Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Nortel’s Green takes 1st place in London Olympics bid

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 31, 2008
in Podcast
. 2 Comments

Going for gold
Photo Credit shutterhack

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Episode 1 of the GreenMonk Podcasts - 08 mins 28 secs

We have been thinking of starting a podcast here on GreenMonk for some time so when I read that Nortel is going to be the official Network Infrastructure Provider for the London 2012 Olympics I decided that would be a great story to start with.

My guest on this podcast is Nortel’s Dave Johnson. Dave is the General Manager, Olympic Programs for Nortel and I figured if anyone could tell us what went on behind the scenes in this process, it’d be Dave.

Dave graciously agreed to come on the show and he explained how Nortel’s Green credentials were paramount to their winning the bid. According to Dave “sustainability was one of the key focuses for LOCOG (the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games) and when they say sustainability, Green is one of the key pillars of that sustainability”.

We are seeing more and more Green credentials being a factor in purchasing processes and this is just one of the more public examples.

If your company isn’t considering going Green for reducing your costs, you may well want to consider doing so to maintain your sales!!!

Download the entire interview here
(7.7mb mp3)

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Microsoft and EEA deal starting to pay off

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 30, 2008
in environment
. 0 Comments

EyeOnEarth

James has written previously about how Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency (EEA) signed a non-exclusive five year deal with a goal to “make environmental information more accessible to citizens in Europe”.

As James said at the time:

Likesay, this is pretty much a canonical Greenmonk story. We are all watchdogs, we are all observers. Science progresses most effectively when research and data are widely distributed. Over 500 million people-that’s a lot of eyeballs. Interestingly enough the EAA is including Turkey in the scheme - so its taking the long, wide view. The EAA has a 13 year history of Open Data, such as making greenhouse gas information available to all, but normally focuses on EU policymakers, rather than citizens. Its great to see them turning the funnel the other way…

This morning EyeOnEarth, the first product of that agreement was launched. EyeOnEarth is a site listing water bathing quality for beaches and waterways throughout Europe.

It contains historical data going back as far as 1991 as well as the ability to give feedback on any beaches/waterways you have visited or are familiar with. This community-based approach makes it an exceedingly powerful tool and this has to be the first time we have seen grassroots activism, supported by central transparency, powered by Microsoft!

This water quality site is the first in a series of such sites which will be rolled out by Microsoft and the EEA. Others in the works are an air quality site and a site about nature and biodiversity parks you can visit.

The opening up of public data for public consumption, somewhat in the manner of Prof. Hans Rosling’s fabulous Gapminder site, but going well beyond that with the ability to give feedback into the system is hugely laudable.

One further necessary addition to the site is access for mobile browsers. I will want to add info about beaches/waterways when I am at the beach from my iPhone or N95. This is not yet possible but when I asked Microsoft’s Director EU & NATO, Ludo De Bock about this his reassured me that:

We haven’t tested or adapted the site for mobile access now due to time constraints but mobile access is a core component of our vision for the Observatory portal as we like to offer an alerting/subscription service

Oh, and the screenshot above was taken viewing the site in Safari on my Mac. I also tested it in Firefox and it works perfectly there too.

Well done guys.

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Supercomputers can be Green - who knew?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 30, 2008
in energy efficiency
. 0 Comments

ibm supercomputer
Photo Credit gimpbully

According to Wikipedia most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.

The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, for example, is a cluster of 3240 computers, each with 40 processing cores while NASA’s Columbia is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors.

If servers and data centers are considered the bad boys of the IT energy world, then supercomputers must be raving psychopaths, right? Well, not necessarily.

The findings of the Green500 List, an independent ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, show that this is far from the case. In fact in their June 2008 listings they report that:

The first sustained petaflop supercomputer – Roadrunner, from DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory – exhibits extraordinary energy efficiency.

Roadrunner, the top-ranked supercomputer in the TOP500, is ranked #3 on the Green500 List. This achievement further reinforces the fact that energy efficiency is as important as raw performance for modern supercomputers and that energy efficiency and performance can coexist.

