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Dell launches its 2020 Legacy of Good Plan

Dell water bottle

Yesterday (Oct 15th 2013) Dell published their 2020 Legacy of Good Plan. In this plan they commit to

leaving a positive, measurable, and lasting contribution to out planet and our society.

Lofty goals indeed, but what about some of the more concrete specifics? Well Dell has published 21 concrete goals with an end-date of 2020 by which they have to achieve them.

The goals cover three distinct categories, Environment, People and Communities.

The Environmental goals include:

  • Reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our facilities and logistics operations by 50%
  • Reduce the energy intensity of our product portfolio by 80% and
  • Ensure 100 percent of Dell packaging is either recyclable or compostable

The People goals include:

  • Increase university hiring to a rate of 25 percent of all external hiring
  • Engage 40 percent of our global Dell team in employee resource groups by 2020 and
  • Achieve 75 percent favorable responses (or higher) in team member satisfaction globally as measured through the annual employee satisfaction survey

While the two Community goals are:

  • Engage 75 percent of team members in community service by 2020 and provide 5 million cumulative hours of service to the communities in which we live and work and
  • Apply our expertise and technology in underserved communities to help 3 million youth directly and support 10 million people indirectly to grow and thrive

The goals are all extremely laudable and measurable, and Dell has committed to transparency in the process. It will be interesting to watch Dell’s progress with the plan, especially as we come closer to the end-date 2020.

Dell claims to have worked closely with its customers in formulating this plan, but according to this Twitter conversation, not all Dell’s customers are on-board, as yet

An obvious goal missing from the People section would be to increase the number of female executives in the organisation, though Dell is already one of the top US companies for executive women. No harm to have written goals for this too though.

Finally while discussing this initiative with David Lear, Dell’s Executive Director of sustainability programs, I asked him what was going to happen to this program given Dell’s move from being a publicly traded to a privately owned company. He responded that because the plan was generated in consultation with Dell’s customer base, those customer’s were unlikely to change significantly after the privatisation, and Dell’s commitment to them wouldn’t change either.

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With great power comes great responsibility – or, Cloud companies need to get on-board

Spiderman

With great power comes great responsibility

This great quote from the movie Spider-Man, is just as true for technology, as it is for superheroes.

Technology has made possible tremendous changes in our quality of life in the last couple of decades. Everything from surgery to transportation, education to construction, space exploration and most other fields of human endeavour now depend heavily on IT. However, these great advances in our knowledge and abilities comes at a cost.

Information Technology’s carbon footprint, estimated by Gartner to be 2% of global carbon emissions in 2007, is rapidly increasing and by some estimates may even double by 2020. This is obviously an unsustainable situation. ICT, which can help so many organisations to reduce their carbon footprint, should itself be an shining example of low emissions.

To this end, the EU commission’s new ICT Footprint initiative is to be lauded. The announcement of the project on EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes blog gave the following details of the initiative:

This is why the European Commission has persuaded three leading standards development organisations and a prominent greenhouse gas accounting initiative to pool their measurement efforts. Under our new initiative these organisations will examine the whole sector, the whole lifecycle and the scalability of these methods.

That means measuring everything from the supply of raw materials to their recycling. Measuring not only what it takes to make products like a laptop, but also the impact of services like hosting data in the cloud. It means that in the near future we will be able to measure the ICT environmental footprint of whole cities or countries, including the positive environmental effects that ICT enables.

Several major ICT companies and organisations from Europe, Asia and the US are now trialling such measurement solutions. And from this month onwards, nearly 30 players have joined the European Commission to broaden and speed up the effort. We call on more and more such players to get involved.

It is tremendous to see this kind of global leadership from the EU. While this only applies to the EU, it does require the development of measurement and reporting systems for whole IT ecosystems and that can only be a good thing. In time, the hope would be that these systems are used well beyond the EU and by all IT providers.

The initial participants in the organisation are some of the better known large IT companies – BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Cisco, Hitachi, Telefonica, Fujitsu, SAP, Nokia, AMD, Dell, HP, etc. However, notably absent are the major Cloud providers. Where are Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, VMWare, RackSpace, Salesforce, even Google who have gone furthest arguably in reporting and reducing their emissions, are not participants.

