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Why would you feature oil companies as customer references?

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Oiled Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation

The BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico was, unfortunately, far from being an isolated incident. Chevron in Ecuador, Shell in Nigeria, Exxon in Alaska – name me an oil company and I’ll name you an environmental disaster. And, it appears that some of them are responsible for funding, climate change denial.

And yet at a number of conferences I’ve been at recently, oil companies have been mentioned as customer references from the podium. From my position as an advocate of green measures, that irks.

Hasso Plattner keynoting the Sapphire Now conference

At SAP’s Sapphire Now conference last week for example, during the keynotes given by Vishal Sikka, CTO, and Hasso Plattner, Chair and co-founder of SAP, three oil companies were featured. And this is a company which is going to great pains to establish a reputation for itself as being being Sustainable.

It is not like SAP were short of customer references – there were probably north of 30 customers shown between the two back-to-back keynotes. No-one would have complained if there were three less.

So, they had oil companies, ok, well to counter that how many of the other customer companies represented were renewable generators? Not one. Not a single one.

C’mon guys, it’s not like renewable generators have a shortage of big data – I remember on visiting Logica’s center of excellence in Lisbon seeing their windfarm management application. They told me that a typical turbine outputs around 250 data points per minute and that particular application was managing over 2,000 wind turbines.

Leaving Logica aside, there are plenty of other well known companies heavily involved in renewables who could have been showcased – think Siemens, Vestas, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Iberdrola, Hyundai, GE, Gamesa, and Alstom for wind energy; then there’s Bosch, Sharp, and Sanyo for solar, for example.

In fairness to SAP, one of their demos, from UK energy retailer Centrica, was a Smart Meter Analytics demo where Centrica was able to utilise the analytics to help consumers reduce their power consumption – more on which in another post.

And, I should not ignore that fact that oil companies such as BP have invested in renewables but is that where their focus really is? SAP is pushing the sustainability agenda and for that they should be given credit. But… show us the evidence in the real world of customers that SAP is supporting.

That’s how you gain credibility.

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Photo credit NOAA’s National Ocean Service

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SAP are now starting to let their customers tell their Sustainability story

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Centrica's Smart Meter Analytics implementation

I attended SAP’s SapphireNow conference this week. At previous Sapphire conferences SAP went strong on Sustainability – having guest speakers like Al Gore and Richard Branson and also having both Co-CEO’s address the topic strongly in their talks. This year however, they went a different route.

This year the main themes discussed by guests and Co-CEO’s were mobility and in-memory computing with sustainability merely referenced a couple of times in passing. On the other hand, a search of the online agenda shows that there were 60 sessions at the event which were Sustainability themed. What’s more, as SAP’S VP Marketing for Sustainability Solutions Marty Etzel pointed out to me, 80% of those sessions were customer or partner led.

I think it shows a certain maturity and confidence by SAP that they are willing to step back from the previous top-down approach to Sustainability that they have espoused and to allow their customers and partners to bottom-up tell the story on their behalf. It is always a far more convincing story when it is your partners and customers are talking up your solutions.

Due to meetings, I couldn’t get to as many of the sessions as I wanted to but fortunately many of them were recorded for replay on the SapphireNow so I’ll be able to catch up with them over the coming days.

It is a gutsy move by SAP to let their customers tell their Sustainability story – but it is one which is vital for the credibility of their solutions.

Disclosure – SAP paid my travel and expenses to attend this event

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report demo’d

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I had a Skype chat recently with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf where he gave me a demo of their new 2010 Sustainability report.

With Peter’s permission, I recorded the demo for publication on YouTube. The video above is the result and the transcription is below.

Some highlights Peter mentioned include:

  1. More sustainable operations have saved SAP ?170 million (!) between 2008 and today,
  2. SAP are updating their Sustainability report quarterly and are embedding it more and more closely with their financial reporting and,
  3. SAP have deep social media embedding in their report

With this report, SAP have put clear blue water between themselves and any other sustainability report. SAP can still take it up another few notches (productising it, putting an api in front of it, publishing in xbrl, etc) but this is the kind of reporting everyone needs to be moving to, as a baseline. Kudos to SAP for once again setting the bar with this report.

