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Smart Grids for Europe white paper presented by SAP to EU Energy Commissioner

12036 NM Smart Grids for Europe En

SAP recently presented a white paper entitled Smart Grids for Europe – Benefits, Challenges and Best Practices to EU commissioner G?nter Oettinger.

The paper makes the case that there are few (i.e. no) ICT transformations that are as promising as Smart Grids in meeting Europe’s urgent energy challenges. The paper also makes a compelling case for Europe to leverage its continental scale and develop a single market Smart Grid. In such a market, on cloudy days, excess electricity generated from wind and wave energy in Ireland and Spain, could be sold into the German market if solar farms, for example were under-producing! Wind is a notoriously variable supplier, but given a large enough grid, it becomes quite stable (the wind is always blowing somewhere!).

The paper identifies the challenges facing the European energy sector currently –

  • Growing demand and rising prices
  • Ageing infrastructure – the electric utility infrastructure in most of Europe is between 60 and 80 years old
  • Climate change and sustainability – 20% reduction in GHG by 2020
  • Energy efficiency – the EU has a 20% energy efficiency target
  • Energy market liberalisation – both generators and consumers now have the right to transact business across internal EU borders
  • Security of supply – reduction of imports and esp fossil fuels

The paper went on to outline the advantages to Europe of smart grids – benefits for both the consumer (residential as well as industrial) and for the retailers and generators. Further benefits come from helping Europe meet its GHG reduction targets by facilitating greater penetration of renewables onto the grid and from making Europe more competitive in world Smart Grid markets.

The current state of Smart Grid deployments in Europe is, however, at best, early stage. The existing efforts are largely national with little coordination among them.

The white paper recommends developing an EU legislative Framework for Smart Grids – complete with proposed milestones. It further recommends incentives for investments in Smart Grids, common European standards for Smart Grids, ensuring privacy, security and trust in Smart Grids and consumer awareness campaigns, amongst other suggestions.

This paper is well worth a read, whether you are EU-based or not, if you have any interest in our future energy roadmap.

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 12/03/2010

Green Numbers

And here are this week’s Green numbers – shorter than usual presumably ‘cos last week was Thanksgiving in the US:

  1. China CDM Fund, the government body that invests money from carbon credits, will almost double its available cash for renewable energy projects to 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in 2012, the vice director of the fund said.

    The fund, which manages 6 billion yuan currently, will add as much as 3 billion yuan a year through 2012, Jiao Xiaoping, deputy director general of China CDM Fund, said in an interview in Shanghai yesterday.

  2. Looks like hard-core behavioral analysis and the good ol? U.S. mail has won one of the bigger cleantech cash prizes of the year.

    Opower has landed a $50 million investment from Kleiner Perkins, Accel Partners and New Energy Associates, more than tripling the $14 million it raised from NEA in late 2008 as it scales up to quadruple its customer base and launch some new products in 2011.

  3. IBM?supercomputers are the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world, according to the latest Supercomputing ‘Green500 List’ announced by Green500.org. A prototype of IBM’s next generation Blue Gene supercomputer is #1 on the list.

  4. The EU would be acting in its own economic interest if it raised its 2020 CO2 reduction target to 30%, says a European Parliament resolution approved on (last) Thursday, which also highlights forest protection and climate aid commitments to developing countries as critical areas for progress in upcoming international talks in Canc?n, Mexico.

Photo credit Lauren Manning

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 07/23/2010

Green Numbers

Photo credit tiffa130

And here are this week’s Green Numbers:

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

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Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 01/29/2010

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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What price carbon emissions?

Excess

Photo credit Pinot & Dita

One of the reasons we are facing a climate crisis is because people have not been paying the full economic price for their carbon consumption. Had they been, we’d be living in a very different world today. A quick comparison of average car fuel efficiency in the US versus the EU (where fuel has typically been priced at 2-3x the US price) bears this out.

When people have to pay a higher price for their emissions, they are less likely to pollute (if only to save themselves money!).

This brings us onto the trickier question though of what is a realistic price for carbon. The recent price of carbon emissions in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) has varied from €30 to €10 while today as I write this, it has a spot settlement price of €15.31. That may be current, but is it realistic?

What is a realistic price for carbon emissions?

Well, the reason we are charging for carbon emissions in the first place is to counter the damage being done to the environment by those very emissions – the polluter pays principle. In other words, the price to emit one tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere should be equal to the price of extracting one tonne of CO2 from the upper atmosphere.

And how much is that?

I have no idea to be honest! I have asked several people in this space and no-one has been able to tell me – principally because the technologies to extract CO2 from the upper atmosphere don’t yet exist! You can be sure that it is significantly more than €30 per tonne though.

As global CO2 emissions continue to rise and the effects of climate change become even more pronounced, the price being charged for CO2 emissions globally will need to trend closer to the price of extraction and away from the current €15.

