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GreenMonk news roundup 10/06/2009

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

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/03/2009

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

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Big Guns in Low Carbon: Kicking Off The Revolution. Ministry of Defence, Tesco, CRC etc

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Tesco reception

A couple of major contract wins caught me eye, or ear this week – one by CA and one by Logica. Job one in moving to a lower carbon economy is working out what our current exposure is. Before we can model business processes in order to rethink their carbondynamics we need to do some basic counting.

Monday I went along to the launch of CA’s ecoSoftware product line and the announcement of a major customer-Tesco. I was interested to find out more because CA’s competence is primarily in managing IT infrastructure, but it obviously plans to break out into broader eco asset management, aggregating information from central heating and building management systems and so on.

Its important to note that CA and Tesco are starting small – with data center assets. But the scope of the project goes much much further. Its worth quoting from the press release (no, really!) to get a sense for the scale of the ambition.

With 468,000 Tesco employees working at more than 4,000 locations across 14 countries, the task of accounting for carbon emissions is time-consuming and complex. Tesco has implemented CA ecoSoftware to help increase the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of its carbon accounting process, enabling the company to more effectively track progress in pursuit of its ambitious carbon reduction goals.

“When we announced our plan two years ago to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% across all of our global operations, we knew we were taking on a big task,” said Mike Yorwerth, IT director of Tesco plc. “Since that time a number of people across the business have been involved in measuring, documenting and reporting on our emissions — a time-consuming, largely manual task. We’re also overseeing hundreds of projects around the world designed to reduce our carbon footprint, all of which need to be prioritized and measured. With CA ecoSoftware, we expect to streamline the process of data management, helping to reduce errors and operational expenses, and improve our ability to communicate major milestones.”

Based on ambitious targets announced in 2007 using 2006 as a baseline, Tesco plans to halve emissions from existing buildings by 2020; halve distribution emissions of each case of goods delivered by 2012; and halve emissions from new stores by 2020. The company has already halved its energy use per square foot in its UK stores and is diverting 100 percent of waste from its UK business away from landfill, achieving this target almost a year ahead of schedule.

Tesco’s goals are tremendously ambitious, especially considering that the firm has been using spreadsheets for carbon accounting until this point. But so should they be. Tesco will start by working with CA around data center power consumption, but then move onto building estate and business process issues. It will be exciting to watch this partnership evolve. Tesco’s targets are not just internal – its also investing in CA ecoSoftware in order to improve reporting to the Carbon Reduction Commitment.

Another big big win came last week with the announcement the MoD is to work with Logica to get a detailed handle on all energy consumption data at major Defence sites across the UK. Logica is a UK software and services company that is doing some really interesting work in sustainability -for example with its smart grid play. Unlike many other players entering the carbon accounting and management space Logica is a services company first, and software builder second. Any major carbon reduction program is going to require a consulting and services element, so this is all to the good. Logica’s SIRA sustainability reporting tool will capture real-time data from the energy smart meters being installed in buildings across UK Defence sites.

Under cross-government measures, the MOD has set targets to reduce its carbon emissions by 12.5% by 2012 and 30% by 2020, relative to 1999/2000 levels.

Its great to see these huge organisations working on carbon reduction. Big wins add up nicely.

If you don’t know about CRC it is important to establish a strategy now. The 5000 biggest users of energy in the UK will all have to report to the government on reduction efforts, as well as being put on a public league table… The green perception game is going to get some sharp teeth with CRC. Unfortunately only 41% of firms have heard of it.

neither Logica nor CA are clients.

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Green Numbers round-up 10/02/2009

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

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Greenpeace’s carrot for HP: the fine art of lobbying

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Carrot #3

Its been an exceedingly good couple of weeks for HP in terms of its sustainability reputation. First,  Newsweek named HP the greenest company in America, and now Greenpeace has removed the penalty point against HP in its latest guide to greener electronics.

What has most impressed me about Greenpeace in this instance though is its attention to detail. You see, a couple of months ago I reported on Greenpeace’s use of the big stick about HP’s performance with respect to using PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride, or vinyl plastic) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in its PCs.

I was therefore hugely impressed when Tom Dowdall of Greenpeace International contacted me this morning to point out that HP has improved its ranking by taking these chemicals out of its newest machine.