Other interesting findings from the list are:

  1. The top three supercomputers surpass the 400 MFLOPS/watt milestone for the first time.
  2. Energy efficiency hits the mainstream - The energy efficiency of a commodity system based on Intel’s 45-nm low-power quad-core Xeon is now on par with IBM BlueGene/L (BG/L) machines, which debuted in November 2004 and
  3. Each of supercomputers in the top ten from this edition of the Green500 List has a higher FLOPS/watt rating than the previous #1 Green500 supercomputer (the previous list was 4 months ago in February)

IBM come out of this list as Big Green - out of the first 40 ranked systems, 39 are IBM-based. That is an incredible committment to Green which can’t be argued with and for which IBM deserves due credit.

And speaking of Green, it is great to see a supercomputer based in Ireland, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing’s Schrödinger supercomputer, coming in joint 4th place on the list of Green computers.

What makes this even more interesting is that many supercomputers are used in climate modelling and for research into Global Warming.

It is counterintuitive that supercomputers would be highly energy-efficient but it is precisely because they consume so much power that a lot of research is going into reducing supercomputers’ power requirements, thereby cutting their running costs. Once again a case of the convergence of ecology and economics (or green and greenbacks!).

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Do you telework?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 29, 2008
in telework
. 4 Comments

Teleworking
Photo Credit DDFic

In case you missed it there was an extremely comprehensive post on the Oil Drum site the other day about teleworking.

The post struck a particular chord with me as I have been working out of home now since 2004!

The post goes through the pros and cons of teleworking and lists 28 advantages of teleworking. Personally, I love working out of home and at this point I’d find it very hard to going back to working from a central office. Working from home means I can be far more productive. I can (and often do) stay working on long after the typical 9-5 workday.

Apart from the obvious environmental benefits of teleworking, the Oil Drum article mentions many of the advantages of telecommuting for companies including:

• Improves employee satisfaction

• Reduce attrition

• Reduces unscheduled absences

• Increases productivity

• Saves employers money

• Equalizes personalities and reduces potential for discrimination

• Cuts down on wasted meetings

• Increases employee empowerment

• Increases collaboration

• Provides new employment opportunities for the un and under-employed

• Expands the talent pool

• Slows the brain drain due to retiring Boomers

• Reduces staffing redundancies and offers quick scale-up and scale-down options

• Prevents traffic accidents

• Take the pressure off our crumbling transportation infrastructure

• Insures continuity of operations in the event of a disaster

• Improves performance measurement systems

• Offers access to grants and financial incentives

Many large companies are embracing teleworking nowadays for many of the reasons listed above.

The telework coalition has an interesting facts page on teleworking which lists details such as:

  • British Telecom, which has 80,000 employees, found productivity rose 31 per cent among its 9,000 teleworkers, due to lack of disruptions, stress and commuting time
  • AT&T found two-thirds of workers offered jobs by competitors remained with the company, citing telework as a major factor in their decision.
  • The bottom line, according to Dow Chemical: Administrative costs have dropped 50% annually (15% of which was attributed to commercial real estate costs.) Productivity increased by 32.5% (10% through decreased absenteeism, 16% by working at home and 6.5% by avoiding the commute.)
  • IBM reduced real estate costs in the US by from 40-60% according to Telecommuting Review and
  • Nortel report that less than 1% of telecommuters want to stop once they have started to telecommute.

April Dunford, Nortel’s Director of Business Development, was interviewed recently about her experiences as a teleworker:

Do you telework? Does your company have a teleworking program in place?

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IBM’s coming on board will speed up the rollout of Smart Grids

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 28, 2008
in smart grid
. 0 Comments

Light House
Photo Credit MumbleyJoe

The observant amongst you may have noticed that we have talked quite a bit about smart grids here on GreenMonk. That is because we believe fundamentally in what it is they are trying to achieve and how they are going about it.

And we are not alone in that!

SAP’s AMI Lighthouse Council is all about Smart Grids and hence SAP are holding their SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio Texas in October where there will be a major focus on Smart Grids.

