QUICK NEWS, December 1: GOOGLE EASES OFF NEW ENERGY RESEARCH; IEA SHOWS THE NEW ENERGY WAY; BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG SAVINGS

GOOGLE EASES OFF NEW ENERGY RESEARCH
More Spring Cleaning Out of Season
Urs Holzle, November 22, 2011 (The Google Blog)

"…[W] e’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward. Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience…

"…Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE [less than] C)… was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an RE [less than] C engineering team focused on researching improvements to solar power technology. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than [Google.org] to take this research to the next level…"


From GoogleGreen via YouTube


"…[W]e’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts…

"…[Google Ventures and Google Treasuries] will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies."


IEA SHOWS THE NEW ENERGY WAY
To maintain renewable energy’s rapid growth, new IEA study assesses challenges and shows how to overcome obstacles
23 November 2011 (International Energy Agency)

"Renewables are now the fastest-growing sector of the energy mix and offer great potential to address issues of energy security and sustainability, but their rapid deployment is also bringing a host of challenges…Deploying Renewables 2011: Best and Future Policy Practice, analyses the recent successes in renewable energy, which now accounts for almost a fifth of all electricity produced worldwide, and addresses how countries can best capitalise on that growth to realise a sustainable energy future…"

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"...The new IEA book…Provides a comprehensive review and analysis of renewable energy policy and market trends…Analyses in detail the dynamics of deployment and provides best-practice policy principles for different stages of market maturity…Assesses the impact and cost-effectiveness of support policies using new methodological tools and indicators…[and] Investigates the strategic reasons underpinning the pursuit of RE deployment by different countries and the prospects for globalisation of RE…"


BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG SAVINGS
LED Lighting to Capture 52% of the Commercial Building Market by 2021
November 22, 2011 (Pike Research)

"Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are gaining significant momentum as an alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lighting in commercial buildings, particularly as the cost of LED lighting technology continues its rapid decline…

"…While the market share of LED solid-state lighting (SSL) is currently quite low, a new report from Pike Research forecasts that LED share will reach 52% of the commercial lighting market by 2021…LED lighting costs for various SSL products will be reduced by 80% to 90% in many cases during the next decade."

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"…[I]ncandescent and less efficient T12 and T8 fluorescent lamps will be almost completely eliminated over the next 10 years. To take more than 50% of the market, LEDs will take share from compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), high-intensity discharge (HID) lighting, and general linear fluorescents.

"Pike Research forecasts that the global market for commercial lighting will reach $42 billion in 2011 and see a peak of nearly $54 billion in 2012 before gradually declining to about $30 billion by 2021. The decline will be due to the extended lamp life of both fluorescents and LEDs as they become the primary lamp types, increasingly displacing demand for replacements for less efficient and shorter-lived incandescent lamps…"