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Microsoft expands its Connector bus service

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Microsoft Connector

Photo Credit samk

Microsoft operate a private bus service called the Connector service for employees to get to work at its headquarters in Redmond. Microsoft has 39,000 employees working at its Redmond campus so providing this facility for them is not only Green, it also reduces on congestion and the requirement for parking spaces.

Microsoft announced the other day the expansion of this service to nine new neighbourhoods in the Puget Sound area. It now covers 19 neighbourhoods and to date:

the Connector has provided more than 380,000 rides to 8,650 employees, and has reduced carbon emissions by 5.5 million pounds. With this expansion, estimates suggest the Connector will eliminate annually 6,730,020 employee car miles and 6,387,550 pounds (or 3,194 tons) of carbon emissions.

That’s some impressive numbers!

As well as getting a free ride, the buses are Wi-Fi–enabled and equipped with AC power – now if only they were battery operated or ran on biofuels, then they’d be really Green!

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/03/2008

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  • The future of electricity: A guide to the Smart Grid

    “Our lights may be on, but systemically, the risks associated with relying on an often overtaxed grid grow in size, scale and complexity every day.”

    What if our greatest energy dependency challenge was not related to the global flow of oil, but the one way flow of electricity coming from distant power plants to our wall sockets?

    Realizing the ‘Smart Grid’ Vision
    The conversation about electricity infrastructure is likely to change very soon as governments and the private sector build out the vision of a smarter, electricity web that is infinitely more reliable, robust and profitable.

    tags: smart grid, doe, electricity 2.0

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/02/2008

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  • Amazon forest destruction speeding up, officials say – CNN.com

    The Amazon is being deforested more than three times as fast as last year, Brazilian officials said Monday, acknowledging a sharp reversal after three years of declines in the deforestation rate.
    Nearly 300 square miles of Brazilian rainforest was destroyed in August, officials say.

    Nearly 300 square miles of Brazilian rainforest was destroyed in August, officials say.

    Brazil’s Environment Minister Carlos Minc said upcoming nationwide elections are partly to blame, with mayors in the Amazon region turning a blind eye to illegal logging in hopes of gaining votes locally.

    tags: amazon, amazon rainforest, deforestation

  • Gore calls for coal plant protests – CNN.com

    Former vice president and environmental campaigner Al Gore has urged young people to protest against new coal-fired power plants that don’t use carbon capture and storage technology.

    September 2008: Al Gore speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

    Speaking at the opening plenary session of the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York, Gore said: “If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

    tags: clean coal, sequestration, carbon capture and storage, coal, civil disobedience

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Carbonetworks on Carbon platforms and Carbon strategies

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I talked with Carbonetworks’ President and CEO, Michael Meehan, the other day. We discussed Carbonetworks’ Carbon platform, and how their application helps companies participate in global carbon markets.

Carbonetworks software helps companies understand whether their carbon is going to be an asset or liability to them today and in the future as and works with companies to roll out their carbon strategies.

The television image in the video is from videocrab

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Is micro (home) generation of electricity good for the environment?

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Home solar
Photo Credit benefit of hindsight

Microgeneration, the generation of electricity by home owners, is becoming increasingly common, especially with the cost of energy going up and the cost of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels for the home falling.

The majority of people deploying these solutions are doing so to 1) lower their home energy bills and 2) to help the environment.

What if I told you that often installing microgeneration equipment does not help the environment?

Bear with me while I try to explain. This is complex, counter-intuitive and I am not the world’s best communicator!

Grid operators have problems integrating renewable energy sources onto the grid right now because they are a variable source of supply. Couple that with the variability of demand and your grid starts to become increasingly unstable.

By far the most economic renewable energy source currently is wind but wind energy’s supply curve is often almost completely out of phase with demand (wind blows stronger at night when there is least demand for energy).

The more renewables that are brought onto the grid, the greater an issue this becomes with grid operators having to shut down production from wind farms in times of oversupply! Bear in mind also that there has to be enough generation capacity from non-wind sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear, etc.) to pick up the slack on days when the wind doesn’t blow.

In times of oversupply from renewables, it would be far preferable to be ramping up consumption of energy using moveable loads, rather than shutting down production from renewables.

Now consider the home-owner who has deployed their own wind turbine. At times when the wind is blowing this home-owner is generating power thereby reducing their demand just when there is an oversupply on the grid! And if they have a net metering agreement with their utility, they further exacerbate the problem by pumping extra electricity into the grid, just when it isn’t required!

Conversely, on calm days, when extra energy is most needed, micro-generation contributes nothing.

There are two main problems:
1. There are no economic energy storage technologies currently available – though this situation is evolving rapidly with the ramping up of investment into battery research by the transportation industry in particular and
2. Real-time pricing data for electricity generation are not exposed to the consumer – if they were, and automated demand response mechanisms were put in place, you would see a radical shift in the energy consumption curve (people would consume energy when it was cheaper – i.e. when it is abundant).

