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Guest Post: On Water and The Climate Ahead

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One of Greenmonk’s core beliefs is that the private sector is making all the running when it comes to long term sustainability thinking, so I was very interested to hear about a conference last week in which water utilities were meeting other stakeholders to discuss climate change related issues. Cortland Coleman was there and very kindly offered to write up the event. If you’re on twitter he is definitely worth following if you’re interested in sustainability.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishmaelo/224261862/

“A symposium was held last week at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S., exploring how global climate change will impact the world’s precious water resources. “The Climate Ahead” was attended by state and federal government officials, researchers, regulators, students and environmental advocates. The annual symposium draws a growing audience of people working on water management issues, climate change and related environmental issues. Over 200 people attended this year’s symposium. There is no doubt that water resources and infrastructure will be stressed by the impacts of climate change. Demand for water is increasing while the supply of safe, healthy water is declining. Global climate change threatens to increase the gap between water supply and demand due to potential changes in weather patterns, seasonal shifts and watershed production. This growing gap could lead to large populations being more vulnerable to water shortages, as unequal access to safe water grows. These same populations are at a greater risk to be victims of flood, drought or other environmental disaster brought on or made worse by the impacts of global climate change. Managing depleting water resources will be a critical skill as we deal with the effects of climate change. Utilities are weighing the anticipated costs of climate change on their drinking water systems. Unfortunately, computer models cannot accurately factor in all variables and therefore, come up short when attempting to clarify and define risk mitigation, cost of not taking action, etc. What is clear is that water usage, conservation, filtration and distribution must all be closely and carefully examined as we work to finds new ways to meet the growing demands for water across the globe. Presentations from the seminar are now available for download from: http://climatechange.rutgers.edu/2008_symposium_presentations.php”

photo courtesy of ishrona under CreativeCommons Attribution 2.0 license.

Greenmonk partners with Akvo, the Open Source for Water.

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Take Me To Your Leader: Earth Calling!

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Do something. Anything. But ideally a push to our elected representatives. Its Earth Day today.

So far private companies have made all the running in retooling for sustainability. When you’re proud of Wal*Mart you know there is a disturbance in the force. So let’s try and get our governments and elected officials doing more than just blowing smoke. Its hard to see how all the hot air they are blowing will help in the fight against global warming.

Come on everybody make some noise!

Its a shame They Work For You and mysociety don’t appear to be doing something to support it yet.

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Finnair: Awesomeness by Carbon Calculator (never say never)

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Just the other day I say we wouldn’t be covering Carbon Calculators unless they ran on AMEE. Wrong. This afternoon I got a link from Joseph Simpson at MovementDesign and it got me thinking. I have no idea why a thinktank dedicated to the future of movement wouldn’t actually blog the link rather than sending it to me, but that’s the web for you. Wired has a story about Finnair. Wired gives them props for not being defensive about emissions, but that’s not what jumped out at me. What I like is the fact Finnair is showing customers the potential carbon impacts of different journeys through different hubs.

It’s a simple application, but it’s pretty cool. Just load in your departure and arrival city, and the calculator returns the total distance of your trip, the amount of fuel used per passenger, and the amount of CO2 generated by that fuel. To calculate the per passenger number, Finnair looks at typical load factors for their different flight segments (long haul flights tend to be 85% full, leisure flights 95%, etc.), and also takes into account what type of plane is being flown on each route, since fuel efficiency varies depending on model. And, with typical Scandinavian thoroughness, Finnair has designed the calendar so that you’re able to see how emissions are impacted by connections at various Finnair hub cities.

Its that last function which interests me most, in some respects. Now if we could just get Finnair to integrate with AMEE at the back end and dopplr, the travel serendipity platform, at the front end for trip-planning, then we’d be cooking with… uh… a wind-powered oven. Exciting times. I would love to know what the implications are for trips through different hubs. I am pretty sure Heathrow, with its circling, and fuel-burning on the ground is just awful. Computers and augmented intelligence are going to redefine travel in the new energy era.

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Using Energy Demand Management to increase uptake of wind power

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Wind Farm_2Image by Mancio7B9 via FlickrI read an article this morning on TechnologyReview.com which was makes the case for using more accurate weather forecasting to prevent blackouts and reduce pollution. Nothing wrong with this idea per se, but forecasting alone won’t go nearly far enough to solve instability problems introduced by increasing the amount of wind energy into a grid.

