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GreenMonk news roundup 09/27/2008

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Schwarzenegger sends “a strong message” to the federal govt

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Arnold Schwarzenegger
Photo Credit Thomas Hawk

I see Grist reporting that the US’ first Cap and Trade program went live. Power plant owners in 10 Northeastern states had to submit sealed bids in order to emit greenhouse gases yesterday.

Then the New York Times has a story about an alliance of 7 Western States and 4 Canadian provinces who have come together under the name Western Climate Initiative to also put a Cap and Trade system in place.

While the WCI draft plan doesn’t come into effect until 2012, the Northeastern states is now live! It only requires a 10 percent reduction in emissions by 2019 and that only in emissions generated by power plants but it is better than nothing and it sets a precedent.

And, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said

We’re sending a strong message to our federal governments that states and provinces are moving forward in the absence of federal action, and we’re setting the stage for national programs that are just as aggressive.

More aggressive, I hope – looks like politics has seriously diminished the “Terminator’s” definition of aggressive!

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Living In De-material World: On Microsoft and Bit Miles

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I have written a fair bit here about Bit Miles (the moral imperative to digitise) and business process dematerialisation, so I was particularly interested in a recent trip to Microsoft’s gaming and world simulation division.

What was so relevant?

One area that I believe holds out great promise for this kind of simulation technology is in sustainable and sustainability modeling. Take the pilot training example above; while the highest cost may be for maintenance engineers, but how much fuel is being needlessly burned? Training in the real world is expensive. Moving Atoms has a cost. I have recently started talking about Bit Miles as a Greenmonk narrative, defined as is the carbon cost associated with moving a good or creating a service that could instead have been delivered digitally. Bit Miles offer us a moral imperative to digitize: a simulation of the world is a beautiful opportunity to rethink and potentially dematerialize business processes.

Why not Supply Chain Simulator ™, which would pull together all of your plant information (pulled in from OSI, say), where your people are located (Peoplesoft), and how you move goods and services (SAP) around the world? An organisation could begin to run really deep “What If” scenarios about the energy costs of their businesses with simulations like these. But what would really make these models sing is the fact they’d be visual and immersive. Telling is rarely as effective as Showing. What would a low energy manufacturing business look like? With virtual technology we could maybe work it out. At this point it might seem that I have gone off the deep end, but the ESP team inspires that in you. I didn’t see a single Powerpoint slide during my visit. Rather Shawn likes to open up people’s imaginations.

I would love to know your thoughts- there is a good discussion going on over at my monkchips blog.

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Daily Links 09/26/2008

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Greenmonk’s Inaugural Cool Award: Fujitsu Siemens

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A couple of months ago I got the chance to chat with Fujitsu Siemens Computer’s chief technology officer (CTO), Dr Joseph Reger, who leads the company’s sustainability initiatives. We went over a fair amount of ground, but one thing that stuck with me was a new technology that came to the market last month – monitors that consume zero power when on standby. Let me just say that again – computer monitors that consumer zero watts on standby. When not in use DC power shuts down completely.
Anyone that has checked the power consumption of their electronic devices, using a Kill-a-Watt monitor, for example, knows just how greedy devices on standby can be (TVs and set-top boxes = bad news). And we have a lot of them in every home and office. According to FSC’s press release:

“Reducing European Union-wide power consumption through the adoption of electrical goods that use zero watts in standby mode would save an estimated 35 Terawatt hours per year according to the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung) – while the EU Stand-by Initiative reports estimates that stand-by power accounts for about 10 percent of the electricity use in homes and offices of the EU Member States.”

In other words, standby power is a problem very much worth solving. This is innovation at work and I commend the engineers at FSC for their efforts. Now if they can just apply the same technology to every other device I use…

When I first heard about the SCENICVIEW ECO device, I thought it had to be worth an award. So I thought why not award it? We need to work out what the COOL award means (Greenmonk probably needs a logo, for it, for example), but for now I would just like to say well done FSC – and congratulations. You are worthy winners of the first Greenmonk cool award for finding ways to lower global carbon emissions and energy consumption.

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If the current climate crisis is not addressed quickly, a global economic slowdown will be the least of our concerns!

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Lights on, nobody home
Photo Credit Hil

Long time buddy Dennis Howlett wrote an interesting post earlier today where he talks about the dangers of being an evangelist.

In the post he takes me to task for being idealistic:

Solutions are only any good if they are solving an identifiable problem. Too often I see social media people trying to force fit solutions based on a perceived need. It is all done with the best of intentions but it is a fundamentally flawed strategy. Here’s a good illustration.

The other day, my good friend Tom Raftery was arguing that the $700 billion US financial industry rescue plan paled into insignificance compared to the good that could be done by investing a fraction of that amount in greening technologies. He may well be right. Many of us at least vaguely know we’re all going to hell in a hand basket if we don’t get a grip on climate change issues. But it isn’t top of mind in the US. Not even remotely close. Given the choice of an immediate resolution to what many believe is the imminent collapse of the US capital markets and a far off destruction of earthly resources is a non contest. The second reality is too remote for many to contemplate even though Tom’s argument is laudable. I suggested putting it in those comparative terms. Whether he does is another matter.

