Summer is just around the corner, and for those who live in big cities, that means spring warmth will soon give way to searing heat. Green roofs can help regulate city temperatures, giving people, and the electrical grid, a much needed break.

Toronto is the first city in North America with a bylaw that requires roofs to be green. And we're not talking about paint. A green roof, also known as a living roof, uses various hardy plants to create a barrier between the sun's rays and the tiles or shingles of the roof. The plants love the sun, and the building (and its inhabitants) enjoy more comfortable indoor temperatures as a result.

Toronto's new legislation will require all residential, commercial and institutional buildings over 2,000 square meters to have between 20 and 60 percent living roofs. Although it's been in place since early 2010, the bylaw will apply to new industrial development as of April 30, 2012. While this is the first city-wide mandate involving green roofs, Toronto's decision follow's in the footsteps of other cities, like Chicago and New York.

Under the direction of Mayor Richard Daley the city of Chicago put a 38,800 square foot green roof on a 12 story skyscraper in 2000. Twelve years later, that building now saves $5000 annually on utility bills, and Chicago boasts 7 million square feet of green roof space. New York has followed suit, and since planting a green roof on the Con Edison Learning Centre in Queens, the buildings managers have seen a 34 percent reduction of heat loss in winter, and reduced summer heat gain by 84 percent.

But lower utility bills aren't the only benefit of planting a living roof. In addition to cooling down the city, green roofs create cleaner air, cleaner water, and provide a peaceful oasis for people, birds and insects in an otherwise polluted, concrete and asphalt-covered environment.

Image via Flickr/pnwra

Silicon Valley might have a corner on electronics, but a dark horse has been creeping up the ranks of clean tech innovation...Britain! In fact, the land of the London Fog was recently placed 10th in a new global ranking of the 38 countries providing the best conditions for clean-technology start-ups.

Here are three UK companies making quite a commotion with their creative and practical clean technologies. Keep an eye out for them!

1. Seawater Greenhouse

The Seawater Greenhouse provides enables year-round crop production in some of the world’s hottest and driest regions. This is accomplished using seawater and sunlight, which can be harnessed for a fraction of normal irrigation costs. The technology imitates natural processes, helping to restore the environment while significantly reducing the operating costs of greenhouse horticulture.

2. Naked Energy (pictured at top)

This company imagines a world in which no homeowner will ever have to choose between solar PV and solar thermal ever again. Naked Energy's Virtu vacuum tube technology is a hybrid solar module that generates both electricity and heat from the convenience of your rooftop. Performance testing of the panels is happening now Imperial College London and will be published early 2012. Early indications are that 'Virtu' produces unprecedented power output and is a step change in solar technology.

3. Zeta LED

The definition of a bright idea, the folks at Zeta Controls have created an LED bulb that looks different than any other. Offering just 13% of running cost of normal 60 watt incandescent bulb, the LifeBulb contains no mercury or harmful components and is completely recyclable. And it looks like it was plucked off the set of Star Wars.

Want to learn more about the up and coming British clean tech industry? Check out Clean and Cool Mission 2012 or stop by Cleantech Forum San Francisco over the next few days.

The Atlanta Google data center is utilizing a "sidestream" treatment plant that uses grey water rather than potable water for cooling.

Originally built in 1997, the Google data center uses an innovative evaporative cooling process which is 50 percent more efficient than standard mechanical chillers. Initially using potable water for the data center, Google decided to greatly reduce it's impact on the environment by recycling grey water rather than wasting drinkable water. Recently local media and officials were provided a tour of the Douglas County Google treatment plant.

The Google sidestream plant uses 30 percent of the grey water that would otherwise head back to the Chattahoochee River. The plant cleans the water to a level appropriate for the cooling process. Any water that is not evaporated in the process is then sent to a second, effluent plant before being sent back to the Chattahoochee, ensuring clean and safe water is being returned to the ecosystem after being used for the cooling process.

A typical data center can use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day as part of the evaporative cooling process. As a former resident of Atlanta, GA I'm all too familiar with the recent droughts, population growth and battles over water resources. This new approach alleviates strain on the municipal reservoir and does provide some benefits, but it should be noted that their is still an impact on the river's flow and ecosystem.

Source: Sustainable Brands

“I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

“Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”

These might sound like quotes from individuals with opposing points of view, but they’re not. In fact, they were both uttered by the same person: Thomas Edison, father of the modern electric light bulb.

Edison embodied two things that tend to be lost in today’s discussion of energy dependence and new energy technologies: he was open to proactive change (even if it superceded his own inventions) and obsessed with practicality.

It can seem like the world is awash with ideas about our energy future, some are exciting, but decades away from being practical. To choose the right option—for consumers and for our economy—can seem daunting, but we don’t have to start from scratch. Building on Edison's research, we can begin to see that the answers have been there all along.

