post

Ford discusses their Electric Vehicle and smart grid integration plans

by



Just before Christmas I had a chat with Ford’s head of battery electric vehicle applications, Greg Frenette. We discussed how Ford has been working with utilities and industry organisations to ready its electric vehicles for deep integration into smart grids.

It was fascinating for me to see just how far Ford have proceeded with their thinking on this.

Here’s the transcript of our conversation.

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone and welcome to GreenMonkTV. My guest in the show today is Greg Frenette. Greg is the Manager of Battery Electric Vehicle Applications for the Ford Motor Company. Greg let’s start of with a bit of historical background. Ford have been looking at electric vehicles for some time now; I think 2005 was when you started looking at electric vehicles and smart grid integration. Were you working on electric vehicles even before that?

Greg Frenette: Oh! Sure, we’ve been working on electric vehicles for over 20 years, in our research organization primarily. And when I say electric, I talk about not only battery electric, but fuel cell electric vehicles. But it was in 2007 when we decided to explore a demonstration fleet of plug-in vehicles, plug-in hybrids that we started thinking very seriously about the integration of those vehicles with the grid and in July 2007 announced a partnership with Southern California Edison, which has since grown to a partnership with about 12 different utilities and industry organizations.

Tom Raftery: What is the basis of that partnership, I mean Southern Cal Edison is a utility company, is it that you are test bedding your electric vehicles to see how they fit in with smart grids or what’s the basis of the partnership?

Greg Frenette: That’s exactly it. We’ve got some very high-fidelity Ford Escape production vehicles that have been modified with Lithium-Ion battery packs and charging systems and we’re really exploring what the interaction of that vehicle with the grid is like. We are trying to get a better understanding of the win-win solutions between industries that’ll be necessary in order to commercialize plug-in hybrids as well as full battery electric vehicles.

Tom Raftery: From the research, what are you guys seeing, how well do electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles — how well do they integrate with smart grids?

Greg Frenette: I think the opportunity is tremendous. With our plug-in Escape fleet of about 21 vehicles that we’ve deployed across North America we’re now in the process of setting up communications and actually demonstrating communications between the vehicles and smart meters which are becoming more and more available today in the market.

So we are finding that whole idea of how a vehicle interfaces with the grid is more than simply plugging it in; there’s an opportunity to communicate and an opportunity for the consumer – automotive consumer, electric consumer to make choices and to communicate those choices back and forth from the vehicle to the grid and vice versa.

I’ll give you an example; if you are sitting in one of our plug-in Escape prototypes, hybrid prototypes, today, what you’d find is if you decided you didn’t want to start charging until the rates are cheaper say around midnight or so you could tell the vehicle don’t charge until then, or if you wanted a full charge by a certain time in order to return home or whatever you could then dictate that, communicate it through the vehicle to a smart meter that would then modulate the charges such a way to meet your needs.

Tom Raftery: Interesting! So you are basically shifting your consumption to match times when electricity is less expensive.

Greg Frenette: You can do that; you can also, though, if you are plugged in and you don’t have a need for a particular charging and you have some freedom flexibility, you can indicate that you are willing to accept interruptible service in order to, again, reduce the cost of charging your vehicle. So that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the, sort of, communications that will become available in vehicles and the, kind of, capability we’ll have to really interact with the grid and dictate how we use energy with vehicles.

Tom Raftery: One of the other issues around integration of Battery Electric Vehicles and smart grids is the billing. So say if I go and visit somebody else, some cousins or some neighbours or some family or something and they live a couple of hours away and I need to charge to get home, can I plug in my vehicle in to their electric outlets and have it billed back to my account, is that — are you working on those kinds of integrations as well?

Greg Frenette: Absolutely! One of the real beauties of Ford partnering with a number of utilities across North America is we are exploring those sorts of scenarios and so this whole idea of mobile billing, how that occurs how it takes place is something we are exploring along with a number of other interface opportunities and challenges that we want to face and work out together.

Tom Raftery: Another issue that people raise around electric vehicles is if an electric vehicle is being charged by a utility who are burning coal are they outputting more CO2 than they would if the same car was running off gas?