If these two nuts were cracked i.e. economic energy storage mechanisms were available and real-time pricing data were exposed, micro-generators could generate energy when the wind blows, store it and then profitably sell it back to the grid when demand increases, or the wind drops.

For now though, while microgeneration may be beneficial in reducing your energy bills, it is of no benefit to the environment.

Note that I didn’t address CHP in this post because I was trying to keep things simple! CHP can be beneficial, as can any microgeneration, if the production of energy increases in line with the price of electricity.

As the price of electricity goes up, so too does its carbon footprint. If you consume electricity when it is cheap, you are facilitating the greater penetration of renewables onto the grid. If, as a micro-generator, you can produce clean power when electricity is expensive, then you are helping the environment.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I fundamentally believe microgeneration is a good thing. However, given the current antiquated state of the grid in many countries, the disconnect between generation and demand profiles for wind particularly, and the lack of decent energy storage technologies, the environmental benefits of microgeneration are far from straightforward. This will change as energy storage options improve and demand response mechanisms and smart grids are deployed.

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GreenMonk news roundup 10/01/2008

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  • PoCarles.com & US: Saint-Gobain and Second Life : Explaining glazing and playing for real trees

    Saint-Gobain Glass, will run a set of conferences, to co-invent with some eco-friendly Second Life residents their next generation of products. The idea is to inspire more than ever both the R&D and Marketing department.

    As well as the conferences, there is a game about the best practices for saving energy in your house, by using the right kind of high-technology glaze. Every resident can play (and win !) and then see a tree growing on Saint-Gobain island. The game will stay open until November 18th. Then, for each virtual tree in Second Life, we will plant a real tree in Lebanon by January 2009.

    tags: glass, glazing, energy

  • Jon Worth » Lyon-Paris vs. Manchester-London

    The case for a high speed rail network in the UK

    tags: tgv, ave, high speed train, rail

  • I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Cringely Plan | PBS

    In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn’t burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn’t much different from that.

    tags: energy policy

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Clear Climate Code project needs your help

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Climate record
Photo Credit vodstrup

I came across the Clear Climat Code project via a message from Sig.

Like all good ideas, this one is very simple –

The Clear Climate Code project writes and maintains software for climate modelling and analysis, with an emphasis on clarity and correctness.

The results of some climate-related software are used as the basis for important public policy decisions. If the software is not clearly correct, decision-making will be obscured by debates about it. The project goals are to clear away that obscurity, to increase the clarity and correctness of climate science software.

Ticks two of my favourite boxes straight away – open source and the climate!

The guys in Ravenbrook, who are coordinating this project took this task on themselves and they have decided to seek a little outside help in the process.

If you can program in Python and would like to help out, you can get in touch with Ravenbrook by email here

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Monitors on the TransEurasia Express!

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Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Fujitsu Siemens Computers announced recently that it was shipping 10,000 monitors and bare bones system chassis from China to Germany by train!

I thought this was simply a pr stunt to get some headlines until I read that transporting the goods by train is one-third faster than ocean freight, costs only one-quarter as much as air freight and yet produces less than 5% of the CO2 emissions of air freight!

Intrigued I invited Fujitsu Siemens senior director of global logistics, Hans Erbe to come on GreenMonk TV to discuss the shipment and to give us some hard numbers around money and CO2 saved!

You can foillow the progress of the shipment on the train’s blog at http://www.transeurasiablog.com/

I should also apologise for the quality of the audio in the podcast. We were connected via Skype and despite connecting several times, this was the best audio we could get 🙁

The television image in the video is from videocrab

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GreenMonk news roundup 09/30/2008

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  • In Need Of Energy: 3 Paths To Personal Power: From The South Of Spain ~ by Paul Read

    An interesting story about getting solar panels installed living in the South of Spain

    tags: solar power, home generation

  • Straight Goods – Ozone hole, again – Chemical lobby weakening ozone treaty.

    More than one million new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed each year and more than 10,000 people will die as a result in the United States alone. That’s nearly 90 percent more skin cancer than in the 1960s.

    Although the scientific evidence wasn’t especially strong 20 years ago, 24 nations headed by Argentina, the United States and Canada took a precautionary approach and signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. That foresight prevented the further destruction of the ozone layer and, by good fortune, kept the equivalent of tens of billions of tonnes of additional carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

    tags: ozone, ozone layer, skin cancer, hcfc, hfc, cfc, co2, greenhouse gas

  • Update: The State of U.S. Geothermal Production and Development

    With 2,957.94 megawatts (MW) of installed geothermal capacity, the United States remains the world leader with 30% of the online capacity total. A recent industry update showed an increase in the pace of geothermal production in the U.S., a country that many experts believe should take initiative to shed the expensive, foreign-dependent lifestyle of running on oil and gas and begin to help mitigate the threat of global warming.