Its easy to bash, but being constructive is a lot harder. Greenpeace seems to have this balance just about it right at the moment. So its well done Tom, well done Greenpeace, and of course well done HP.

photo credit brettf at flickr

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/02/2009

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

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The importance of open standards for broad smart grid adoption

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Standards

Photo credit Leo Reynolds

If you are not sure why open standards are important, you need to read this quote from the opening address of the The Southern African Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference 2005, by then Minister of Science and Technology, Mosibudi Mangena:

The tsunami that devastated South Eastern Asian countries and the north-eastern parts of Africa, is perhaps the most graphic, albeit unfortunate, demonstration of the need for global collaboration, and open ICT standards. The incalculable loss of life and damage to property was exacerbated by the fact that responding agencies and non-governmental groups were unable to share information vital to the rescue effort. Each was using different data and document formats. Relief was slowed, and coordination complicated.

If the Internet weren’t built on open standards we might have found ourselves in a situation where you’d need an IBM browser to look at the IBM website, an HP browser to look at the HP site, a Microsoft browser to view the Microsoft site and so on. In fact it is the very openness of the standards on the internet which has led to its explosive growth and ubiquity.

Proprietary standards lead to vendor lock-in and to the crazy situation where if, for instance you buy a Sony digital camera, it typically uses Memory Stick cards that can be acquired only from Sony and a few select licensees, and this memory is typically much more expensive than alternative memory types available from multiple sources but which won’t work in Sony cameras.

In the Smart Grid space, standards are also extremely important. We need ensure that there is no vendor lock-in (i.e. if a utility has GE transformers, they need to be free to buy their smart meters from any smart meter vendor, not just GE, for example).

One of the most successful of the open standards has been TCP/IP, the protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched network, like the Internet or almost all home or company networks. The next incarnation of TCP/IP is called IPv6. The advantage IPv6 has is that it allows far more items to be networked than is currently possible and that will be vital if we are to start networking the appliances in our house so they can participate in the Smart Grid. This is why companies like Cisco, who have no history in the energy space, are going to have a part to play in the roll-out of Smart Grids. Indeed Cisco have been talking up the importance of IPv6 for Smart Grids and creating ecosystems “to facilitate the adoption of Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications standards for smart grids.”

This explains why standards and interoperability are becoming really hot topics in the Smart Grid space at the minute. In fact that’s what the majority of the company announcements from last week’s Gridweek conference were about:

By far the most important announcement around Smart Grid standards though wasn’t from a company, it was from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They presented for public comment a major new report on Smart Grid interoperability standards. That this document was launched by US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke should be an indication, not just of the importance of standards for Smart Grids but fortunately, just how important the Obama administration perceives them to be as well!

Cisco famously said that the Smart Grid space:

will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than the Internet. If you think about it, some homes have Internet access, but some don’t. Everyone has electricity access–all of those homes could potentially be connected

The only way Smart Grids will achieve that scale is if the standards required for that growth are drawn up and adopted.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/01/2009

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

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Make people responsible for their energy use to drive down consumption!

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Joe Baguley wrote a fantastic post recently on the HomeCamp blog on monitoring energy use in the home. It is a really good read as Joe outlines how he first became interested in home energy monitoring and over time evolved into the “home energy enforcer” (!). He goes through the tools he employed to monitor his home energy use and how, as he evolved to more granular and network accessible information, he was able to make even greater savings on his electricity bills.

What is even better though is how the first comment on the post came from his father, who said:

Pity he did not do this for the 20 plus years he lived at our house, the only way he saved energy then was to lie on the settee and wach me mow the lawns! He neven opened his bedroom curtains as it was easier to reach out of bed and turn on the light.

So there are two very important lessons to be taken from this post:
1. The more information you have about your energy consumption, the easier it is to reduce it and
2. One of the greatest incentives to reducing your energy consumption is having to pay the bills.

Joe didn’t worry about saving electricity while living with his parents, but now that he is paying for his electricity himself, reducing his energy footprint (and by extension his carbon footprint) has taken on a whole new level of importance. As he said himself:

What drove me to do all this was not only a fascination with tech, but more importantly a fascination with not wasting money. Not saving the planet – saving cash. In my experience cash beats morality every time…

I wonder, within businesses, would the best way to reduce energy usage be to expose energy usage information to all the employees (broken down facility, by department and even by individual)? Then make energy reduction part of people’s KPI‘s.

By extension, when electricity information in the home is granular enough, would a good way to reduce it be to assign energy budgets to all the members of the house (especially the kids!)?

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GreenMonk news roundup 09/30/2009

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