Monthly Archive for June, 2008

IBM reckons Green is where economic and ecological concerns converge

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 27, 2008
in Uncategorized and datacenter
. 0 Comments

I love this ad. It demonstrates that not only has IBM a sense of humour but also that they have the right story - today, with soaring energy prices, Green is where economic and ecological concerns converge.

Last year IBM announced Project Big Green. This was a commitment by IBM to re-direct $1 billion USD per annum across its businesses to increase energy efficiency! Serious money by anyone’s standards.

This isn’t just some philanthropic gesture on IBM’s part. By making this investment the company expects to save more than five billion kilowatt hours per year. IBM anticipates it will double the computing capacity in the eight million square feet of data center space which IBM operates within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint. In other words they expect to double their compute power, without adding data centers, nor increasing their carbon footprint!

This year, IBM have gone even further! As an extension of their project Big Green they have announced ‘modular data centers’ similar to Sun’s S20 product. They come in three sizes and IBM claims they are

designed to achieve the world’s highest ratings for energy leadership, as determined by the Green Grid, an industry group focused on advancing energy efficiency for data centers and business compute ecosystems.

I’d love to see comparable metrics between the S20 and IBMs modular data centers.

However, the take home message today is that IBM is committing serious resources to its Green project. Not because they care deeply for the planet (I’m sure they do) but because they care deeply about the bottom line and with increasing energy costs, there is now a sweet convergence between doing the right thing for the planet and for the shareholder!

by-sa

The high price of oil is not the problem - it is the solution to the actual problem of anthropogenic climate change

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 17, 2008
in biofuels
. 6 Comments

Algae
Photo Credit Future-PhD

Chris Morrisson has a post on the VentureBeat blog extolling a heavily self-funded startup called Algenol Biofuels which is using algae to produce ethanol for use as a fuel.

The company is about to build a refinery in Mexico to produce:

a jaw-dropping billion gallons a year of ethanol by the end of 2012

In the article he mentions two other algal biofuel companies Sapphire Energy and Aquaflow Bionomic both of whom are working on fuels produced from algae.

All very well but these companies are solving the wrong problem. The problem these companies are trying to solve is the current high price of oil. The high price of oil is not the problem - it is the solution to the actual problem of anthropogenic climate change!

In fairness to Chris, he also mentions work on getting algae to produce hydrogen:

Separately, talk in some quarters is picking up about using algae to produce hydrogen, a process being perfected by, among others, the University of California at Berkeley in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Now, if this came to fruition, Honda’s announcement today that they are going to start selling cars based on hydrogen fuel cells this coming July (2008) could be seen as very prescient.

by-sa

Introducing the NegaWatt!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 16, 2008
in demand response and energy demand management
. 3 Comments

Feather in the sky
Photo Credit Sarey*

Yes, you read the title correctly and no, NegaWatt is not one of my normal typos!

What then is a NegaWatt? A NegaWatt, is a MegaWatt of electricity that you don’t use! Huh?

Think of it like this, suppose a utility company has 100MW to supply.
Now let’s say their typical demand is 90MW.
If a potential customer contacts them looking for 20MW, they have a problem.

They can either try to build new generation of 20MW (expensive) or, try to get their existing customers to reduce their demand by 20MW. The reduced demand is typically done through efficiencies and the required reduction, when achieved, is 20 NegaWatts - 20 MW of virtually generated electricity.

Now, take the concept of a NegaWatt a little further. If you could ‘generate’ a lot of NegaWatts it should be possible to sell these demand side units back to the utilities. They are just as useful to the utilities for meeting demand as actual MegaWatts. More useful when demand for electricity is high and supply is low.

This is not some fictional futurescape. It is actually happening now to a limited extent in some parts of the US and will be rolled out far more widely in the coming years as energy markets and smart grids become more sophisticated.

How might someone create NegaWatts? Well, have a look at some of the posts we have written here about Energy Demand Management for some ideas.

A lot of the work in this area currently is looking at things like changing settings on thermostats (think aircon, refrigeration and water heating), bringing diesel generators online, and time-shifting of consumption (think storage heaters and pre-cooling buildings early in the day when demand is lower).

Companies like Comverge, EnerNoc and Echelon are making devices and systems that let consumer monitor and adjust their electricity use in real time.

This is a whole new market which is about to open up. There are massive opportunities there for people to write software to manage this, to build the hardware to do this, and to aggregate NegaWatts for sale to utility companies.

