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GreenMonk news roundup 08/29/2009

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

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Green Numbers round-up 08/28/2009

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

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GreenMonk news roundup 08/28/2009

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

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GreenMonk news roundup 08/27/2009

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

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IBM’s Jim Spohrer on the Smarter Planet University Jam

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IBM held their inaugural Smarter Planet University Jam earlier this year. The Jam was a crowdsourcing process held by IBM earlier this year where nearly 2,000 students from more than 200 universities from 40 countries around the world took part with the aim of building a Smarter Planet through technology.

Some of the findings from the Jam were:

  • Eight of 10 students want universities to revamp traditional learning environment
  • Over 90% want to join or start a Green Advocacy group at their campus
  • 64% of students believe that the world has a chance to reverse carbon emissions by 2025 and
  • 60% believe that education and efficient transportation offer the best hope for sustainability of our cities

I had the chance to talk to Jim Spohrer, the Director of IBM’s Global University Programs (GUP) recently about the Jam. We discussed the thinking behind it, the outcomes what were its take-aways.

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Friday Green numbers roundup 07/31/2009

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I am going to start posting numbers based posts regularly on Fridays from now on (as soon as I return from my holidays i.e. from August 26th onwards).

I’d love to hear from people if there is an appetite for these kinds of posts. Feel free to leVe your opinion or suggestions in the comments section below. Thanks.

  • EcoSystem Executes Agreement for $76 Million in Equity Financing

    EcoSystem Corporation today announced its execution of agreements for the sale of EcoSystem preferred stock and warrants to purchase common stock to five investment funds for $76 million.

    Funding under the agreements is expected to occur prior to August 5, 2009 upon the satisfaction by EcoSystem of pre-funding conditions. The funds will be held in a restricted EcoSystem account and will be available for use according to the use of proceeds schedule and other conditions specified in the agreements.

    EcoSystem will use the investment proceeds to acquire distressed ethanol production facilities, to acquire other strategically-compatible assets, and to develop and integrate EcoSystem’s Cellulosic Corn™ technologies into EcoSystem’s planned ethanol production facilities.

    tags: EcoSystem Corporation, ethanol, Cellulosic Corn, GreenNumbers

  • Convey Computer secures $24m Series B venture financing for green computers

    Green computing company Convey Computer Corporation has closed $24.15m in Series B financing. The round of funding was led by new investor, Braemar Energy Ventures. Series A investors CenterPoint Ventures, Intel Capital, InterWest Partners, Rho Ventures, and Xilinx also participated.

    Additionally, the company has announced two new board members in Jiong Ma, PhD, of Braemar Energy Ventures and Joshua Ruch of Rho Ventures.

    tags: Convey Computer Corporation, Braemar Energy Ventures, GreenNumbers, CenterPoint Ventures, Intel Capital, InterWest Partners, Rho Ventures, Xilinx

  • North American Windpower: Content / Projects & Contracts / NaturEner Closes On Construction Financing Tax-Equity Facility For Montana Wind Project

    San Francisco-based NaturEner USA LLC has closed on a $117.5 million construction loan and a $120 million tax-equity facility arranged by Morgan Stanley for NaturEner’s Glacier II wind farm outside Ethridge, Mont.

    tags: NaturEner, Morgan Stanley, glacier II, Wind farm, GreenNumbers

  • Intel actively looking at more cleantech deals | Small Business | Reuters

    Intel Corp’s global investment arm Intel Capital is actively looking at additional investments in cleantech companies and could announce more deals this year, a senior executive said on Wednesday.

    “We are actively looking at companies,” said Steve Eichenlaub, head of Intel Capital’s cleantech investments.

    “In this environment where a lot of venture capitalists had to pull back, for whatever reason, … we are seeing more companies come our way as our doors are open,” he added.

    Intel Capital said earlier on Wednesday that it has invested about $10 million in five cleantech companies, including energy efficiency company CPower and Grid Net, which builds software for smart meters.

    tags: intel, intel capital, cpower, grid net, smart meters, GreenNumbers

  • Electric-car maker Coda gains high-powered investors | Green Tech – CNET News

    Electric sedan maker Coda Automotive has attracted some well-connected people with its latest round of funding, including former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson.

