One of my favourite environmentally minded blogs is From The Grumpy Old Man. There is some great stuff in there, but Eddy is worried his readership is not picking up quickly enough. All I can say is, keep it up Eddy. The community will come.

Sample:

“I’ve seen somebody drinking O2 water the other day. Not only it had artificial kiwi and apple flavour but also extra oxygen added. According the ‘manufacturer’, it uses patented technology from Life Technologies, Inc. to put extra oxygen into ordinary water. The resulting beverage has 10 times more oxygen (72mg) as ordinary water and provides an extra boost of energy by increasing the amount of oxygen in your blood. What a load of crap!”

Grumpy by name…

The keynote began this morning with the James Gosling and John Gage show and the usual cod(e) humour. They used the opportunity to show off the new JavaFX technology. The application was very cool. The entire Moscone Center is wired up with censors to monitor carbon dioxide and energy consumption, with the results of the monitoring visualised on screen. Although Sun provided very little information the company has long talked about an Internet of Things. That is an internet where all devices are connected to the network. From an energy demand management perspective monitoring in incredibly important. Hopefully Sun will start bringing environmental measurement technology to market.The more we monitor the more we can manage…

As Sun pointed out, in a room this size if the carbon dioxide saturation was three times higher it couldn’t support life. Sobering thought.

Another great spot from our pals at GreenBang.

Earlier this week at our EnergyCamp unconference we were talking about chargers for laptops and mobile phones. You know they keep consuming electricity when they are not plugged into the device, right? If not please unplug them when not in use. Its a small thing that will cut your electricity bill.

David Berlind said: “wouldn’t it be great if you could get a charger that switched itself off when your laptop was fully charged?” Great idea David! Well it seems Nokia at least is way ahead of us.

Well done Nokia for innovating in this area. Now a request – please stop screwing us with proprietary power inputs. Its not even remotely funny that my N95 has a USB port for data and a separate pin for power. In order to cut waste in raw materials (namely metals) the Chinese government has mandated standard USB ports for data and power. You want to do business in China, right? Well please fix your manufacturing processes, and cut your addiction to revenues from proprietary power interfaces. USB power for the win.

From an innovation standpoint you’re hurting yourself with the addiction to these high margin cables. Compare with the iPhone. Power is not the only lifeblood – so is data. When you plug an iPhone into a Mac or PC it synchronises data, and charges the phone. If Nokia wants to encourage a similar synchronicity it should go with the standard. Energy and Data are both lifebloods.

Give it two years and iPhones will be 50 quid. What then? Start the fightback- make synchronisation more natural. And you’ll have an advantage if you make the plug a self turn off model.

Our inaugural EnergyCamp on Monday in Las Vegas worked out really well. By the end of the day we had a built a vibrant little community, buzzing with ideas and thinking about how to implement them. This was a tribute to the calibre of the people that took the time to participate. We had vendors, business people, and IT folks and they all brought something to the party. We kicked off the day with a chat between me and Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s new chief sustainability strategist. Rob is whip smart and will make a real impact at Microsoft. The fact the company gave the job to someone that had been working as general manager of a business unit indicates how seriously it takes the new role. What I most admire about the approach he plans to take is that it goes far beyond “the green data center” and really asks broader questions about how we live now, and how we’ll live tomorrow. Transport, Housing and heating, Energy Management – those are the areas where software can make a differerence. Rob gave the example of a new Korean water turbine energy project, which would have been inconceivable without powerful HPC modelling of tidal currents. Then the community took over. And I have to say Jason Hiner writes it up better than I ever could…

“The event started with a more traditional presentation to kick things off, but then attendees were invited to take markers and paper and write down their idea for a discussion topic. Each person who had written something went up to the front of the room, took the mic, and explained their idea to the audience. Then the attendee taped the idea into a slot on the grid. After all the ideas were up on the board, the attendees gathered around and consulted about which ideas were similar enough to group together, with the permission of the people who originally submitted the idea. Some of the topics that made the cut included:

• Alternatives to business travel
• Building a hyper-energy efficient data center (case study)
• Best layouts for data centers while staying green
• Operationlizing green practices
• It’s the people, stupid
• HVAC distribition in the data center
• Best practices for recycling and refurbishing electronics

Our wiki from the unconference is here. David Berlind and Angela Bole did an oustanding job of logistics for the event. Tom Raftery was a superstar. Thanks guys! I have a bunch more follow up posts to write. Here is David and his energy:

This might seem a little circular but i would just like to thank Dan from Greenbang for his kind words about our unconference on Monday.

It seems to Greenbang that holding an energy-saving conference in Las Vegas is quite a funny thing to do. But if you are going to hold a global conference, why not do it in front of some show girls. You just get much more out of your meetings than you would with video conferencing. Energy Camp is a meet-up dedicated to the reduction of information technology’s global carbon footprint.

Actually though Energy Camp is about reducing energy footprints across all of our activities, not just those that are IT-related. Keynote speaker Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s new sustainability czar takes a widescreen view- which is one reason I am so excited about the show. For him IT is only 3% of the problem…

Thanks to LaserGuided for the awesome picture of Vegas at night, under creativecommons Attribution 2.0 license.

 

This is kind of pathetic. One luxury car company sues another. Who cares? This news has nothing to do with sustainability. My partners at Re*Move might disagree – they have been big Tesla fans. But from a Greenmonk perspective arguments about IP like this are so last 20th century. Compete on the basis of implementation people. Lower barriers to participation. And besides if you want a muscle car maybe you should buy an Alfa or buy a Pontiac and forget about the planet for a bit. If you want sustainability just drive slower.

Are you familiar with No Impact Man? Its a cool experiment.

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

But to cause no net impact is impossible to do merely by restricting consumption and waste output. Just participating in society makes us responsible for the negative environmental impacts of society’s functioning, even if our personal lifestyle does no harm. To offset our societal ecological debt, we also plan to take actions that will have positive environmental impact. For example, we’ll volunteer with the Nature Conservancy to clean up garbage off the beach. To help sop up our share of the year’s CO₂, we will take part in a reforestation project to help plant trees.

Then there is The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.

The problem with being off consumption is that you can no longer buy a ‘treat’ for yourself in order to snap out of a bad mood. Being off consumption means no comfort food, no self-gifting, no temporary postponement of pain by the rush of adrenalin triggered off by that perfect purchase.

But I knew that when I went off consumption. I knew that, to resist the temptation to buy, I’ll basically need to be happy all the time. I also knew that I’ll face my first big test as soon as I hit a bad day

I have written before about the Intel-powered central heating. But how about a POWER-heated pool? From Techworld comes a cool story Datacentre used to heat swimming pool. IBM did the design work in conjunction with a company called GIB-Services. Who says you can’t have luxury and sustainability?

The pool is being closed temporarily for repairs this summer, at which time the heat transfer system will be put in place, says GIB-Services CEO Hans-Rudolf Scharer.

“It isn’t so complicated,” Scharer says, explaining that water is used to transfer the heat. “We pump hot water to the swimming pool.”

Excess heat generated by datacentre computers is collected in a storage area, where it heats up water that is piped to a heat exchanger at the pool facility. There, the heated water raises the temperature of the pool water. The process repeats itself as often as necessary with the heat exchanger, true to its name, exchanging heat from one part of the water to another.

Finally – another Techworld story. This time based on a survey from Bell Micro. I am not so into the UK companies aren’t ready to green yet angle (tell me something I don’t know), but one finding quoted in the story really jumped out at me because of its grassroots up implications.

While 84 percent of businesses took green issues seriously, half said employees rather than chief executives were driving the change. 

If employees are driving the agenda, its far less likely to be simple green-washing or tick list filling. Go concerned employee people!