Greg Frenette: Well that scenario could certainly present itself. One of the things — one of the opportunities that may present itself in how consumers interact with the grid is you may dictate through your vehicles or through an interface at the meter — you may dictate that you want the greenest form of charging.

In other words you will dictate that you will charge at times when the least the amount of coal is being burnt and perhaps other sources of energy are being made available to the grid. So that sort of thinking is something that we are currently engaged at. At the end of the day, though, the total environmental solution is more than a solution at the tailpipe of the vehicle. It has to be what we call a wells-to-wheels solution, and so the energy industry sees the role, I think, they need to play in helping drive emissions down, helping us really improve the environment together.

Tom Raftery: Okay, one last question Greg. When will I see a Ford Battery Electric Vehicle in the showroom?

Greg Frenette: Well, our current plans, today, call for Ford Transit Connect Battery Electric Vehicles to begin coming off our production line at the end of next year (2010).

The following year, 2011, we are currently scheduled to be putting out a full electric Ford Focus Battery Electric Vehicle and then our plans beyond then, 2012 and beyond, call for a plug-in hybrid, a version of the vehicles that we are currently running in demonstration today. So we are not talking about a long-term reality here; what we are really talking about is vehicles that are currently under design and development and will be deployed out in to the public very shortly.

Tom Raftery: Superb Greg, that’s been fantastic. Thanks for agreeing to come on the show.

Related articles by Zemanta
post

Costs of running communication networks about to tumble?

by

Communications

Photo credit armandoalves

I saw a report on the Green Data Center Blog today that a new industry group called GreenTouch has been formed with the express aim of reducing the amount of energy communications networks (including the Internet) use.

In fact their Global Mission is to, by 2015:

deliver the architecture, specifications and roadmap — and demonstrate key components — needed to reduce energy consumption per user by a factor of 1000 from current levels.

This is an incredibly ambitious aim and one that you might be inclined to dismiss if it were not for the fact that its members include from industry Bell Labs, AT&T, and China Mobile; MIT and Stanford University from the academic world; and The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control from government – the full list from the GreenTouch members page is:

With the use of the Internet and mobile phone networks merging and growing daily with people uploading photos and video from their mobile phones to the Internet for example, this is a very timely development. From the network provider’s perspective, the ability to drastically reduce the costs associated with running these networks has to be compelling.

Similarly, for large organisations who run significant internal and external communications networks, any opportunity to tackle communications overheads and their energy-related emissions will be welcomed. In an era when the air-travel experience is becoming increasingly onerous due to increased security restrictions, the potential to shrink the price of alternatives such as telepresence solutions, will also be a boon.

Also, the utility companies, with their need to significantly invest in communication networks in the next few years as they roll out their smart grids, must be looking at this announcement with a lot of interest.

I’m curious to see where Cisco (and Juniper) are in all this!

Gee Rittenhouse, the head of Research for Bell Labs explains more about GreenTouch in the video below:

Related articles by Zemanta
post

Google Energy to start disrupting the utility industry?

by

Google Energy

Photo credit filippo minelli

There is no doubt about it but Google is a disruptive company.

First Google disrupted search, then advertising, then video (with their acquisition of YouTube), and then Office applications with the launch and continued development of Google Apps for Domains. Most recently Google has disrupted the mobile phone industry, first with the launch of their Android operating system and just a couple of days ago with the launch of their Nexus One mobile phone.

What then should we make of Google’s recent creation of a subsidiary called Google Energy LLC and Google Energy’s request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market [PDF]?

Given Google has already invested in solar power generation, given further that Google has invested in wind and geothermal power generation technologies (as part of its RE < C project), and given that Google has already launched its first product in the Smart Grid space, Google PowerMeter, should we now expect Google to start disrupting the utility industry as well?

Curious about what all this meant I contacted Google spokesperson Niki Fenwick to try to get some answers – see my questions and her responses below:

TR: What was the thinking behind Google’s setting up Google Energy? Why is Google applying to the FERC for permission to trade in electricity?

NF: Google is interested in procuring more renewable energy as part of our carbon neutrality commitment, and the ability to buy and sell energy on the wholesale market could give us more flexibility in doing so. We made this filing so we can have more flexibility in procuring power for Google’s own operations, including our data centers.

