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The Power Electronics team from Swansea University’s School of Engineering has developed one of the world’s most advanced Smart Electricity Meters. And the team is now supplying nearly 1.5MWh per year of free ‘Green electricity’ to the University, helping to reduce its carbon footprint.

The team, based within the Electronic Systems Design Centre, implemented their prototype Smart Meter to highlight the potential of electricity metering technologies in the near future.

The Smart Meter is to be the focal point for a consumer’s personal energy queries. It monitors their energy consumption, giving information not just through a traditional power reading, but in a user-friendly way by displaying animated graphics of money on a large clear screen on the meter.

It also goes one step further than most other potential Smart Meters in that it monitors individual power circuits in the home, including upstairs lighting, downstairs lighting and kitchen sockets.

The team believes there is also the possibility to monitor individual appliances when the technology is adopted further.

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The rising interest in vehicles powered by electricity — either part-time, as in hybrids like the Toyota Prius, or in battery-only cars like the Tesla Roadster — has increased the pressure to develop more efficient devices to store the power. Progress has been steady, but huge breakthroughs have not emerged from the research labs.

The baby-step pace is prompting automakers to move cautiously with their production plans. Toyota, which had been expected to use lithium-ion batteries in the next-generation Prius, announced that the car, which goes on sale next spring, will stick with proven nickel-metal hydride chemistry.

Toyota’s engineers were not ready to adopt the compact high-energy, lithium-ion batteries in a mass-production vehicle, opting to run them in test fleets first. Though the company is optimistic about the potential of lithium batteries, challenges in their durability and operating temperature ranges remain.

While General Motors, Mitsubishi and Nissan have announced plans to employ such batteries in the future, and each has a battery manufacturer as a partner, Honda has set off in a different direction. Last March, Honda’s president, Takeo Fukui, told Automotive News that “lithium-ion batteries are still not usable from our perspective.”

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Technology users are failing to take adequate steps to protect their privacy in digital society. New research urges for positive guidelines for technology designers through ‘face-keeping.’

In the face of technology that will soon be able not only to track an individual’s movements but predict them too, people are far too relaxed about protecting their privacy, according to social psychologist Saadi Lahlou, writing in a special issue of Social Science Information on cognitive technologies, September 4, 2008.

According to Lahlou, and other authors in the special issue describing recent experiments, the combination of information and communication technologies and pervasive computing will soon enable continuous monitoring of individual activity, beyond what was imagined by 1984 author George Orwell.

What Lahlou terms “the system” – referring to the mass of interconnected data-collection devices from mobile phones, to internet sites, to surveillance cameras – can search, compare, analyze, identify, reason and predict the movements, motives and actions of individuals, he warns. Even such a transient event as gaze is now traceable by automatic devices.

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The world’s carmakers have mapped out their route to a greener future

THERE is nothing like high oil prices, panic-selling of big cars and the prospect of swingeing new penalties on carbon-spewing vehicles to concentrate the minds of the world’s carmakers. In less than two years something remarkable has happened. Technologies once regarded by horsepower-obsessed marketing departments as politically correct public-relations fluff, never likely to see the light of day, are entering the mainstream just as fast as the car firms can get them there.

Only 18 months ago it was common to hear Toyota’s pioneering Prius hybrid joked about as a funny-looking niche vehicle with which Hollywood stars could painlessly flaunt their green credentials. Although General Motors (GM) had exhibited a plug-in hybrid concept car, called the Chevrolet Volt, early in 2007, hardly anyone took seriously the claim that it might reach production in 2010. And just ten months ago carmakers in America were lining up to lobby Congress against proposed legislation that would oblige them to achieve a fleet-average fuel consumption of 35 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2020. It simply could not be done, they wailed.

In Europe a similar campaign, with the German carmakers to the fore, was being waged against a plan by the European Commission to impose financial penalties by 2012 on companies if their fleets emitted, on average, over 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre (g/km). It was, they said, technically impossible to comply with the new rules, which they saw as a wicked plot to emasculate a proud and successful industry.

The grumbling about tighter emissions laws will continue, but spurred on by rocketing prices at the pump and changing customer preferences, the manufacturers have quietly got on with the job of transforming the fuel and CO2 efficiencies of their vehicles. Moreover, the blue-sky thinking of the recent past which, encouraged by large government subsidies and conveniently elastic time horizons, appeared to favour the hydrogen fuel-cell, has been dumped for the practical and achievable. Although carmakers differ over the details of the coming revolution in efficiency, there is now a consensus across the industry about its thrust, and about both the role of the underlying technologies and when they will be on sale.

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Tesla Motors, the automobile startup with backers that include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, held a party tonight to mark the launch of its Menlo Park storefront. The store, which is the company’s second, will be open to the general public beginning this Tuesday.

Despite Tesla Motors’ well deserved reputation as a high-end car manufacturer, it is still very much a startup - the company’s $150 million in funding pales in comparison to coffers held by large automobile companies like Ferrari. As a result, Tesla has strived to create a atmosphere of style and sophistication at its showrooms without breaking the bank.

