Influent | Technology in Motion

The 44th US President, Barak Obama, brings with him a very ambitious energy plan. The President’s legislation will benefit cleantech companies across the board from energy efficiency to wind and solar.

The plan entails three bills that aim to accomplish one goal—$150 billion to building clean energy.

The first is the $825 billion stimulus package that is expected to be signed into law in February. The bill includes $20 billion in tax cuts for alternative energy and research and development concentrated on energy conservation and efficiency, $32 billion to modernize the power transmission grid, $16 billion to retrofit public housing to use less energy, and $2.4 billion for developing technology to lower emissions at coal-fired power plants.

The second is a new energy bill that will call for a renewable mandate: 10 percent of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025. According to an interview conducted by Red Herring, Michael Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), confirmed this mandate, stating the energy bill should contain a nationwide renewable electricity standard, also called a renewable portfolio standard, which requires an increasing amount of the country’s electricity to be generated from renewable sources like wind and solar.

Last, Mr. Obama also has his sights on creating a climate bill to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. The energy plan calls for a cap-and-trade system. Carbon-emitting companies trade emissions credits, or allowances, in an open market under a cap, or limit, on those emissions. The climate bill could mandate reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

There is a lot of excitement and anticipation around Obama’s energy bills in the cleantech community. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the cleantech investment community voted Obama 6-1 over McCain in the election.

Administrative backing coupled with a real need for alternative energies sets the stage for the development and growth of today’s cleantech companies. Let’s hope the current economic situation does not detain the president from fulfilling his clean energy promises.

We know the advantages of liquid cooling; it can extract more heat from cooled parts, which makes it ideal for handling issues like overclocking and it is less influenced by the ambient temperature. Liquid cooling is not limited to one component, so it can cool the CPU, GPU and other components simultaneously while creating relatively no noise.

Fujitsu’s LifeBook N7010

The appeal of liquid cooling has some OEMs working diligently to create a water cooling system that can fit into today’s average height profile, .7-1.5 inches. It seems the closest that anyone has come thus far is the Fujitsu LifeBook N7010. The laptop, which was reviewed by Engadget on Dec.15, didn’t exactly receive extensive praise. According to Thomas Ricker of Engadget, the laptop is full of compromises including its size, nearly 2 inches thick and 7 and half pounds in weight. The computer has only one hour of promised battery life. On the flip side it is packed with features like a digital television turner, 1.3 megapixel webcam, fingerprint scanning security, 4GB of memory, a 4-inch LCD touch screen along with other bells and whistles. Don’t expect to get your hands on a LifeBook N7010 if you live in the US, Fujitsu is only distributing this liquid cooled laptop within Japan.

Strides are being made to create a viable liquid laptop solution, but there is still no liquid pump on the market that can fit into an average laptop profile. The quest continues.