 

I have written about hotel air-conditioning before on this blog, and I have to raise the issue again. I am just leaving Las Vegas and one thing that drove me completely nuts was the over zealous maids at the MGM Signature that kept turning on the air-conditioning when I was out of the room. As a rule I don’t use aircon in hotels, favoring ambient temperatures where possible, even though it means I have to sleep on top of those Scandinavian style duvets they have in hotel rooms otherwise I’d die of overheat.  Why do mains turn on the air con when you’re out. It is insane!

Hotels- its time to do your bit with some kind of automation to more effectively manage this sink. Hey – you could even crow about it and get some greenwash points. Peace out. Now I am off to fly thousands of miles and emit a ton of carbon dioxide….

A while ago it dawned on me what a ridiculous waste of resources the obligatory conference bag is. Plastic carrier bags are not the only bag-related problem we face. Every time you go to a conference you get a bag you really don’t need or want. They’re often poor quality and fall apart quite quickly. So what would be a better approach showing some social responsibility. My friend Ed then came up with a great idea: One Laptop Bag Per Child. Nigel James had crystallised things for a lot of us. SAP to its great credit understood what we were talking and did something about it.

It seems like the shoe has finally dropped, that a lot of schwag is actually drek. I got news from Duke a couple of days ago: This year’s JavaOne backpack is made out of materials that can be recycled.”

Well now comes of more bag sanity from Web 2.0 expo. Cote’ just fired over a link from news.com.

Now that is a lot of gapingvoid designed bags from SXSWi. So apparently Web 2.0 Expo is trying to lessen the environmental impact of the throwaway Events industry.

“It’s a bit hard on the old conscience being employed in an industry (that) creates as much waste as the events industry,” wrote Web 2.0 Expo general manager and co-chair Jennifer Pahlka. “Much is made of the carbon footprint of an event, but I’m well aware of an even more daunting measure, the ecological footprint, which looks at the sum total of resources used. Take a look at all that goes into producing an event the size of Web 2.0 Expo (including what our sponsors, exhibitors, and speakers bring) and you can either get depressed or try to tackle the problem. We’re doing both… We have a long way to go, but I thought I’d share some of the changes we’ve implemented this year.”

Among the changes Pahlka mentioned: Using 100 percent recycled materials for the program guide, attendee direct mail, attendee bag, and event signage; reducing the program guide by a third; recycling badges; providing water coolers and encouraging attendees to bring their own bottles; and more.

Of course, even Pahlka acknowledged that the efforts are only a start. And I do wonder how many attendees will bring their own bottles or recycle their program guides–another initiative.

“One thing I’ve become painfully aware of is that recycling is a good step, but not generating the waste in the first place is orders of magnitude more beneficial to the earth,” Pahlka wrote. “That’s why ‘reduce’ should always be the real goal. We’re working with sponsors on further steps for reducing, and with our vendors on all three Rs. In some areas, we’re aware we’re taking risks. For instance, we’ve tried to limit the print run of the program guide this year, so there’s a chance we’ll run out if people don’t follow our lead and leave their used guides for others to reuse. We hope you will all be tolerant of any errors we make in support of this effort.”

Well done Event Organiser people!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am extremely pleased to announce that Tom Raftery, social craftsman and energy maven, has agreed to become a Greenmonk associate. He will now be a regular contributor to the Greenmonk blog, and we will also work together to build out a related consulting-oriented business. Its very early days for Greenmonk itself, let alone the Raftery relationship, but I am hopeful that I can help Tom establish the regular monthly income that will enable him to live in Seville in style. We plan to work together for a lower footprint.

Seriously though: Tom’s skill-set is right on the money. Greenmonk was always supposed to be about grassroots, open and social software approaches and methods, and Tom is an expert. I would be surprised if we don’t get some greenmonk podcasting going at some point. And Tom has real experience of building a hyper energy efficient data center. what’s not to like?

photo of the Alcazar Palace in Seville courtesy of John Picken under CreativeCommons Atrribution 2.0 license.