Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down
HP helps Africa with recycling standards – PC Magazine
HP is working with international development groups to improve computer recycling practices in four of its fastest-growing African markets.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I have made no secret of the fact that I am a big fan of Smart Grids and Demand Response programs (properly rolled out, of course!). I have also spoken at various international conferences propounding the benefits of Smart Grids and Demand Response for quite a while now.
You can imagine my disappointment then when I read an article entitled Outsmarting the Smart Grid which was strongly anti-Smart Grids, on The EnergyCollective site by William Tucker, a pro-nuclear writer.
William sets a facetious tone for the article in his opening paragraph:
The latest delusion about energy is the “smart grid.” This bright new technological miracle will once again help us overcome the realities of physics and allow us to live in a world run on wind and sunshine.
The genesis for Mr Tucker’s displeasure appears to be the above GE ad informing people of the benefits of Smart Grids.
He says
It’s fitting that the girl is standing in front of a clothes dryer because that and washing dishes are the only examples anyone has ever been able to come up with about how residential users are going to “redistribute” their energy consumption.
What else can they do? Are they going to wait until after midnight to watch prime-time television? Are they going to heat up dinner at 4 a.m.? Are they going to turn on lights at sunrise instead of sunset? And how about air conditioning, that most voracious consumer of electricity?
Again with the unhelpful sarcasm.
While it is true that not all loads in the home are movable – I use the example that I am highly unlikely to get up at 3am to cook my dinner just because energy is cheaper – there are more than just the dish washer and the dryer. Mr Tucker neglects to mention here air conditioning (though he does mention it elsewhere in his post so he is aware of it). Nor does he mention heating water in an immersion, refrigeration, PHEVs or storage heaters for example – all very movable residential loads. Of course, he neglects to mention industrial scale demand response altogether!
Mr Tucker then re-defines the Smart Grid to suit his argument
the underlying presumption of the smart grid is that it will somehow help us conserve significant amounts of energy
Uh, no it isn’t. The presumption of the Smart Grid is that it will more closely align demand with supply, thereby stabilising the grid and facilitating the further penetration of renewables onto it, thereby lowering our carbon footprint. The Smart 2020 report (7mb pdf) estimates that Smart Grids will reduce CO2 by 2.03 GtCO2e by 2020.
Mr Tucker seems hell-bent though on criticising Smart Grids for not reducing consumption quoting from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) “The Green Grid,” study published last June
its most optimistic prediction was that by 2030 we could reduce electrical consumption by 7 to 11 percent below what is now being projected. That’s not an absolute reduction in consumption but only a slowing of its anticipated rise. Second, as the study concludes, “shift[ing] load from on-peak to off-peak periods may not necessarily save energy.” It will only save money. And when you make electricity cheaper, people may consumer more of it.
What Mr Tucker is again conveniently forgetting is that electrical consumption is not the problem, per se. The problem occurs when that energy is generated using coal, oil or some other non-renewable form.
In fact, there are times when we have too much electricity and you are increasingly seeing wind farms curtailed as a result of this phenomenon. Instead of curtailing wind energy when we have an excess, what we should be doing is demand stimulation – stimulating people to increase their demand at this time of excess supply. This can be achieved by dropping the price of electricity to 0 or even making it negatively priced and making that information available via Demand Response programs rolled out over Smart Grids.
Mr Tucker concludes by once more poking fun at the GE ad
In that light, it’s worth going back to that last little GE vignette where the girl says, “It’s sunny in Arizona.” She is standing at a window looking at a waxing half moon about three hours above the horizon. If she’s in the Midwest, that means the sun has already set in Arizona. If she’s on the East Coast, then it’s about to go down. She’d better get to bed because in another twenty minutes the lights, refrigerator, television, computers and everything else are going to turn off.
Meeting pointless pedantry with more pointless pedantry, the girl is looking at a street light, not a waxing moon.
Mr Tucker’s main argument is that Smart Grids won’t necessarily reduce consumption so we shouldn’t bother with them.
Energy is very abstract, no-one really cares how much they use. What they do care about is the utility bill at the end of the month and increasingly, the carbon footprint of that consumption. If I consume 10 TeraWatt hours in my home daily (not possibly obviously!), as long as it has a negligible carbon footprint, so what?
What Smart Grids and intelligent Demand Response programs will do is, massage the demand for electricity so that it lines up with the supply. This stabilises the grid for the ISO (the grid operator) allowing them to add even more variable generation sources (i.e. renewables) to the system lowering costs and carbon footprints. Win, win.
The discussion continues in the comments where Mr Tucker rails against Demand Response
Now that I think about it, here’s what’s going to happen if the utility can cut off 1/6th of its air conditioning load on a rotating basis. If people know this – which they will – they’re just going to run their air conditioning a little higher while it’s on in order to compensate for the 1/6th of the time it’s off. It’s like the low-flush toilets that you have to flush twice to do the job.
However, for once he has a valid point!
This is why when you roll out Demand Response programs, you put the control directly in the hands of the consumer. The top-down, command and control utility attitude of “we’ll turn off your aircon when it suits us” will only turn people against Demand Response.
Instead, you roll out home area networks and home energy portals where people decide themselves how they want their devices to respond to pricing signals. You’d be able to program your dishwasher to wash the dishes when electricity at 6c/KWh or 6am, which ever came sooner, for example. If you put the washer on at 8pm, for the most part, as long as the dishes are washed by 7am the following morning, you don’t care when it happens.