TR: Google has made some investments in renewable generation (solar, geothermal and wind), does Google hope to take on the utilities by selling electricity? How does this tie into Google’s PowerMeter project?

NF: This move does not signal our intent to operate as a retail provider and is not related to our free Google PowerMeter home energy monitoring software. We simply want to have the flexibility to explore various renewable energy purchase and sale agreements (that means we can buy electricity wholesale, rather than through a utility).

TR: Will Google Energy be used to develop more Smart Grid products?

NF: We don’t have any plans to announce at this time.

TR: How does this tie into Google’s partnership with GE?

NF: This move isn’t related to our partnership with GE.

So there you have it, according to Google this application to trade in electricity on the wholesale market is simply to gain more flexibility in procuring power for Google’s own operations, as part of Google’s carbon neutrality commitment.

Google have no plans to become a retail electricity provider.

For now. Things change.

After all, it is not so long ago that Google were denying rumours that they were developing a Google phone!

Related articles:

post

What If We Create a Better World For Nothing?

by

091207usatoday global warming.91
One of my goals in 2010 is to help move the sustainability debate beyond Global Warming. Global Warming or Climate Change is still arguable – while other environmental impacts and issues are not. Its surely time for sustainability advocates to reframe our narrative – and get beyond the Global Warming debate. We might as well try and convince evangelicals of evolution… instead we need to start focusing on immediate and real issues- such as a lack of potable water in many geographies. Energy independence is perhaps the best argument for renewal energy. People are generally more worried about national security than the potentials threats of global warming.

Of course some really major climate events may change the game, but for now, we should focus on the changes we can make in terms of business, culture and politics. You can understand why I love this cartoon from USA Today, which sums my thoughts up beautifully.

post

Green Numbers round-up 12/18/2009

by

Green Numbers

Photo credit MildlyDiverting

Welcome to this Friday’s Green numbers round-up!

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

post

15 Green Predictions for 2010

by

Looking into my crystal ball

Photo credit seanmcgrath

It is the end of the year – that time of year when everyone rolls out their X Predictions for 2010 post and, in that regard, GreenMonk is not going to be any different!

Well , maybe slightly different, some of the following predictions are more like hopes and aspirations on my part than likely outcomes!

  1. There will be an increasing emphasis on sustainability initiatives as organisations understand their financial benefits
  2. CSR reporting will become mandatory for large companies in the EU
  3. Companies will more and more look to IT to help them with their energy efficiency programs
  4. An heightened legislative emphasis on carbon reporting will spur the development of more carbon reporting software
  5. There will be greater and greater integration of carbon reporting functionality into ERP and financial reporting applications
  6. Standards will be agreed for energy and water footprint labels for products and services
  7. Water and energy footprint labels will be made mandatory in the EU
  8. At least one smart grid rollout in the US will fail spectacularly due, in large part, to poor stakeholder communications
  9. More and more Smart City initiatives will come on stream as cities aim to become more sustainable
  10. Mainstream car manufacturers will start to release plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles
  11. At least one major mobile phone handset manufacturer rolls out mobile phones with built-in environmental sensors (for crowd-sourced environmental data viewable in realtime with an Augmented Reality browser)
  12. Bluefin tuna stocks will crash in the atlantic
  13. It will be a record year for ice loss in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
  14. It will be a record year for damage from hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific
  15. 2010 will be the warmest year on record due to the combined influence of El Niño and global warming

    16. and a bonus prediction for good luck:

  16. The US will finally pass climate legislation limiting CO2 emissions (but it won’t go far enough!)
post

PG&E smart meter communication failure – lessons for the rest of us

by

See no evil, hear no evil

What we have got here is a failure to communicate

The famous line from legendary movie Cool Hand Luke is the first thing that comes to mind when one hears about the fiasco which PG&E’s smart meter rollout in Bakersfield Ca. has become.

From the report on the SmartMeters.com site:

a class-action lawsuit has been filed representing thousands that will demand damages from the utility and third-parties also involved in the $2.2 billion project.

