I attended the first three days of IBM’s Start summit last week and I’m definitely going back this week for more.

The venue (Lancaster House) is a sumptuous mansion in the centre of London whose opulence, defies description!

The event kicked off with a day dedicated to discussing Smarter Cities. The speaker list included Martin Powell (Boris Johnson’s Advisor on the Environment), Nigel Hugill (Chair of the board, Centre for Cities), Hamish McRae (Associate Editor, The Independent), and Emma Harrison CBE (who seemed a little out-of-place to be honest!).

IBM's Ginni Rometty spaeking at IBM Start

The audience on the day included several chief executives of cities, the talks (especially Martin Powell’s Achieving a Sustainable 21st Century City Environment) were incredibly interesting, and the networking was tremendous.

Day two was Smarter Energy for a Sustainable Future. This was by far the best of the three days I attended, which says a lot considering how good the other days were! Again, the speakers (incl Charles Hendry (UK Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change), Martin Lawrence, (MD, EDF) and Rachel Fletcher, Director Distribution, Ofgem) and the audience were stellar but two things made this day stand out for me: 1) there was far more audience participation encouraged than either of the other two days and 2) most of the discussions were about Smart Grids – a topic I have had a deep interest in for some time now.

Day three was all about Smart Transportation. Once more the delegate and speaker lists were stratospheric. Speakers included Philip Hammond (UK Secretary of State for Transport), Ken Livingstone (former Mayor of London who introduced London’s Congestion Charge), Prince Charles (Prince of Wales and one of the initiators of the event), Graham Dalton (Chief Executive of the Highways Agency) and Len Porter (Chief Executive of RSSB) and Keith Ludeman (Group Chief Executive, Go-Ahead Group). Unfortunately, as I was flying home, I missed most of the afternoon sessions of the smarter transport day (and no, the irony is not lost on me!) but the morning discussions were fantastic.

Jim Steer, Director, Greenguage 21 at IBM Start

Two things which appear not to have been covered during the Smarter Transport day were sections dedicated to shipping (though this may be covered in the Smarter Supply Chain day) and walking/bike schemes.

A few critiques – the event is being held under the Chatham House rule which, while it is supposed to foster freer discussion at the event, it stifles reporting of the event subsequently. Also, the connectivity (even 3G) at the event is ery poor – probably a consequence of the building being owned by the UK Foreign Office and finally, there was no beer on offer at the reception – only wine!!!

If those were my only gripes with the event, you know it was good. The most impressive thing for me from the three days was the fact that no speaker (IBM or otherwise) mentioned a single IBM product. This was not a sales oriented event.

I’m back again for days seven and eight and I’m really looking forward to more of the same. Well done Caroline Taylor and the IBM team.

So I gave back the loaner Insight to Honda yesterday. Honestly, I was sorry to see it go.

Here are my impressions of the Insight divided into my likes and dislikes and most are direct comparisons with my current car, a Toyota Prius. Realise I am no motoring expert and these are extremely subjective opinions!

Likes:

• The Insight is quite a bit more responsive than the Prius
• It has a lot better external visibility, especially rearward and the two side mirrors are very generously sized
• The driver’s seat gives very good lumbar support
• The radio sounds a lot better (more bass, less tinny) than the Prius

Dislikes:

• The dashboard in the Insight is very confusing and hard to read information from. Honda could definitely do with some input from usability experts here. The dashboard in the Prius is far easier to find information from as you drive
• There is significantly less rear passenger legroom in the Insight
• Although the emissions figures for the Insight are roughly similar to the Prius (101-105g CO2/km), it is slightly less fuel efficient (I got 5.5l/100km (46.12mpg US) in the Insight compared to 5.1l/100km (42.77mpg US) for the Prius)
• The one button for Eco Mode means it is not possible to control the EV mode as easily as with the Prius – this is important as there are times driving the Prius I want to be in EV mode for fuel economy reasons

Other opinions –

• My wife found the Insight passenger seat too hard for her taste (the lumbar support I liked!)
• My six year old didn’t like that his seat belt was harder to close in the Insight (seats might be narrower and thus booster partially covers seatbelt buckle)
• My three year old liked the flowers on the side of the loaner Insight Honda gave me!!!

The bottom line for the Insight is that it is a nice drive. It is about €3,000 cheaper than the Prius to buy in Andalucia (depending on options you are looking at €18k for the basic Insight vs €21k for the basic Prius). This biggest issue I had with the Insight was the dashboard but if I could save €3,000 on the purchase price without sacrificing on emissions, I’d put up with poor information display.

I went to Jerez today to collect the a Honda Insight which Honda offered to me to try out. They are letting me have it for a week.