I have lamented many times on this blog the lack of transparency of Cloud companies and they continue to prove me correct. Unfortunately.

Transparency around energy use and emissions is coming, have no doubt. Cloud companies will eventually have to report this information. They will be dragged into it screaming and kicking, but it will happen. Then we will be able to finally decide which provider to use based not just on price, but also on their impact.

In the meantime, if you are interested in reducing the impact of your Cloud computing, you could do worse than to check out MastodonC – a company that “selects the most efficient and sustainable location for your Hadoop job” and/or Greenqloud – a company offering public compute cloud using only renewable energy to power their cloud (their data centers are based in Iceland where 100% of the electricity comes from hydro and geothermal sources).

Photo Credit Greg and Mellina

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ArcelorMittal FCE roll out Organisational Risk Management software to unify maintenance processes

Organisational risk management (ORM) is the new hotness in the sustainability field. It is receiving increasing attention, as SAP’s Jeremiah Stone mentioned when I talked to him at SAP’s Sapphire/TechEd event last week. One assumes that it is receiving this increasing attention at least partly because that’s where the customer dollar is focussed right now.

What exactly is ORM? Organizational risk management is “risk management at the strategic level” according to the Software Engineering Institute – think of it as kind an amalgam of the traditional Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S) and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) sectors.

How do these fit into the sustainability agenda? Well, risk mitigation is all about reducing the risks of an adverse event occurring – one that either hurts people or the company reputation (or often both!). It does this by mandating procedures and processes with verifiable sign-offs. It also does this by scheduling maintenance and raising alerts when equipment goes out of tolerance. This properly scheduled maintenance of machinery will ensure it not only runs safer, but often will also mean it stays more fuel efficient. This can mean significant energy savings in organisations which use a lot of power.

While at SAP’s TechEd/Sapphire last week I spoke with Edwin Heene, who works with ArcelorMittal and is responsible for the rollout of their ORM software solution. I had a quick chat with him to camera about the project and why ArcelorMittal embarked on it.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi, everyone welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are at the SAP Sapphire event in Madrid, and with me I have Edwin Heene from ArcelorMittal. Edwin you have been involved in the organizational risk management project rollout or are involved in at the moment for ArcelorMittal. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Edwin Heene: So in ArcelorMittal Flat Carbon Europe we are doing a global organizational standardization project in maintenance, that including also the safety processes and this is something that we do in several countries namely eight countries in Flat Carbon Europe.

Tom Raftery: So maybe we should give it a bit of context first. Who are ArcelorMittal? You are a large steel company, but could you just give us a little bit of background about the company first?

Edwin Heene: ArcelorMittal is the largest steel producing company in the world doing — covering about 6% of the annual year production. Has a number of employees about 260,000 in 2010. And presence in Flat Carbon Europe because that?s the sector where — segment where I work in. It is covering eight different countries, and we have about 35 locations in Flat Carbon Europe.

Tom Raftery: Okay, so as I mentioned in the start you are in the middle of this organizational risk management software rollout, can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Edwin Heene: So this system we — in 2008 we selected the fact the solution has update to the support us with this harmonization and there we found out that there was a good supporting tool for operational risk management and safety processes namely the solution was PWCM –Work Clearance Management solution.

Tom Raftery: Okay, and you brought SAP in to help you in a kind of collaborative role in developing the application for yourselves.

Edwin Heene: Yeah, because in Flat Carbon Europe we had already a number of plans that are on good level of safety and managing the safety risks and so on in the operational part with some legacy systems, with a decision to go to one common system, the SAP system, we have to convince the other people with, which have already a good supporting IT tool to move over to SAP.

And therefore we found out that there were some lags still in the supporting SAP PWCM solution. So we had a number of meetings with Jeremiah Stone from SAP who is leading co-innovation programs in SAP and there we decided to, in order to close these gaps to provide these functionalities in standard SAP environment to step in a co-innovation program with SAP.

Tom Raftery: Okay and why roll it out — what was the reason behind the rollout of the application?

