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Friday Green Numbers round-up for Feb 18th 2011

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Green Numbers

And here is a round-up of this week’s Green numbers…

  1. How La Poste Saves $7 Million a Year In IT Energy Costs

    France’s La Poste manages 180,000 PCs that sat mostly idle, yet still used as much electricity as if they were fully engaged in a difficult computing problem.

    “The AVOB solution does what other solutions do by automatically putting the PC into low energy mode when inactive after a specified amount of time,” Charpentier explained. “That saved La Poste 50 percent on average. What AVOB does differently is to also automatically adapt power consumption of the PC depending on the task to save an additional 10 to 20 percent on the …

  2. Joule on Pace to Produce Solar Fuels at Productivities Far Exceeding Those of All Known Biofuel Processes

    Joule Unlimited, pioneer of Liquid Fuel from the Sun?, today supported the high-productivity potential of its production process with the publication of a detailed analysis and model of its breakthrough solar-to-fuels platform.

    Published by Photosynthesis Research, the peer-reviewed article examines Joule?s critical advances in solar capture and conversion, direct product synthesis and continuous product secretion, which collectively form a platform for renewable fuel and chemical production with yields up to 50X greater than the maximum potential of any process requiring biomass. In addition, the analysis counters prior assumptions about …

  3. Waste Management Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2010 Earnings

    Waste Management, announced financial results for its fourth quarter and for the year ended December 31, 2010. Revenues for the fourth quarter of 2010 were $3.19 billion compared with $3.01 billion for the same 2009 period. Net income for the quarter was $281 million, or $0.59 per diluted share, compared with $315 million, or $0.64 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2009. The Company noted several items that impacted results in the 2010 and 2009 fourth quarters. Excluding these items, net income would have been $287 million, or $0.60 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2010 compared with $257 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2009, an increase in earnings per diluted share of over 15%.

    For the full year 2010, the Company reported revenues of $12.52 billion compared with $11.79 billion for 2009. Earnings per diluted share were $1.98 for the full year 2010 compared with …

  4. Exxon, Shell Both Essentially Admit Peak Oil Is Upon Us – Or Will Be Soon

    Two today on peak oil and how the big oil companies are finally publicly (if quietly) coming around to what peak oil researchers have been saying for a while: It’s here, or will be shortly.

    First, Wall Street Journal highlights how ExxonMobil is having a hard time finding new oil and has had a hard time for a while now. For the past 10 years for every 100 barrels it’s extracted it’s only been able to find 95 more. Natural gas exploration on the other hand has been very successful–enter, fracking.

    Second, Raw Story sums up a report by Shell that at best …

  5. Climate change doubled likelihood of devastating UK floods of 2000

    Researchers have for the first time quantified the part climate change played in increasing the risk of a severe flood

    Global warming made the floods that devastated England and Wales in the autumn of 2000, costing ?3.5bn, between two and three times more likely to happen, new research has found. This is the first time scientists have quantified the role of human-induced climate change in increasing the risk of a serious flood and represents a major development in climate science.

    “It shows climate change is acting here and now to load the dice towards more extreme weather,” said Myles Allen of Oxford University, who led the work, which he started after his own home was…

  6. Florida governor slams brakes on high-speed rail – rejects $2.4 billion in government funds

    Florida’s Tea Party-backed Governor Rick Scott on Wednesday rejected $2.4 billion in government funds to build a high-speed passenger rail line, prompting a sharp rebuke from Washington as political tensions grew over the federal budget deficit.

    At a news conference in the state capital, Scott strongly criticized President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2012 unveiled on Monday and said federal grants earmarked for Florida to begin work on a high-speed rail link between Tampa and Orlando would be turned down.

  7. Soaking Up the Sun to Squeeze Bills to Zero – Zero-Net Energy office building in Colorado

    The west-facing windows by Jim Duffield?s desk started automatically tinting blue at 2:50 p.m. on a recent Friday as the midwinter sun settled low over the Rocky Mountain foothills.

    Around his plant-strewn work cubicle, low whirring air sounds emanated from speakers in the floor, meant to mimic the whoosh of conventional heating and air-conditioning systems, neither of which his 222,000-square-foot office building has, or needs, even here at 5,300 feet elevation. The generic white noise of pretend ductwork is purely for background and workplace psychology ? managers found that workers needed something more than silence.

    Meanwhile, the photovoltaic roof array was…

  8. Soladigm Closes $40M for Its First Smart Window Factory

    Windows that can be tinted on demand could be a promising way to cut energy costs, but technology to control the amount of light and heat that pass through windows isn?t common. Soladigm hopes to change that and has just lined up an additional $10 million in equity financing to bring a Series C round to a total of $40 million, the company said Tuesday.