This all feeds back into the read/write grid we have discussed here previously. With the rise of the NegaWatt, electricity becomes a far more two-way tradeable commodity and the implications for the uptake of renewables on the grid are enormous.

by-sa

New, radically more efficient wind turbines

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 13, 2008
in renewables
. 1 Comment

Traditional wind farm
Photo Credit fieldsbh

The traditional look of windfarms, like the one above, could be changing if an article I read on News.com recently is anything to go by. The piece was about a new type of wind turbine from a company called FloDesign.

The devices have:

  • -shorter sturdier rotors so the turbines can be placed closer together. This also vastly eases the problems associated with transporting normal blades
  • -smaller blades which also means that the turbines can continue operating at higher wind speeds long after existing wind turbines would have to shut down
  • -a fin which points it into the wind, negating the need for a motor to turn it and thus making it easier to maintain and more efficient and
  • -a cowled prop, not unlike jet engines, which generates vortices. These vortices magnify the energy from the wind allowing them to capture 3-4 times more energy than traditional wind turbines.

Small wonder then that they have been winning prizes all over the place and, according to the News.com article, attracting the attention of pre-eminent VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

For more check out this fascinating video put together by the company:

by-sa

Salmonella Tomatoes: An Argument For View Source and Food Miles

Published
by
monkchips
on June 12, 2008
in food
. 4 Comments

Tomatoes -- Are They Poison?
Creative Commons License photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

You may not be familiar with the term food miles. Wikipedia describes it thus:

“The point was to highlight the hidden ecological, social and economic consequences of food production to consumers in a simple way, one which had objective reality but also connotations.”

Many people are very skeptical about the “hidden costs of transport” arguments against food that has been shipped thousands of miles. But public health offers another, very clear reason to more deeply consider the provenance of the food we eat. The current salmonella scare in the US is pretty chilling.

As things currently stand in food supply chains we usually have little or no idea of where our food came from. There are very few of us are that are like my friend Chris Dalby, who only buys food from farm shops, but that’s surely going to change as more and more products turn out to be contaminated. Increasingly we’re going to want to be able to “view source” for the food we eat. Food miles encourages us to do just that.

Tim O’Reilly said:

HTML, the language of web pages, opened participation to ordinary users, not just software developers. The “View Source” menu item migrated from Tim Berners-Lee’s original browser, to Mosaic, and then on to Netscape Navigator and even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Though no one thinks of HTML as an open source technology, its openness was absolutely key to the explosive spread of the web. Barriers to entry for “amateurs” were low, because anyone could look “over the shoulder” of anyone else producing a web page. Dynamic content created with interpreted languages continued the trend toward transparency.

Just like the rise of the web we’re going to need new standards, new linking and tagging mechanisms, and new ways of thinking if we’re to going to be able to trust modern food networks as they become increasingly complex.

by-sa

Games consoles really are gas guzzlers and the PS3 is an SUV!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on June 11, 2008
in Uncategorized and hardware
. 4 Comments

PS3 Controller
Creative Commons License photo credit: DeclanTM

James had a post here a couple of weeks back asking “Are Games Consoles Really Gas Guzzlers?“. This was in response to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald where Greenpeace accused games console vendors of ignoring environmental concerns.

James correctly pointed out that the story was light on specifics - there was no data to support the assertion that the games consoles were power hungry.

Yesterday I spotted a Tweet from April Dunford where she said:

Sony Playstation 3 consumes five times more energy than a medium sized refrigerator – 10 times as much as the Wii. http://tinyurl.com/6ft8l5

Intrigued, I followed the link and sure enough the story seems to back GreenPeace’s assertion:

They found out that a medium sized refrigerator of about 12 cu. ft. volume (60 inches in height) will cost $50 a year while Sony Playstation 3 will cost $250 a year even if it is not in use and only turned on. Microsoft XBox came second behind Playstation 3.

The original research was carried out by Australian consumer group Choice. Choice is the largest consumer organization in Australia with over 200,000 subscribers.

Ouch! The PS3 consumes five times more power than a fridge even if not in use? Interestingly the Nintendo Wii only consumes one tenth the power of a PS3. Yet another reason to love the Wii!!!

The target demographic for games consoles are typically the younger generation who are idealistic and really clued into Green. If the console manufacturers really want to differentiate themselves they should get Energy Star certified. The first one who does will reap the rewards.

by-sa