Ireland’s National Control Centre already makes extensive use of weather information and currently we generate, on average 6.5% of our power requirements from wind. However at 3am on a summer’s morning, with a 40mph wind blowing over the country, that can rise to almost 50% (demand at that time is typically 1.8GW and supply from the 40mph wind is around 0.9GW).

The Irish government has committed to raising the amount of power generated by wind to an average of 33% by 2025. When that happens on a similar summer’s morning at 3am with the increased number of wind farms deployed, lets say demand across the country has doubled to 3.6GW the supply from wind will be 6.3GW – that’s 2.7GW excess over demand! No amount of forecasting, however accurate, will fix that.

And no, you can’t shut down the wind farms because if there were any possibility of that, the banks would run a mile from financing them and you would never achieve your 33%.

Conversely the current peak demand in Ireland comes in around 5GW and if this grows to 10GW by 2025 this means Ireland could potentially need to invest in building installed generation capacity of 10GW from non-wind sources to cope with calm days.

So what do you do? Well, if you can’t control the supply, you have to control the demand. To do that you use Energy Demand Management (EDM). In other words you let the market set the price for electricity in real-time based on actual supply and demand. You publish the pricing in real-time using web services and demand will react accordingly.

When there is a shortage of electricity (on calm winter evenings when everyone has their Christmas lights on, for example) electricity pricing will spike. At this time, organisations with diesel generators or gas turbines, if notified of the increase in price will switch to their own generation if it is cheaper. This will take their demand out of the equation and there is the possibility of their selling any excess generation back into the grid helping to further alleviate the problem – a win-win.

In a domestic situation, smart meters capable of taking pricing information from the grid and controlling devices around the house accordingly, may decide to increase the temperature setting on the fridge by a degree or two, reduce the temperature on the central heating or immersion a degree or two, pause dishwashers or dryers until electricity is cheaper – all easily configurable by the house owner obviously.

In the situation where there is an excess of supply over demand, electricity pricing will go negative. In other words, in cases of a significant oversupply of energy (remember the 2.7GW example above?) we will be paid to consume power! Refrigeration plants can drop the settings on their thermostats, ice bank air conditioners can start cranking out the ice, swimming pools can turn up the heat and it may even be economical to start making hydrogen to store (and burn later as a clean energy source when the price increases again).

And, in the domestic situation, smart appliances can start up, thermostats can adjust to suck in power and plug-in hybrid vehicles can start to act as a national distributed energy store.

In 2007 the cost of electricity generation in Ireland varied from 6c per kWh to over 1€ per kWh. This variation in costs was never passed on to the consumer. Had it been I suspect we would have seen remarkably different patterns of usage.

If supply and demand are brought more into synch using demand side management, the instabilities normally associated with increased wind energy on the grid automatically become significantly more manageable thereby allowing for a far higher penetration of wind energy into the market.

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Link grab bag: Cars, Impacts, Marketers, Heated Swimming Pools and Employees better than CEOs

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This is kind of pathetic. One luxury car company sues another. Who cares? This news has nothing to do with sustainability. My partners at Re*Move might disagree – they have been big Tesla fans. But from a Greenmonk perspective arguments about IP like this are so last 20th century. Compete on the basis of implementation people. Lower barriers to participation. And besides if you want a muscle car maybe you should buy an Alfa or buy a Pontiac and forget about the planet for a bit. If you want sustainability just drive slower.

Are you familiar with No Impact Man? Its a cool experiment.

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

But to cause no net impact is impossible to do merely by restricting consumption and waste output. Just participating in society makes us responsible for the negative environmental impacts of society’s functioning, even if our personal lifestyle does no harm. To offset our societal ecological debt, we also plan to take actions that will have positive environmental impact. For example, we’ll volunteer with the Nature Conservancy to clean up garbage off the beach. To help sop up our share of the year’s CO2, we will take part in a reforestation project to help plant trees.

Then there is The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption.

The problem with being off consumption is that you can no longer buy a ‘treat’ for yourself in order to snap out of a bad mood. Being off consumption means no comfort food, no self-gifting, no temporary postponement of pain by the rush of adrenalin triggered off by that perfect purchase.

But I knew that when I went off consumption. I knew that, to resist the temptation to buy, I’ll basically need to be happy all the time. I also knew that I’ll face my first big test as soon as I hit a bad day

I have written before about the Intel-powered central heating. But how about a POWER-heated pool? From Techworld comes a cool story Datacentre used to heat swimming pool. IBM did the design work in conjunction with a company called GIB-Services. Who says you can’t have luxury and sustainability?

