Building A Grandkid-Friendly Future: One Vending
Machine At A Time
by Lee H. Goldberg
Much like the first daffodils poking their heads up through the frosty spring ground, green power technologies seem to be popping up in the most unexpected places. In fact, my recent experiences at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco point to 2005 as the year when energy conservation has moved beyond the solar panel-and-granola set and plopped loudly into the heart of hardcore commercial electronics. The large number of companies introducing power conservation and management products at the show is a good indicator that the technology is beginning to hit the mainstream hard and will quite possibly become one of the most promising growth markets for the power semiconductor sector.
Much of the activity centers around chipsets for building high-efficiency, sub-1 W standby power supplies that will power everything from set top boxes to printers in the many European and Asean markets where regulations dictate low-power idle operation for most consumer electronics. In my whirlwind day-and-a-half visit to the show, I managed to speak with Analog Devices, Infineon, Philips, STMicroelectronics, and Toshiba about their latest green power supply solutions. With much of the world market heading towards supplies that save power in both their operating and idle states, it's a pretty good bet that these companies are staking out a claim in a large growth market.
The conference also had several other interesting surprises on the green power front. Perhaps the biggest news is the huge move toward incorporating power factor correction (PFC) in medium-sized power supplies in response to new global requirements. Besides the solution from International Rectifier reviewed here last week, I stumbled on two new chip makers (iWatt and Power Factor One) introducing PFC solutions. Much of the world is reducing the reactive loads on its generating plants by requiring PFC in supplies 75 W and larger, something that will help reduce carbon emissions and open up many new opportunities for the power electronics sector at the same time.
But perhaps the most surprising indicator that green power's time has come was discovering that it had already invaded the unglamorous world of vending machines. That's right, vending machines. While at a briefing with Zilog, I discovered that one of their customers, USA Technologies, has introduced an embedded controller called the Vending Miser which uses some clever algorithms to cut the power consumption of an ordinary refrigerated soda machine by 35% - 50%. This might not seem like a big deal at first, until you realize that the average vending machine takes around $280 worth of electricity a year to keep your Dr Pepper chilly and your Clark Bars crunchy. And with millions of vending machines in the US alone, USA Tech's $80 modules could make a big difference. In fact, with only 100 k units worth of their EnergyMiser products sold to date, they already saving 134,024,496 kWh of electricity per year, which translates to saving their customers over $12,000,000 on their electricity bills.
And if you happen to worry about what kind of world we're leaving our grandkids, you might also take satisfaction that the devices have already kept over 100 k tons of CO2 per year out of the air: the equivalent of taking close to 8000 cars off the road. While green vending machines alone won't save the world, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to imagine the hundreds, or even thousands, of other market niches where green power products offer tremendous opportunities for economic and environmental savings.
The race to a grandchild-friendly future will be won in small steps, as engineers and entrepreneurs create the products, tools and business practices that make both economic and environmental sense. And green power technology will be there to play its role in building that better tomorrow, one vending machine at a time…
Questions? Comments? News on your own grandkid-friendly products? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com
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