Bakersfield residents believe their new smart meters are malfunctioning because their bills are much higher than before. PG&E claims higher bills are due to rate hikes, an unusually warm summer, and customers not shifting demand to off-peak times when rates are lower.

This has to be a huge embarrassment for PG&E and their partners who are spending $2.2 billion on this project.

So what has gone wrong?

A recent report in the New York Times raises speculation that the meters themselves are to blame:

Elizabeth Keogh, a retired social worker in Bakersfield, Calif., who describes herself as “a bit chintzy,” has created a spreadsheet with 26 years of electric bills for her modest house. She decided that her new meter was running too fast.

Ms. Keogh reported to the utility that the meter recorded 646 kilowatt-hours in July, for which she paid $66.50; last year it was 474 kilowatt-hours, or $43.37.

At a hearing in October organized by her state senator, Ms. Keogh took out two rolls of toilet paper — one new, one half used up — and rolled them down the aisle, showing how one turned faster than the other. “Something is wrong here,” she said.

Scores of electric customers with similar complaints have turned out at similar hearings. At one in Fresno, Calif., Leo Margosian, a retired investigator, testified that the new meter logged the consumption of his two-bedroom townhouse at 791 kilowatt-hours in July, up from 236 a year earlier. And he had recently insulated his attic and installed new windows, Mr. Margosian said.

I spoke to good friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Jeff Nolan earlier today after I saw him Tweet:

yeah I’m actually pretty pissed, PG&E installed a so called “smart meter” and my utility bill increased $300.

It seems Jeff was having the same problem and his bill was also up significantly over the same month last year.

There are a number of problems here – all to do with transparency and communication.

If, as PG&E say, this is because of “customers not shifting demand to off-peak times when rates are lower”, then it follows that PG&E have either failed to communicate the value of shifting demand or the time when rates are lower.

One of the advantages of a smart grid is that the two way flow of information will allow utilities to alert customers to real-time electricity pricing via an in-home display. PG&E have not rolled out in-home displays with their smart meters, presumably for cost reasons. If they lose the class-action law suit, that may turn out to have been an unwise decision.

Even worse though, in a further post on Twitter, Jeff said:

I’m waited for PG&E to put up the daily usage numbers, I won’t get those until next month for some unexplained reason

This defies belief, frankly.

It seems that PG&E’s smart grid rollout is woefully under-resourced at the back-end. What PG&E should have is a system where customers can see their electrical consumption in real-time (on their phone, on their computer, on their in-home display, etc.) but also, in the same way that credit card companies contact me if purchasing goes out of my normal pattern, PG&E should have a system in place to contact customers whose bills are going seriously out of kilter. Preferably a system which alerts people in realtime if they are consuming too much electricity when the price is high, through their in-home display, via sms,Twitter DM, whatever.

Jeff himself likened this situation to the e-voting debacle where the lack of transparency around the e-voting machines meant the whole process collapsed. In the same way, a lack of open standards around smart meters means we can only trust the smart meter manufacturers and utilities when they tell us that they are operating honestly. That is unlikely to fly.

This debacle has massive implications, not just for PG&E’s $2.2 billion smart meter rollout, but for smart meter projects the world over.

Transparency and communications failures can lead to utilities being sued by their customers, as we have seen with the PG&E example. Not a desirable situation for any company. The PR fallout from the Bakersfield rollout means PG&E will have a much harder time convincing other customers to sign up for smart meters and may potentially set back smart grid projects in California for years.

You should follow me on twitter here.

Photo credit svale

post

IBM’s John Soyring talks about IBM’s Smart Planet initiatives around water

by

I posted my video interview with IBM’s John Soyring previously as part of a round-up of my impressions of the IBM Connect09 event. I have since had the interview transcribed so I thought I’d post it once more as a stand-alone post, with the transcription – the content is that good.

Transcription:
Tom Raftery:

Hi, everyone and welcome to GreenMonkTV. My guest in the show today is John Soyring from IBM. John you are a part of the IBM Software Group and we are at the Connect 09 Conference today and we are talking a lot about the Smarter Planet initiative from IBM. So IBM has traditionally been known as Big Blue. Are you guys now going to rebrand as Big Green?

