Having just taken delivery today of my Toyota Prius and having just read the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) fabulous report on Vehicle to Grid possibilities, I decided it was time to address a post to this topic.

First off, what is vehicle to grid? Vehicle to Grid (or V2G) is the idea that plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) could be used to help stabilise electrical grids by consuming power when there is an excess of electricity, and selling electricity back to the grid when electricity is scarce.

The supply of electricity is variable. All the moreso as the concentration of renewable sources added to grid increases. When this variability of supply is combined with the constant variability of demand the result is an extremely unstable grid and the occasional resultant power outage. This instability increases with the addition of more renewable sources (wind and solar).

Early on summer mornings (2am to 6am) is the typical trough of demand for electricity. As more and more wind farms are added to the grid, if there is a steady wind blowing at this time, there is a very real possibility that the amount of energy being supplied by wind farms will exceed the demand! With an excess of demand over supply the price for electricity will go extremely low or even negative to stimulate demand. At this time, if there are a large number of PHEVs connected to the grid, they can pull down the excess power and store it. In other words, they start to act like a giant distributed battery bank for the country.

The following day, if there is little wind and the temperature is high (not unusual in summer) the supply of electricity will be low and the demand for power will be high as people turn on their air conditioning units. With low supply and high demand, electricity will now be quite expensive. At this time, it would make economic sense for PHEV owners to sell the electricity stored in their vehicles back to the grid.

Furthermore, as the RMI report put it:

Utilities sell a disproportional amount of their power on hot summer afternoons. At night, business plummets. For the utility, that means their expensive generation and transmission equipment stands idle. “Night-charging” vehicles, therefore, could be a lucrative twist on the business of selling electrons.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently estimated that if half the nation’s light vehicles were ordinary plug-in hybrids they would represent a night-charging market of 230 gigawatts. That’s good news for the U.S. wind industry. In many areas, wind tends to blow harder at night, creating more energy when the vehicles would be charging.

All this requires the implementation of smart grids by utilities. These grids will be able to signal the cost of electricity (reflecting the supply and demand) in real-time and devices (vehicles, air-conditioning units, diesel generators, refrigeration plants) will respond to the price fluctuations accordingly so that when electricity is expensive, the demand will drop and supply will be stimulated to increase.

Smart grid trials are already taking place with Enel in Italy having rolled out a smart grid to 27.2m Italian residences! In the US, Austin Energy has been working on building its smart grid since 2003 while Xcel Energy announced its plans to build the first fully integrated “Smart Grid City” in the nation in Boulder, Colorado.

To get this vision to become a reality, consumers will have to be incentivised to buy PHEVs. This might be done by governments, or by utilities who contract with the vehicle owner to subsidise the price of the car, for the use of the battery when needed!

Governments could help push this forward by mandating that all government owned vehicles be PHEVs (though the police might want a derogation until there are high performance PHEVs!).

Car manufacturers also need to produce PHEVs! Toyota will bring the first plug-in Prius to market in 2009 and Renault Nissan have committed to producing electric vehicles for Israel and Denmark. With oil now at $140 per barrel and not looking likely to drop significantly in the coming years, the number of people looking to buy PHEVs will only trend upwards.

Then there are the environmental benefits of large fleets of cars not emitting CO2 for large portions of their journeys. And the resultant grid stability would enable greater penetration of wind power, producing (typically) more power overnight, just when PHEVs would normally be recharging.

What about you? If you could by a plug-in hybrid which would help stabilise the grid, increase the penetration of renewables, and allow you to sell power back to the grid, would you?

James sent me an email the other day about a new term he had come across - Precycling.

It wasn’t one I had come across before either. According to Wordspy, Precycling is

Purchasing products based on how recyclable they are

With the earliest citation coming from 1989.

The Wikipedia entry on Precycling is more comprehensive:

Precycling is the practice of reducing waste by attempting to avoid bringing into the home or business items which will generate waste. It includes such practices as buying consumables in bulk to reduce packaging, buying consumables in recyclable packaging over non-recyclable packages, avoiding junk mail, and using electronic media for reading materials, especially throwaway items such as magazines or newspapers.

I guess this is a another form of ethical consumerism.

We in GreenMonk have written previously about carbon accounting software and the huge opportunities which are about to open up in this space.

Carbon footprint reporting is increasingly becoming part of the purchasing process with purchasers seeking carbon footprint data from their vendors. It will in time be mandatory and when that happens, every company will have a requirement for this kind of software. Companies establishing a name for themselves at this early stage will be well placed when that requirement comes to pass.

