post

Friday Green Numbers round-up for Feb 18th 2011

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 …

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit house of bamboo

post

Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 02/12/2010

Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

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

  • Iberdrola Renovables SA, the world?s largest operator of wind parks, agreed to buy Spain?s largest wind farm from Gamesa Corporacion Tecnologica SA.

    Renovables, based in Valencia, paid Gamesa 320 million euros ($441 million) for 244 megawatts of power capacity in Andevalo, Spain

    tags: iberdrola, iberdrola renovables, gamesa, Wind farm, greennumbers

  • IBM recently ran a ‘Jam’ – an online discussion – on environmental sustainability and why it is important for CIOs, CEOs and CFOs to address it. The Jam involved thousands of practitioners and subject matter experts from some 200 organisations. It focused primarily on business issues and practical actions.

    Take a look at the check list below and it becomes rapidly apparent, C-level management need to tackle the issue before it is foisted upon them.

    IBM’s Institute for Business Value will fully analyse the 2080 Jam contributions, but this is the essential CIO checklist derived from comments made during the Eco-Jam.

    tags: ibm, ecojam, eco jam, cio, greennumbers

  • Data centers are, thankfully, getting a lot of attention when it comes to making them more efficient. Considering that roughly 60% of the electricity used at a data center goes to keeping the servers cool, focusing on smart cooling tactics is essential. HP has taken this to heart and has opened it’s first wind-cooled data center, and it’s the company’s most efficient data center to date.

    In this piece, HP claims that their data center is the world’s first wind-cooled data center – I’m not sure just how valid this is as I have heard BT only do wind-cooled data centers!

    tags: hp, bt, data center, datacenter, wind cooled, air cooled, greennumbers

  • “Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.

    The founder of the Virgin group, whose rail, airline and travel companies are sensitive to energy prices, will say that the ?coming crisis could be even more serious than the credit crunch.

    “The next five years will see us face another crunch ? the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well,” Branson will say.”

    tags: richard branson, oil crunch, peak oil, virgin, greennumbers

  • “Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished making it much harder to grow crops around the world, according to a study by the University of Sydney.

    The study, reported in The Daily Telegraph, claims bad soil mismanagement, climate change and rising populations are leading to a decline in suitable farming soil.

    An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”, the report found.

    Soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes, in Europe 17 times faster and in America 10 times faster.

    The study said all suitable farming soil could vanish within 60 years if quick action was not taken, leading to a global food crisis.”

    tags: greennumbers, soil, topsoil, soil fertility

  • In response to an environmental lawsuit filed against the oil giant, Chevron has fortified its defenses with at least twelve different public relations firms whose purpose is to debunk the claims made against the company by indigenous people living in the Amazon forests of Ecuador. According to them, Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon between 1964 and 1990, causing damages assessed at more than $27 billion.

    tags: chevron, ecuador, greennumbers, amazon rainforest, amazon, toxic waste, pollution

  • Indian mobile phone and commodity export firm Airvoice Group has formed a joint venture with public sector body Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam to build 13GW of solar and wind capacity in a sparsely populated part of Karnataka district in south west India.

    The joint venture is budgeting to invest $50 billion over a period of 10 years, claiming it to be the largest single renewable energy project in the world.

    tags: greennumbers, india, airvoice, solar, wind, renewables, karnataka, renewable energy

  • Using coal for electricity produces CO2, and climate policy aims to prevent greenhouse gases from hurting our habitat. But it also produces SOx and NOx and particulate matter that have immediate health dangers.

    A University of Wisconsin study was able to put an economic value on just the immediate health benefits of enacting climate policy. Implications of incorporating air-quality co-benefits into climate change policymaking found coal is really costing us about $40 per each ton of CO2.

    tags: greennumbers, coal, sox, nox, particulate matter, greenhouse gases, health

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

post

Energy and Sustainability show for Monday Feb 8th

Watch live streaming video from greenmonktv at livestream.com

We had a great Energy and Sustainability show yesterday – in case you were unable to make it, I recorded the video (above) and the chatstream (below):

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:22
Tom Raftery :

Monday Feb 8th – show kicking off in just under 10 mins
Hi everyone, can you see/hear me ok?

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:31
Joe Garde :

all good tom

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:32
Tom Raftery :

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/409887/rbs_labelled_dirtiest_bank_in_britain.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-decock/nuclear-energy-toxic-expe_b_446868.html
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/japan-guilty-whaling080210

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:36
jonerp :

Tom, it’s ok, we can drink that nuclear water after the plant is done with it – you gotta mellow out

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:37
Tom Raftery :

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2257313/fertile-topsoil-lost-globally
http://tcktcktck.org/stories/climate-news/think-tanks-take-oil-money-and-use-it-fund-climate-deniers
http://www.naturalnews.com/028108_Chevron_Ecuador.html

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:40
jonerp :

God I hate that oil company sponsored pseudo scientific “research”….and I see so called “reasonable” people citing that research all the time…grrrrr…..