If nothing else, this will encourage us to move to a less carbon intensive lifestyle – manufacturers of carbon intensive products beware!

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How many countries does it take to change a light bulb?

Light bulb

Photo credit _Beat_???

Well, the EU thinks it takes 27 countries to change the light bulb. And they may well be right.

Today the EU brings into force a ban on frosted and incandescant lightbulbs of 100W and over. This is the first part of a program to completely phase out incandescent light bulbs in the EU by 2012. According to the EU announcement, as a result of this

EU citizens will save close to 40 TWh (roughly the electrictity consumption of Romania, or of 11 million European households, or the equivalent of the yearly output of 10 power stations of 500 megawatts) and will lead to a reduction of about 15 million tons of CO2 emission per year.

However, this message doesn’t appear to be getting through to many of the EU citizens with many reports of people hoarding 100W lightbulbs across Europe.

Recycling CFL Lightbulbs

Recycling CFL Lightbulbs

Reasons for the hoarding are understandable. The light quality from CFL’s is not comparable to incandescents. CFLs lights are not dimmable. They are more expensive (at least as an initial outlay) and they need to be disposed of carefully as they contain small amounts of mercury. Fortunately our local Hipercor store has a special collection point for safe disposition and recycling of CFL’s. If your shop doesn’t, ask them why not!

However, on the positive side, what this ban does is it creates a large market of consumers (EU population is approx 500m people) hungry for good lighting solutions. This should act as a serious spur for innovation in the lighting space. The current alternatives to incandescent lights are CFL’s, Halogen lights and LEDs.

Of these, the CFLs have the limitations outlined above. Halogen bulbs have light quality equivalent to incandescents but they are not very energy efficient, saving at best 25-50% over incandescents (as compared to CFLs saving typically 75%) while still being expensive and LEDs are still quite an immature technology.

The LED light though holds the most promise. LEDs are mercury free, they are fully dimmable, their lifetime can be 50,000 to 60,000 hours (or about 10 times longer than an average CFL), there is no bulb or filament to break and they are extremely energy efficient. There are some barriers to their widespread adoption currently (they are expensive to produce and LEDs are quite directional) but the sudden appearance of a marketplace of 500m people will definitely act as an incentive to invest in overcoming these difficulties.

Thanks in no small part to today’s ban, in a few short years I expect we will all be using LEDs to light our homes and reducing our carbon footprint considerably in the process.

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Green Shoots at Microsoft: Public Sector Engagement: EU, UK

As I have written previously, Microsoft is finally beginning to pull together a coherent green story under new sustainability supremo Rob Bernard. The company is also missing a bunch of tricks, but more on that later. But back to the good. Yesterday came news that Microsoft is signing a non-exclusive five year deal with the European Environmental Agency (EAA) with a goal to “make environmental information more accessible to citizens in Europe”. A laudable goal. As I have written before We Are The Watchdogs. But in order to be watchdogs we need open data, transparently collected and shared. Its somewhat ironic that Microsoft is providing its services and software for free; given the EU sometimes has an issue with freebies. It will be interesting to see whether the EEA’s new web presence still uses Google custom search like the current one. The first step is to build a Web 1.0-style publishing portal, which will be based on the usual Microsoft middleware, and some Microsoft Live services, such as Virtual Earth. The EAA has wider ambitions that just publishing data however. According to the press release Professor Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the EEA said:

“This collaboration is a first of its kind to establish a two-way communication on the environment. Until now, authorities, including the EEA, have communicated their data to the public. But local observers, who are often the first to notice real change in their environment, had difficulties sharing their observations with others. This partnership will provide them a platform to do exactly that”.

Likesay, this is pretty much a canonical Greenmonk story. We are all watchdogs, we are all observers. Science progresses most effectively when research and data are widely distributed. Over 500 million people-that’s a lot of eyeballs. Interestingly enough the EAA is including Turkey in the scheme – so its taking the long, wide view. The EAA has a 13 year history of Open Data, such as making greenhouse gas information available to all, but normally focuses on EU policymakers, rather than citizens. Its great to see them turning the funnel the other way…

In other Microsoft related eco news, brought to my attention by Dominic Campbell, the first social media manager at a UK local authority, Wakefield Council saves over £4m while cutting carbon emissions.A skeptic might say this story was just greenwashing, but at Greenmonk we tend to focus on outcomes, rather than looking for hyprocrisy. As Jamie Hailstone writes: “the council will save more than £4m and cut carbon emissions by 35 tons.” There is a virtuous circle created by marketing efficiency as green. Green is Lean. Microsoft’s virtualisation team could learn a lot from the case study – there is nothing wrong with quick wins. Final bonus link: check out this sexy story about Virtual Earth running on Wind powered-servers.