The pool is being closed temporarily for repairs this summer, at which time the heat transfer system will be put in place, says GIB-Services CEO Hans-Rudolf Scharer.

“It isn’t so complicated,” Scharer says, explaining that water is used to transfer the heat. “We pump hot water to the swimming pool.”

Excess heat generated by datacentre computers is collected in a storage area, where it heats up water that is piped to a heat exchanger at the pool facility. There, the heated water raises the temperature of the pool water. The process repeats itself as often as necessary with the heat exchanger, true to its name, exchanging heat from one part of the water to another.

Finally – another Techworld story. This time based on a survey from Bell Micro. I am not so into the UK companies aren’t ready to green yet angle (tell me something I don’t know), but one finding quoted in the story really jumped out at me because of its grassroots up implications.

While 84 percent of businesses took green issues seriously, half said employees rather than chief executives were driving the change. 

If employees are driving the agenda, its far less likely to be simple green-washing or tick list filling. Go concerned employee people!

 

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Chasing AMEE, EdenBee and the Carbon Account

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As I am sure you all know by now Greenmonk is a fan of Amee, the carbon caculator’s carbon calculator – or “the World’s Energy Meter” as it styles itself. AMEE is a back end service for carbon data, with the data freely available under a CreativeCommons Attribution and Share-Alike license. Credible? Tesco, the world’s second biggest retailer, and DEFRA, the UK’s EPA, are both heavily involved. AMEE an Exemplary Open Service. And being an environmental API as well, its an Exemplary GreenMonk Service.

I realised this morning, having been invited to an interesting new social networking service called EdenBee, that I now basically use AMEE as a yes or no. If someone approaches me with news of something that has a carbon calculator that isn’t AMEE-based my default is pretty much total lack of interest. Nice related conversation here.

Later in the day someone pinged me to look at The Carbon Account.  Like EdenBee it passes the AMEE-test. I will wait until people start inviting me before I check it out though.Nice to see the “ingredients” listed – that is, what open source technologies support the site.

The only thing AMEE needs to fix is the URL. Come on guys you’re the world’s electricity meter…

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Wal-Mart leading by example?

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Street sign for Wal*Mart Drive near Gordon, PennsylvaniaImage via Wikipedia

I spotted on the Wal-Mart site today that they are giving away 1m reusable shopping bags on April 19th (2008).

Why is that important? Well traditional shopping bags take up to 1,000 years to break down in the environment. Wal-Mart’s shopping bags are made from recycled materials and normally sell instore for $1. It is even more significant when you consider that Wal-Mart is the largest grocery retailer in the United States, with an estimated 20% of the retail grocery and consumables business.

Wal-Mart’s conversion to green is not new. In 2005 Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott announced that they was going to be a:

“good steward for the environment” and ultimately use only renewable energy sources and produce zero waste

Specifically he set the following aims for the company

  • reduce energy by 20% in existing stores and 30% in new stores in the next 7 years
  • increase fuel efficiency in Wal-Mart’s truck fleet (the 2nd largest fleet in the US) by 25 percent over three years and doubling it within 10 years
  • and cut solid waste from U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs by 25 percent in three years

The 3 biggest uses of electricity in stores are heating/air-conditioning, lighting and refrigeration. To tackle these costs Wal-Mart:

  • painted the roofs of their stores white to reflect heat,
  • put smart skylights to harvest light and reduce lighting requirements and
  • put refrigerated goods behind glass doors with LED lighting

As yet, there is no word on how well Wal-Mart is doing to meet its aims but in a more recent announcement Lee Scott re-emphasised that

Wal-Mart’s goal is to be supplied by 100% renewable energy, create zero waste and sell products that are energy efficient

He also has a vision of shoppers coming to shop in Wal-Mart while their plug-in-hybrid cars recharge in the parking lot (from power generated from renewable sources).

With 1.2 million employees, Wal-art is the United States largest employer. Having the company CEO drive a message like this to the employees through changes in the stores and to their massive customer base through initiatives like the reusable bag giveaway helps remind people about the problems associated with rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Filed Under: co2

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Dell HQ using 100% Green energy

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Dell announced on their Direct2Dell blog the other day that they are now using 100% green energy to power their corporate HQ in Texas. The facility is 2.1 million square-foot and is home to more than 10,000 employees.

