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Smart Grid FUD: Its time to cut the crap

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HI!.jpg
Greenmonk spends most of its time researching smart grid approaches and deployments.? I hired Tom Raftery largely because of his visionary take on the future of energy networks – Electricity 2.0. So you can imagine how happy I am that smart grid stimulus funds are being aggressively spent… on antivirus and encryption software. Yay – that’s just the market we want to track.

The “security industry” just loves to sell FUD. Its what they do. But the almost ghoulish lip-smacking around smart grids as the next great revenue opportunity is really off-putting. Is security important in a distributed energy network? Of course- but really its a small part of the puzzle, not the prize itself. With all this in mind I really enjoyed a post from EMC’s RSA stable this week. A guy called Sam Curry explains that customers are getting wise to the FUD, or are at least bored of it.

Sam: so?how’s your SmartMeter deployment going?
Security Director (SD): great! we’re rolling out about 1,000 a month
Sam: so, which ones are you using?
SD: COMPANY X
Sam: great, great, I heard they’re implementing encryption into their products
SD: yeah, I heard about that; but it’s not in the meters yet
Sam: ah — so what are you using for encryption?
SD: nothing
Sam: <gasp>
SD: uh, oh — here comes the FUD

And then it hit me?most of the time security people come in and try to scare customers and partners. What’s the point in that? Well?it’s a confidence scam. You scare people with FUD and then you comfort them with your brand

Sam seems like a good guy, a smart guy, and he understands that the real goal, the carrot as he calls it, is the hope of “better, greener power generation”. The real train wreck though will be our economies if we can’t fix some pressing energy concerns. The RSA post is excellent, and of course utilities need to rethink their entire risk profile and processes, just as IT does in the age of the internet. I am going to ping Sam and talk to RSA’s real smart grid offerings, so expect an update in the near future.

I want to start getting under the skin of smart grid deployments, and make sure we’re not substituting real smart grid innovation with unrelated product and service purchasing. After all- those stimulus funds… that’s our money. So we should be scrutinising the spend. There has to be more to smartgrids than AV.

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Tech company sustainability reports reviewed – Updated

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Corporate Social Responsibility
Original photo by ATIS547

I was asked on Twitter recently where to find a list of links to tech companies’ CSR reports.

I didn’t know where to find one, so I built one and as well as just the links, I also added in a few extra observations I noted about the reports.

[table id=4 /]

As previously reported here, the 2009 SAP Sustainability Report is superb.

Another company in the list worthy of note is BT, whose report, despite the lack of interactivity, is the only other report to hit the GRI A+ rating.

HP’s site has gone heavy on design to the detriment of usability which is unfortunate because some of the content is really good.

After that, almost all of the companies who have a 2009 report published have done a really good job. The exception to this is Microsoft whose 2009 report, while an improvement on previous reports, still has a long way to go to approach a professional CSR Report standard.

Of the companies who have yet to publish their 2009 report, Oracle and Adobe’s 2008 reports are lacklustre attempts, at best. Neither report to GRI standards and both are long on pretty pictures and short on relevant data.

Having said that, at least Oracle and Adobe are producing Sustainability reports.

The three laggards in this list are Google, Amazon and Apple – none of whom are producing sustainability reports at the minute.

In their defence, Google has its Going Green at Google website and Apple has its Apple and the Environment site, both of whom go into considerable detail on each companies initiatives. In Apple’s case, it does go deep into a lot of the data you would normally see in a Sustainability report. Why it refuses to produce a formal report is beyond me.

In contrast, Amazon’s attempt at an Environmental site/page is an embarrassment. If this is the best they can do, honestly, they’d be better off doing nothing.

One issue I noted was that HP, Cisco and Apple [PDF] all report on sourcing 100% renewable power in Ireland. This is not possible for the reasons I outlined in this post.

What other companies should I add to this list? Please feel free to suggest any in the comments and I will update the list.

UPDATES:
Since publishing this, Nokia have brought out their excellent 2009 report and it is now included above.
Also, based on suggestions received on FaceBook I have added details about 3 other companies (NEC, Fujitsu and Indra Sistemas). It was also suggested there that I go over various telco companies CSR reports. I’ll leave that to a separate post.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Sustainable SAP

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SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott at SapphireNow 2010

I attended SAP’s Sapphire Now conference in Orlando earlier this week along with around 12,000 others.

It was a very interesting few days of talks, meetings, and showcases.

SAP’s commitment to Sustainability was evident throughout the event. The two keynote speakers invited by SAP were Al Gore and Richard Branson, for example – both of whom talked about the importance of sustainability to help mitigate climate change.

For me though, the most impressive statement that SAP considers Sustainability a strategic imperative, not just a sop to marketing, was the fact that both co-Ceo’s addressed Sustainability at length in their keynote addresses.

