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ICT could deliver approximately 7.8 GtCO2e of emissions savings in 2020

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Measuring time
Photo Credit aussiegall

James has, in previous posts referred to the fact that IT is responsible for 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions but that it can have a disproportionate influence on the other 98%. This is something we believe fundamentally in GreenMonk so it is great to see others vindicating our position.

The Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) recently published a report, independently audited by McKinsey and Company called Smart 2020. The report is a fascinating read and comes to the conclusion that ICT could:

deliver approximately 7.8 GtCO2e of emissions savings in 2020. This represents 15% of emissions in 2020 based on a BAU [Business As Usual] estimation. It represents a significant proportion of the reductions below 1990 levels that scientists and economists recommend by 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. In economic terms, the ICT-enabled energy efficiency translates into approximately €600 billion ($946.5 billion) of cost savings. It is an opportunity that cannot be overlooked.

Apart from emissions associated with deforestation, the largest contributors to climate change are transportation and power generation, so how could IT help these functions?

According to the report the use of

  1. Smart motor systems – optimised motors and industrial automation would reduce 0.97 GtCO2e [0.97 giga tons CO2 emissions] in 2020, worth €68 billion ($107.2 billion)
  2. Smart logistics – global savings from smart logistics in 2020 would reach 1.52 GtCO2e, with energy savings worth €280 billion ($441.7 billion)
  3. Smart buildings – smart buildings technologies would enable 1.68 GtCO2e of emissions savings, worth €216 billion ($340.8 billion) and
  4. Smart grids – smart grid technologies were the largest opportunity found in the study and could globally reduce 2.03 GtCO2e , worth €79 billion ($124.6 billion)

Even though we have been heavily promoting the use of smart grids and demand response on this blog I was impressed that they could reduce CO2 emissions by 2 giga tons by 2020. This is one of the reasons why I was super-excited today when SAP’s Mike Prosceno invited me to attend their SAP for Utilities conference which is going to be in San Antonio Texas in October. This is a conference about the future of utilities and there will be a big focus on smart grids, smart meters and AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure).

How will IT help reduce emissions? It comes back to that old chestnut – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Or as Steve Howard, CEO, The Climate Group said in his opening address in the report:

When we started the analysis, we expected to find that ICT could make our lives ‘greener’ by making them more virtual – online shopping, teleworking and remote communication all altering our behaviour. Although this is one important aspect of the ICT solution, the first and most significant role for ICT is enabling efficiency.

Consumers and businesses can’t manage what they can’t measure. ICT provides the solutions that enable us to ‘see’ our energy and emissions in real time and could provide the means for optimising systems and processes to make them more efficient. Efficiency may not sound as inspirational as a space race but, in the short term, achieving efficiency savings equal to 15% of global emissions is a radical proposition.

Via Doug Neal (aka gblnetwkr)

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Introducing the NegaWatt!

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Feather in the sky
Photo Credit Sarey*

Yes, you read the title correctly and no, NegaWatt is not one of my normal typos!

What then is a NegaWatt? A NegaWatt, is a MegaWatt of electricity that you don’t use! Huh?

Think of it like this, suppose a utility company has 100MW to supply.
Now let’s say their typical demand is 90MW.
If a potential customer contacts them looking for 20MW, they have a problem.

They can either try to build new generation of 20MW (expensive) or, try to get their existing customers to reduce their demand by 20MW. The reduced demand is typically done through efficiencies and the required reduction, when achieved, is 20 NegaWatts – 20 MW of virtually generated electricity.

Now, take the concept of a NegaWatt a little further. If you could ‘generate’ a lot of NegaWatts it should be possible to sell these demand side units back to the utilities. They are just as useful to the utilities for meeting demand as actual MegaWatts. More useful when demand for electricity is high and supply is low.

This is not some fictional futurescape. It is actually happening now to a limited extent in some parts of the US and will be rolled out far more widely in the coming years as energy markets and smart grids become more sophisticated.

How might someone create NegaWatts? Well, have a look at some of the posts we have written here about Energy Demand Management for some ideas.

A lot of the work in this area currently is looking at things like changing settings on thermostats (think aircon, refrigeration and water heating), bringing diesel generators online, and time-shifting of consumption (think storage heaters and pre-cooling buildings early in the day when demand is lower).

Companies like Comverge, EnerNoc and Echelon are making devices and systems that let consumer monitor and adjust their electricity use in real time.

This is a whole new market which is about to open up. There are massive opportunities there for people to write software to manage this, to build the hardware to do this, and to aggregate NegaWatts for sale to utility companies.

This all feeds back into the read/write grid we have discussed here previously. With the rise of the NegaWatt, electricity becomes a far more two-way tradeable commodity and the implications for the uptake of renewables on the grid are enormous.

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HP teaming with Xtreme Energetics to produce cheaper, more efficient cheaper solar

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Photovoltaic array
Photo Credit Pink Dispatcher

James and I had lunch the other day with Simon Wardley.

