The Volvo V60: all-electric, hybrid, and diesel all-in-one! | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

We just posted some great videos highlighting green cars from the Washington DC Auto Show (Watch SobukaTV), and we found one more cool car worth mentioning, the amazing Volvo V60! Most car manufacturers pick a specific efficient technology and design the car around it, but the engineers at Volvo decided to merge three different technologies into one!

Scheduled to be revealed at the Geneva Auto Show on March 1st 2011, the Volvo V60 Plug-In Hybrid is designed to operate as an all-electric, as a hybrid, or as a diesel, at the switch of a button. This gives consumers the choice of changing their driving style depending on the situation. If you have a simple commute of driving back and forth between work and home, you can put it in Pure mode and drive it as an all-electric, with a range of up to 30 miles. Not enough? switch it to a hybrid and stop worrying about the distance, because in Hybrid mode it can cover up-to 745 miles (125 mpg equivalent) on a single tank of diesel! That’s like driving from Washington D.C. to Chicago, IL or Jacksonville, FL on a single tank of gas! Obviously if you’re stuck in traffic, etc. this may change some, but it’s still amazing! And if you pull up next to some ego-tripping “lemme race you and leave you in the dust” type, switch to Power mode and let them taste the 285 horsepower from the combined diesel and electric motors, with 0-62mph in 6.9 seconds and 472 foot-pounds of torque. They’ll have second thoughts of ridiculing your Volvo “family” wagon.

The V60′s front wheels are are powered by the five-cylinder 2.4 liter D5 turbo-diesel engine (215 horsepower and 320 foot-pounds of torque). The rear wheels are powered by a 70 horsepower electric motor that gets its juice from a 12 kilo-watt-hour lithium ion battery pack. The car comes with a six-speed automatic transmission. Volvo estimates the car will be in European showrooms by 2012, and it seems like it will be a while until we get it here in the US. With Europe’s diesel prices at approximately $7.80/gallon compared to the $3.80/gallon in the US, you can’t be mad at them for that… but we need such cars here too! (viaTreehugger, wired, and volvo)

Tags: electric, green cars, green tech, hybrid, plug-in, V60, volvo

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 26th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Magic Hat: a brewery that runs on beer | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

Magic Hat: a brewery that runs on beer

Posted on March 11th, 2011 by Daniel

If you’re like most folks at happy hour, you probably never think about what it took to make that beer in your hand… some could care less about the quantity they consume, but that’s another topic… anyway, did you know that one of the best breweries out there is running its operations on beer? No, they’re not getting drunk off their own supply, instead they’re running their facility by turning their excess beer and other organic waste into natural gas.

A typical brewery produces plenty of organic waste during the brewing process by using large quantities of hops, barley, yeast, etc.. Some of the spent grain is usually sold or given away to farmers as cattle feed, and some of it may end up as wastewater in the watershed, after being treated on site. But thanks to Purpose Energy‘s biphase orbicular bioreactor (or B.O.B.), the brewery’s organic waste can be turned into biogas, which can then be used to power the facility.

The man behind Purpose Energy and B.O.B. is Eric Fitch, a 37 year-old mechanical engineer by training, and home brewing extraordinaire (he once clogged up the pipes of his Cambridge, MA, apartment building when he dumped the oatmeal looking organic waste from his brew into his garbage dispenser). Fitch initially tested out his invention by taking away the waste from Yuengling’s brewery in Tampla, FL, to a local farm, where he dumped it into a 400-gallon methane digester. With his refined B.O.B, he went back to New England to approach several breweries for a pilot project, and Magic Hat agreed.

Magic Hat’s 42-foot tall silo structure is what houses Purpose Energy’s B.O.B. system. The B.O.B. has a 50-foot diameter, can hold 490,000 gallons of waste slurry, and produces about 200 cubic feet of biogas per minute to power the brewery’s operations. The whole thing cost about $4 million to build, and just 100 feet away from the main Magic Hat facility, it’s like having your own power plant in your backyard. The system can save up to $2 per barrel of beer, and with Magic Hat’s medium-sized operations delivering 154,000 barrels of beer per year, they save approximately $25,000 every month!

Like its company slogan says, Purpose Energy is “saving the earth, one beer at a time.” And we say cheers to that! (via boston.com, treehugger.com)

Tags: biogas, green brewery, Magic Hat, Purpose Energy

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2011 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Business, biofuels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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The legal industry is saving trees | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

The legal industry is saving trees

Posted on January 16th, 2011 by Nick

I occasionally run into many seasoned legal professionals around the Washington DC area working on big corporate cases. In almost every encounter, there is a conversation about the massive size of files (.doc, .xls, .ppt,..) they receive from their clients. They include  hard drives, cd’s/dvd’s, flash drives, and even back-up tapes. Yes, I said back-up tapes.

Some of you tech savvy people who already know what is a back-up tape, just hold on for a minute, while I explain…. All the information that is central to your job is backed up. Depending on the type of IT budget your company has allocated in preserving your data, the information you work on is saved on or off site, real-time, daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever your IT data retention policy states.

