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GreenMonk news roundup 12/04/2009

News

Photo credit just.Luc (just.Censored)

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

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Green Numbers round-up 12/04/2009

Green Numbers

Photo credit Jeremy Brooks

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

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New version of Eye on Earth site – more data, less visible!

Eye on Earth
Photo credit Tom Raftery

We last wrote about the Eye on Earth site in July 2008. If you can’t remember that far back, a quick recap – Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency (EEA) signed a non-exclusive five year deal with a goal to make environmental information more accessible to citizens in Europe.

EyeOnEarth, the first product of that agreement was launched on July 30th 2008 as a site listing water bathing quality for beaches and waterways throughout Europe. What was unique about the site was that it contained historical data going back as far as 1991 as well as the ability for anyone browsing the site to give their own feedback on beaches/waterways. A superb way to capture and present grassroots water quality data.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been major changes to the EyeOnEarth website. The site has been moved to Microsoft’s new cloud computing services platform Windows Azure, and data from 6,000 air quality monitoring stations across Europe is now also included in the site. The air quality data includes information on ozone, particulate matter (PM10) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) but, curiously, doesn’t include sulphur dioxide (SO2) or carbon dioxide (CO2).

The site has now been combined with Bing Maps and Silverlight controls which work quite well once you realise that you have to type in the name of the location you are interested in into the search bar at the top to see any data. Intuitively I initially clicked on air and water stations on the map but this failed to do yield any data. This appears to be a function of your zoom level because once you zoom in far enough, a click on an air or water station will yield the information.

The fact that the site is written in Silverlight is disappointing as the number of computers with Silverlight installed is somewhere between 32% and 47%. There is a non-Silverlight version of the site available but I failed to get this to work either on my Vista PC or on my iPhone.

The lack of a working platform for mobile is a big disappointment, frankly. Back in 2008 Microsoft’s Director EU & NATO, reassured me that:

We haven’t tested or adapted the site for mobile access now due to time constraints but mobile access is a core component of our vision for the Observatory portal as we like to offer an alerting/subscription service

I took this to mean that there would be a mobile version of the site developed.

However, what Microsoft and the EEA have now delivered is an SMS service whereby you can text a command to a UK number (+44 7786 201 106) – this allows you to receive instant updates on air and water quality for any location in the EEA member countries, however, as far as I can tell there is no way to add data to the site from your mobile, something I’d be very keen to do if I had the option.

The addition of the air quality data to Eye on Earth is a very welcome development, however making the site less accessible, and not having a mobile version of the site means that this update of the site would appear to be a case of one step forward and two steps back.

UPDATE: Just thinking now that if there were an api to this data and if it were geotagged, it would make a really interesting Augmented Reality Layar for a mobiles.

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IBM’s Software Analyst Connect event, Smarter Planet and sustainability

I attended IBM’s eighth annual Software Analyst Connect (#Connect09) last week in Connecticut. The theme of the event was “IBM Software for a Smarter Planet”.

You have to admire IBM for coming up with the Smart Planet branding strategy. Now anything Smart (Smart Cities, Smart Water even Smart Work) is automatically, subconsciously associated with IBM.

The Connect 09 event itself was superb. The delegates were all analysts and I was humbled to be in the company of so many really bright people.

It was a two day affair broken up into a healthy mix of keynotes, breakout sessions, round tables, an appliance showcase and chats with experts. The content level was very high and the networking opportunities were off the charts (I had face time with Steve Mills, Al Zollar, Sandy Carter and John Soyring (in the video above) to name-drop but a few).

The breakout sessions had titles like:

  • IBM’s Industry Frameworks and Solutions for a Smarter Planet
  • Driving Smarter Business Outcomes with Analytics and Information and
  • Smart Work and Dynamically Adaptive Collaboration

So while the content was quite in-depth and at times extremely technical, unfortunately there wasn’t a strong emphasis on sustainability. This is no big surprise as this was never billed as a sustainability-related event.

Having said that IBM’s larger Smarter Planet strategy talks very much to the Internet of Things vision where everything is instrumented with RFID tags or sensors and inter-connected which has massive potential implications for making the world more sustainable.

Then the talks from Steve Mills referenced IBM’s work with utilities in the Smart Grid arena and the development of the SAFE Framework while John Soyring talked up IBM’s work around the world on Smart Water initiatives.