During the course of what turned out to be a wide-ranging discussion Simon brought up the topic of flexible solar panels. I was delighted to read today then that Xtreme Energetics and HP are teaming up to produce

a solar energy system designed to generate electricity at twice the efficiency and half the cost of traditional solar panels

According to the piece, XP will use thin-film, transparent transistors developed by HP which are made from readily available materials such as Zinc and Tin – which have the added advantage of not having environmental issues.

Within 24 months, the company will release roof panels integrated with HP’s technology to deliver dramatic energy gains at a comparable price point to conventional PV systems, Colin Williams, CEO of Xtreme Energetics said. “Our panels will be twice as efficient, we’ll be able to deliver a higher energy density, and customers will have the option of choosing a color.”

The fact that the electronics are transparent means that more light gets through and thus the efficiency is further improved.

If these are truly transparent, south-facing windows on buildings could have these applied without significant impact on light entering the building. Ten at times when most energy is needed (sunny days when the aircon is turned up to 11), these transparent PV walls are cranking out the power to cool the building.

It is cheaper peak shaving – I like it.

Via

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On HP Labs, Sustainability, Energy Demand Management and Bit Miles

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I spent today in Bristol at HP Labs, learning about the company’s relaunch of its R&D organisation. I came away impressed with the crispness of the new vision. In the past HP Labs came across like an academic organisation, removed from commercial concerns. I am happy to report though that the new approach and tone seems much more focused and business like.

From a Greenmonk perspective the real meat came this afternoon when Chandrakant Patel, Director, HP Sustainable IT lab (and dab hand with a sketch pad, which made for lovely slides.) joined the session via web conference.

The conference worked a charm; I found myself nodding along and giving out non-verbal queues to a face filling a six foot screen. The contrast couldn’t have been starker with BT’s CSR event this week: the telco’s Boston-based head of videoconferencing didn’t fly back to the UK to avoid the air miles footprint (good), but instead of live conferencing he prerecorded a video (bad). Note to BT-showing can be a lot more effective than telling, especially when you have a room full of influencers ready to be impressed.

The 98%: dematerialise it

But what of HP Lab’s strategy for sustainability? Chandrakant’s first slide carried the same basic message at my own Green stump speech: that is, IT only accounts for 2% of global energy consumption (and so carbon emissions), wheras the great majority of the problem is found in areas such as buildings and heating, supply chain logistics and transport – the 98%.

IT is a small percent, but it has a unique opportunity to attack the 98% problem.

HP has more skin in the game here than you might think – because of its printing business. While HP didn’t use the term Bit Miles it did talk a lot about “Long Tail Printing”. That is, digital printing at the point of use, avoiding the need to pulp a bunch of copies of some book or magazine noone ever read. Bear in mind that print technology is now moving into three dimensions, so you can potentially print objects not just characters on paper. The potential for print and micro-fabrication to reduce transportation cost is vast. Chandrakant talked about the need to create an “IT ecosystem” for the printing industry, to ensure it is carbon positive rather than negative. The HP Labs’ approach he said was to replace conventional supply chains with sustainable IT ecosystems.

Of course not everything in the vision is new. On the contrary:

“We need to leverage the past to create the future.”

One of the key problems with the 98% is the complexity of the metrics involved. How do we really know, asked Chandrakant, that the carbon used to create the Halo video conference wasn’t greater than the flight he chose not to take? There is a need for irrefutable metrics. And we don’t have 15 years. HP Labs is now working on prototypes to model and predict the impact of different re-engineering strategies, then measure and monitor the results. “These tools”, said Chandrakant’s UK equivalent Chris Preist, will analyse consumption of available energy and greenhouse gases across the lifecycle.

HP’s vision here is nothing less than to give businesses the tools they need to simulate the greenhouse impacts of potential new products and services. What if I used IBM tools here, or a BT network? What if I chose Apple hardware over Windows laptops? And so on.

This could be an entirely new frontier in product design and lifecycle management.

In order to create these kind of footprint models we’re going to need manufacturing companies to share information about their production and logistics processes. Needless to say I suggested after the briefing that Preist talk to Gavin Starks of AMEE as soon as possible.

Hurry Up I said

When it came to Q&A my question was why such initiatives are in the Lab, rather than in the field. At least one industry- air travel – is no longer viable with oil prices above $80 a barrel. Other industries won’t be immune to the rise of transportation costs.

Chandrakant responded by contrasting HP’s current approach, going public early, with earlier efforts to persuade data centers to invest in smart cooling technology.

“Unlike in 1998, we need to act fast. This time we’re going out and talking about it immediately.”

Preist added: Why is HP being open and transparent? in order to solve the challenges we have around sustainability we have to scale. Talking of opening up, HP also plans a “Sustainability Hub… “, that is, an online place to share and pool information.

So what about the 2%?

HP does of course have a plan for low carbon data centers, which involves using beams of light rather than wires in data center equipment. This idea is not so far fetched- we’re all used to idea of TV traveling along optical fibre now, so why not bits along a beam? Atoms are cheaper to move than atoms, and photons are cheaper to move than electrons.

