world temperatures provoked a backlash among climate skeptics.

Link AFP

G8 buries climate pledges in time capsule

Group of Eight leaders meeting in Japan wrangled over the timeframe to fight global warming, but they have a set deadline when their pledges will be reviewed - in 100 years.
Their summit documents, along with current newspapers, will be buried in a time capsule at the luxury hotel where they met for three days in the mountain resort of Toyako in northern Japan.
The Windsor Hotel Toya will dig up and open the time capsule on July 7, 2108.
"We hope to confirm that the summit will have been remembered for 100 years as a key conference on climate change and that by then global warming will be halted as promised by the leaders," a hotel spokesman said.
The time capsule will be put in a new park along with a monument with the engraved autographs of the G8 leaders and a sculpture representing a chunk of ice that is melting due to global warming.

Link AFP

G-8 goes green in Japan

A brand new Toyota 'plug-in' Prius is parked near a sleek-looking, hydrogen-powered RX-8 Mazda and eight more environmentally friendly cars.

Behind them, a futuristic 'Zero Emissions House' is showcased to the thousands of international journalists who have come to Toyako, in northern Japan, to follow the Group of Eight (G8) summit.

Inside their media centre, journalists find 400-page directories of eco-friendly products currently on sale in Asia, from a recyclable and reusable microwave food container to an energy thrifty LED spot light.

And an exhibition on the impact of global warming on the melting Arctic ice cap and the Himalayan glaciers reminds them of why everybody needs to do their bit to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Fighting climate change is one of the top priorities of this week's G-8 meeting, which brings together the world's seven richest countries (United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada) plus Russia.

At their last meeting in Heilingendamm, Germany, G-8 leaders promised to take into serious consideration Japan's 'Cool Earth 50' proposal to at least halve greenhouse gas emissions from the current levels by 2050.

But aside from reiterating that commitment, G-8 leaders meeting in Hokkaido are not expected to reach any groundbreaking deals on a post-Kyoto protocol, which called for a 5-percent reduction of global emissions on their 1990 levels and which is due to expire in 2012.

'As for medium-term targets, this is the core challenge for United Nations negotiations until the end of 2009. The G-8 is not a forum to agree on that target,' this year's host, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters ahead of the July 7-9 summit.

A series of obstacles stand in the way of such a deal.

The first is political.

The United States, the world's biggest polluter, did not ratify Kyoto out of concerns for its industries and now says it will not sign up to a new protocol unless this imposes strict limits also on rapidly developing countries such as China and India.

The second is more practical.

Even the staunchest supporters of Kyoto are failing to meet its ambitious targets. According to latest figures available, for instances, the industrial plants and power stations of Germany and Britain, two of the world's best-behaving countries on the environmental front, not only failed to cut emissions in 2007, they both increased them by about 2 percent.

And even Japan, which is challenging the European Union (EU)'s role as the world's leader on climate change, has seen its carbon dioxide emissions rise rather than fall in recent years.

Moreover, the current slowdown in the global economy risks making costly emission-reducing schemes even less popular.

As the display in Toyako proved once again, it is not only a matter of lacking political will.

Another problem is that the technology behind some the boldest environmentally friendly projects is still either untested or too expensive.

The Zero Emissions House, for instance, gets all the energy it needs from a combination of solar panels on its roof and windows and from nearby small wind turbine generators - but it currently costs three times more than a normal house.

'We hope to make these kinds of houses viable within the next 10 to 20 years,' said an official from Sekisui, one of the companies behind the initiative.

The Mazda RX-8, meanwhile, is currently only available for leasing to a handful of Japanese corporations, though a further 30 are being built for the Norwegian market.

Of more immediate benefit could be the new Toyota Prius, which has added a battery that can be recharged from home to its existing hybrid electric-petrol engine.

Toyota says the new Prius, due to hit the Japanese, European and the US markets in 2010, will produce half as much CO2 as its previous incarnation.

But the company acknowledges that existing batteries are too heavy and expensive to allow the new model to run on electric energy alone for much more than 15 km.

Environmentally conscious journalists present in Toyako were at least able to draw some relief from the fact that the building that hosted them is fitted with recyclable materials and an air-conditioning system that uses snow.

Link India eNews