The giant “green”duck

The inovative structure is designed to provide, in theory, a green city with solar power and hydropower.

An interesting way of supporting sustainability was found by a team of British designers and artist. They came up with a floating tourist attraction that will also attract solar power in Copenhagen Harbor as the Danish city plans to become carbon-neutral until 2025.

The giant sea duck shaped structure is as high as 12-story.

Constructed from lightweight steel and wrapped in solar panels, the “energy duck” could collect the rays of sun during the day and at night could bask the harbor in LED lights that change color in rhythm with the hydro turbines inside it, as the blog designboom says.

So the city’s visitors could be able to cherish the shows of lights from a distance, but also they could get on board of the energy duck and take a look at the inside work of it.

The giant bird was designed and constructed with the help of the designers and artists Pochee, Adam Khan, Louis Leger, and Patrick Fryer in a competition lead by Land Art Generator Initiative, a project that has the purpose to bring together art and sustainable design in order to discover more solutions regarding renewable energy.

Someday, this beautiful concept could be a reality.

iPhone 6 will be manufactured with solar energy

The technology giant that in the past drew fire from campaigners for the fossil fuel dependence, is nowadays the leaders of companies for taking control of its own energy resources. Even if the solar farm owned by Apple is not doing great, the people in control of the environmental areas make use of the power harvested by the panels and place Apple on the green power-friendly companies map.

As we can remember, all the data centers were converted to clean energy and Apple is obliged to use solar power, the sapphire screens for the iPhone 6 will be manufactured with solar energy, in a factory in Arizona.

To minimize carbon footprints

In the past year, the telegenic Jackson was the front woman for Barack Obama’s environmental plans as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. At present, she is responsible with the needs of minimizing the carbon footprint that Apple is causing. She also needs to be certain that the company does what it takes to decarbonize its products.

Big amounts of electricity are required by the data centers in order to preserve climatic conditions and keep the servers running and supplying all the electronic transactions on a daily basis.

Thanks to this new initiatives, users can be sure that when they need to download something or chat with somebody they will not be responsible for contributing to the carbon pollution, as Jackson reports.

“If you are using your iPhone, iPad, Siri or downloading a song, you don’t have to worry if you are contributing to the climate change problem in the world because Apple has already thought about that for you. We’ve taken care of that. We’re using clean energy,” she added.

Apple is also planning to use solar and geothermal energy for a manufacturing site in the U.S., a plant in Mesa, Arizona that produces sapphire glass.

“We are aware that almost 70% of our carbon footprint is in our supply chain,” Jackson said. “We are actively working right now on the facilities that we have here in the United States”.

This new investments represent a reversal for the company that faced a lot of critics for the working environment and the toxic chemicals dependence especially in Chinese factories and for the use of carbon-based sources as coal.

More clean energy from Google

Search engine is giving a $1 Million prize for the construction of a compact idea for turning green energy into a power source that can be utilized in the house.

Google, together with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), has begun a ‘Little Box Challenge’ to come up with and construct a kW-scale power inverter, that can be useful to transform in renewable energy, meaning solar and wind, until turning it into convenient current for houses and automobiles.

The competition is challenging because the new object needs to not be bigger than a little laptop, meaning maximum roughly 1/10th of the current size.

“We are looking for someone to build a kW-scale inverter with a power density greater than 50W per cubic inch. Do it best and we will give you a million bucks,” Google said in a blog post.

Google is certain that this will help “change the future of electricity”.

“We believe that inverters will become increasingly important to our economy and environment as solar PV, batteries, and similar power sources continue their rapid growth,” Google added.

It added that the innovation coming in will have wide applicability across areas, will increase the performance drive down price tags and open up new use cases.

Google announced the construction of a smaller power inverter could provide a bigger number of hoses that function with green energy, more practical electrical grids distributed wisely and could also bring a benefits to the isolated areas on earth.

“A smaller inverter could help create low-cost microgrids in remote parts of the world. Or allow you to keep the lights on during a blackout via your electric car’s battery. Or enable advances we haven’t even thought of yet,” Eric Raymond from Google’s Green Team reports.

The due date for the competition is this year’s September and the winner of the contest will be unveiled in the first month of 2016.

Green energy for Microsoft

The soft giant said they will power a number of datacenters with wind power. In order to do that, they signed a 20-year contract with a wind farm from Illinois.

The deal with EDF Renewable Energy is very much alike with the one the company signed last fall for a wind farm from Texax.

This Pilot Hill Wind Project is among the company’s biggest wind investment until now since it is 60% larger than the one in Texas, Keechi Wind Project

The leas with EDF Renewable Energy will see Microsoft assets up to an approximately 675,000 MWh of green energy from the 175MW wind farm every year.

Robert Bernard, Microsoft chief environmental strategist, reports in a blog post that the company is “committed to reducing our environmental footprint, and over the past two years we continue to meet our goal of becoming carbon neutral”.

“By purchasing wind, we will reduce the overall amount of emissions associated with operating Microsoft facilities and hopefully spur additional investment in renewable energy. Because the Chicago datacentre draws power from the Illinois power grid, projects like Pilot Hill help provide a non-polluting source of energy that displaces greenhouse gas emissions from conventional power.” he added.

The site construction has already begun at will be finished next year.

The senior energy campaigner at Greenpeace, David Pomerantz, believes Microsoft’s wind energy acquisition reveals that they are willing to compete with other cloud computing companies on the renewable front.

“Microsoft‘s large purchases of wind energy in Illinois and Texas, taken alongside the commitments by cloud competitors Rackspace and Google to power their respective operations with 100 per cent renewable energy, highlight the failure by Amazon Web Services to reach even the starting line in the race to build a clean cloud and green internet. As other companies move to embrace solar and wind, AWS risks losing business from customers that are beginning to expect their cloud to be powered by renewable energy” he also said.