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Daily Links 09/23/2008

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  • Post-Olympics Beijing To Traffic: “Welcome Back!” : TreeHugger

    Beijing will not extend its Olympics-time odd-even car restriction policy past its deadline of Sept. 20th, officials said this week, as the Paralympic Games drew to a close. Drivers will be “encouraged” instead to leave their car at home one day a week.

    The return to Beijing’s traffic- and smog-heavy status quo will mark the end of what may have been the world’s largest pollution control experiment: a restriction on cars, factories and construction that lasted for two months and resulted in the clearest skies Beijing has seen in a decade and raised vehicle speeds 10 percent to 43 kph.

    tags: beijing, car restriction policy, car ban, smog

  • Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Is the financial crisis more dire than the climate crisis?

    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. It’s the facts that make scientists alarmists, not their politics

    tags: climate change, ipcc, co2, romm

  • BBC NEWS | Technology | Google and GE in energy deal

    The internet giant Google has teamed up with technology multinational General Electric to develop a “smart” electric power grid and promote clean energy.

    tags: smart grid, google, ge, clean energy

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What’s your Crazy Green Idea (for $25,000)?

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Excellent! I see that the X Prize Foundation are offering a prize of $25,000 for “Your Crazy Green Idea”!

From the site:

The X PRIZE Foundation and Prize Capital, LLC are offering $25,000 for the best video proposing a new Energy and Environment X PRIZE. Contestants need to submit a 2-minute video via www.youtube.com/xprize. Entrants will be narrowed down to 3 finalists by the X PRIZE Foundation. Once the 3 finalists are identified, XPRIZE.org users will vote to determine the winner. The winner will be announced on XPRIZE.org in December 2008.

The winning video must answer the following three questions:
1. What is the specific prize idea?
2. What is the Grand Challenge or world-wide problem that you are trying to solve?
3. How will this prize benefit humanity?

The fact that this prize is open to anyone and that you use YouTube to submit your ideas is a spectacularly good idea – creating online buzz, crowdsourcing the ideas and being totally transparent about it. X Prize ftw!

As of this writing 30 videos have been submitted. Check them out and then submit your own! But hurry, the deadline for submissions is Oct 31st.

The X Prize Foundation is an educational nonprofit who came to prominence in 2004 when the Foundation awarded the Burt Rutan-led team, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, $10 million for building and flying the world’s first private spaceship.

The X Prize foundation are also behind the Progressive Auto X Prize competition – a competition with a $10m prize to develop a radically fuel efficient car.

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Space based solar power?

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I saw an announcement the other day on the National Space Society‘s website about a breakthrough in Space-based solar power.

Normally the stuff of science fiction, it turns out that John C. Mankins, former manager of NASA’s Exploration Systems Research and Technology Program, performed a milestone demonstration of the critical technology enabling Space Solar Power: long-distance, solar-powered wireless power transmission.

According to the release on the Space Power Association site:

During the week of May 5-9, 2008, a key step on the path to Space-Based Solar Power was achieved: a “first-of-a-kind” long-range demonstration of solar-powered wireless power transmission using a solid-state phased array transmitter located on the U.S. island of Maui (on Haleakala) and receivers located on the island of Hawai’i (Mauna Loa) and airborne. The demonstration, achieved by Managed Energy Technologies LLC of the U.S. and sponsored by Discovery Communications, Inc., involved the transmission of RF energy over a distance of up to 148 kilometers (about 90 miles): almost 100-times further than a major 1970s power transmission performed by NASA in the Mojave Desert in California. The 2008 project (which lasted only 5 months and cost less than $1M) proved that real progress toward Space Solar Power can be made quickly, affordably and internationally, including key participants from the U.S. and Japan.

A number of key technologies were integrated and tested together for the first time in this project, including solar power modules, solid-state FET amplifiers, and a novel “retrodirective” phase control system. In addition, the project developed the first ever “field-deployable” system-developing new information regarding the prospective economics of space solar power / wireless power transmission systems

There are a lot of announcements coming out at the moment about advancements in solar power but of them all, this one has to be one of the most intriguing!

