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• After Business , Consulting Goes Green
  Srikant Rajan 07:35:58 pm on August 29, 2008 | 1 | # |
  Tags: CSR, green business, green consulting, green IT, IBM

  IBM is looking to leverage its consulting expertise , to make more moolah and it wants to do it by targeting business which are aiming for a low environmental impact.The new service , based on the six sigma strategy  is aptly title “  Green Sigma  “  and aims to analyze water and energy use is sectors such as transportation , data centers,IT systems.

  Such a service comes at a time when companies are facing pressure from stakeholders ,  both primary and secondary  to lighten their environmental impact. Studies also seem to indicate that there is a significant value proposition by executing activities in an environmental friendly manner.One such method for greening that has found favor with many organizations is CSR. Increasingly companies are looking towards CSR not just as a “ responsibility “ but as a core strategy that would help in opening new revenue streams and thus obtain a new brand identity.

   

• Intel To Develop Solar Technology
  Srikant Rajan 01:36:03 pm on June 17, 2008 | 1 | # |
  Tags: IBM, intel, PV, solar cell, solar energy, SpectraWatt, thin film solar

  Intel has announced a setting up of a new  start up SpectraWatt under its "New Business Initiatives" program.It has also announced a $50 million investment in SpectraWatt and is joined by Cogentrix Energy, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of  Goldman Sachs Group, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund (“CETF”) and Solon AG.SpectraWatt will manufacture and supply photovoltaic cells to solar module makers .It is expected that SpectraWatt will break ground on its manufacturing and technology development facility in Oregon in the second half of 2008 with first product shipments by mid-2009.Intel however was tightlipped when it came to which technologies it would focus upon and choose to say that it would focus on "advanced solar technologies" which can mean a whole bunch of things.

  This development comes in heels of IBM’s decision to partner with Tokyo Ohka Kogyo to improve thin film solar modules.It seems both Intel and IBM plan to leverage their expertise in chip design for advancing solar technology.

   

• Concentrated Solar Cells To Learn From IBM Chips
  Srikant Rajan 08:03:34 am on May 17, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: heat transfer, IBM, photovoltaics, PV

  Researchers at IBM have recently demonstrated that it is possible to increase concentration of sunlight on Photovoltaics (PV) cells without melting them.Such cells are commonly referred to Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV).These CPV’s have a higher input energy per unit area,thus the amount of electric power generated per PV cell  increases nearly five times. However the challenge in using these CPV’s is to cool them efficiently.The technology employed to cool computer chips may provide a solution to this issue.Supratik Guha, lead scientist of photovoltaic research at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, NJ,explains that the heat released by state of art chips is about 100W/cm2 which is similar to the heat output of CPV’s .Guha, further adds that modifying a material normally used in computer chips and employing it in concentrated PV cells improves heat transfer between PV cells and heat sink.