No surprise then to see the announcement on Cnet today that software company Carbonetworks received $5 in series A funding for its online carbon calculator from clean-tech venture firm NGEN Partners.

Climate Earth is another player in this space, to my knowledge hasn’t announced any funding yet and their website could stand some work but their Team is impressive.

These companies should be working with AMEE so that everyone can benefit from the data.

Watch this space, more companies and more offerings are likely to spring up and don’t be surprised if some of these early players become attractive acquisition targets for more established software houses.

photo credit: _e.t

We recently lauded the NY Times’ Thomas Friedman for arguing that oil is like an addiction and needs a minimum price floor to ensure current investments in greentech are sustainable. But there is a problem with Friedman (or perhaps with us)- his rhetoric is so effective that often you’re blinded to inconsistencies in his positions.

My issue, basically is that Mr Friedman can’t maintain his position that globalisation is an end-game, underpinned by cheap transport, in the face of current oil price realities. I have been known to say that the problem with The World is Flat is the same as the problem with The End Of History. Both works were in some sense absolutely correct, but were out of-date as soon as they were written. Spiking oil prices are putting paid to the World is Flat (when gas is expensive transportation and logistics get surprisingly bumpy) just as 9/11 pumped up, then smashed the End of History’s Neoconsensus.

In a sense these works are the opposite of Science Fiction; they are history books. Rather than find aspects of the future in the present, and extrapolate them with imagination to create a vision of the future (its just not evenly distributed), Friedman and Fukayama are masters of describing a point in time, and how we got there. Indeed with titles like The World is Flat and The End is History we would be surprised if either writer were really inspired to work out what happens next. For that we need visionaries like Al Gore.

I’d love to hear more from Friedman about the implications of his newly found love of higher oil prices.

The IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), a non-profit organization, is the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology. The IEEE released a position paper on Energy Efficiency recently.

In the paper they make the case for the importance of energy efficiency policies and urge legislators to promote aggressive policies and legislation to nurture development of energy efficient products and services.

Through improved energy efficiency, the United States can grow the economy, improve balance of payments, strengthen national security, and mitigate the environmental impacts of energy use by reducing emission of both air pollutants that reduce air quality and impact public health, and greenhouse gases that affect climate change. Increased energy efficiency will help to decrease our vulnerability to oil supply disruptions.

Specifically make eight recommendations for the US federal government to implement:

1. Promoting user awareness of economical energy efficiency opportunities
2. Promulgating minimum efficiency standards for products consistent with life cycle
   analysis and internalization of environmental costs
3. Providing incentives for capital investment in energy efficient technologies and processes
   in all sectors, such as residential, commercial, industrial and transportation
4. Developing technologies to further reduce energy losses in electric power generation,
   transmission and distribution
5. Developing, commercializing and using more efficient electric-drive technologies in
   public transit, freight, truck and personal transportation, such as plug-in hybrid electric
   vehicles
6. Improving and upgrading transportation systems to reduce energy consumption, and
   adopting “smart growth” policies that reduce distances traveled
7. Using communications and information technologies, such as teleconferencing and the
   Internet, to reduce the need for business travel, such as in telecommuting
8. Using demand management programs to reduce peak demand, in lieu of building new
   generation.

Again we see reference to Demand Management and smart grid technologies. I had an analyst briefing with Cisco this morning and they too were referring to smart grids as were SAP yesterday.

When you see large commercial entities like SAP and Cisco and august non-profits like the IEEE and The Climate Group all singing off the same hymn sheet, about similar technologies to solve our energy problems you can be pretty confident that Demand Response and smart grid technologies are going to play a significant role in solving the energy crunch.

James has, in previous posts referred to the fact that IT is responsible for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions but that it can have a disproportionate influence on the other 98%. This is something we believe fundamentally in GreenMonk so it is great to see others vindicating our position.

The Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) recently published a report, independently audited by McKinsey and Company called Smart 2020. The report is a fascinating read and comes to the conclusion that ICT could:

deliver approximately 7.8 GtCO2e of emissions savings in 2020. This represents 15% of emissions in 2020 based on a BAU [Business As Usual] estimation. It represents a significant proportion of the reductions below 1990 levels that scientists and economists recommend by 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. In economic terms, the ICT-enabled energy efficiency translates into approximately €600 billion ($946.5 billion) of cost savings. It is an opportunity that cannot be overlooked.

Apart from emissions associated with deforestation, the largest contributors to climate change are transportation and power generation, so how could IT help these functions?

