SmartPlanet: Supermarket Gets Grip on True Cost of Refrigeration with and without Doors

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smartplanet logoThe simple plan that saved a supermarket chain millions

By Tyler Falk | January 3, 2013

Imagine if your refrigerator didn’t come with a door. The unnecessary energy use would be costly and your kitchen would always be cold.

Despite the obvious benefits of having a door on a refrigerator, supermarkets around the world have aisles upon aisles of refrigerated food displays without a door — aka, the aisle we rush through to stay warm.

But one supermarket chain in the United Kingdom made the switch to replace its open refrigerators to refrigerators with doors. The Co-operative put fridge doors in 100 stores and is seeing major cost benefits. According to The Guardian, the chain is saving more than $80 million a year. The chain has 2,800 stores across the U.K. and plans to put fridge doors in all new stores and each of the 500 stores it retrofits each year.

Energy is the second largest cost for the company, behind staffing. And, as The Guardian points out, if all supermarkets in the U.K. used fridge doors it would save as much energy as twice the annual electricity output of Europe’s second largest coal plant. Supermarkets in the U.K. use 5 percent of all electricity.

It’s not a move that I would necessarily call innovative, just smart business. So the question is, what’s holding back other supermarkets? Basically stores see this as a barrier for customers and they’re afraid that sales will drop. But Dave Roberts, director of The Co-operative, says that’s a myth, at least in his stores: ”That was a big concern for us. But we found that because we put LED lights around the doors, customers said it brought the product to life. In no places where we have put doors on fridges have sales gone down.”

Co-op supermarkets extend fridge door scheme [The Guardian]

SmartPlanet: Russia Slams Open Arctic Route to Japan

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smartplanet logoThe shortest route: Russia ships gas to Japan via Arctic

By Mark Halper | December 20, 2012, 4:29 AM PST

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Want to ship some liquefied natural gas to Japan from somewhere up north, but don’t fancy taking the circuitous southern route through Panama or the Suez? Try heading through the Arctic. But first, get yourself a good nuclear powered icebreaker.

That’s what Russia’s Gazprom did a few weeks ago.

It lined up two of the country’s atomic icebreakers to escort an LNG carrier from Norway’s port of Hammerfest to a gas terminal in Tobata, Japan.

The flotilla slammed right through the Northern Sea Route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans along the Siberian coastline, heading down through the Berring Strait.

“This strategic route reduces trip time from northern Europe to northeast Asia (by) almost 40 percent comparing with routes via the southern seas and oceans,” Gazprom’s website states.

Read full article, more photos

 

SmartPlanet: An app to model big decisions

SmartPlanet

An app to model life’s big decisions

By

SmartPlanet | December 5, 2012,

If you’re faced with a big decision, you no longer need to go with your intuition – there’s an app for that. The app, called iMODELER, is an offshoot of a European Union research project into decision support systems. It visualizes personal decisions or strategies in a way that its creators say will lead to “non-linear” decisions that are less influenced by emotions and impart a clearer understanding of life’s complex interconnections.

German software company CONSIDEO released iMODELER as a free download for Apple’s iOS and as Web application in August. A new desktop edition was announced last month that includes advanced features to target businesses and large organizations. iMODELER is a derivative work from MODELER, an applications that boasts over 200,000 user ranging from BMW, NATO and the Worldbank to over 1,000 schools and universities.

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SmartPlanet: Solar and Wind Energy Challenge Funding of Fossil Fuel

SmartPlanet

Solar group to World Bank: Give us gas and oil’s $12B, and we’ll cool planet

Siemens: 880m euros’ worth of wind power orders since July

Phi Beta Iota:  The current approach to solar and wind is mis-directed toward the traditional centralized capture and downstream distribution.  Those costs are waste.  Micro-girds, neighborhoods combining solar, wind, biogas, ambient, and all other forms of non-fossil fuel energy — including human bicycle power — is the lowest cost, smallest footprint, most sustainable approach to powering humanity.

SmartPlanet: CISCO in Lake Nona, Flordia – Brilliant Today, Flooded Tomorrow

Advanced Cyber/IO, SmartPlanet

A Florida aerotropolis bets on intelligent infrastructure

By | October 23, 2012

Ever heard of Lake Nona? If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a 7,000-acre, 25,000-person planned community in Orlando, Florida with urban ambitions the size of Tokyo.

In just 15 years, the community wants to become ”a global model and standard for sustainable urban development” — quite the opposite from what’s typically found in sprawling central Florida. To do so, it wants to tightly and deliberately link educational facilities, recreational facilities, a “medical city,” workplaces, retail centers, entertainment and residential development using digital infrastructure.

The community announced this morning that it plans to partner with Cisco, the American networking technology company, to design and deploy networking infrastructure to connect its healthcare, real estate, retail, education and community services.

What’s that mean, exactly? Things like “smart work centers,” “intelligent buildings” and unified healthcare and education services. Also, digital signage, unified communications (data, voice, wireless), fiber to the home, energy management, smarter transportation and IP-based video surveillance. (If it can be digitized, it appears that Cisco is willing do it.)

Because of the deep level of integration between the two entities, Cisco has declared Lake Nona an “Iconic Smart+Connected city” — the first in the U.S., and one of eight in the world.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  It merits reflection that CISCO and IBM and other great companies are not coming together on this, their lack of commitment to Open Source Everything being one reason.  It also merits reflection that in 100 years Lake Nona will be under sea water.   No one in the USA outside of Earth Intelligence Network seems to be thinking 100 years out, which is going to make the cost to future generations much greater.

See Also:

Graphic: Maps of the Post Flood Future Geography

SmartPlanet: SmartNation Starts with SmartBra Whose Temperature Sensors Detect Tumors

SmartPlanet

Early detection is key when it comes to tackling breast cancer but getting screened more than once a year can be impractical, especially for women under 40.

Now, one medical company hopes to make spotting tumors as easy as getting dressed in the morning. The First Warning System is a “smart bra” designed to catch cancer far before it becomes noticeable to mammograms. Since it would be easy to slip on and could presumably be worn at least a few times a week, having frequent breast cancer screenings wouldn’t even require a trip to the doctor’s office.

The bra, which is lined with extremely precise sensors, measures changes in cell temperature. Such changes are created by blood vessel growth, which can indicate a developing tumor. The data collected by the bra is then processed by software that uses an algorithm to make sense of the changes and determine whether or not a tumor could be growing.

Read full article.

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