John Soyring:

Well, certainly someone referred to that, but blue is important too because of the color that water appears to many peoples as well and water is part of our projects.

Tom Raftery:

The Blue Marble.

John Soyring:

It is.

Tom Raftery:

So tell us about some of the stuff you are doing around water, for instance, since you brought that out.

John Soyring:

Yeah, I would be happy to. So we have selected water because we know that there is already a shortage, globally, of the amount of potable water available to people and the lack of potable water is a major cause of health problems in parts of the world and has adverse impacts on economy; so right now is a problem already, a pretty severe problem.

Secondly as you look at supply and demand the amount of fresh water on the face of the earth or drinkable water or water that’s easily purified to be drinkable is finite in nature, it hasn’t changed over centuries really and the total amount – it is a very significant amount.

Yet, the demand with population growth and with the growth of certain economies around the world where more and more people are demanding water not only for their own personal use, but also for commercial use – there is an increased stress on the system. So we look at it from a macroeconomic standpoint and say there’s has got to be something we could do to help here.

So this team got together and said how could we apply technology to help all of the world of water, whether it’s managing water resources or helping people to better distribute the water or very importantly how to make more intelligent decisions on how to consume water.

So if I use one example as representative and I won’t give out their specific numbers because they share them on confidence with me of what they are doing, but as an example the country of Malta we were very fortunate to work with them, because of the work they were already doing and recognizing that water is extremely important to the people, the citizens of Malta and the visitors, but very importantly as they continue to grow their economy an increased availability of water is going to be critical to that.

What they told me, 100% of the water comes from rain catchments that’s about 55-60% of the total supply and about 40% or 50%, it varies, I believe, during the year is seawater from the Mediterranean Sea that’s desalinated, purified, and then distributed. Now, as I had the benefit of coming and visiting some of their desalination centers and purification centers, and they were already using state-of-the-art technology.

Now in the future will there be a better technology with nanotechnology and other on filtration systems? Very likely; so it’s great to be able to work with some people who already on the leading edge of pushing the technology to it’s boundaries.

The second is how you would distribute that water, because today water in almost all cities and regions of the world or countries in the world is heavily subsidized by tax payers. Consumers don’t really realize the true cost of water because the price…

Tom Raftery:

Water is free. You just turn the tap and there it is.

John Soyring:

It is so inexpensive the monthly bill that people perceive it to be free, but in reality the cost is much higher that what they are being charged. With governments – city, regional, federal governments around the world being stressed because there’s a gap between the taxes they collect and the amount that they are spending is not a sustainable economic model.

So eventually water will have more and more market prices and for decades, now I have been projecting personally. This is my own personal opinion that the price of a barrel of water will far exceed the price of a barrel of oil. And what’s important is we can live without a barrel of oil, we’ve got alternatives to oil. It’s going to take a while to develop those, but we don’t know really have alternatives to water that we have to drink and survive whether it’s animals or human beings in that category.

Tom Raftery:

Because I saw in a statistic recently that it takes 16,000 liters of water to produce one kilo a beef.

John Soyring:

It is expensive and the other thing I found recently and it takes quite a few liters of water to produce a one liter of beer.

Tom Raftery:

I’ll give up the beef, I won’t give up with the beer.

John Soyring:

I happen to be a real big fan of one of your Irish beverages.

Tom Raftery:

Guinness?

John Soyring:

Yes, the Guinness is just absolutely wonderful, but think about this and Malta is pretty representative of many other countries. We create this purified drinkable water very expensively on a per liter basis, we distribute it, our water systems are very old, many times measured in centuries not just decades.

There’s leaks in the system, so there’s loss of water in the distribution system, loss of water when they get in to the buildings – the residential homes or commercial buildings, loss in the building is pretty bad also from a health standpoint because it creates mould which has adverse affect on the living beings that are in that home or that commercial building; but, very importantly when you think about we designed our plumbing systems that assume as you pointed out water is free.