As a first step in this project Dell replaced lights and retrofitted air conditioning units throughout their central Texas facilities thereby reducing electrical demand significantly, saving more than $1.2 million and cutting CO2 emissions by nearly 8,200 tons.

Having reduced demand, Dell then sourced its remaining energy requirements from Green sources. It is purchasing all of the power generated from Waste Management’s Austin Community Landfill gas-to-energy plant, meeting 40 percent of Dell headquarters’ campus power needs. The remaining 60 percent comes from existing wind farms and is provided by TXU Energy.

Because Dell has committed to purchasing this power, it has negotiated a fixed price with its suppliers. This gives Dell price certainty on its operational costs for power, and the company expects that as energy prices rise, it will see cost benefits to using green power in the future.

This announcement brings Dell a considerable way towards its stated aim of becoming a fully carbon neutral company.

Dell also helps its customers achieve a lower carbon footprint by producing a number of low energy consuming computers. It’s green technology solutions include the OptiPlex 755 and Inspiron 531 desktops, Latitude D630 laptop, PowerEdge M-Series blades and PowerEdge Energy Smart servers. The company’s desktop systems alone have helped customers save more than $2.2 billion and avoid approximately 22.4 million tons of CO2.

This is a spectacular achievement on Dell’s part and it yet again shows that it is big industry who are leading the way in the battle to reduce CO2 emissions. Why that? Typically because being energy efficient means lowering your cost base thereby becoming green and more profitable at the same time. What’s not to love?

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Hotels: Please Save Energy, One Degree At A Time

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I have written about hotel air-conditioning before on this blog, and I have to raise the issue again. I am just leaving Las Vegas and one thing that drove me completely nuts was the over zealous maids at the MGM Signature that kept turning on the air-conditioning when I was out of the room. As a rule I don’t use aircon in hotels, favoring ambient temperatures where possible, even though it means I have to sleep on top of those Scandinavian style duvets they have in hotel rooms otherwise I’d die of overheat.  Why do mains turn on the air con when you’re out. It is insane!

Hotels- its time to do your bit with some kind of automation to more effectively manage this sink. Hey – you could even crow about it and get some greenwash points. Peace out. Now I am off to fly thousands of miles and emit a ton of carbon dioxide….

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Thoughts on Green SOA: a work in progress

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Yesterday at IBM’s SOA Impact 2008 show in Las Vegas (my favorite eco-city) I gave my Green SOA stump pitch. Its still a work in progress, and fortunately perhaps the number of delegates was pretty low. SOA for Dummies across the hall on the other hand was packed.

What is service oriented architecture, and why is Greenmonk so dorky today? Good questions both. SOA is an approach to software development that should enable far greater flexibility than normal.  Business and technical interfaces are standardised, and stored in libraries so that services can be reused, or changed as required by the business.

Why is Greenmonk so dorky? Well, you can’t fight your nature, now can you?

My argument at the event is basically that if SOA is a means to better alignment between IT and the business, then we should also drive sustainability into the mix. Componentising services gives you freedom to leave, for example, potentially allowing you to swap a provider out for a greener, or more importantly from a bottom line perspective, more energy efficient service.

The new frontier in compliance is environmental regulations and mandates. South Korea, as I found out yesterday, already has a carbon added tax. I have written about REACH , the EU chemical reporting standard before. One quote I used, which I find pretty striking given it comes from a US oilman (not exactly a community full of bleeding heart liberals):

“The U.S. needs a strong, consistent and mandatory national framework to manage carbon emissions. One that is unencumbered by diverging state and regional initiatives. Without this framework, rising public concern over climate change threatens our energy security by contributing to further access restrictions.”

Jim Mulva, Chairman & CEO, ConocoPhillips

Environmental compliance is going to cost companies hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars over the next few years. My partner in crime at the event is a guy called Jim Bitonti, who presented about his company Evergreen Energy, its C-Lock application and partnership with IBM called GreenCert. The application, a sophisticated distributed app for greenhouse gas measurement, monitoring and management is built end to end on IBM middleware, so it was not surprising IBM asked me to collaborate with him. But regardless of platform Jim knows his stuff, and is solidly pragmatic about the opportunities and limitations of environmental compliance. I would like to see a collaboration with AMEE, and will hopefully broker a meeting between Gavin and C-Lock next week.

I realise now that I need to make the pitch more technical for n audience of SOA folks. But all in all it was a good learning experience, and I am certainly glad IBM realizes the importance of Green SOA, even if its customers are yet to catch on.