    Soladigm plans to use some of the money for its first factory, which will cost about $130 million, be located in Mississippi, and be set to start shipping its electrochromic windows in the first quarter of …

  9. Would you buy a $40 light bulb?

    Maybe you should.

    This week, Philips Lighting said that its AmbientLED 12.5 watt bulb ? which, just to confuse you, is also sold under the Philips EnduraLED brand ? has qualified for a EPA?s Energy Star rating. That means that it?s an efficient and, quite possibly cost-effective alternative to the 60-watt bulb, even with a $39.97 list price at Home Depot.

    Here?s how the math works, at least according to Philips …

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Photo credit house of bamboo

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My “Green IT – driving efficiency, sustainability and enabling efficient working practices” presentation

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Green IT – driving efficiency, sustainability and enabling efficient working practices

Conference organising company iQuest contacted me last year to ask me to deliver a keynote presentation at their Green IT Summit.

The event took place in Dublin yesterday and my keynote talk entitled “Green IT – driving efficiency, sustainability and enabling efficient working practices” is above.

The organisers prudently decided that they didn’t want to take the risk of any of their international speakers not making it to the event because of the ashcloud. This would have left them with a hole in the schedule at the last minute so they contracted the services of OnlineMeetingRooms and three of the presenters were able to present to the audience in Dublin, over an online video connection, without having to travel!

The title I was asked to present on was quite broad and I had 30 minutes to try cover it all so I had to go at quite a clip but the feedback has been extremely positive so it seemed to work out very well.

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Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 03/26/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Dell Hybrid hiding its (Green) light under a bushel!

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Screenshot of Dell Hybrid taken from their site

I first heard about the new Dell Hybrid PC from Walter Higgins on Twitter.

My initial reaction was “Dell Hybrid”? Do they have petrol engines and electric motors? Why the Hybrid name? It isn’t immediately obvious from the Dell Hybrid page on Dell’s website.

They look nice, to be sure but what about the Green credentials they are touting?

I then received an email from Dell’s Renee Daulong and she explained:

The Hybrid is about 80 percent smaller than the typical desktop minitower, and uses up to 70 percent less energy. In addition to being extremely energy efficient and Energy Star 4.0 compliant, the Studio Hybrid’s unique packaging was designed to be environmentally responsible:

· Reduced packing materials 30 percent by weight.

· Packing materials are also 95 percent recyclable.

· Reduced printed documentation 75 percent by weight.

· System recycling kit is included.

The Studio Hybrid can personalized with a choice of seven optional, interchangeable external finishes or color sleeves, one of which is made from bamboo.

Some of that information I found subsequently on the Hybrid page if you click on the Design tab about half-way down.

It is superb to see manufacturers being more responsible in their latest PC models but come on Dell, a machine as Green as this should at the very least have a dedicated page highlighting its Green credentials.

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RackSpace’s customers ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products?

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Premium
Photo Credit ignescent_infidel

Jon Brodkin wrote a piece in ComputerWorld UK about a survey of RackSpace‘s customers which seems to suggest that they ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products. John goes on to extrapolate that they:

found some results suggesting businesses are losing interest in green technology.

There are a number of problems with this assumption. First off you have to realise that Rackspace don’t do co-lo. Rackspace only do managed hosting. So, if I am an IT manager I can’t put my equipment, no matter how energy-efficient, in a RackSpace Data Center, I have to use their equipment. What is not clear from the piece John wrote is what was the ‘premium’ the RackSpace customers were being asked to pay.

Again, if I am an IT manager, I can choose to buy, for example Dell’s PowerEdge™ Energy Smart 2950 III (SV22952), which is cheaper but slightly less powerful than their standard PowerEdge™ 2950 (SV22951). Realistically, the only reason I am going to do this is if it is going to save me money.

As James said previously – the wrong people are paying the electricity bill in companies currently (no pun):

IT doesn’t pay for its electricity. No, seriously, go to your FM manager or IT manager and ask who pays to power your IT properties. The vast majority of IT systems get a free ride on electricity bills, which is one reason its taken so long to fully consider IT carbon costs.

When that changes (and it will) watch IT managers suddenly become extremely interested in the energy ratings of their servers.

Going back to the RackSpace survey, fundamentally I think Rackspace are taking the wrong approach. What they should be doing is increasing prices to their customers across the board to reflect their own increased energy bill – except for those customers who chose to be hosted on energy efficient servers. If RackSpace took that route, suddenly you’d see a an about-face in the number of their customers who are apparently losing interest in green technology!!!

[Disclosure: I am co-founder a director of Cork Internet eXchange (CIX) an energy efficient data center based in Cork, Ireland. CIX charges all customers separately for their electricity usage.]