Will it ever become a reality? Who knows, but with this proof-of concept a significant barrier has been removed!

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How to make a hosting company carbon neutral РRen̩ Wienholtz of Strato

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CO2
Photo Credit <

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/rene_wienholtz_podcast.mp3]

Episode 4 of the GreenMonk Podcasts – 36 mins 28 secs

My guest on this podcast is Strato’s Executive Director for Information Technology and Innovation Rene Wienholtz.

Strato are Europe’s second largest hosting company and Strato are also carbon neutral! Amazingly they achieved this without buying any offsets. How did they do it?

Listen to René explain it.

Here are the questions I asked René and the approx. times I asked them:

Can you tell us something about your own background first and who are Strato? – 00:34

If I heard you correctly you are now the largest hosting company in Europe? – 02:28

You guys are a bit like RackSpace in the sense that you don’t do co-location, you rent space on your servers, id that right? – 02:38

You mentioned that you decided to re-architect the setup in Strato and reduce your carbon footprint, was this for environmental reasons or business reasons? – 03:34

Questions from readers:

Jiri Ludvik
what percentage in carbon reduction they achieved by each of the step you mention? – 05:48

Do you use underfloor plenums as well to direct the air to the cold aisles? – 21:47

Can you talk to us too about the energy savings you are getting from buying CO2 free energy? – 25:44

Have you negotiated a set price from your clean energy supplier for a set period? – 29:36

Can you tell me how long this price is guaranteed for? – 30:15

Have you had any independent 3rd party certify that you are carbon neutral? – 30:27

More questions from readers:

Jim Hughes
Has the carbon saving had a real cost benefit? Or have the lower power costs been exceeded by the premium for carbon neutral electricity? – 31:42

Would you recommend other hosting providers take the same route? – 32:53

Do you think environmental awareness is an area where European hosting companies have a head start over the US? – 34:47

Download the entire interview here
(33.4mb mp3)

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The network is the computer

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RJ45 ethernet connector
Photo Credit Olivander

I see a news item on CNET this morning about IBM which says:

IBM is set to debut a technology at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas that executives say reduces storage costs by up to 80 percent.

That’s a pretty big claim and if it were anyone else I’d have a hard time believing it but IBM bring a lot of credibility as well as resources to the table when making an announcement like this.

The CNET story goes on to quote the IBM release (which is, as yet, not available on the IBM News site):

Based on an algorithm developed by IBM Research, VSO [Virtual Storage Optimizer] dramatically reduces the large physical storage requirements associated with storing virtual images. The solution also allows organizations to streamline operations by creating new desktop images in mere seconds or minutes, a process which previously could take up to 30 minutes – a 75% reduction in the time required to create and deploy new virtual machines. This represents a tremendous operational savings for clients, and allows them to realize more immediate returns on their investments.

If this is the case then the main barriers to virtualization, cost and complexity, are no more and we may well see a move to massively more efficient computing which can only be a good thing!

John Gage, one of the founders of Sun, coined the phrase “The network is the computer” and it sure looks like that vision is now coming to pass.

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Any questions for Strato Director Rene Wienholtz?

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Sevici
Photo Credit Rock Alien

Despite being Europe’s second largest hosting company, Strato are also carbon neutral!

They didn’t achieve this by purchasing offsets either. Strato did it by:
1) purchasing energy efficient hardware
2) using very precise cooling methodologies
3) using customised software to run its facilities and finally
4) by buying CO2 free energy from NaturEnergie.

Strato’s Executive Director for Information Technology and Innovation is Rene Wienholtz and I will be chatting to him tomorrow morning asking him how a hosting company, typically a massive power sink, can go carbon neutral.

If you have any questions you’d like me to put to Rene in the podcast, either leave them in a comment on this post, or email them to me ([email protected]).

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Would you buy a car if you had an option to (electric) car share?