Jerez is about 100km away. I drove there in our Prius and drove back in the Insight. A couple of differences struck me straightaway –

• First off, the dashboard of the Prius is far clearer – the Insight’s dashboard is not integrated and makes finding the information you want more complex (not something you want distracting you while you are driving)
• Secondly, the Insight seems more responsive than the Prius – although I wasn’t pushing the Insight, the accelerator was very obviously more sensitive than the Prius’.

In terms of fuel economy, the Prius beat the Insight on the 100km journey with the Prius achieving 5.1l/100km as opposed to the Insight’s 5.5l/100km – it might not sound like much but that makes the Prius 8% more fuel efficient than the Insight in this (admittedly unscientific) test.

I’ll publish more pics and impressions of the insight as the week progresses.

I talked to Rich Lechner, IBM’s VP of Energy and Environment, the other day about the global problem of getting transportation right. According to Rich, in the US alone, congested roadways cost about $78bn per year so this is very much an economic as well as a sustainability-related issue!

We had a wide-ranging conversation about all kinds of solutions, including using demand response to manage traffic flows!

There were two panel discussions on Sustainable Transport at the European Future Energy Forum. The panels were very high powered and included names like Robin Chase, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, and John Leggate.

The discussions were wide ranging touching on topics like how city architecture has evolved and now we design cities for a model of car ownership. This is a basic corollary of Parkinson’s law – the volume of traffic expands to meet the size of the road. In other words, building bigger roads only encourages car ownership.

There was general agreement that electrification of the global car fleet is the way to go with John Leggate mentioning the ancilliary benefits that electric vehicle to grid technologies will bring. Prof Neville Jackson of Ricardo was less optimistic about how quickly we can electrify asserting that battery costs are in the region of £400-£800/kW.hr. However this was contradicted by Hans De Boer of Better Place and Melissa Stark of Accenture who both said £300-£350/kW.hr were more realistic prices for batteries.

Masdar city will be the world’s first carless city using car parks at the periphery of the city and underground electric Personal Rapid Transit throughout the city. While this will make Masdar an enviable city in which to live, it is not a viable solution for existing cities.

ZipCar‘s Robin Chase argued that private car ownership is very inefficient – it is a large sunk cost for a device which is often utilised less than 1 hour per day. Former UK Conservative Party vice-chair Steven Norris concurred citing the fact that a combination of parking (£50 per day) and congestion charges means it is too expensive for him to use his car to go to work! Car sharing, as proposed by Robin Chase (and her company ZipCar in the US) is basically ‘cars as a service’ and, to my mind, going to be one of the more successful transportation models of the future.

There was no disagreement that the cheap price of oil in the past has led to the current unsustainable transportation situation and the ensuing climatic consequences.

Now if we could make the ZipCar model ubiquitous and utilising electric cars, we would solve many problems!

Photo credit midnightglory

I was delighted to see news today that the Canadian province of Ontario is the latest to sign up to roll out Better Place’s car charging infrastructure.

Better Place is a California-based, startup that aims to reduce global dependency on petroleum through the creation of a transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles. Typically the vehicles will be capable of having their batteries swapped out to facilitate rapid ‘refueling’ of the vehicle, analogous to swapping out rechargeable batteries for your kids (or your!) toys.

Better Place will build its first Electric Recharge Grids in Denmark, Israel and Australia where the electricity will be generated by renewable energy. In fact, Denmark and Israel have gone so far as to enact policies, which create a tax differential between zero-emission vehicles and traditional cars, to accelerate the transition to electric cars.

Ontario is the 2nd largest car manufacturing center in North America after Michigan, so seeing it embracing Car 2.0 is really heartening. Ontario is also rolling out a Smart Grid project under Hydro One Networks so this should make the job of rolling out the charging (and billing) infrastructure that much easier.

As part of the announcement, Better Place has announced that it will be sourcing electricity from Bullfrog Power, who will provide all of the renewable energy needed to power the Better Place network.

Shai Agassi, Founder and CEO, Better Place said:

Today’s announcement is the all-important first step in an expected electric car charging network rollout for Canada, and we look forward to working in partnership with the Ontario government on it

From the Better Place release:

Under the Better Place model, the company plans and installs a network of charge spots and battery exchange stations, giving drivers the same convenience to “top off” as they enjoy today with gasoline stations. Much like the mobile phone model, Better Place installs and operates the network of charging infrastructure, while leading auto manufacturers produce electric cars for the Better Place network. Better Place sources renewable energy to power the network, creating a zero emission solution from generation to grid to transportation.