As well as SAP, not surprisingly the utilities are all over this space because Smart Grids will give them the ability to far better manage their energy supply and the demand, thereby reducing the number of outages. It seems that every day brings news of a new Smart Grid trial by some utility.

ComEd are looking at Smart Grids in Chicago, Manitoba Hydro is testing about 4,500 smart meters in Winnipeg, Xcel Energy has announced plans to make Boulder the first SmartGridCityTM, PEPCO has rolled out a Smart Grid trial in 1,000 homes in Washington DC, Austin Energy plans to have all its meters converted to Smart Meters by December 2008, etc. In fact, here is a Google Map of all the Smart Grid projects currently underway globally!

As well as the utilities, because this is a whole new area, there are literally hundreds of startups in this space from the likes of SynergyModule in Ireland to more established names like Echelon and Itron in the US.

Because of the involvement of these myriad players, IBM has also come on board to try to bring some standards to the table. According to this recent article in CNet,

The idea is to create a common set of communication protocols and data formats that utilities and smart-grid start-ups can adhere to.

With these technical blueprints, based on standards like TCP/IP, new technologies can be plugged into the grid on a large scale…. What’s happening now is a patchwork of smart-grid trials using differing products, an approach that prevents fast technology change.

This is great news for the rollout of Smart Grids globally. If we have a universally agreed set of standards that everyone adheres to then the creation and integration of smart grids and smart grid devices suddenly becomes far less complex.

It will still take some time before there are the devices in place, and the regulators and utilities sign-up to convert completely to Smart Grids but a heavy weight like IBM’s coming on board can only help move things along.

[Full disclosure: SAP have invited me to attend the SAP for Utilities conference, I am a sometime unpaid advisor to SynergyModule and IBM are a RedMonk client, though not a GreenMonk client!]

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Supply chain management and carbon accounting

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 25, 2008
in carbon accounting
. 1 Comment

Supply chain
Photo Credit phitar

I came across two fascinating surveys of supply chain execs attitudes to climate change today!

The first from environmentalleader.com says that:

The survey of over 500 North American supply chain executives shows that the vast majority of respondents, 90 percent, think that over the next three years green issues will remain or become more important to their transport and logistics processes…

This push towards green is reported to be driven by a number of factors, including financial ROI (61%), public relations payback (78%), improved customer relations (83%), decreased fuel bills
(70%), and improved supply chain efficiency (59%)….

The results revealed that 72 percent are or are planning to improve energy efficiency, 37 percent are redesigning warehousing and distribution center networks, and a dramatic 60 percent are measuring and/or reducing emissions.

Amidst the slew of supply chain carbon measurement tools and technologies that have come onto the market in the last year, only a handful of respondents are already using an external measurement tool. But while 16% have deployed an internal system for this purpose, another 30% are currently researching which software to use or purchase in the short term.

30% are researching software for measuring supply chain carbon footprint? I smell opportunity!!!

The other survey I came across came from McKinsey. The report is a survey of 2,000 global executives.

According to the McKinsey report:

for consumer goods makers, high-tech players, and other manufacturers, between 40 and 60 percent of a company’s carbon footprint resides upstream in its supply chain—from raw materials, transport, and packaging to the energy consumed in manufacturing processes. For retailers, the figure can be 80 percent…

Surprisingly perhaps, we find that many of the opportunities to reduce emissions carry no net life-cycle costs—the upfront investment more than pays for itself through lower energy or material usage. Others, however, will require tradeoffs between emissions and profitability, in areas such as logistics and product design (including product specification and functionality). Forward-looking companies are using such discussions as opportunities for supplier development, for example by transferring best practices in manufacturing, purchasing, and R&D—as well as energy efficiency—to key suppliers. This opens the possibility of still lower costs and improved operational performance, in addition to helping suppliers remove more carbon from their supply chains.

Reading between the lines there are a few important messages here:

  1. Good carbon accounting software is becoming more and more of a requirement
  2. Attacking energy efficiency aggressively can significantly reduce a company’s carbon footprint
  3. Companies are increasingly looking at reducing supplier’s carbon footprints as a means to reduce their own. This can be either through working with suppliers or by choosing suppliers based on their carbon footprints.
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