WHy is this conversation so critical? Back-up tapes can range in size that’s why. Let’s start with a 250 GB back-up tape, the standard size of a desktop hard drive these days. Let’s assume that each file on your tape is about 1/4 of a MB (250 KB), filled with all types of office files (word docs, power point, excel spreadsheet, etc..). Now you are talking about 1,000,000 files easily just off one tape.

Here is how we relate this ‘legal-tecky’ conversation to Sobuka:

If the average file is 5 pages, that’s already at 5,000,000 pages (10,000 realms – 500 pages/realm)! Try printing that out to your favorite Xerox machine. You’d be in the office  for the next 20 days non-stop. RainForestMaker.org calculator estimates this as cutting down 720 trees. I am trying to figure out how may trees Noah’s Ark used up to save the world. Because for just one back-up tape, the size of a regular computer HD, all the trees on our planet (~ 400 billion) would be in jeopardy, a subtle but trend-like Armageddon.

We should be thankful that the legal industry already knows this is not practical but even more from a financial standpoint. They have utilized technology throughout the years to help take snapshots of files by producing them into tiff images, jpegs, and even ‘natively,’ thus reducing the need for paper.

Let us know how your business or industry is saving trees. Please feel free to leave a comment below.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 1:50 am and is filed under Environment, Featured Content, Green Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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A Groupon for the greenie in you – GreenDeals.org | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

A Groupon for the greenie in you – GreenDeals.org

Posted on January 10th, 2011 by Daniel

In case you haven’t heard, Groupon, a web-based coupons seller for various local businesses, is making a killing with its business model. So much so in fact, that it declined a $6B offer from Google! Its amazing success in this market has left the doors wide open for plenty of other competitors with a similar model, thus giving customers like you and I more choices for discounted coupon deals to enjoy.

The latest addition to this market comes from the good folks at Green America, a network of eco-friendly and socially responsible businesses. The site is  GreanDeals.org, and it focuses on bringing customers green-related coupon discounts from the vast network of Green America approved businesses. The site was launched in November 2010 at the San Francisco Green Festival, after conducting beta testing with over 100,000 users (via GreenBiz.com).

The success of the Groupons of the world does show that customers are willing to wait for discount bargains on items that they may have overlooked in the past. From our experiences at sobuka.com, financial concerns are stated as the biggest barrier to entry when it comes to go green. If green related deals are packaged and presented successfully, there is no reason why GreenDeals.org can’t break through the barrier and move more customers to eco-friendly alternatives while shopping.

Tags: green america, green coupons, Green Shopping, greendeals.org, groupon

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Go Green with recycled paper | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

Go Green with recycled paper

Posted on December 31st, 2010 by admin

We would like to congratulate Autumn from Glenn Dale, MD, our big winner of December’s Green Photo of the Month contest, with a $50 prize, and it was SUPER EASY.  Here is how it went…Autumn was shopping for Christmas gifts when she realized that her Target giftcard was attached to recycled paper made from renewable energy and 100% post-consumer fiber which is definitely “green” related. So a light bulb went off and she ripped out her camera phone and went snap…snap and finally she emailed it to Sobuka’s Green Photo Contest.

Thanks again to everyone that participated in our contest! To take part in the next one, check out the details below:

It’s easy to Go Green and WIN with Sobuka!

Submit one picture that you took of something green (environmentally friendly technology, service, process, etc.). Remember to tell us where it was taken, and why you think it’s green related. Email your photo to contest [at] sobuka [dot] com. Happy shootin!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2010 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Photo of the Month. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Holiday Greetings From Sobuka | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

Holiday Greetings From Sobuka

Posted on December 25th, 2010 by Nick

A year in review:

We launched Sobuka by hosting an event in March,  Alex joined the team in April and we documented the EarthDay Climate Rally, we went to see some politicians do their thing at the 13th annual Congressional Renewable Energy Expo in June, showed a little something on sustainable urban farming with the great guys at ECOffshoots.org in July, introduced you to the possibilities of eco-friendly construction with the Green Building Institute tour (also July), brought you the Progressive X-Prize competitors in September, exposed you to Western Maryland’s green communities in October, documented the many possibilities of green living by showing you things like how much biking you have to do to light a bulb at the DC green festival (also October), and last but not least, we showed you how to install a rain barrel with dcgreenworks.org and how DC is going solar with one neighborhood at a time (hello Mt. Pleasant solar co-op!).

After 70 blog posts, 17 videos, 3 Meet-Up events, 2 Green Photo of the Month contest winners, and a new website redesign, we just have one simple thing to say: it has been a great first year, and it wouldn’t be possible without the support and involvement of each and every one of you.
A big thank you goes out from us to you!

- The Sobuka Team

Tags: christmas, Holiday Greetings, New Year

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 25th, 2010 at 1:55 am and is filed under Featured Content, Holiday Greetings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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fun times

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