Harnessing Green Power

Worldwide energy consumption is set to increase by 30 percent in the next 15 years. The environmental impact of this energy demand and supply is 37,124 million tons of carbon emissions. Now more than ever, the interaction between the natural resources and the population has to be maintained at a balance in order to ensure the continuity of the human race. Energy is essential to life and its conservation has become an absolute necessity.

The increased global demand for energy can be addressed through a number of macro-scale energy harvesting technologies like windmills, watermills and passive solar power systems. These technologies are not new and have the capability to help meet the current energy demand. In recent times, wind turbines, hydro-electric generators and solar panels have turned harvesting into a small but growing contributor to the world’s energy needs. These technologies have two significant advantages over battery-powered solutions: virtually inexhaustible sources, and little or no adverse effects on our environment. Macro-scale harvesting technologies differ in many ways but have one thing in common: they feed the grid, typically adding kilowatts or megawatts to the power distribution system.

Now, as designers seek to cut the cords, they turn to micro energy harvesting systems that can scavenge milliwatts from solar, vibrational, thermal and biological sources. Many electronics devices are resorting to micro harvesting technologies for energy supply, such as calculators, watches, radios and Bluetooth headsets. There are also applications that consume on the order of milliwatts as well but have not yet adapted micro-harvesting as a source of energy. One very promising application is a remote sensor.

The most promising micro-harvesting technology extracts energy from vibration, temperature differentials and light. A fourth possibility – scavenging energy from RF emissions – is interesting, but the energy availability is at least an order of magnitude less than that of the first three. A few years ago, micro-harvesting could have been called a scientific curiosity. But the design community has made possible the unexpected result of pushing micro-scale energy harvesting out of the lab and onto the designer’s bench. Now, designers are sizing up ULP not just from the consumption side but from the production perspective as well. But this brings challenges as harvested power derived from ambient sources tends to be unregulated, intermittent and small.

In line with the exponentially growing demand, the energy usage the world over is coming under a scanner. Various certifying agencies like Energy Star, Blue Angel, Nordic Swan, and California Energy Commission Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) are trying to increase awareness among the masses by educating the people about the impact of electronics devices on the environment.

TI’S GREEN SOLUTIONS
Semiconductor companies are also playing a pivotal role in making our carbon footprint lesser and keep our planet greener for a longer period of time. The conservation does not stop at just reducing the losses in the power conversion circuits. It begins here, as every piece of circuitry in consumer devices today is trying to introduce more features with less power. And Texas Instruments is in every step of the design. From RF and power management—including AC/DC, Power Factor Correction, DC/DC and linear power conversion—to DSPs and ultra-low-power microcontroller units (MCUs), TI has products to differentiate and offer power-efficient designs.

One example is TI’s CC430 technology platform, which integrates the company’s high-performance MSP430 MCU with low-power RF technology. The combination of the power-efficient, highly functional MSP430F5xx MCU and a low-power RF transceiver on a single chip offers a unique low-power/performance mix and high integration to help break down barriers to RF implementation such as stringent power, performance, size and cost requirements helping bring wireless connectivity to new applications, one of them being energy-harvesting applications.

In addition to solving low-power issues, integration also reduces package size and cost, which is a top priority for small sensor applications that might be deployed, for example, in a mesh network or some other “network of things”. Examples can include innovative RF sensor networks that report data to a central collection to analyze and regulate information such as smoke in the atmosphere to detect forest fires, moisture or pesticide information in crop fields, or even humidity levels in a winery.

Recently, TI launched a family of fully integrated analog front ends (AFEs) for portable to high-end ultrasound diagnostic equipment. The AFE58xx family allows the design of innovative ultrasound systems with superior image quality and reduced power consumption. The first device, the AFE5805, addresses the specific needs of the portable ultrasound market with nearly 20 percent lower power consumption than existing integrated solutions.

THE FUTURE
Renewable energy is an area which India would greatly benefit from in the long run. Solar energy, which is a major form of renewable energy, is not usable as is. Whether you want to charge the batteries with the power available from these solar panels or run an inverter that feeds the power back to the grid and gets you power credit, you need power processing circuitry that can help achieve either of these tasks.

It is very important that we are made aware of “Green Power” solutions. Energy efficiency of appliances like cell phones, TVs, incandescent lamps versus CFLs at home, air conditioners and water pumps, including cars, have a direct effect on carbon footprint associated with their design and usage. Texas Instruments plays an important role in both line powered and portable power applications that efficiently convert power at the point of use. If the present is any indication, “energy efficiency” will soon become part of the daily vocabulary.