According to the report the use of

1. Smart motor systems - optimised motors and industrial automation would reduce 0.97 GtCO2e [0.97 giga tons CO2 emissions] in 2020, worth €68 billion ($107.2 billion)
2. Smart logistics - global savings from smart logistics in 2020 would reach 1.52 GtCO2e, with energy savings worth €280 billion ($441.7 billion)
3. Smart buildings - smart buildings technologies would enable 1.68 GtCO2e of emissions savings, worth €216 billion ($340.8 billion) and
4. Smart grids - smart grid technologies were the largest opportunity found in the study and could globally reduce 2.03 GtCO2e , worth €79 billion ($124.6 billion)

Even though we have been heavily promoting the use of smart grids and demand response on this blog I was impressed that they could reduce CO2 emissions by 2 giga tons by 2020. This is one of the reasons why I was super-excited today when SAP’s Mike Prosceno invited me to attend their SAP for Utilities conference which is going to be in San Antonio Texas in October. This is a conference about the future of utilities and there will be a big focus on smart grids, smart meters and AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure).

How will IT help reduce emissions? It comes back to that old chestnut - if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Or as Steve Howard, CEO, The Climate Group said in his opening address in the report:

When we started the analysis, we expected to find that ICT could make our lives ‘greener’ by making them more virtual – online shopping, teleworking and remote communication all altering our behaviour. Although this is one important aspect of the ICT solution, the first and most significant role for ICT is enabling efficiency.

Consumers and businesses can’t manage what they can’t measure. ICT provides the solutions that enable us to ‘see’ our energy and emissions in real time and could provide the means for optimising systems and processes to make them more efficient. Efficiency may not sound as inspirational as a space race but, in the short term, achieving efficiency savings equal to 15% of global emissions is a radical proposition.

Via Doug Neal (aka gblnetwkr)

I have been asking a question of various manufacturers recently and not getting a satisfactory answer.

The question I was asking was why don’t we make heat tolerant servers. My thinking being that if we had servers capable of working in temperatures of 40C then data centers wouldn’t expend as much energy trying to cool the server rooms.

This is not as silly a notion as might first appear. I understand that semiconductors performance dips rapidly as temperature increases, however, if you had hyper-localised liquid cooling which ensured that the chip’s temperature stayed at 20C, say, then the rest of the server could safely be at a higher temp, no?

When I asked Intel, their spokesperson, Nick Knupffer responded by saying

Your point is true – but exotic cooling solutions are also very expensive + you would still need AC anyway. We are putting a lot of work into reducing the power used by the chips in the 1st place, that equals less heat. For example, our quad-core Xeon chips go as low as 50W of TDP. That combined with better performance is the best way of driving costs down. Lower power + better performance = less heat and fewer servers required.

He then went on to explain about Intel’s new hafnium infused high-k metal gate transistors:

It is the new material used to make our 45nm transistors - gate leakage is reduced 100 fold while delivering record transistor performance. It is part of the reason why we can deliver such energy-sipping high performance CPU’s.

At the end of the day – the only way of reducing the power bill is by making more energy efficient CPU’s. Even with exotic cooling – you still need to get rid of the heat somehow, and that is a cost.

He is half right! Sure, getting the chip’s power consumption down is important and will reduce the server’s heat output but as a director of a data center I can tell you that what will happen in this case is more servers will be squeezed into the same data center space thus doing away with any potential reduction in data center power requirements. Parkinson’s law meets data centers!

No, if you want to take a big picture approach, you reduce power consumption by the chips and you then cool these chips directly with a hyper-localised solution so the server room doesn’t need to be cooled. This way the cooling is only going where it is required.

IBM’s Steven Sams IBM’s Vice President, Global Site and Facilities Services sent me a more positive answer:

We’ve actually deployed this in production systems in 3 different product announcements this year

New z series mainframes actually have a closed coolant loop inside the system that takes coolant to the chips to let us crank up the performance without causing chip to slide off as the solder melts. New high performance unix servers system P….. actually put out 75,000 watts of heat per rack….. but again the systems are water cooled with redundant coolant distribution units at the bottom of the rack. The technology is pretty sophisticated and I’ve heard that each of these coolant distribution units has 5 X the capacity to dissipate heat of our last water cooled mainframe in the 1980’s. The cooling distribution unit for that system was about 2 meters wide by 2 meters high by about 1 meter deep. The new units are about 10 inches by 30 inches.