So we use it for all sorts and I was shocked as I talked to the CEOs of different water utility companies around the world that’s a very higher percentage of water that’s just flushed down the toilet; a very significant part and that when you look at the majority of it that’s actually going for irrigation for the grasses and lawns, or for the flowerbeds, for vegetable gardens, for trees, for irrigation, for farms, it’s a very high percentage. None of it really needs the quality of potable water that we have.

Tom Raftery:

So there’s a disconnect there between the amount that’s flushed down the toilet and what could be used for irrigation purposes?

John Soyring:

And the interesting thing, as I was in Malta meeting with some of the government leaders and the business leaders in Malta and on my flight back to the United States the airline had copies of the Financial Times and I was reading through a section and it was a Middle East country, I believe it was Qatar back in about April had a paid section that they put in and talked about the different parts the government one of which is water management.

I taught that it was just absolutely visionary what they are doing because the leaders in Qatar were setting goals for the future, they wanted to able to — every time they created a liter of a drinkable water, they want to able to use that liter seven times before they dispose of that.

Tom Raftery:

Wow!

John Soyring:

Now, so that’s a great vision. Now the question is from our system today that use the water once in 95% plus of the cases, how can we get to a case where we are satisfy a vision like Qatar has of using it seven times?

Certainly a new plumping system would do, but another thing is if we have the intelligent sensors of where the water is being used, then we can people aware of their consumption habits are we’ve certainly seen that in hybrid vehicles that when they no what their patrol consumption is they try to optimize that and change behavior.

Now if we can make that information available to the consuming public and also if they know what the real cost of water is and the benefits, we think we can precipitate some of that change.

So that’s what we are doing and for the smart water grid in Malta, we’ve signed several other deals and just issued press release earlier this week, one for the lower Colorado River Authority, which is a watershed in Texas supplying water to central Texas.

One is in Japan with a water utility, one is in Australia, and then there’s a variety of other projects anywhere from working on the Hudson River in New York, which has in its 1960s and 1970s, unfortunately, became very polluted.

Tom Raftery:

Sure.

John Soyring:

To be able to place sensors through the river to identify when various chemicals – whether it’s agricultural runoff, industrial chemicals, personal use chemicals, because people are using medications, but they eventually flow out of you body, usually get flushed down the toilet, but they end up not being separated during the water purification process for sewage, and when they do the sewage processes it mixes in the river.

So if we put sensors in the river, we can identify the source and start to mitigate the pollution problem by hitting it at the source as soon as possible.

Tom Raftery:

You did a project in Galway Bay in Ireland as well.

John Soyring:

Yeah, absolutely, and as you know being Irish the Bay in Galway is probably the major source of economic growth for the city of Galway and the surrounding region, whether it’s the fisheries which depend on the quality of the water, they have better catches if the water quality is better; to Galway is one of the major import and export centers, the ports in Ireland so the commerce of the country of Ireland is very dependent upon the success of it.

Vacationers, people like to bathe in Galway Bay, so by putting sensors throughout on buoys throughout the Bay we are able to capture information and help Ireland be the first country to start satisfying a European regulation where this data has to be captured and made available to the public immediately, so they can make decisions. One of the things that we measure is E. coli high concentrations.

Tom Raftery:

Right.

John Soyring:

If the concentration level is below what the Health Department determines is acceptable or the EPA in Ireland they say bathers feel free to go in. Now people can make that decision rather than waiting for a notice and perhaps missing it in the newspaper, going swimming, and then ending up with some health problems.

Tom Raftery:

John, that’s been great. Thanks, for taking the time to come on the show.

John Soyring:

Oh! It’s a pleasure. Thank you for coming here to this event.

post

SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management software launched

by

SAP BusinessObjects Sustainability Performance Management

I wrote a piece on SAP’s new Sustainability Performance Management (SPM) tool a few weeks back. At time of writing it was very much in the realms of speculation as the product was, as yet, unreleased.

Last Thursday, Dec 10th, SAP announced the release of the software and having been given a preview of the software the previous day by SAPs Charles Zedlewski, I thought it time to circle back with an update on my previous speculations.

It turns out that I jumped the gun a bit when I posited that:

SAP have taken the next logical step with their Sustainability report. They have productised it!