Similarly with your immersion, if it selectively heats the water when electricity drops below either a set price or a set temperature, as long as you have enough hot water, you are happy.
Obviously any home energy portal like this would allow the home owner full control over all the devices in the house because they belong to the home owner, not the utility!
Long term, what I want to see happen is, I want utilities to publish their generation mix (% coal, % natural gas, % oil, % hydro, % chg, % wind, etc.), as well their prices, in realtime. That way I should be able not only to control my devices but also have the ability to select the Greenest utility supplier dynamically at any time – now that’s a Smart Grid well worth having.
Technology Treading Lightly : The Rise of AV Power and Green TV
Detailed thought-provoking blog post on the power consumption of various in-home av setups
NASA – NASA-Funded Carbon Dioxide Map of U.S. Released on Google Earth
Interactive maps that detail carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are now available on the popular Google Earth platform. The maps, funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy through the joint North American Carbon Program, can display fossil fuel emissions by the hour, geographic region, and fuel type.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I’m giving a talk at the O’Reilly ETech conference in San Jose next month (March 11th 2009). The title of my talk is “Electricity 2.0: Applying The Lessons Of The Web To Our Energy Networks“.
The talk will be about how to make the electrical distribution system more green and more resilient using demand response and smart grids in a consumer empowering way. I will also discuss my vision for an electricity system where you will be able to see the generation mix of all utilities and dynamically chose the Greenest supplier and other out there concepts!
In the video above, you can watch a primer to this talk I gave in a webinar for O’Reilly last night.
America’s future wind web? | csmonitor.com
Wind power could feed 20 percent of the US energy diet. But first, the country needs a new energy network.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The government is expected to give the go-ahead to the coal-burning Kingsnorth power plant. Here, one of the world’s foremost climate experts launches an excoriating attack on Britain’s long love affair with the most polluting fossil fuel of all
Poor Brazilians rejoice as loggers return to pillage the rainforest | Environment | The Observer
Twelve months ago, troops and police drove illegal loggers out of the Amazon in an effort to halt deforestation. A year later, the sawmills are starting to reopen – and unemployed locals couldn’t be happier. Tom Phillips reports from Tailândia
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
A superb GreenPeace photo essay on how electronic waste, given to a UK County Council (Hampshire) bring center, illegally ended up in Nigeria.
Unfortunately due to greed and complete lack of oversight, I suspect this kind of thing happens all too often, leading to massive pollution problems in the recipient countries.
Is America Ready to Quit Coal? – NYTimes.com
With concerns over climate change intensifying, electricity generation from coal, once reliably cheap, looks increasingly expensive in the face of the all-but-certain prospect of regulations that would impose significant costs on companies that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Cutting Costs With Solar Walls – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com
Amidst the general gloom in the renewable energy sector, one Toronto-based energy company is discovering a renewed appetite for a low-cost, low-tech solar air heating system based on one of the immutable laws of physics: hot air rises.
Cheap food damages the environment, says Waitrose boss | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Cheap food damages the environment, says Waitrose boss
Saving on fuel and safeguarding the environment with smart driving
GreenDrive advises the driver on the most economical driving style to use, when to accelerate, when to break, and when to keep the speed. This is done on mobile phones and personal navigation devices.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Tivoli and Ricoh had a stand at Pulse 2009 where they were showing how it is possible to reduce a company’s carbon footprint by actively measuring and managing printer usage across organisations, through software!
I asked the guys there to talk me through the process and to give a demo to camera.
Oh, and there was free beer at the conference, hence the bottle in my hand!!!
[Disclosure – IBM paid my travel and expenses to attend Pulse 2009]
Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP for Energy and Environment. He gave this presentation at the Pulse 2009 conference last week. I thought it was so good I asked him for a copy to put up on SlideShare – he very graciously agreed, so here it is.
There were some amazing statistics in the talk. Here are just a few of the highlights for me from the deck –
Slide 8:
In 2001, there were 60 million transistors for every human on the planet… by 2010 there will be 1 billion transistors per human. In 2005 there were 1.3 billion RFID tags in circulation…… by 2010 there will be 30 billion
Slide 10:
Our personal information footprints will grow 16 times between now and 2020
Slide 13:
an estimated 170 billion kilowatts are wasted by consumers each year due to insufficient power usage information
Slide 15:
Forty-five percent of traffic on the busiest New York City streets is circling the block looking for parking …congested roadways cost $78 billion annually in the form of 4.2 billion wasted hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted gas
Slide 17:
U.S. CPG companies and retailers lose $40 billion annually due to inefficient supply chains
and Slide 19:
In the U.S., a typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles, a potato 1,200 miles, a beef roast 600 miles …grocers and consumers throw away $48 billion worth of food every year
Slide 21:
Industry accounts for about 22% of freshwater usage today …the combined direct consumption of five food and beverage giants in 2007 was enough to serve the daily basic water needs of everyone on the planet
and Slide 42:
42% of IBM’s employees do not regularly come into an office saving $100M annually in real estate costs
Last year IBM saved $97M in travel costs by using online collaboration
Process improvements in the chip making process in Burlington, VT are saving 20M gallons of water, 15 thousand gallons of chemicals and over 1.5M kilowatts of electricity annually….achieving $3M in annual savings and increasing manufacturing production over 30%
What part of the presentation did you find most interesting?
[Disclosure – IBM paid my travel and expenses to attend Pulse 2009]