The new dealership is situated in Menlo Park, about 5 minutes away from downtown Palo Alto and Stanford University. The interior of the building is designed to be “industrial chic” - a strange mix of luxurious furniture (white leather sofas, marble tables) and the trimmings of a basic garage (concrete walls, exposed wooden ceilings). It works surprisingly well, keeping the store’s high-end customers at home without distracting from the showroom’s main attraction: the cars.

Ah, the cars. Tesla has half a dozen of their Tesla Roadster electric car on display, and they don’t disappoint. It’s hard to put into words how ridiculously sexy the Tesla Roadster is in person, so we’ve grabbed a lot of pictures. Suffice to say, as soon as you walk in the store, you’re going to want one.

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A hydrogen refuelling station which could be installed in the home as an alternative to visiting a petrol station has been unveiled.

Users will need a hydrogen-powered car to go with it although the system can also be used for heating and cooking.

Hydrogen has long been touted as an alternative energy source to carbon-hungry fossil fuels.

One of the biggest obstacles to wider adoption of fuel-cell vehicles is the lack of hydrogen fuelling stations.

To be used as a fuel, hydrogen must first be produced using another energy source.

While some scientists are hopeful of the fuel uses of hydrogen, many others are sceptical because it is inefficient to produce, expensive to transport and to convert into electricity.

A home refuelling station could provide much needed infrastructure to kick-start a hydrogen-based economy, thinks Sheffield-based ITM Power, the firm behind the system.

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Hydrogen is interesting but the energy equation is a big question mark for its overall use and long-term viability . . . - IT

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“We get a ton of pitches at TechCrunch every single day. It is a deluge we can hardly keep up with. Some are amusing, some are horrible, and a select few rise to the level of deserving a post. The large majority, though, never see the light of day. We thought: Why not let startups connect directly with our audience, and let the audience decide which ideas are worthy and which ones are not?

So today we are launching a little video project here at TechCrunch called Elevator Pitches. The premise is pretty simple: Startup founders and CEOs give us a 60-second video pitch about their companies, and our audience (that would be you) votes them up or down. You can think of it as a YouTube for elevator pitches (and, in fact, we are hosting the videos on YouTube and simply embedding them on the site).”

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According to recent reports, nearly a billion people are severely affected by the high cost of food. Yet the problem doesn’t have to do with the simple economic equation of supply and demand. Indeed, these same reports note that while the cost of food has been rising sharply around the world there also has been a parallel increase in the amount of food being produced. [extern] According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), despite record production in 2008 food prices are expected to remain high, cutting off access to commodities for the world’s poorest people. From this, it’s clear that the present food crisis has little to do with supply and demand and instead is mainly due to other influences such as ineffective trade policies, market speculation, and the rising cost of energy, namely oil.

A prime example of this sad state of affairs is the situation in Hungary. The economy of this Central European country was mainly based on agriculture as it has few natural resources. In fact, for the most part of the last two centuries it was considered the bread basket of the region; its high quality agricultural products were exported throughout Europe and beyond. Thanks to the past two decades of neo-liberalism, which has sought to turn Hungary into a logistics center for the movement of goods and services between east and west, this agricultural focus has been lost. As a result, rural communities lie in a dilapidated state and the country now imports most of its food. What it does export is often cheap commercial trash, as exemplified by the tainted paprika scandal of a few years ago.

As in the rest of the world, the global rise in food prices has hit Hungarian consumers hard. The paradox, however, hasn’t been lost on most Hungarians. For years farmers have complained about cheap imports which have been putting them at a disadvantage. Unlike other European countries, such as France, Germany or The Netherlands, the government in Hungary has given little support to the agricultural sector. Indeed, many accuse the government of selling out the interests of its own rural communities for that of multinational companies which have sought to buy up cheap Hungarian land. As a result, the past few years have seen farmers en masse slaughtering their herds, digging up their orchards and vineyards, and allowing their fields to go barren since to make a living from agriculture has grown steadily difficult. At the same time, the price of food has been on the increase.

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AS anyone who has ever received a virtual Jagerbomb or fought off intergalactic cyber chickens knows, social-networking sites are designed to be entertaining. If there wasn’t so much fun to be had, there wouldn’t be so many articles warning that what you post on your profile — i.e., photos of you in a beer helmet and a tequila bandolier — could one day cost you a job.

Yet sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace are evolving beyond their reputations as procrastinators’ Xanadus.

With American consumer confidence at a 26-year low and one in seven workers telling the Pew Research Center that they fear they will be laid off, social-networking sites are becoming, for some users, platforms from which to network for job leads, to forge professional contacts or even to announce to friends that you are out of work.

Landing a job through a social network not designed for that purpose appears to be a rarity. But savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and all-around business networking. Even human resource professionals are encouraging people to log on.

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Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to “All year!” now that Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of New Zealand’s national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

Food has moved around the world since Europeans brought tea from China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.

Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of mega-markets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe — like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco — has accelerated the trend.

But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.

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