Green tech’s Five for Ten

Green is the common thread for many of the technologies that’ll power 2010. Here are five that will make their mark.

'Gloom and doom in a very big room." The Economist described COP15, the recent climate summit, rather nicely.

Despite Copenhagen, 2010 marks a new decade - a greener one. The jury may be still out on global warming, but the need for green tech is driven by economics in India: an acute power shortage, and the high cost of backup power.

Power saving is sometimes driven by shortage and cost, at other times it emerges by serendipity. Traffic lights moved to LEDs because they didn't need replacement every six months, but the spinoff - low power draw - meant they could be powered by solar panels, and thus set up even in areas where power cables weren't around. Now, with our metros moving increasingly on LED traffic lights, their total impact is being felt with the low power draw. That's how it is for a lot of tech: it's born and evolved for other reasons, but there's a green spinoff that becomes interesting. Take cloud computing...

1. Green is the Cloud: Cloud computing is the future. Services delivered over the Net (such as Google mail) promise a simple, pay-per-use way to get services on tap, just like electricity. But they're also the greenest way to go. Businesses don't need to set up lots of equipment and hardware at their offices - they simply pay for what they use from the cloud. The provider services many users from one set of equipment. The green spinoff: this cuts energy use per user sharply. The cloud is a more efficient, and a greener way to use technology. Instant-on, connected desktop and mobile devices that tap the cloud will further drop energy cost per user.

2. Greenhouse Effect: House-owners are discovering - and applying - simple techniques for cutting power usage at home. Such as high-albedo reflective paint (drops rooftop temperature 20 degrees), CFL lamps, natural light use, and more. This year will see a ramp-up of solar heating, motion sensors, and LEDs. Newer projects, especially in Gurgaon, are building in green features: large double-glazed glass areas for natural light, VRF air-conditioning, water harvesting and recycling. Tata's Raisina project claims a pre-certified "gold" status from the Indian Green Buildings Council. While these are still years away, the need for lower power consumption is driven by the cost of backup power.

3. Sleep Softly: Appliances spend most of their time in sleep mode - an idle state, when they're plugged in and turned on but not in use. Whether it's a phone charger plugged in, or a TV in 'standby', they all consume power - over 10 watts for some TVs. There's global pressure to cut this standby power draw, over a tenth of your energy bill. Just a reduction of a half-watt in a phone charger means a drop of 83 megawatts for India, assuming one-third of India's 500 million chargers stay plugged in.

Tip: Look for Energy-star or BEE ratings appliances, which tell you that the device consumes less power in both active and sleep mode. And use a master power switch to turn off an entire console or air-conditioner's power stabiliser, to kill wasted power. Up ahead in 2010: universal, ultra-low-power phone chargers, and TVs and electronics that draw less than a tenth of a watt on standby power.

4. Personal Power: The last frontier for personal tech is the battery, and that will improve to the point where multimedia gadgets are practical. But it's a tug of war. Just as phone batteries pack more punch and you can get back to three-day runtimes, 3G comes in, sapping power back down to a day's charge. Just hope for universal chargers by 2011, so that you'll be able to find a charger almost anywhere. But power-packed lithium batteries and fuel cells will make a mark.

5. Smart Software: The biggest impact on energy efficiency will come not from solar power or hybrid vehicles but from smarter software. Software that controls the electrical grid, software that uses sensors data to smartly control building lighting and cooling, software that improves the efficiency of car engines, software to run power management for computer networks. It's software that will really rule 2010's cleantech. CyberMedia is the publisher of 15 specialty titles such as Living Digital.