In my interview with Diversey’s CEO Curt Johnson a few weeks back he made the point that

CO2 is waste, so if you minimise CO2, you minimise waste and you maximise efficiency and increase profits

In his keynote on Tuesday morning, SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe made the same point when he said that saving carbon emissions meant saving money. He concluded his keynote discussing SAP’s carbon reduction targets and how SAP’s sustainability solutions will help SAP’s customers reduce their emissions.

This ties in very strongly with the SAP Sustainability strategy which SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf set forth during his presentation. SAP are committing to being an Exemplar and Enabler. By that they mean SAP will be an exemplar organisation in terms of its own sustainability initiatives and through its software solutions, it will enable its client companies to do the same.

Peter told me some time back that though SAP’s CO2 emissions were around 500,000 tonnes, their customers’ emissions were 10,000 times that! That’s a lot of emissions to be able to influence.

To that end, SAP’s on-demand Carbon Impact application seems to be coming along nicely now. I saw a pre-release of the upcoming version and it is starting to go beyond carbon impacts in terms of emission management, so I wonder how long before we have a re-brand! And SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management tool is a big help for companies wishing to track and communicate sustainability performance

SAP co-CEO's (and bottled water!)

SAP co-CEO's (and bottled water!)

I have written about how good their 2009 Sustainability Report was and how customers have been asking SAP to productise it. I asked Peter Graf during his presentation when he planned to deliver a Sustainability Report Generator to enable customers to also produce awesome sustainability reports but there are no imminent plans to release it it seems, which is a pity.

Despite the fact that both co-CEO’s had bottled water beside them during their keynotes at Sapphire Now (see pic), SAP have been quite consistently pushing the sustainability message for a while now. It is great to see. Hopefully some of SAP’s competitors will take note and the term Sustainability will go away because it will be synonymous with business as usual.

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SAP’s latest Sustainability Report is teh awesome!

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SAP's 2009 Sustainability Report using OAuth!

SAP released its 2009 Sustainability Report during the week and if last years Sustainability Report was good, this one is outta the park!

SAP released their first Sustainability Report in November 08 reporting on the 2007 year. It was a good initial effort (prepared in accordance with the GRI guidelines and achieving a ?C? level certification) delivered in your typical PDF format. The main innovation the first year was that there was a separate site for readers to leave feedback.

Then in May 2009 SAP released their 2008 Sustainability Report. This report achieved a B+ GRI rating and was far more interactive than the previous report (or any Sustainability Report I had previously seen). It allowed readers to interact with the data and showcased the interactive Sustainability Map which categorised core business processes related to sustainability and mapped them into distinct categories. Again SAP solicited feedback from users.

Now the 2009 Sustainability Report takes this to the next level. It:

  • achieved an A+ GRI rating by reporting on more sustainability GRI indicators and by adding new metrics, including Renewable Energy, Business Health and Culture Index, and Employee Satisfaction
  • includes the new edition of the Sustainability Map
  • establishes short- and long-term goals for many of SAPs metrics beyond carbon footprint
  • contains more embedded interactive dashboards leveraging data sourced from SAP Carbon Impact and SAP Business Objects Sustainability Performance Management
  • enables readers to comment on SAPs performance and solutions in the context of the report (no longer on a separate site) and
  • SAP will now produce quarterly updates on their carbon performance

There’s also the Materiality Matrix and the Create Your Own sections where you can try out different scenarios to see how they would affect SAP’s goals.

What do I love about this report?

  • I love how the two co-CEO’s went beyond simply putting their name to a letter at the start of the report (that’s so 2009!). They took the time out to record videos to introduce the Sustainability Report and talking about SAP’s commitment to sustainability.
  • I love the ability to leave comments on every page. The comment system allows you to login using your Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, FaceBook, Google, or AOL credentials and uses OAuth for account verification. The geek in me just loves that (hence the screenshot above).
  • I love how the performance summary presents the data in stunningly simple to digest format. Clicking on the data here drills down into more detail on those numbers. The detail section is often highly interactive. For example in the carbon footprint section of the report you can see the carbon footprint by quantity, or by employee, by region or overall, by emission scope and clicking on a year gives a breakdown for that year specifically. Also, clicking on the printer icon allows you to print, while clicking on the Excel icon lets you download the data! and
  • I love how this report makes SAP’s sustainability data and their targets so transparent

Scott Bolick, SAP’s VP Sustainability Solutions, informed me that readership of SAP’s Sustainability report went from 3,500 for the 2007 PDF report to approx 30,000 readers for the online 2008 report. On top of that, many of SAP’s customers after looking at it, asked if they could purchase the technology to produce a similar report themselves! That’s a ringing endorsement right there.

It will be interesting to see what the readership of this report will be – you gotta suspect it will blow way past the 30,000 that last year’s report had.

[Disclosure – SAP are GreenMonk clients]

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It is surprisingly easy to leave yourself open to claims of Greenwashing!

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Spinning wind power

Photo credit Doxi

Companies need to take a lot of care when making Green claims. The whole Green energy space is massively complex and it is surprisingly easy to leave yourself open to claims of Greenwashing.