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Sevici
Photo Credit Cayetano

I live in Seville, Spain and this town has a wonderful community bike rental program called Sevici. This is run by the town council and JCDecaux and use of these bicycles is free for the first 30 minutes and in the order of €1 per hour thereafter.

You use an RFID card to access the bicycles and you take bikes from, and return them to stations throughout the city like the one in the photo above. When you return the bike to a station, it is automatically recognised and locked.

Now what if you took this concept and married it with the idea of Car Sharing? And, what if all the cars in the car sharing program were electric (or plug-in hybrids) so that when you returned the car to its station, it plugged itself in and started to charge?

While a model like this wouldn’t work well in a suburban area, if you lived in a city center and had access to something like this, you might never need to buy a car. For cities trying to reduce their levels of pollution, levels of congestion or their carbon footprint, a scheme like this would seem to be a very appropriate step to consider.

A plan like this could also help with electricity grid stabilisation using vehicle to grid technologies.

Would you buy a car if you had an option to (electric) car share?

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Large Hadron Collider? Our priorities are way off!

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Leaks
Photo Credit Image Editor

While it is exciting to watch the stories breaking today about the successful startup of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I have to wonder about the price tag.

The total cost of the LHC is estimated at between €3.2 to €6.4 billion and while that is a wide margin, even if it is closer to the €3.2 billion mark that is still a huge amount of money to spend trying to confirm “the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics”. And that is just the financial cost – the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by its build and operation must be staggering.

I would far prefer to see all this money and effort being channelled into renewable research. Imagine how much more advanced wind, solar and wave/tidal energies could be now if scientists had €4b of research grants to work with.

I’m a scientist by training and I don’t for a second underestimate the benefits to mankind of being able to explain how elementary particles acquire properties such as mass but I do think that with our polar ice caps melting and small island nations becoming submerged, our priorities on this one are a little mixed up.

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Thirst!

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Ireland is one of the least densely populated countries in Europe and it has some of the highest amounts of rainfall.

After seeing the following presentation about the world’s dwindling water resources the water shortage in Dublin, which I posted about yesterday, appears all the more scandalous.

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Thanks to Shel for linking to this presentation on Twitter.

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Maybe it is a good thing this August was so wet in Ireland

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Leaks
Photo Credit Meredith Farmer

They say it rains in Ireland one day in every two and certainly this year it lived up to that reputation what with August 2008 being the wettest August since records began.

The Irish Met office said in its monthly report for August 2008:

August was a month of exceptionally heavy rain over most of the country, bringing flooding in many areas. Following the pattern of much of this summer’s weather, low pressure close to or over Ireland brought a succession of Atlantic frontal systems across the country, giving some significant falls. It was the wettest August on record at a number of stations, including Dublin (Phoenix Park), where rainfall records began in 1837.

Given that you’d imagine that Ireland would be the last place suffering from a shortage of water. You’d be wrong!

A recent report from Forfás, the national policy advisory body for enterprise and science identifies four major urban centres – Dublin, Galway, Athlone and Letterkenny which could face water shortages over the next five years. Why? Leaky pipes seems to account for a lot of it, it seems. From the report:

Ireland has relatively high levels of unaccounted for water. Approximately 43 percent of the total volume of treated drinking water produced in the Gateways and Hub towns is lost before it reaches the final consumer.

That goes some way to explaining how Dublin, a city of just over 1m people, consumes 500m liters of water per day.

That level of waste is absolutely outrageous and instead of trying to fix the problem, Dublin City Council are talking of piping water from Lough Rae, a special area of conservation on the Shannon in the West of Ireland to Dublin!

The correct way to tackle this is, similar to our current energy problems, make the system more efficient (fix the leaks) and manage the demand (start charging households for water). Ireland is one of the few EU countries which doesn’t charge its citizens for water, and it shows!

With just 1% spare capacity of water, in some ways maybe it is a good thing this August was so wet in Ireland, or the water shortages might have been a reality sooner than later.