    The company, which plans to sell an all-electric sedan in California next year, said on Tuesday that it has completed a series B round of $24 million in equity. The money will be used to bring its car to market and fund a joint venture to manufacture the car battery.

    The Coda is a highway-capable sedan with a 100-mile range to be made in China.
    (Credit: Coda Automotive)

    Joining Paulson as an investor and President Clinton’s former chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty. Other investors include investment bank Piper Jaffray, energy investor Tom Steyer, former Edison International CEO John Bryson, and company executives

    tags: coda, coda automotive, hank paulson, bev, battery, GreenNumbers

  • SunRun Raises $18M for Solar-As-A-Service | Green Business | Reuters

    Residential solar company SunRun closed a Series B round of funding for $18 million led by Accel Partners and joined by existing investor, Foundation Capital.

    The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2007, said it plans to use the funding to expand into new markets.

    SunRun expanded its solar-as-a-service business to Massachusetts and Arizona in early 2009.

    SunRun provides turnkey residential solar systems with minimal start-up costs as low as $1,000. Customers do not own the systems, but instead buy the electricity at a fixed rate from SunRun.

    tags: SunRun, Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, GreenNumbers, solar energy

  • 28/07/09 ACCIONA net leaps 343 to 1.198 billion euros in 1H/09

    Net financial debt falls 59 per cent to 7.353 billion euros; revenue amounts to 2.931 billion euros and EBITDA comes to 393 million.

    ACCIONA closed the first half of 2009 with an attributable net profit of 1.198 billion euros, 343 per cent more than in the same period of 2008. This increase comes mainly as a result of the balance between income and expenses derived from the Endesa operation. Net profit excluding extraordinary items came to 68 million euros, a 45.5 per cent fall on the same period of last year.

    tags: GreenNumbers, Acciona, Endesa

  • Obama Administration Awards More Than $54M For State Energy Prog

    U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently announced more than $54M in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support energy efficiency and renewable energy projects in Nevada, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Under DOE’s State Energy Program, states and territories have proposed statewide plans that prioritize energy savings, create or retain jobs, increase the use of renewable energy, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    “This funding will provide an important boost for state economies, help to put Americans back to work, and move us toward energy independence,” said Secretary Chu. “It reflects our commitment to support innovative state and local strategies to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy while insisting that taxpayer dollars be spent responsibly.”

    These states and territories are receiving 40 percent of their total State Energy Program (SEP) funding authorized under the Recovery Act today. They will now have received 50 percent of their total Recovery Act SEP funding. The initial 10 percent of total funding was previously available to states to support planning activities; the remaining 50 percent of funds will be released once they meet reporting, oversight, and accountability milestones required by the Recovery Act.

    tags: steven chu, GreenNumbers, ARRA, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, DOE, energy savings, renewable energy, greenhouse gas emissions

  • McKinsey: Energy efficiency could save $700 billion | Green Tech – CNET News

    Energy efficiency–it’s not just the low-hanging fruit, it’s the fruit that’s lying on the ground, Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently quipped. Now McKinsey has put a number on the potential savings: $1.2 trillion on an investment of $520 billion over 10 years.

    The consulting firm on Wednesday released a follow-up report to its often-cited economic analysis for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    tags: energy efficiency, GreenNumbers, steven chu, mckinsey, greenmonktv

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

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TRIRIGA – “like a kitchen towel for stimulus funds!”

