It was only a couple of months ago that I dinged Microsoft for not taking Green issues seriously enough in a blog titled Where is Microsoft’s Green Story? Well its been in the hopper for a while, but I wanted to make sure I credited Microsoft with getting its act together before the end of the year. There is some rather splendid news to report.

Rob Bernard has been appointed to the role of Chief Environmental Strategist for Microsoft. This is a new role for the company, and Rob will be responsible for defining and implementing a global strategy for the company’s environmental efforts. Rob will be reporting to Scott Charney.

Microsoft created this new role to assess the company’s environmental impact and opportunities at all levels, including: working with product groups to create technology innovations in software and hardware that can help enable customers to minimize their impact on the environment, assuring responsible business practices that work to reduce the company’s direct and indirect environmental impact, and working with partners in industry, government and non-government to engage on global environmental issues.

Rob has held various positions during his 10 year career at Microsoft; most recently he was general manager for Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team where he managed relationships with over 100 of the world’s largest Independent Software Vendors.

Anyone that doubts commitment should look at who has been appointed. GM of developer evangelism is a huge deal at Microsoft. This is far from a “ticklist” appointment. I will be talking to Rob soon, and will let you know what his plans are.

 

Happy Christmas Microsoft! Thanks for taking this seriously. We appreciate the contributions you’re going to make.

Sometimes you have to pimp something, just because its great to know you’ve been involved. The slogan above, which I helped with, has now been formally adopted by AMEE, an organisation I have written about before here.  So what is the news? Momentum, and an appearance at next year’s ETech.

If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?

The Climate Change agenda has created an imperative to measure the energy profile of everything. As $trillions flow into re-inventing how we consume, we have a unique opportunity to start with open data and open systems. AMEE (http://www.amee.cc) is an open aggregation platform for energy and CO2 data, algorithms and transactions. We aim to dramatically accelerate change, because we need to.

AMEE is a neutral aggregator of reliable carbon data, for use by commercial and noncommercial groups. Active users include: the UK Government, Google, Morgan Stanley and The Royal Society for the Arts.

Developer API keys are available, and we’ll be showing some of the applications.

Nice One Gavin. I hope I am there to see you present.

In other conference news I am pleased to report that GeeKyoto has a great idea for a London green geek unconference thingie.

Since this post is on geeKyoto any theme would be related to the topic of climate change, sustainability and other technical and green issues.

So I would like to ‘announce’ geekGreen2008. Announce in the sense that here is an idea, here are my thoughts on what such a conference could be.

Here is the pitch:

geekGreen2008 – radical ideas and stories in the time of climate change.

Venue: Well to be decided and has lots of dependancies but it is going to be UK based, at least for the first (only?) one. My initial take was for London. Interesting2007 was held at the Conway Hall in Holborn. The main theatre can hold 300 people and it has a nice stage. It also has an interesting history. Where else? Well RIBA has been suggested as has the ICA, and maybe somewhere like the BFI on the South Bank has some interesting spaces. In fact the South Bank would be interesting because Cape Farewell are currently in residence there and Cape Farewell is a project that I would love to see a part of this.

Outside of London though still has possibilities. Of course the ideal location would be the Eden Project in Cornwall, though somewhere like the Centre for Alternative Technology would also be a possibility.

So there you have it. No date or location decided yet but I want to play for sure. What about you? Go sign up at Mark’s blog. Make a contribution.

Picturecredit jessiebarber

Why is it the only people that don’t seem to get the urgency of the situation are our elected (so you don’t count Mr Brown) leaders? Avaaz is a lobbying group, and this is a good one to raise.

Climate negotiations in Bali are in crisis. Things were looking good till now: near-consensus on a delicate deal, including 2020 targets for rich countries, in return for which China and the developing world would do their part over time. IPCC scientists have said such targets are needed to prevent catastrophe. But Japan, the US and Canada are banding together to wreck the deal, and the rest of the world is starting to waver…

We can’t let three stubborn governments throw away the planet’s future. We have until the end of Friday to do everything we can. Please sign our emergency global petition below — we’ll deliver it through stunts at the summit, a full-page ad in the Financial Times in Asia, and directly to country delegates to stiffen their nerve against any bad compromise. Add your name to the campaign below now!