The one use of the Smart X lingo which IBM use and I do object to is Smart Oilfields. The thinking goes that Smart Oilfields are ones that extract oil more efficiently from the ground. I’m sorry, but CO2 is a pollutant which is endangering all life on this planet. Anything which helps put more CO2 into the atmosphere, cannot be very smart.

It was spectacular to get a chance to record my chat with John Soyring about IBM’s work on water globally. Take 10 minutes to watch the video above. You’ll be glad you did.

Full disclosure, IBM is a client and paid my airfare (economy) to attend the event, accommodation and all delegates received a gift of a solar phone charger.

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How to Reduce Energy Consumption in Retail: Change The Font On Your Cash Register


Yesterday I got an update from an ERP company called Epicor that primarily serves the mid-market. While I am not an ERP specialist its always interesting, as a middleware guy, to get a view from the app side. Greenmonk for obvious reasons also takes a keener view than the RedMonk mothership in applications in areas such as carbon accounting, energy and utility management.

Epicor seems to be doing quite well in the down economy, but I was most interested when Adam Prince, senior Director of Product Marketing started talking to Epicor’s Green Retail strategy. While any number of IT vendors are now all over the sustainability opportunity in their marketing and product management very few have joined the dots around explicit vertical industry opportunities. That said, here is a white paper from IBM and Intel on sustainable retail ops.

One of our clients, StreamServe, pitches paper reduction to utilities. Given how much paper utilities create this is a compelling vertical-focused story.

But Epicor introduced another interesting idea to me. Reducing carbon footprint by changing the font on Retail point of sale (POS) terminals. Seriously. Less ink and less printing means less power. Some might say the savings would be too small to measure, but actually in cash terms the efficiencies add up pretty fast. Epicor’s advisory and tech works with IBM and NCR POS gear.

Epicor Green Retail is a services-led approach: consultants and business analysts come in to review the business’s energy consumption, review current systems configurations, and make suggestions about mechanisms to reduce the energy footprint of stores.

While changing fonts is only part of the opportunity around POS, the overall numbers appear compelling.

According to Lynne Davidson, vice president, Services and Support for Epicor Retail:

“Based on calculations from the U.S. Department of Energy, retailers can achieve 500-600 kWh or an average of $70 of power savings per register/device per year. If applied to 500 registers, in three years this could translate to roughly $101,000 in savings, a reduction in CO2 emissions by 60 tons and, from an environmental standpoint, is equivalent to planting 125 acres of trees.”

Another thing to think about then – small changes do add up. Some sustainability initiatives may involve whole new supply chains – others are as simple as changing a font. Oh yeah- the retailer will save some money on ink too. 😉

photo courtesy of NCR.com. I would have used an IBM image, but they. are. so. miserable. Hey IBM Retail marketing people POS doesn’t have to be monochrome!

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Green Numbers round-up 11/27/2009

Green Numbers

Photo credit Jeremy Brooks

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

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Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind!

Record Spanish Wind Energy

Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7% of its energy requirements being supplied by wind energy.

As you can see from the graph above, the amount of electricity being supplied by wind, the light green portion of the graph, doesn’t go below 30% at any point in the 24 hours and is closer to between 40-50% for most of the time!

These are figures the world’s most ambitious countries are targeting hitting by 2020, at the earliest!

Notice also on the graph that the contribution from coal (the red band) during this period is in the low single digits, never rising above 6.4%.

And finally notice also that for a lot of the period significant amounts of generation is below the 0MW line – this occurs when the electricity is being either stored using pumped hydro storage, or being exported for sale on the international markets.

The Guardian reporting on this quoted Jos? Donoso, head of the Spanish Wind Energy Association

“We think that we can keep growing and go from the present 17GW megawatts to reach 40GW in 2020,” he told El Pa??s newspaper.

Windfarms have this month outperformed other forms of electricity generation in Spain, beating gas into second place and producing 80% more than the country’s nuclear plants.

Experts estimate that by the end of the year, Spain will have provided a quarter of its energy needs with renewables, with wind leading the way, followed by hydroelectric power and solar energy.

The graph above is taken from the site of the Spanish grid operator Red Electrica de Espa?a (REE).