Dennis is referring to a couple of posts I put up on Twitter the other day where I said:

The climate crisis is infinitel more dire than the financial crisis, so why aren’t we spending billions on it? http://url.ie/q51

@jeffnolan I don’t think fixing the climate is noble, I think it is waaaaay beyond urgent and dwarves the importance of the financial crisis

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@dahowlett The US gov’t isn’t investing in the climate prob but can spend $100billion on the financial crisis? Insanity!

At the time of writing those posts I incorrectly thought that the US government was investing $100 billion to fix the financial crisis. I have since realised that that figure is actually $700 billion.

I am not sure if Dennis saw the original post and my link to Joseph Romm’s excellent article because if he did and he had followed it he would have read things like:

If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

So warned IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri last fall when the IPCC released its major multi-year report synthesizing our understanding of climate science. And remember Pachauri was handpicked by the Bush administration to replace the “alarmist” Bob Watson.

and

What happens if we fail to act in time to avert the climate catastrophe?

Note, none of the above points are opinion. They are facts culled from the IPCC reports, reports which are widely believed to be conservative and whose predictions up to now have been shown to underestimate the observed outcomes of climate change to-date.

Now, given that the IPCC think we need to take definitive action before 2012 or it will be too late and that most people believe the IPCC to be extremely conservative, I think Dennis may want to re-think his assertion that:

Given the choice of an immediate resolution to what many believe is the imminent collapse of the US capital markets and a far off destruction of earthly resources is a non contest

Then again, maybe he’s right!

How many people do you know who are aware that definitive action needs to be taken by 2012 or its too late? Not many I suspect.

As against that, how many people do you know who are aware of the immediacy of the current financial crisis? Significantly more, I imagine.

The message about the immediacy and urgency of climate change is not getting out there.

If the current financial crisis is not addressed quickly, we risk a global economic slowdown.

If the current climate crisis is not addressed quickly, a global economic slowdown will be the least of our concerns.

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Daily Links 09/25/2008

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  • Peter Gleick: Deal With the Water Crisis Now

    Among the challenges facing the next president, few are more complex—scientifically, politically, and economically—than the unsustainable global demands on fresh water supplies. Sources are drying up in the US and worldwide, raising the specters of hunger, disease, and international conflict. No one has a clearer view of these issues than Peter Gleick, president and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based environmental think tank. So what will the new president need to understand about water? Here are eight slides from Gleick’s hypothetical PowerPoint presentation.

    tags: water, peter gleick, drought

  • Barack Obama’s campaign has rushed to proclaim his support for ‘clean coal’ technology | Environment | guardian.co.uk

    Barack Obama’s campaign yesterday rushed to proclaim his support for “clean coal” technology after remarks by running mate Joe Biden cast doubts on Democratic friendliness to the coal industry.

    tags: clean coal, obama

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Google and GE joining forces on clean energy

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In the above video Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google interviews Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE.

The reason Google and GE were talking? Google and GE jointly announced the other day that they are coming together “to help develop tomorrow’s power generation, transmission and distribution — known as the “smart grid” — and its interface with next generation electric transportation”.

From the release:

The existing U.S. infrastructure has not kept pace with the digital economy and the hundreds of technology opportunities that are ready for market. In fact, the way we generate and distribute electricity today is essentially the same as when Thomas Edison built the first power plant well over one hundred years ago. Americans should have the choice to drive more fuel efficient cars – or even electric cars – and manage their home energy use to reduce costs, and buy power from cleaner sources, or even generate their own power for sale to the grid.

We all receive an electricity bill once a month that encourages little except prompt payment. What if, instead, we had access to real-time information about home energy use? What if our flat screen TVs, electronic equipment, lights and appliances were programmed to automatically adjust to save money and cut energy use? What if we could push a button and switch the source of our homes’ electricity from fossil fuels to renewable energy? What if the car sitting in our garage ran on electricity – the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline – and was programmed to charge at night when electricity is cheapest?

This is spectacular news! GE are the largest player in the power industry in the US. Their product line covers every aspect of power generation, transmission, distribution and consumption. And GE have an enviable record in renewables. They are the largest manufacturer of wind turbines globally having purchased Enron’s wind business out of bankruptcy for $300m and turned that into an asset generating between $7-$8bn in 2008!

Google get Demand Response. Coming from an Internet background as they do, they know all about the read/write web, p2p and publish and subscribe mechanisms – these are going to be the cornerstone of Electricity 2.0 as espoused by Eric Schmidt and Google in their release, and by me as I write about them regularly on this blog!

In fact, I am giving a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on Oct 23rd entitled “Electricity 2.0 – Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks” – this builds on the Keynote I gave there last year on using demand response to reduce our carbon footprint.

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Daily Links 09/24/2008

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Any questions for Carbonetworks CEO Michael Meehan?

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Questions
Photo Credit Marcus Ramberg

Carbonetworks have developed an incredibly full-featured, online, carbon strategy platform.

This application generates or takes in carbon footprint information, normalizes the carbon data across all of a company’s facilities and then monetises it so companies can think of their carbon as either an asset or a liability on the balance sheet.

But Carbonetworks then goes the next logical step and gives companies access to their marketplace where they offer fully verified offsets as well as a network of other reduction options so companies can have a diverse spread of carbon reduction investments.

Carbonetworks CEO is Michael Meehan and I will be chatting to him tomorrow and podcasting the conversation.

If you have any questions you would like me to put to Michael during the discussion, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post or email them to me ([email protected]).