What do I mean?

Well, take the Irish energy sector, for example. Anyone who generates electricity in Ireland, which is to be distributed on the grid, is required to sell that power into the wholesale pool – the Single Energy Market (SEM).

Then any retailer who wishes to sell that power to businesses or residential customers, buys the electricity from the pool and sells to their customer base.

Now if you are grid connected in Ireland for your electricity supply (as most organisations are) you get your power from this pool.

Can you see where I am going with this?

Most electricity companies in Ireland do generation as well as retail. Some of them have a significant portfolio of renewable resources (chiefly wind). However, because of the structure of the market, they can’t sell this power directly to consumers, it has to go to the SEM pool first.

When the electricity retailers sell electricity, they have to purchase it from the SEM pool to sell to their customers. Because all electricity sold in Ireland comes from the same SEM pool, everyone has the same percentage of renewables in their supply (unless they have a private supply).

What this means in effect is that you can’t selectively buy renewable electricity in Ireland.

If you see companies saying that their Irish operations are “running on almost 90 percent wind power”, for example, they are either ill-informed, or they are Greenwashing.

If you can’t selectively purchase renewable electricity, what can you do to reduce the carbon footprint of your energy consumption?

Well, the best thing to do then would be to move your loads to times when the percentage of renewable sources in the pool is highest! Any company committing to doing that would be making a bona fide Green statement.

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 05/07/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here are this week’s Green numbers:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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SunSpec Alliance setting standards for the solar industry

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BP Oil Spill

Photo credit Tom Raftery (Me!)

Sunspec.org is an alliance of renewable industry companies whose aim is to define communication standards data monitoring for the solar power industry.

Up until now there haven’t been any standards agreed around data communication in the solar power industry which added huge cost and complexity to the monitoring and management of solar farms – especially when there were multiple vendors involved. These lack of interoperability and increased cost issues have greatly hobbled solar power’s growth.

To address this the SunSpec Alliance was formed last year with the express purpose of defining standards which, if widely adopted, should significantly speed up the deployment of solar energy systems and be a big help in their management, reporting and maintenance.

On this coming May 11th, the Alliance will publish their initial set of proposed communication standards for the industry and open them up for public review and comment. The first specifications cover the inverter, the meter and the environmental sensors.

The release of these documents will be followed up by implementations of the specifications by Alliance member companies, testing, certification and a branding project to bring those products to market. Once these standards start to become widely adopted, they can be proposed to the IEC or the IEEE to become official international standards.

Standards are hugely important for the growth of any emerging industry. In the case of solar power, the standards will be all the more important, coinciding as they are with the with the arrival of smart grids and the development of smart grid interoperability standards.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Suddenly the business case for being an ethical, non-polluting business seems all the stronger

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BP Oil Spill

Photo credit NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Is the massive environment, health and safety (EHS) risks, which fossil fuel companies represent, starting to hurt their businesses?

Reading this morning about the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico I note that BP’s market value has fallen from ?122bn last week to ?102.5bn today – a loss of almost ?20bn in a week (or just over 16% of its value).

What has to be really worrying for BP investors is that

Things must be pretty grim at present in BP’s plush London HQ but it is not like BP have an exceptionally poor record by fossil fuel producers standards. For example:

And this EHS risk is not limited to oil and gas companies. On the contrary:

Massey Energy, the owner of the Upper Big Branch coal mine which exploded four weeks ago, killing 29 miners, has a terrible record of environmental and health and safety abuses. In fact, so bad are they that the FBI announced recently that they would be investigating Massey for the possible bribery of federal officials overseeing mining industry regulation and for potential criminal negligence.

Massey’s main competitors in the US are little better –

With the rapidly increasing number of environmental lawsuits taking place companies like the above are going to be spending more and more of their time in the courts with the consequent losses in time, productivity and reputation which that entails.

When you couple that with the growing interest in environmental issues being taken by the SEC, the EPA and investors and suddenly the business case for being an ethical, non-polluting business seems all the stronger.

After all, as many people noted on Twitter in the last few days, spills of air from wind farms or sun from solar plants are not going to have the devastating environmental consequences we have witnessed in the last decades as a result of our addiction to fossil fuels.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 04/30/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Smart Grid Heavy Hitters – Jon Wellinghoff, Chair of US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – part 2

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Jon Wellinghoff is the Chairman of the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – the FERC is the agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil.

I recorded an interview with Jon a few weeks back. The resulting video was too good to reduce to a single piece, so I split it into two. I published the first part of the interview a couple of weeks ago, this is part two.

In this second video we discussed:

  • Why it is a good thing for utilities that customers consume less electricity – 0:36
  • How smart grids help increase the penetration of renewables on the grid – 2:12
  • How electric vehicle owners are being paid up to $3,600 per annum to provide regulation services for utilities while charging! – 2:54
  • How renewable energy sources can be used as baseload power (no coal or nuclear baseload need ever be built) – 4:34