Edwin Heene: The reason behind the harmonization and standardization program in Flat Carbon Europe is first of all to improve the maintenance processes in effect implementing all the best practices that we have in several plants and you have a best practice in every single plant to absorb that in one common model, one common business model and implement that in all different plants. Throughout this implementation of best practices you have business results, operational results in every single plant. Benefiting of being in a large group and learning from each other, learning from the best practice from another group.

Tom Raftery: Excellent, Edwin that?s been great, thanks a million.

Edwin Heene: Thank you.

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Green Numbers round-up 09/04/2009

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

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TRIRIGA – “like a kitchen towel for stimulus funds!”

Kitchen Towel

Photo credit renaissancechambara

When I published my video interview of Hara’s CEO Amit Chatterjee, John Clarke, Director of Climate Change Solutions, TRIRIGA left the following comment:

I agree with Amit’s ‘carbon diet’ analogy as it highlights the need for organization to move to a state of ‘carbon heath’. Achieving true carbon health requires a comprehensive strategy focused on the operational and resource efficiency of an organization. Organizations focused on sustainability must move beyond the environmental reporting to evaluate operational changes and investment opportunities that reduce their environmental impact.
Organizations need software that moves beyond carbon accounting to deliver management and reduction components. The software should weigh an organization’s environmental impacts to identify underperforming facilities, processes and assets, analyzes the financial and environmental benefits of capital investments to develop the ideal diet and automate preventive maintenance activities to keep critical equipment operating at peak resource efficiency.
For the sake of transparency, I work for a company that has this kind of software, and I’m happy to discuss the topic with anyone who’s interested. Feel free to reach out.

I was intrigued so we had a chat with John yesterday about TRIRIGA (I forgot to ask why the name is in all caps!).

TRIRIGA started off in 2000 as a technology spin off from the largest design build firm in the casino construction industry (!) and have grown to a 211 person company since then. According to John, TRIRIGA has more than a third of the Fortune 100 using its software to manage their global real estate portfolio. They have identified this space as having huge opportunities because buildings currently represent 48% of carbon emissions globally and energy represents one third of a buildings operating costs.

In 2006 TRIRIGA received feedback from its customer advisory board that they needed to build technology to measure their environmental impact and optimise capital spend relative to carbon abatement on top of the existing software. In response they extended their software to capture energy, waste, water, direct-to-air emissions, and they embedded the Greenhouse Gas protocol to capture the carbon associated with all of this data.

With this data mapped against the real estate portfolio it is possible to identify under-performing locations.

As John put it

If you consider a company with identical buildings in Chicago and New York, same square footage, same equipment, same opportunities for replacing insulation, etc. so you have got the exact same abatement options. When you consider the CO2 emissions associated with the energy in Illinois versus New York (one being predominantly coal-fired, the other having a combination of energy sources including nuclear which has a much lower carbon co-efficient) and then you associate also with that the cost of energy in those two facilities that will identify that the same capital investment in two different locations will have a significantly different return to the organisation depending on the environmental and economic impacts.

All of those factors help identify your under-performing locations and then when you consider the abatement options, the system will then weigh those different characteristics to determine the ideal opportunities based on your strategic goals, whether that is cost reduction with some carbon goals or carbon reduction with the highest economic saving.

TRIRIGA are IBM Partners and they have Deloitte as strategic partners (as well as Deloitte’s being a customer for all of their real estate management).

Data in TRIRIGA’s software can be tracked on either a facility basis or on a project basis (organisations can track capital projects within TRIRIGA). TRIRIGA has a set of assessment tools which evaluates the under-performing locations, a set of financial models that evaluate the financial and economic return, the environmental opportunities can be used to generate a capital project which is then used to manage the implementation (i.e bid management, LEED/BREEAM checklists, etc.). On project completion, TRIRIGA handles the commissioning (inspections of set points, etc.) and finally TRIRIGA drives a set of automated alerts and work order tasks to notify those responsible at the required intervals, whether time-based or based on some runtime reading. So pretty much a full life-cycle delivered within the TRIRIGA applications.