Please just go sign the petition. Remember: small things can make a difference, when you add them up. We need to Step it Up folks.

Tom Raftery is a social media rock star and all-round good egg. This blog provides a really nice in-depth look at the cooling strategies used by the Cork Internet Exchange, a project he has been closely involved in. Normally GreenMonk echews hardcore green data center stuff, but this one caught my eye because it was driven by CIX, rather than by a big vendor agenda. There is plenty of good information and data in there if you’re thinking about cooling strategies. Air-conditioning is one of the major costs in a data center yet its sometimes ignored in favour of trying to make servers cooler. Get the air-con right though and you can cut costs and carbon too.

Its also a great grassroots story because it takes account of the fact its often fecking cold in Ireland. Why spend money on cooling if its cold outside? The basic strategy:

1. Utilise free cooling.
2. Maximise chilled water temperature.
3. Eliminate water mixing.
4. Eliminate air mixing.
5. Utilise low resistance slow speed air paths.
6. Minimise humidification.

More from Dennis here.

Note to Tom – please sort out your diagrams though, mate, the links are 404ing.

i just came across this website, via dominic campbell, and its pretty much a perfect exemplar of the GreenMonk mindset. Its upbeat, its community-oriented, and it clearly demonstrates that even small changes can make a difference.

How does it work?

The idea is to sign up to challenges, as simple as for instance making sure your car tyres are properly pumped up, and then see that others are doing the same thing, then aggregating the relevant data.

For example:

209 people have reduced CO2 emissions by 1.32 tons by completing this challenge so far. That’s equal to turning off the electricity of 1 home for about 1 month!

You can then hook up with others, create teams, or compete to be the most carbon-busting carbon buster. Very cool all around. Except its US only…. 🙁

Just when you think a battle is well and truly over, history has a habit of turning around to tweak your nose. One of the common big ideas of the moment in IT is that computing is becoming a utility. One of the key arguments underpinning this thinking comes from industrial history, calling out electricity as a model for IT provision. High profile exponents of the argument include Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Nicholas Carr, rhetorician, comedian, and sworn enemy of IT snake-oil.

From Jonathan’s Blog:

It took about a decade for those deploying electricity to settle on a few standards that ultimately accelerated consolidation. From voltage to cycle to plug configuration. (The processes used to get there, although they involved far more violence and loss of animal life, bear a remarkable resemblance to standard setting in the computing industry.) Spooling forward, once the standards existed, businesses could plug into a grid – labor markets went through a fairly sizable dislocation (all those engineers and “CEO’s” had to find other work), but electricity was firmly established as a ubiquitous service.

I started reading The Big Switch the other day, Nicholas Carr’s follow up to Does IT Matter? I am a sucker for arguments from history, and Nick is a good exponent of same. Back in 1892 corporations needed a chief electricity officer to ensure supplies of this most vital commodity. But just a few years later nobody did.

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.

The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did.

Whether or not Jonathan and Nick are right, it does seem ironic that just as, according to Nick, we no longer need the anachronistic CIO… the Chief Electricity Officer is seemingly about to make a comeback… A PR and communications company recently initiated a debate on the subject, based on primary research:

Seventy-seven percent of business decision makers believe there is a need to expand the C-Suite to include a Chief Energy Officer to manage, implement and measure a company’s return on investment in environmental technology, the so-called Return on Environment, according to a new global survey (PDF) released by Hill & Knowlton.

Beyond the possibility of such a role, we can see hints it is emerging. News is coming fast from Google, for example, on the energy front. First it announces its going to invest in wind, now comes the news the Google brains are going to be applied to replacing coal. From TechWorld:

Google co-founder Larry Page said:

“We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient datacentres. We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.

Building data centers is obviously not the same as solving the world’s energy needs, but I can’t deny Google’s potential to make an impact in a space that needs more investment and attention. If I ran GE I would be be keeping a very close eye on Google. Its true though- analysts don’t get it.

Its not just Google getting in on the act of electricity generation- BT recently announced plans to invest heavily in wind power. Now I learn from ComputerworldUK that HP is initiating a major solar power program to lessen it reliance on outside sources. “The company has signed a contract with SunPower to install 5,000 solar-power panels in its San Diego facility. The installations will cover 10% of the energy used by the facility and save HP £375,000 in power costs over 15 years.”