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Kitchen Towel

Photo credit renaissancechambara

When I published my video interview of Hara’s CEO Amit Chatterjee, John Clarke, Director of Climate Change Solutions, TRIRIGA left the following comment:

I agree with Amit’s ‘carbon diet’ analogy as it highlights the need for organization to move to a state of ‘carbon heath’. Achieving true carbon health requires a comprehensive strategy focused on the operational and resource efficiency of an organization. Organizations focused on sustainability must move beyond the environmental reporting to evaluate operational changes and investment opportunities that reduce their environmental impact.
Organizations need software that moves beyond carbon accounting to deliver management and reduction components. The software should weigh an organization’s environmental impacts to identify underperforming facilities, processes and assets, analyzes the financial and environmental benefits of capital investments to develop the ideal diet and automate preventive maintenance activities to keep critical equipment operating at peak resource efficiency.
For the sake of transparency, I work for a company that has this kind of software, and I’m happy to discuss the topic with anyone who’s interested. Feel free to reach out.

I was intrigued so we had a chat with John yesterday about TRIRIGA (I forgot to ask why the name is in all caps!).

TRIRIGA started off in 2000 as a technology spin off from the largest design build firm in the casino construction industry (!) and have grown to a 211 person company since then. According to John, TRIRIGA has more than a third of the Fortune 100 using its software to manage their global real estate portfolio. They have identified this space as having huge opportunities because buildings currently represent 48% of carbon emissions globally and energy represents one third of a buildings operating costs.

In 2006 TRIRIGA received feedback from its customer advisory board that they needed to build technology to measure their environmental impact and optimise capital spend relative to carbon abatement on top of the existing software. In response they extended their software to capture energy, waste, water, direct-to-air emissions, and they embedded the Greenhouse Gas protocol to capture the carbon associated with all of this data.

With this data mapped against the real estate portfolio it is possible to identify under-performing locations.

As John put it

If you consider a company with identical buildings in Chicago and New York, same square footage, same equipment, same opportunities for replacing insulation, etc. so you have got the exact same abatement options. When you consider the CO2 emissions associated with the energy in Illinois versus New York (one being predominantly coal-fired, the other having a combination of energy sources including nuclear which has a much lower carbon co-efficient) and then you associate also with that the cost of energy in those two facilities that will identify that the same capital investment in two different locations will have a significantly different return to the organisation depending on the environmental and economic impacts.

All of those factors help identify your under-performing locations and then when you consider the abatement options, the system will then weigh those different characteristics to determine the ideal opportunities based on your strategic goals, whether that is cost reduction with some carbon goals or carbon reduction with the highest economic saving.

TRIRIGA are IBM Partners and they have Deloitte as strategic partners (as well as Deloitte’s being a customer for all of their real estate management).

Data in TRIRIGA’s software can be tracked on either a facility basis or on a project basis (organisations can track capital projects within TRIRIGA). TRIRIGA has a set of assessment tools which evaluates the under-performing locations, a set of financial models that evaluate the financial and economic return, the environmental opportunities can be used to generate a capital project which is then used to manage the implementation (i.e bid management, LEED/BREEAM checklists, etc.). On project completion, TRIRIGA handles the commissioning (inspections of set points, etc.) and finally TRIRIGA drives a set of automated alerts and work order tasks to notify those responsible at the required intervals, whether time-based or based on some runtime reading. So pretty much a full life-cycle delivered within the TRIRIGA applications.

The US federal govt has allocated $bn’s to energy efficiency programs recently. A significant portion of that is going to public schools (govt funded schools) systems. At the same time, the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act in the US senate will provide an additional $6.7bn for Green public schools. So roughly $45bn is about to be pumped into the energy efficiency of the public school system in the US. Denver public schools (a TRIRIGA customer) raised in the order of $300m in a public bond to update their schools. All of that money is under the control of the facility and real estate groups. This is not unusual, as you look at organisations who are attempting to reduce their environmental impact, you’ll see a similar trend, the money that is being allocated is being transferred from the controller to the operations group (the COO) and to the facilities group. These are the very people TRIRIGA deals with.

As my colleague James Governor (@monkchips) pointed out on the call, TRIRIGA is “like a kitchen towel for stimulus funds!”

TRIRIGA software is a Java based web app and it runs on either an Oracle or SQL Server back-end db. It integrates with most versions of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP (they are a NetWeaver certified application) ERP apps.

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/31/2009

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

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/30/2009

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

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GreenMonk news roundup 07/29/2009

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