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:41
Tom Raftery :

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/chevron_toxic_legacy_5/
http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-strong-us-manufacturing-data-plus-nigerian-violence-means-oil-will-rally-2010-2
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/feb/07/branson-warns-peak-oil-close
http://www.newenergyworldnetwork.com/renewable-energy-news/by_technology/energy_efficiency/renewable-energy-utility-good-energy-criticises-uk%E2%80%99s-feed-in-tariff-rate.html
http://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/8781076971

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:45
jonerp :

oil energy scarcity is one of the big looming clouds blocking the view of any true long term economic recovery – without more progress on renewable economic and energy models that is.

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:48
Tom Raftery :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/traftery/

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:49
jonerp :

oh, and anyone who thinks that “coal is clean” has never held the stuff in their hands.

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:49
Tom Raftery :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/traftery/4340528102/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/traftery/4339782517/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/traftery/4339781747/
http://www.abengoasolar.com/corp/web/en/our_projects/solucar/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq58zS4_jvM&feature=channel
http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/07/audi-green-police-worst-green-superbowl-commercial/
http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/models/a3.html
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/quebecs-new-vehicle-emission-law-in-dispute/

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:53
Joe Garde :

tar sands on google maps – http://bit.ly/dsExVN zoom in

Mon, 8 Feb, 16:54
Tom Raftery :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/7182811/BP-faces-investor-revolt-over-Canadian-oil-sands-project.html
http://news.techworld.com/green-it/3212190/energy-star-rating-for-green-data-centres-to-launch/?cmpid=TD1N5&no1x1
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2257160/top-brands-usher-era-green
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/411050/uk_joins_calls_for_ban_on_atlantic_bluefin_tuna_trade.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/cites-supports-international-trade-ban-bluefin-tuna.php
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/work-connect/uhaul-creates-reuse-center.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/los-angeles-may-get-mandatory-rainwater-harvesting-law.php
http://www.csrinternational.org/?p=6340
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51zo3LA70U&feature=player_embedded
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/index.html

Mon, 8 Feb, 17:07
jonerp :

Thanks Tom.

Mon, 8 Feb, 17:07
divydovy :

great show Tom, thanks

Mon, 8 Feb, 17:07
Joe Garde :

great Tom.. thanks

Mon, 8 Feb, 17:08
Tom Raftery :

Thanks everyone for your time, interest and contributions

Mon, 8 Feb, 17:08
MikeTheBee :

Well done, I was a bit limited in bandwidth today, so will watch back l8r. Thx

post

George Lee keynotes the it@cork Green IT conference

RTE economics correspondent George Lee gave the opening keynote presentation at the 2008 it@cork conference – Green IT: Reduce CO2, Raise profits.

He gave an excellent presentation, showing off first his Segway (a personal electric transport device) and explaining his reasons for bringing it to the event. He then went on to give a superb talk diving deep into the numbers around the coming energy crisis, climate change and how they dwarf the current financial crisis their importance for the planet!

If you want to skip the Segway rant and get into the energy and carbon emissions data, skip forward to 16:50.

Great to hear from an economist who puts the long-term good of the planet before a short-term financial view!

[Disclaimer: GreenMonk were a media sponsor of the it@cork Green IT conference]

post

Peak oil is here – now what are you going to do about it?

Congressman Roscoe Bartlett [R] in the video above addresses the US congress on the liklihood that we have hit peak oil.

Congressman Bartlett has been banging this drum since 2005 but he received an unlikely ally in the International Energy Agency yesterday! The IEA is not known for being alarmist and is typically extremely conservative in these matters however yesterday’s Medium-Term Oil Market Report from the IEA contained some interesting nuggets which suggest that they are coming around to the “Peak Oil is here now”, way of thinking.

Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency speaking at a press conference at the World Petroleum Congress, emphasized that market fundamentals were the main underlying factor behind high oil prices. “OPEC production is at record highs and non-OPEC producers are working at full throttle, but stocks show no unusual build. These factors demonstrate that it is mainly fundamentals pushing up the price,” he added.

In other words, no build up of stocks means it is a simple case of supply and demand, not speculators, which is causing the current price increase.

This is not good news.

The report goes on:

Over 3.5 mb/d of new production will be needed each year just to hold global production steady. “Our findings highlight again the need for sustained, and indeed, increased investment both upstream and downstream — to assure that the market is adequately supplied,” stated Mr. Tanaka.

But figures for new production have been falling year-on-year, never mind increasing 3.5mb/d.

Ok, so if we say peak oil has arrived and we are never again going to see a barrel of oil go below $120 per barrel (in fact it will trend ever upwards over time), just what are you going to do now that you have that information?

Will you start an efficiency drive in your company? Remember your financial accounting – saved overhead goes straight to the bottom line!

Will you buy a hybrid car? Will you install solar/wind generation capacity at your place of work/home? Will you go vegetarian?

We are headed into challenging times but for people and companies who make the right choices, there is, as ever, money to be made!