The REE website has highly detailed and extremely interactive infographics produced using Adobe’s Flex software:
Real-time (and historic) demand, along with generation structure and CO2 emissions
Real-time (and historic) structure of electricity generation (the graph above is taken from this page) and
Demand curves over intervals of time

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GreenMonk news roundup 11/14/2009

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

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Green Numbers round-up 11/14/2009

  • This page shows the current ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    The calculated figure uses estimates of the level of carbon dioxide (CO2 – the main greenhouse gas) based on actual measurements taken monthly a worldwide network of stations and collated by the Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colorado. The record of CO2 concentrations available from ESRL stretches back over 50 years.

    tags: co2, ppm, carbon dioxide, greennumbers

  • “Not that it will change any minds. The overwhelming evidence of the last decade has convinced all those it will I think, but just in case there are those who are just beginning to ask questions…

    A few months back, I was adding up the record highs and the record lows for some sample years in the 1990’s and 2000’s. A friend tipped me to the raw data. He told me that there was a definite trend, with a marked decrease in record lows and an increase in record highs.

    With just a little bit of research, I quickly spotted the pattern. Since the planet is warming due to increased greenhouse gases, it was no real surprise. I really should have written something about it back then, but it would be anecdotal and not science.”

    tags: climate change, record high, record lows, temperature, greennumbers

  • “14 Democratic senators affirmed their allegiance to the profits of polluting industry at the expense of the health and jobs of their constituents. In a letter to Senate leaders, a bloc of senators with powerful coal interests in their states called for “fair emissions allowances in climate change legislation.” Their definition of “fair,” unfortunately, turns out to be full taxpayer subsidies for global warming polluters. “

    tags: coal, pollution, polluter pays, greennumbers

  • “Wind energy provided more than half of Spain’s total electricity needs for several hours over the weekend as the country set a new national record for wind-generated power.”

    tags: wind energy, spain, ree, wind, wind farms, greennumbers

  • “TIMES are tough for tuna. The guidance of scientists that advise groups that manage tuna stocks is falling on deaf ears.

    The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas meets this week in Brazil to set catch limits. ICCAT’s scientific advisers have told it that stocks of the giant bluefin tuna are plummeting towards collapse. Catches in 2008 were at three times the ICCAT limit, which is itself more than what its scientific advisers consider sustainable (see “Tigers of the sea”)Movie Camera. “It’s like the year before the collapse of the northern cod,” says Dan Pauly at the University of British Columbia, Canada. In 1992 the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed. It never recovered.”

    tags: tuna, iccat, iotc, fisheries collapse, yellowfin, greennumbers

  • This page shows the current ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    The calculated figure uses estimates of the level of carbon dioxide (CO2 – the main greenhouse gas) based on actual measurements taken monthly a worldwide network of stations and collated by the Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colorado. The record of CO2 concentrations available from ESRL stretches back over 50 years.

    tags: co2, ppm, carbon dioxide, greennumbers

  • “Not that it will change any minds. The overwhelming evidence of the last decade has convinced all those it will I think, but just in case there are those who are just beginning to ask questions…

    A few months back, I was adding up the record highs and the record lows for some sample years in the 1990’s and 2000’s. A friend tipped me to the raw data. He told me that there was a definite trend, with a marked decrease in record lows and an increase in record highs.

    With just a little bit of research, I quickly spotted the pattern. Since the planet is warming due to increased greenhouse gases, it was no real surprise. I really should have written something about it back then, but it would be anecdotal and not science.”

    tags: climate change, record high, record lows, temperature, greennumbers

  • “14 Democratic senators affirmed their allegiance to the profits of polluting industry at the expense of the health and jobs of their constituents. In a letter to Senate leaders, a bloc of senators with powerful coal interests in their states called for “fair emissions allowances in climate change legislation.” Their definition of “fair,” unfortunately, turns out to be full taxpayer subsidies for global warming polluters. “

    tags: coal, pollution, polluter pays, greennumbers

  • “Wind energy provided more than half of Spain’s total electricity needs for several hours over the weekend as the country set a new national record for wind-generated power.”

    tags: wind energy, spain, ree, wind, wind farms, greennumbers

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

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November chat with IBM’s Rich Lechner

Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP of Energy and Environment.

He is a regular interviewee here where we discuss various matters related to energy and environment. This interview was recorded while I was at the SAP TechEd 2009 event in Vienna in a crowded interview room so I apologise in advance for the poorer than normal audio and video quality.

In this show we discussed IBM’s recently released Solution Architecture For Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE) and we had a quick chat about the recently published Green IT for Dummies book.

[Disclosure] The Green IT for Dummies book was written with input from IBM and I served as technical editor for the book. Having said that, I hadn’t seen the completed book until Rich held it up during the video and the link to the book on Amazon above is not an affiliate link – I get no monies from its sales.