The current version of the SPM will not output a sustainability report similar to SAP’s hugely innovative one of earlier this year although executives I talked to would not rule out that coming in future versions.

What the SPM will do for organisations is reduce the amount of time spent tracking down, collating data and creating reports. It can automatically collect KPI data across all sustainability dimensions (economic, social and environmental) from a variety of sources, so customers can move beyond manual data collection and spreadsheet-based recording.

The library of nearly 400 KPI’s includes a variety of sustainability metrics, including those based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standard as well as the Walmart sustainability index. If you require customisation (and what organisation doesn’t?) building your own custom KPIs or editing the installed ones is quite straightforward.

The data can be pulled from existing SAP apps within the organisation, it can integrate with 3rd party systems or information can be entered manually and then quickly reported either internally or externally. Audit trail functionality helps ensure integrity and transparency of the data.

Two further things I would like to see from this application are:
1. The ability to output at the touch of a button a Sustainability Report similar to SAP’s recent one and
2. An on-demand option (on-demand is SAP for SaaS!) – an on-demand version would ensure that organisations are always using a version which is abreast of the latest green regulations

Having said that, this is a very solid looking v1 with an intuitive UI and a very comprehensive back-end.

I have a call with SAS this afternoon to learn more about their SAS for Sustainability Management product – it will be interesting to see how it stacks up beside SAP’s SPM.

Related articles by Zemanta:

post

UK’s Carbon reduction commitment legislation – the shape of things to come globally!

by

Climate change

Screenshot credit Tom Raftery – data from NASA

The world is getting warmer. 2008 was the 9th warmest year on record. 2009, barring a sudden, severe, global cold snap, will end up being the 4th or 5th warmest year on record and with El Niño coming on in the Pacific, 2010 looks likely to set a new temperature record for the hottest year in recorded history.

Climate change is real and it is here, now. So what you say, what does that have to do with me? Or more to the point, what does that have to do with my work?

Well, if you are based in the UK, there is a strong chance that next April, it will have a very direct impact on your job, company, or business. This is because the UK has passed legislation called the Carbon Reduction Committment (CRC).

The CRC is a groundbreaking piece of legislation designed to help the UK meet its carbon reduction targets by 2020. Basically, the CRC scheme will apply to organisations that had a half-hourly metered electricity consumption greater than 6,000 MWh per year in 2008. Organisations qualifying for CRC would have all their energy use covered by the scheme, this includes emissions from direct energy use as well as electricity purchased. Initially, it is estimated, around 5,000 organisations will qualify, including supermarkets, water companies, banks, local authorities and all central Government Departments. Qualifying organisations mostly fall below the threshold for the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, but account for around 10% of the UK carbon emissions.

The organisations involved will need to register or make an information disclosure by 30 September 2010. A financial penalty (£5,000 plus a per diem charge for each subsequent working day an organisation fails to submit a report) will be imposed on organisations who fail to meet the deadline.

The first year of the scheme (April 2010-2011) is called the footprint year. Companies are required to submit an audited report of their emissions during the footprint year by 29 July 2011. Again financial penalties will be imposed for failing to meet the deadline.

In the second year, (2011-2012) participants will have to purchase emissions allowances to cover their forecast emissions for 2011/12. And in 2013 auctioning of carbon allowances begins, with all the income from the auctions recycled back to participants by the means of an annual payment based on participants’ average annual emissions since the start of the scheme.

There will be a bonus or penalty according to the organisation’s position in a CRC league table. The league table will be made public thereby enhancing the transparency of companies carbon reporting and hopefully shaming any egregious emitters into reducing their carbon footprint.

I have gone in to a bit of detail about the CRC here because it is difficult enough to find out information about the scheme and most UK business appear to be wholly unprepared for its implementation. The UK Department of Climate Change (I think it is interesting that the UK has a government department of climate change in the first place – how many other governments do?) has an easy to follow guide to the CRC [PDF] available for download which will help.

The CRC is going to be closely watched by other countries and you can be sure it will be used as a model by many to reduce their carbon emissions.

As I mentioned at the outset of this piece, climate change is here, it is real. Increasingly we are going to see bills like the CRC enacted so we can try to mitigate its effects.