The chief energy/electricity officer- is it really so far fetched corporations would create the role when energy supplies aren’t guaranteed. its fine to rely on market solutions, but when the market isn’t perfect (and markets rarely are, especially with geo-politics involved) supply is far from certain. Russia is in a positionto turn Europe’s gas off. We’ve arguably already hit Peak Oil, the point at which we stop finding new economic deposits.

When technology companies start their own electricity generation efforts you know the wind is changing. The lights are going on because we’re getting worried about the lights going out.

 

 

picture credit: NY Times story Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy

Technorati Tags: Sun – GE – Google – energy – greening – PeakOil – HP – solar – wind

Dell is now rolling out a new waste disposal services for SMBs, including free curbside pickup.

I have a feeling the service is only available in the US for now, which is a shame. But well done Dell.

Programmable Web writes up the open source, open data AMEE carbon calculator.

I recently covered freecycle… a service to help people offload useful stuff to each other when they don’t want it anymore. Now comes news that Islington Council is recycling the freecycle approach, with its own SwapXhange, which appears to be going really well.

So far over 17,000 people have visited the Islington Swapxchange website and you have swapped over 16 tonnes of items . This is the equivalent of 354 fridge freezers, 785 televisions, 1040 lawnmowers or 114 pianos!

Well done posh Islingtonites! 😉

photocredit – EVERYDAYLIFEMODERN

In other good local news, a case-study driven report from the Society of IT Management (Socitm) urges local authority IT departments to take action to make their operations more environmentally friendly. See the Computerworld story here.

Another cool Computerworld story is this story on employee-owned retailer John Lewis, a cool interview with Gary Hird, technical infrastructure manager. Two points to note.

One: employee ownership means that “gimmicks” to make people, say, turn off the lights, are more effective. Signs don’t say “turn off the lights, its green”…. they say “Switch off – it’s eating my bonus”.

Two: maybe mainframes aren’t so bad after all. I loved this throwaway line:

An audit of server usage revealed a low 8% utilisation. “Our mainframe has nearly 100% utilisation,” points outs Hird. “Clearly, the Intel servers could do better.”

The solution- implement VMware.

Or just blog more about it? I have to admit I was really surprised by the findings from this research from Umbria, a blog strip-mining service. Given its now commonly accepted the blogosphere is pretty well split between the sexes, I couldn’t work out why “Almost six in 10 mentions were from males, indexing far higher than the generic blogosphere composition.”

Could it be that green is just another fact-based way for us to geek out? Its like green fact porn or something? New green products etc. At Greenmonk I try and get in touch with my “feminine side” – no amount of facts its going to move the debate forward. What matters now is feelings. There – I said it. I am going to have to think some more about what Umbria’s findings though, and hopefully they will be carrying out the survey again.

When I first heard about BadBuster a lightbulb went off (energy-saving of course). Sustainability rating in real time, something like the way FT.com now turns every company name into an AJAX-based live share price widget… but in this case with an ethical dimension.

The idea behind BadBuster is that when you come across a brand or company name on the web the BadBuster widget aggegates data from a number of other systems, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, Calvert Online and ClimateCounts. BadBuster condenses the numbers from those sources into a single score for each company. The tragic thing about BadBuster is that’s its IE only, as Read/Write Web points out in its review. Hopefully that will change in the short term. I might well start using it then, but for now its just something interesting. Better informed web surfers has to be a good thing. It looks like this:

Its Friday afternoon, so a bit of fun is always good. I was taken with this photo story.

The Met Office is taking part in a global programme to monitor the world’s oceans to improve understanding of how they influence climate change.

The Argo programme uses thousands of floating devices like the one pictured, which provide continuous data from even the remotest parts of the world’s oceans.

They look like bouys, as above, and there are a lot of them out there. Its amazing how much coverage you get out of 3000 devices, given the scale of the world’s oceans.

I do hope the machines don’t end up like their namesake’s though- the original Argo collapsed, killing its famous skipper, Jason. The lesson – don’t mess with Hera….

bonus pic for the dorks amongst you.

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