    Further, new technologies promise increased growth in locations previously not considered, indicating that the future outlook for expanded production from conventional and enhanced geothermal systems is positive.

    Geothermal energy, considered by a growing number of renewable energy experts as the best form of renewable energy for its ability to provide continuous, 24-hour, clean, sustainable energy production, has long been an underdog to other technologies. With advances in technology and funding from government and investors, the U.S. can steadily increase development in using the heat of the Earth itself for substantial and widespread energy production

    tags: geo, thermal, geothermal, geothermal energy, geothermal power

  • London firm unveils new software for mobile phones that can track transport and measure carbon footprint | Environment | guardian.co.uk

    Keeping track of your carbon footprint could become as simple as slipping a mobile phone in your pocket: a London-based start-up company has developed software for mobile phones that uses global positioning satellites to work out automatically whether you are walking, driving or flying and then calculate your impact on the environment.

    tags: carbon footprint, mobile phone, gps

  • Hottest tech job in America? Wildlife biologist – Sep. 18, 2008

    With scores of solar power stations planned for sites in the Southwest, demand for wildlife biologists is hot. They’re needed to look for lizards and other threatened fauna and flora, to draw up habitat-protection plans, and to comply with endangered-species laws to ensure that a desert tortoise or a kit fox won’t be inadvertently squashed by a solar array.

    tags: solar, solar power, biologist, wildlife biologist

  • Ostara secures $10.5M for wastewater-to-fertilizer technology » VentureBeat

    Vancouver, Canada-based Ostara Nutrient Recovery Systems is the latest in a series of companies to make its business converting waste into useful products — in this case by removing nutrients, like phosophorus, from wastewater and recycling them into fertilizer. The water treatment firm has just raised $10.5 million in private equity financing from VantagePoint Venture Partners and Foursome Investments Limited.

    tags: recovery, recycling, water, water treatment

  • New Battery Alternative Stores Huge Amounts of Energy : Gas 2.0

    A research group at the University of Texas at Austin has taken a carbon-based nanomaterial called graphene, and developed it into a device that has the potential to vastly improve upon the energy storage capacity of batteries. Reportedly, graphene could also double the current maximum storage capacity of the group of battery alternatives known as ultracapacitors

    tags: graphene, ultracapacitors, energy storage

  • Ocean offers hope for green energy

    Indeed, ocean energy is “probably the last of the large natural resources not yet investigated for producing electricity in the United States,” according to a report from the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.

    While the technology is still in its infancy, the report predicts ocean energy could be among the most environmentally benign generation methods yet developed.

    tags: wave power, wave energy, hydrokinetic

  • Wave power to the people – Sweden.se

    wave power could supply Europe with 2,000 terawatt hours of clean electricity per year. That is about half the electricity used in Western Europe or the United States each year.

    tags: wave energy, wave power

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GreenMonk news roundup 09/29/2008

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  • MSNBC Interactive

    A dynamic Energy map of America showing infor on everything from the grid to biomass, geothermal, wind solar etc.

    tags: energy, renewables, map, grid

  • The Energy Roadmap – Houston, we have a problem! Energy storage

    Business Week is reporting that ”…13 days since Hurricane Ike ripped through Texas, and nearly one-quarter of the residents of the fourth-largest U.S. city still don’t have electricity.”

    Is the problem electricity production?
    No. The power plants are fine.

    The problem is the wires. The grid itself
    The network is too vast to repair quickly in the fall out of Hurricane Ike.

    The problem is storage.
    We have no viable way of storing vast amounts of electricity at the local level.

    The solution? Making energy storage a priority and create systems that support a local ‘Electron Reserve’.

    tags: energy storage, electrical grid, grid

  • The Energy Roadmap – Consumers looking to cleantech startups

    The key word for the cleantech (or alternative energy) world is momentum.

    Market conditions change, as do consumer attitudes and expectations. If alternative energy concepts fail to live up to their hype, public support could fade along with political will and policies that enable growth.

    Cleantech startups are trying to reach people who are asking ‘What can I do to accelerate changes in energy?’

    tags: cleantech, wind energy, solar energy, home generation, renewables

  • Helix Wind Energy for Home Use | Green Tech Gazette

    Helix Wind out of San Diego, California has come up with an atypical wind turbine design for home use. While most wind turbines still use the tried and true rotor or propeller style to catch the breeze, the Helix Wind turbines use something more akin to artwork.

    Because of their unique design Helix Wind turbines are capable of capturing omni-directional winds and transforming this into electrical energy. In addition, the turbines are extremely quiet, operating just 5 decibels above ambient background noise.

    tags: wind energy, wind turbine, helix wind