The Green Show: The 'Renew America Roadtrip' in a Tesla Roadster

[ Background music ] >> Mark Licea: Hey everyone I'm Mark Licea and this week the Renew America Road Trip kicks off in a Tesla roadster, Walmart implements green labeling on its products and find out what it costs to power a heavy duty gaming PC. The Green Show starts now. ^M00:00:15 [ Music ] ^M00:00:23 >> The Renew America Road Trip is a cross country drive in a Tesla roadster. The event kicked off last week here in New York City. Take a look. >> We are the co-founders of Renew America Road Trip. >> Renew America Road Trip is America's first green charity drive, all volunteer, cross country in an all electric sports car, 0 emission vehicle. We are driving cross country to raise awareness of renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly technologies. We'll be driving this car right here-Tesla roadster. We are promoting charities across the country. Major stops in all the major cities from New York to San Francisco starting today we're launching at the Hotel here in New York City, Times Square. Everybody can get out and do their part to reduce our dependence on foreign oil to help our country get back on track economically. You could say that this is the largest drive-athon that's ever been done. We're volunteering our time to drive across country and we're hoping that others are gonna come out to the website- renewamericaroadtrip.com and they can pledge and no money goes to us it goes directly to charities and you know you can do your part. >> So come out and show your support. We're going to have events all across the country and we could be in your neighborhood. It's for a fantastic cause and again let's drive America green together. >> Speaking of Walmart is becoming a driving force in the green scene. The mega retailer just announced it will label all of their products with a green rating. To determine the rating Walmart is partnering with 12 universities to ask companies information on each product including details on manufacturing materials and packaging. The answers will then be calculated to determine a green rating that will appear on the labeling of each product. The plan could reach stores by 2011 but the company says that their data index won't be operational until around 2014. This could force a lot of retail stores to do the same. I'm guessing something like this probably would not get a good score. Moving right along our desktop editor Rich Brown tested out the power consumption of the high end gaming desktop and compared those results to an average system. Take a look. What system are we talking about? >> Yeah this is a system from digital storm a small boutique PC gaming vendor. While this system could certainly used a lot of power we don't expect it would be any different than another boutique gamer that had a similar config. So we're not laying it on digital storm that it eats a lot of power just systems like this. >> Why does this suck up so much energy? >> Well it has a quad core CPU that is wickedly over clocked for 1 thing and then it also has a dual chip graphics card, very fast. Graphics cards in general just suck up a lot of juice. You know when you throw in a high end card that has 2 chips in it then you're kind of eating up twice the power. >> How much annually will you pay for running a system like this versus another gaming system? >> We found that with this one if memory serves it was about $120 on the year. >> And how does the power testing come up with that particular number and how many hours a day would a gamer have to play in order to match those numbers? >> We waited it for the kind of power you would use over about 2.4 hours to be exact a day. We played Far Cry 2 on this system and every other PC that has a discreet graphics card and we let that run for about 10 minutes and then take a reading and calculate from there. >> Good to know. Although if you're spending a ton of dough on a high end gaming PC in the first place you probably don't care about an extra few bucks on your power bill. Onto a more sunny product: Docomo just announced a new solar hybrid phone. It packs an 8 megapixel camera and wide VGA display. You can charge it with the phone's built in solar panel. 10 minutes of sun will generate enough power for 1 minute of talk time and you can get it wet. It should be on sale in Japan by September. If you take it to the beach remember it's not sand proof so when it's not charging you should probably just keep it in a case just like any other phone. [ Background music ] >> That's it for this week. Write to us greenshow.cnet.com and subscribe to us in iTunes. I'm Mark Licea thanks for watching. ^M00:04:18 [ Music ]