Eventually, Edison founded General Electric, a company that has been exploring the world of efficient energy technologies for over a century. Always with an eye to the future, GE has focused on improving existing power generation products as well as inventing new ones. From the first water wheel to harness the energy of Niagara Falls to the flexible, futuristic organic, LEDs, GE has strived to produce high quality products that make life better. In fact, GE's recently released data visualization tool aggregates all of their annual reports from the past 120 years and actually lets you track all the different energy-related products it’s developed over the decades.

Click on the word solar, and you’ll see the first mention pop up way back in 1946 when GE was first developing new ways to measure solar ray intensities. The first mention of wind power shows up in 1974 when the company worked with NASA to develop a wind generator. Fast forward a few decades, and you'll find advanced technologies for gathering both of these sources of renewable energy, like GE's thin film solar panels and high capacity wind turbines. While the potential is huge, and other countries are already taking advantage of these products, in America, the true energy generating capacity of wind and solar remains to be seen.

It's frustrating to realize the disconnect between availability and utilization of solar and wind power technologies, especially since most of the decisions are made by those with a vested interested in maintaining the status quo (Edison would be livid). The good news, however, is that the renewable energy industry continues to grow. And as GE’s new data visualization tool demonstrates, these technologies are a part of our national conversation now, more than ever. The key is to never become comfortable with what we’ve got, or afraid to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

This post was written in collaboration with GE as part of their new DataViz App available here.

Top Image Credit: Flickr - webhamster

Climate change is an urgent issue. We needed to start reducing our carbon emissions years ago if we were to have a chance at escaping the worst effects of a slowly warming world. But it's hard for people to take action to stop something when they can't actually see it happening. A new iPad app aims to provide a window into our slowly (quickly) changing world.

Conveniently released around the same time as the much-anticipated iPad 3, the Painting with Time: Climate Change App (PWT Climate in the App store) lets your fingers reveal how global warming is rapidly changing our world.

Created by Red Hill Studios, in collaboration with World View of Global Warming, provides a range of time brushes and special time slicers that let you manipulate photographic sequences to discover how glaciers have drastically retreated in numerous places around the world, and examine the ways that climate change is disrupting the timing of natural events such as flower buds opening.

"It's very hard for people to really appreciate long term events – our brains are not wired that way," notes Red Hill Studios Creative Director Bob Hone. "This 'temporal myopia' has helped us ignore our impacts on the planet. Fortunately, with digital imagery and high tech satellites, we can extend our time perception to visualize the long term effects of climate change."

The creators hope that this app will help people understand that rapid changes are occurring, even though they can't always be felt or seen with the naked eye. By making it possible for people to experience the transformation of our planet in a much more direct and tactile manner, the app has a chance to compel them to take action now, rather than later.

Download the free app here, and let us know what you think!

Two German interaction design students have re-envisioned the grocery store shopping experience.

In response to increasing consumer demand for detailed product information, German design students,  Benedikt Burgmaier and Fabian Kreuzer, have reinvented the process for purchasing meat, cheese and fish. As part of this concept, the glass case surrounding the fresh meats and cheeses, also functions as an interactive screen. Through simple interactions with the glass case, customers can simply point to an item to see more information including price and product description. Small books in front of the case can be lifted for more detailed information about origins and recipes to appear on the screen.

Although just a prototype, this project is an imaginative and inspirational look at the future of consumer experiences. What do you want to see in the grocery store of the future?

Source: food + tech connect

When the BP oil spill contaminated the Gulf of Mexico, authorities were hard pressed to find a safe way to get the crude out of the water quickly. Ultimately boats deployed miles of boom in an attempt to contain the spreading slick, then spend weeks skimming it out of the water. Chemical dispersants were released by airplane, but these were highly controversial as they merely break down oil into smaller bits, but don't degrade it completely.

Now it seems that scientists from Bristol University may have discovered a more efficient way to clean-up oil spills that won't leave any (or not nearly as much) of these invisible toxins behind: a soap that can be controlled by magnets.

Researchers created the soap by dissolving iron in liquid surfactant. The soap’s magnetic properties were proved with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution.

To test its properties, the team introduced a magnet to a test tube containing their new soap lying beneath a less dense organic solution. When the magnet was introduced the iron-rich soap overcame both gravity and surface tension between the water and oil, to levitate through the organic solvent and reach the source of the magnetic energy, proving its magnetic properties.

What scientists hope is that this magnetic soap could be deployed in oil spill areas as a means to literally lift the crude particles out of the water quickly and completely, without leaving behind a nasty "dispersant" residue. The solution could also be used in scientific experiments that require precise control of liquid droplets.

"From a commercial point of view, though these exact liquids aren’t yet ready to appear in any household product, by proving that magnetic soaps can be developed, future work can reproduce the same phenomenon in more commercially viable liquids for a range of applications from water treatment to industrial cleaning products,” said Professor Julian Eastoe.

It's high time that oil recovery technology caught up with the technology used to get it out of the ground in the first place. Although it would be nice if we could just stop building leaky oil rigs and pipelines, the potential of this discovery could go a long way toward protecting our waterways, though there's no mention of whether it would be viable in the freezing waters of the Arctic, oil's next frontier.

Image Credit: Flickr - lsgcp