Using this photonics approach HP estimates it can make a 75% reduction in carbon footprint for data centers. Not bad for starters! I like HP’s narrative of dematerialisation, whether we’re talking about printed pages or processors. Don’t make things manifest unless you actually need to. That’s a key to sustainability.

“The ultimate goal is photonics, but we need intermediate steps. We have teams beginning to transfer technology but we’re looking for partners, that can co-create in this area… that’s critical.

Greenmonk Take

I came away generally impressed with HP and its progress in sustainability thinking. It has some super bright people thinking far beyond the 2% and ready to work with customers in a range of industries in becoming more sustainable. But even more importantly its increasingly clear the IT industry is not only fully aware of the need to become more sustainable but also is quickly reaching a consensus on how to tackle some of the problems. I see a lot of hope for standards, information sharing, and IP cross-licensing. The public sector may not get it. Manufacturing may not get it. The general public may not get it. But IT – IT gets it. It doesn’t matter whether I am talking to Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, or Sun the agenda is pretty well shared now. The green data center is important but completely overhauled supply chains and ways of living even more so.

disclosure: HP is not a client, but paid my train fare to Bristol. Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Sun are clients.

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Green Answers and Roofs: The City of London Development Corporation

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greenbang is one of my favourite ecoblogs. I was particularly taken with its recent Q&A series with Simon Mills – the sustainable development coordinator for the City of London Corporation, which manages affairs in the Square Mile. His answers are a model of clarity- evidently Simon is not a politician. I like the way his answers include links to information resources, and are so well-informed across a range of subject areas. Some of the answers are quite surprising and definitely worth reading. The series works as a great example of transparency, a core Greenmonk value.

The City of London has a policy for “green roofs”. Here’s why:

Firstly we have identified green roofs as a valuable resource for biodiversity in our Biodiversity Action Plan, and have produced guidance notes for developers on both Green Roofs and Vertical Habitats.

Secondly we have identified how important green roofs are to combat the impacts of climate change– basically they act a giant sponges, soaking up excess rainfall and releasing it slowly, so as not to overwhelm the sewers.

Who knew? The format greenbang used is interesting – giving each answer its own blog entry, rather than compiling them into one uber-interview – works really well. So here are the questions:

What is the plan for making buildings zero carbon at the 2012 Olympics?

As the owner of three of London’s most vital wholesale markets, serving the fresh produce needs of London’s businesses, what is City of London doing to get more local, organic and Fairtrade produce sold through these markets?

What is the City of London doing to change the mindset of its resident corporations to make the same everyday steps to be greener that individual consumers are?

What is the City of London doing to encourage a ‘buy recycled’ policy?

With a huge unmet demand for food growing space from the population in the area, are the City of London looking into alternative growing space such as Green Roofs?

Why is the City so bad for cycle parking? – it’s a close-run competition with Westminster on who offers the fewest proper parking stations.

While I realise the City Of London is a particular approach to city and financial district governance, with a long and distinguished history, I would love to see greenbang, which has some global coverage ambitions, run a series of interviews with officials in cities such as New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Frankfurt.

photo courtesy of Cimm.

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Ban The Bag: First Modbury, Now London

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What a heartening way to start the week.

Just yesterday I was thinking it was great that Modbury has now officially banned the plastic bag. BBC Nature’s Rebecca Hosking deserves all the plaudits she is recieving for leading the campaign. But it could never happen in London, I thought.

That was, until I read the Daily Telegraph this morning (its not my usual tipple, but I was on a plane) and saw a story on page 9, London Shops May Stop Giving Out Plastic Bags.

“Shops in London could be banned from handing out plastic bags under a new law.”

The initiative comes from London Councils, the umbrella group representing all local authorities in the capital: shoppers would have to bring their own bags or buy reusable ones at the till. To be fair, retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury have already made great strides in this regard, offering nice jute bagsand so on, but a legal restriction can help a lot to really drive a behavioural change.

For those that consider such schemes to be an “outrageous attack” on their liberty I would encourage them to consider the 4bn plastic bags a year that go to landfill in the UK each year. Perhaps a more encouraging thought should come from the smoking bans in major European cities. Arriving at Barcelona airport this morning was so much more pleasant and welcoming than usual. Smoke really has no place in public buildings. One day we may feel the same about using plastic bags. [So much for a new libertarian-minded bias… Ed.]

Its a shame the BBC doesn’t put its considerable weight behind the plastic bag campaign on a national basis, which would be an excellent use of license fee money, as far as i can see, tapping into grassroots concerns about the environment. Why not give Rebecca a show and a campaign?

But, you can’t always hope for top down support. As the Telegraph reports, another option would be to introduce a tax on plastic bags, “but such a move is likely to be rejected by the Treasury.”

As usual in the UK, leadership isn’t coming from the top. Well done London Umbrella. I hope you succeed.

Next… the world?

picture courtesy of polandeze, take on a Sheffield canal.

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