The US federal govt has allocated $bn’s to energy efficiency programs recently. A significant portion of that is going to public schools (govt funded schools) systems. At the same time, the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act in the US senate will provide an additional $6.7bn for Green public schools. So roughly $45bn is about to be pumped into the energy efficiency of the public school system in the US. Denver public schools (a TRIRIGA customer) raised in the order of $300m in a public bond to update their schools. All of that money is under the control of the facility and real estate groups. This is not unusual, as you look at organisations who are attempting to reduce their environmental impact, you’ll see a similar trend, the money that is being allocated is being transferred from the controller to the operations group (the COO) and to the facilities group. These are the very people TRIRIGA deals with.

As my colleague James Governor (@monkchips) pointed out on the call, TRIRIGA is “like a kitchen towel for stimulus funds!”

TRIRIGA software is a Java based web app and it runs on either an Oracle or SQL Server back-end db. It integrates with most versions of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP (they are a NetWeaver certified application) ERP apps.

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June 15th GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability show – Face Off!

Last week I wrote a post in response to Dennis Howlett’s ZDNet article questioning the causes of climate change and therefore our reactions to it.

I also mentioned Dennis’ post in last week’s Energy and Sustainability show so Dennis contacted me and asked for an opportunity to come on the show to put forward his point of view. Dennis is an old friend, so of course I said yes.

So yesterday’s Energy and Sustainability show was a Tom vs Dennis face-off on climate change (actually it was a good natured chat with Dennis basically saying he was asking questions because not enough people were being skeptical!).

What do you think?

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Rich Lechner’s May update

Rich Lechner is IBM’s Vice President of Energy and Environment. I met him at an IBM event and asked if he would agree to do a monthly video update on Energy and Environmental matters. He graciously agreed and this is the 3rd installment.

In this episode Rich discusses bringing all an organisation’s energy information together – and the implications for organisational structure that will ensue.

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April 20th GreenMonk Energy and Sustainability show


Check out the video above of today’s GreenMonk Energy and Sustainability show along with chat stream below:

04:30 TomRaftery : Hi all – kicking off the show in a min
04:30 mikeTheBee : Hello Tom.
04:30 ustreamer-40756 : Hiya
04:31 mikeTheBee : Could ustreamers note their names if poss.
04:31 TomRaftery : Audio & video ok?
04:31 mikeTheBee : Not yet for me
04:32 mikeTheBee : Okay
04:32 mikeTheBee : 6 viewers
04:32 Suki_Fuller : Hello all.
04:33 TomRaftery : http://blog.beliefnet.com/choprafamily/2009/04/1500-farmers-in-india-commit-m.html
04:34 mikeTheBee : 7 viewers
04:35 TomRaftery : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/14/global-warming-target-2c
04:35 mikeTheBee : 9 viewers
04:35 mikeTheBee : 11 viewers
04:36 ustreamer-19973 : how do we set out names?
04:36 mikeTheBee : Just a comment will work, or login for name
04:36 ustreamer-19973 : THanks i get it
04:36 TomRaftery : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution
04:37 monkchips : does the debate now move from Sustainability to Survivability?
04:37 ustreamer-19973 : 19973: Chris Phillips (Will create an account later(
04:37 monkchips : massive implications for which species we protect and so on
04:37 TolkienLibrary-2627 : you can type /nick and a nickname
04:37 monkchips : what the shit? whoa….
04:39 TomRaftery : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090413102225.htm
04:39 mikeTheBee : 10 viewers
04:39 monkchips : tom- what are the sustainability implications of Oracle acquiring Sun – or is that just too much of a stretch
04:40 monkchips : sun v positive on green.
04:40 monkchips : has done a lot of good work
04:40 monkchips : some nice low power techniques
04:41 TomRaftery : http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/19/rising-sea-levels-in-pacific-create-wave-of-migran/
04:41 TomRaftery : http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/13/technology/gunther_electric.fortune/index.htm
04:42 mikeTheBee : 13 viewers
04:43 TomRaftery : http://gas2.org/2009/04/19/car-companies-agree-on-plug-standard-for-electric-vehicles/
04:43 ustreamer-549 : ?
04:43 Suki_Fuller : Internationally also?
04:44 cminion-7005 : We they should have learnt that from history, if you look at how hte national grid came about
04:44 mikthebee-nametest : .
04:44 Suki_Fuller : Awesome.
04:45 TomRaftery : http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090414/wl_asia_afp/chinaenvironmentgovernment
04:45 mikeTheBee : Good tip re /nick TolkienLibrary, thx
04:45 monkchips : a lot of the good environmental news comes from China. that top down thing can be bloody useful in sustainability
04:45 TomRaftery : http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/19/china-environment-kyoto
04:46 mikeTheBee : Ought to work for the EU too!
04:47 TomRaftery : http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/20/police-intelligence-e-on-berr
04:48 monkchips : those fucking fucks. that is corporatism at best, fascism at worst
04:48 Suki_Fuller : That makes people in my profession look bad.
04:49 TomRaftery : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/18/coal-carbon-capture-storage
04:49 Suki_Fuller : *Shame*
04:49 monkchips : UK police share info with the “department for business, enterprise and regulatory reform”#
04:49 monkchips : which then shares it with a French company, with a huge French government shareholding
04:50 monkchips : to establish coherent PR story etc
04:51 Suki_Fuller : @monkchip – Exactly – bite the nose to spite the face
04:51 ustreamer-73483 : hi folks
04:51 TomRaftery : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/19/sellafield-nuclear-plant-cumbria-hazards
04:52 mikeTheBee : 14 Viewers
04:53 ustreamer-73483 : the irish sea?
04:53 ustreamer-73483 : jesus
04:53 monkchips : its easier to catch the fish when they glow in the dark…
04:53 ustreamer-73483 : justin
04:53 Suki_Fuller : lol
04:53 Suki_Fuller : not right James not right
04:53 ustreamer-73483 : what fish?
04:53 TomRaftery : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/world/asia/15coral.html?_r=2
04:53 mikeTheBee : Sellafield processing rather storage surely.
04:55 JustinParks : long term investment?
04:55 monkchips : i think its goodness
04:55 TomRaftery : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090419212516.htm
04:55 monkchips : research has shown
04:56 monkchips : that small areas, kept clear, can significantly increase biodiversity
04:56 cminion-7005 : less food transported, less petrol required to drive people around???
04:56 monkchips : @tomraftery – its just the Ryanair model for the globe. pay at the point of excretion
04:56 mikeTheBee : Ah Ryan Air per Kg charing
04:57 JustinParks : Im not going to mention the Cow emissions in congunction with fat folk
04:57 Suki_Fuller : The only people that get upset are fat
04:57 monkchips : more likely to drive? nah – the morbidly obese have those nice
04:57 monkchips : little electric cars….
04:57 JustinParks : better…
04:57 TomRaftery : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
04:58 JustinParks : I saw a documentry on this
04:58 JustinParks : paid to farm nothing
04:59 TolkienLibrary-2627 : good concept
04:59 TolkienLibrary-2627 : viva Costa Rica…
04:59 Suki_Fuller : Coolio
04:59 TolkienLibrary-2627 : and Borneo
05:00 TomRaftery : http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/17/epa-obama-find-carbon-dioxide-is-a-danger-to-public-health-and-welfare-requiring-regulation/
05:00 JustinParks : Here Tom: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/documentary_archive/4551977.stm
05:00 monkchips : gotta run! client call. thanks Tom. great show as ever
05:01 mikeTheBee : Did you hear? Siemans comment re Dublin’s Carbon Footprint being bigger than Londons, per capita.http://www.rte.ie/business/2009/0420/mibusiness.html
05:01 JustinParks : did you check http://www.cooltribe.com/
05:02 TolkienLibrary-2627 : now following you at twitter… this was great! thnxs
05:02 JustinParks : yeah goodo so very environmental orientated site
05:03 JustinParks : that could be fun
05:03 mikeTheBee : Thx all
05:03 Suki_Fuller : Wow. Great articles today & as always awesome show
05:03 JustinParks : spammers contribution to climate change
05:03 TomRaftery : Thanks everyone for a great show
05:03 mikeTheBee : Thx Tom
05:03 JustinParks : thnaks Tom
05:03 JustinParks : lluegoi
05:03 Suki_Fuller : Thanks Tom
05:03 TomRaftery : Justin – you are right – forgot to mention the spam carbon footprint story – d’oh!
05:04 TolkienLibrary-1882 : thnxs Tom
05:04 TomRaftery : Thanks for the kind words Suki
05:04 JustinParks : lolo seriously?
05:05 TomRaftery : I’ll get link – one sec
05:05 JustinParks : I was “kindof” takin the mick… out of spammers
05:05 JustinParks : but I suppose its very true
05:05 cgarvey : sorry, missed it.. will catch the recording hopefully!
05:06 TolkienLibrary-1882 : don’t know who tweeted about this show, but came in by twitter…
05:06 TolkienLibrary-1882 : loved the articles…
05:06 TomRaftery : http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/report-shows-spam-s-massive-carbon-footprint–633
05:07 TomRaftery : TolkienLibrary – great, thanks for joining in
05:07 TomRaftery : This time every Monday
05:07 TomRaftery : cgarvey – I’ll have the recording up shortly on GreenMonk.net
05:07 TolkienLibrary-1882 : so spam not only bad for my productivity it seems!
05:07 JustinParks : thanks, pleasure Tom, gotta run
05:08 TomRaftery : TolkienLibrary, exactly
05:08 TolkienLibrary-1882 : what would be the impact of twitter on the environment?
05:09 TomRaftery : Significant too I suspect but it can be a force for good – I use it to disseminate stories
05:09 ustreamer-35467 : Tom sorry Joe and I missed you today, Cheers Mark (Charmer)…
05:09 TomRaftery : np Mark – will have recording on GreenMonk later today
05:11 TolkienLibrary-1882 : whenever you ask a question, the answer is already somewhere on the internet: http://earth2tech.com/2009/04/15/twitters-an-energy-guzzler-other-hard-truths-for-web-20-app-addicts/