For consumers, it means they’re able to subscribe to a sustainable transportation service. Better Place provides the batteries to make owning an electric car affordable and convenient. Better Place will install charge spots in parking spaces at home, at work, and at retail locations, which enable the network to automatically top off the electric car.

For distances longer than what most people drive in a given day, drivers will pull into battery exchange stations to swap a depleted battery for a fresh one in less time than it takes to fill a car with gasoline.

Better Place and the San Francisco Bay area recently announced plans for a $1 billion network to be developed in and around San Francisco. Hawaii has also signed up to roll out Better Place infrastructure.

With wins like this, Better Place has very quickly established itself as one of the dominant players in the emerging Electric Vehicle sector.

And with so much emphasis on electric cars at this year’s Detroit Auto Show, the future looks really bright for the EV industry.

Microsoft operate a private bus service called the Connector service for employees to get to work at its headquarters in Redmond. Microsoft has 39,000 employees working at its Redmond campus so providing this facility for them is not only Green, it also reduces on congestion and the requirement for parking spaces.

Microsoft announced the other day the expansion of this service to nine new neighbourhoods in the Puget Sound area. It now covers 19 neighbourhoods and to date:

the Connector has provided more than 380,000 rides to 8,650 employees, and has reduced carbon emissions by 5.5 million pounds. With this expansion, estimates suggest the Connector will eliminate annually 6,730,020 employee car miles and 6,387,550 pounds (or 3,194 tons) of carbon emissions.

That’s some impressive numbers!

As well as getting a free ride, the buses are Wi-Fi–enabled and equipped with AC power – now if only they were battery operated or ran on biofuels, then they’d be really Green!

Photo Credit Cayetano

I live in Seville, Spain and this town has a wonderful community bike rental program called Sevici. This is run by the town council and JCDecaux and use of these bicycles is free for the first 30 minutes and in the order of €1 per hour thereafter.

You use an RFID card to access the bicycles and you take bikes from, and return them to stations throughout the city like the one in the photo above. When you return the bike to a station, it is automatically recognised and locked.

Now what if you took this concept and married it with the idea of Car Sharing? And, what if all the cars in the car sharing program were electric (or plug-in hybrids) so that when you returned the car to its station, it plugged itself in and started to charge?

While a model like this wouldn’t work well in a suburban area, if you lived in a city center and had access to something like this, you might never need to buy a car. For cities trying to reduce their levels of pollution, levels of congestion or their carbon footprint, a scheme like this would seem to be a very appropriate step to consider.

A plan like this could also help with electricity grid stabilisation using vehicle to grid technologies.

Would you buy a car if you had an option to (electric) car share?

I love this – a German company comes up with an idea to make ships far more fuel efficient using… sails! Yes, wind-powered ships. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? Oh, hang on…

Seriously, watching the video above, Skysails, the company re-inventing the technology, seems to be onto a really good thing. Fuel burnt by ships accounts for 4% of global CO2 emissions – twice as much as the aviation industry produces.

The kite-like sail is computer controlled, extendible up to 300m above the ship and can save up to 20% on a ships fuel (and therefore its CO2 emissions). Also these ‘kite sails’ are up to five times more efficient than traditional sails.

The company expects to kit out 1,500 ships with these Skysails by 2015. If they are that good, they should licence the manufacturing of these and have them installed in 15,000,000 ships by 2015!

Photo Credit aplumb

I received a press release from HP the other day informing me that HP have

qualified all business PC, printing and server products shipped throughout the United States and Canada for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) SmartWay logo labeling program

Perhaps the SmartWay program is well known within the United States but I hadn’t heard of it before so I went to the SmartWay site to have a look.

From the site’s basic information page:

The SmartWay brand identifies products and services that reduce transportation-related emissions. However, the impact of the brand is much greater as the SmartWay brand signifies a partnership among government, business and consumers to protect our environment, reduce fuel consumption, and improve our air quality for future generations.

The site links to the EPS’a Green Vehicle Guide which allows you to compare the fuel efficiency across hundreds of different car models.

However the real meat is in the Smartway Transport section of the site. This is a

collaboration between EPA and the freight sector designed to improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions, and improve energy security

So responsible haulage companies can join the Smartway program and get help in becoming more efficient and Smartway certified (joining Smartway is free). Smartway certification then means that as well as reducing costs, responsible shipping companies will pick up extra business from companies like HP who are looking to have a greener supply chain.

However, if HP really wanted to show its commitment to Green they could announce their intention to become a carbon neutral company, as Dell has done.

On the other hand, Dell could take a leaf from HP’s book and also receive approval from the EPA to have the SmartWay logo displayed on its product packaging for the compliance of its shipping network. You are only as Green as your supply chain after all!

[Disclosure - Dell are a GreenMonk client company]