The new webhosting servers iDataplex use Intel and AMD microprocessors and jam a lot of technology into rack that is about double the width but half the depth. To ensure that this technology does not use all of the AC in a data center the systems are installed with water cooled rear door heat exchangers… ie a car radiator at the back of the rack. These devices actually take out 110% of the heat generated by the technology so the outlet temp is actually cooler then the air that comes in the front. A recent study by the a west coast technology leadership consortium at a facility provided by Sun Microsystems actually showed that this rear door heat exchanger technology is the most energy efficient of all the alternative they evaluated with the help of the Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory.

Now that is the kind of answer I was hoping for! If this kind of technology became widespread for servers, the vast majority of the energy data centers burn on air conditioning would no longer be needed.

However, according to the video below, which I found on YouTube, IBM are going way further than I had thought about. They announced their Hydro-Cluster Power 575 series super computers in April. They plan to allow data centers to capture the heat from the servers and export it as hot water for swimming pools, cooking, hot showers, etc.

This is how all servers should be plumbed.

Tremendous - data centers as energy exporters, not energy sinks. I love it.

Nortel announced the release their Energy Efficiency Calculator online last week.

The tool is available for anyone to use after a quick registration (name, email and country) and uses best guestimates to give figures for energy spend.

The data are highly customisable, you can vary country, energy costs, company setup (network, no. of employees, etc.). It outputs costs to run the network infrastructure, kWh consumed, MBTUs generated and CO2 emissions.

This is an extension of the “Cisco Energy Tax” campaign which Nortel have been running very successfully now for some time.

It would be nice to see easy totals calculated for the outputs (possibly they are there but I didn’t see them) and it would be far nicer if it were not coded in Flash!

Having said that, this is a neat tool and reinforces the connection for companies between saving costs and lowering CO2 emissions.

Now Cisco, where is your rebuttal?

See the video below for more:

[Disclosure: Nortel are a GreenMonk client]

The Guardian revealed today that it has obtained a World Bank report claiming that biofuels are responsible for 75% of the recent surge in food prices - far more than was previously thought.

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.

The report was being withheld, it seems to avoid embarrassing President Bush because it directly contradicts his claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises.

The report author, Don Mitchell, is an internationally-respected senior economist at the World Bank and has done a detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices. This approach allows for a much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food supply than was possible in previous reports.

Dr Mitchell’s report

argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

However, the news on biofuels isn’t all bad. There are some biofuels which don’t cause massive food price increases, and while I’m not a huge fan of biofuels (burning them produces CO2 still, don’t forget), they are a renewable resource.

They have, in the case of algae for example, the potential to be used in large-scale carbon sequestration projects. Large vats of algae could have the exhaust from power plants bubbled through them. The algae would feed on the CO2 and along with light convert the carbon into biofuel - recycling the carbon if you will.

Long term we need to get off the carbon economy but algal biofuels (which are not produced on viable farmland) look like a reasonable short-term way of reducing our CO2 emissions.

Congressman Roscoe Bartlett [R] in the video above addresses the US congress on the liklihood that we have hit peak oil.

Congressman Bartlett has been banging this drum since 2005 but he received an unlikely ally in the International Energy Agency yesterday! The IEA is not known for being alarmist and is typically extremely conservative in these matters however yesterday’s Medium-Term Oil Market Report from the IEA contained some interesting nuggets which suggest that they are coming around to the “Peak Oil is here now”, way of thinking.

Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency speaking at a press conference at the World Petroleum Congress, emphasized that market fundamentals were the main underlying factor behind high oil prices. “OPEC production is at record highs and non-OPEC producers are working at full throttle, but stocks show no unusual build. These factors demonstrate that it is mainly fundamentals pushing up the price,” he added.

In other words, no build up of stocks means it is a simple case of supply and demand, not speculators, which is causing the current price increase.

This is not good news.

The report goes on:

Over 3.5 mb/d of new production will be needed each year just to hold global production steady. “Our findings highlight again the need for sustained, and indeed, increased investment both upstream and downstream — to assure that the market is adequately supplied,” stated Mr. Tanaka.

But figures for new production have been falling year-on-year, never mind increasing 3.5mb/d.

Ok, so if we say peak oil has arrived and we are never again going to see a barrel of oil go below $120 per barrel (in fact it will trend ever upwards over time), just what are you going to do now that you have that information?

Will you start an efficiency drive in your company? Remember your financial accounting - saved overhead goes straight to the bottom line!

Will you buy a hybrid car? Will you install solar/wind generation capacity at your place of work/home? Will you go vegetarian?

We are headed into challenging times but for people and companies who make the right choices, there is, as ever, money to be made!