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What is your company’s Sustainability Communications Program like?

Sustainability

Photo credit _ A l v a r o _

I guess the first question should be does your company have a Sustainability Communications Program? If not, why not?

As I mentioned in my last post, it is now time for everyone to

band together not only at national levels, but at company and community levels to do everything we can to work to reduce our impact on the planet. Don’t rely on your politicians to do it for you. Get together with friends, neighbours, co-workers and make a change.

So, what is your company doing about sustainability? Some companies invest heavily in this space. Others roll it under the marketing umbrella and still more, don’t even have a sustainability policy.

How do you improve your company’s sustainability policies? I don’t know! But more than likely, you or others in your organisation have great ideas about ways your company can be more environmentally responsible. Why not poll them?

Roll out a bottom-up Sustainability Suggestions Wiki in your organisation today. Most people have excellent ideas on how to improve things in their company but assume they will not be listened to. A wiki allows people to make suggestions in a transparent, meritocratic manner.

Incent people to do so. Give prizes for best suggestions every month. Prizes could be anything from something small like a CFL light bulb, or a Current Cost meter, all the way up to sponsorship of an MBA in Sustainable Business, or any number of things in between.

Go further, video and podcast interviews with winners – make them heroes in the company. The rewards for the company will often be cost savings through efficiencies but also a more highly motivated workforce, who see the company as being responsible and caring of what they (the employees) think.

Enabling bottom-up suggestions in this manner (and subsequently acting on them) promotes a “We are all in this together” spirit and empowers people to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, a difference which they may be unable to make as individuals.

Why wouldn’t you do this?

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The cheaper the electricity the lower its carbon footprint!

Supply and demand

Photo Credit Milton CJ

I was speaking at the EventoBlog España conference on Saturday and I made the comment that electricity’s carbon footprint tends to increase as it becomes more expensive.

In follow-up questions, I failed to explain well what I meant so I will attempt to do so here.

Electricity pricing (on the wholesale market) is a function of supply and demand. When demand is high, electricity is expensive, when demand is low, electricity is typically cheap.

For weather based renewables (wind, solar, wave) – they produce power completely independently of the price of electricity, so they produce the same amount whether electricity is cheap or expensive.

Since weather based renewables are on average a constant percentage then they tend to have a higher slice of the market when electricity is in low demand/cheaper.

In other words, weather based renewables are independent of demand, therefore at times of low demand, they have a higher share of the market. This is even more so the case for wind which tends to blow more at night when demand is lower.

As there is a definite correlation between low demand and low price, it can be said by extension that the cheaper the electricity, the lower its carbon footprint!