Now here’s the transcription of the demo:

Tom Raftery: Hi, everyone. Welcome to GreekMonk TV. We are talking today to SAP?s Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf, who is going to give us a quick demo of the new 2010 SAP Sustainability Report.

Peter Graf: So, this is SAP?s 2010 Sustainability Report, which people can find online at sapsustainabilityreport.com. The report lays out the three key areas of impact for SAP. In the first place, SAP wants to become a more sustainable company, so we are talking about our own sustainability performance. The second section of the report is about how SAP helps customers to run more profitably and sustainably, so that?s mostly a conversation about our applications and software solutions.

And then finally, there is a section on how people at SAP drive opportunity for others through IT. And then, certainly the last part, as always when we put our report on the line is that encouraging into action and dialog between us and those who come and visit the report. And we call that section Do Your Part and that describes how everyone can contribute.

Tom Raftery: Great. Can you show me some of the details of how SAP have done in the last year? How does it look onscreen, because it?s very different from any other sustainability report that?s out there?

Peter Graf: Exactly. So before we go there, the data that we talk about is all assured by KPMG, and there are two levels of assurance and yes, this report is A+ from GRI perspective. It?s got the best rating that you can get from GRI. It complies with a whole variety of standards, but most importantly, we have not only done limited assurance to our greenhouse gas numbers, we?ve actually gone for reasonable assurance, meaning the assurance company actually assures that this is really our footprint. And we do that because we believe in the future there will be much more scrutiny around how people are reporting greenhouse gas emissions.

And that?s what the greenhouse gas emissions look like. You can see the trend from 2000 to 2007; we?ve always increased our emissions. In 2007, we set ourselves the goal to reduce our emissions step-by-step back to the level of 2000 by the year 2020, so we have an absolute carbon target. That is pretty aggressive considering that in 2000, we had about 24,000 employees and already today in 2011, we have more than 50,000 employees and we want to obviously continue to grow as a company.

You can also see that we have kind of flipped the chart to kind of visually highlight that emissions are seen as a liability to SAP so they show below the line.

Tom Raftery: And clicking on any of those bars redraws the kind of pie chart on the right?

Peter Graf: Exactly, so you can go and drill into the different years and you can see how the emissions change. For example in 2008, we had 31% of our emissions from flights that also tells you that we include Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in our calculation.

That number dropped dramatically in 2009, given that in the times of economic crisis, we just don?t service as many customers, so you can see that here. And then in 2010, the number continues in absolute terms to be reduced, which is amazing given that we have actually increased our revenues by 17% in 2010 while reducing our emissions. You can see that very nicely when you look at the carbon emissions on a Euro basis. We are now at 33.9 grams per Euro revenue and in 2008, that number was 45.6 grams.

So, in terms of carbon efficiency we have dramatically accelerated and you can drill into different areas. For example, revenue in the Americas, you can actually go and look at different scopes and include or exclude them in the competition. So that?s the benefit of having this kind of interactivity.

Tom Raftery: The obvious question that comes to mind then is, if you are spending all this money on getting carbon out of your system, out of your organization, it must be costing the company a small fortune.

Peter Graf: Yeah, that?s the secret sauce I would say, because what we do at SAP is from the carbon perspective, we have a very, very good idea about where we need to kind of have activity in order to have a positive financial impact. So, here you see the SAP specific abatement cost curve that we have, which is produced with the help of SAP carbon impact and you can see, for example, for every ton of carbon that we avoid using video conferencing, the company saves ?654 and there are 39,000 tons that we can abate that way. So, the width of every one of those rectangles describes how much carbon we can save, the height describes the financial impact.

We have done an analysis in terms of a business as usual case, so we extrapolated our carbon performance from the 2000 to 2009 further into the future in the business as usual case and in comparison to that business as usual case Tom, we saved ?170 million. So, 170 — so it looks like this is expensive stuff, but in reality for us, we live the sustainability business case and we are bringing in savings by becoming more energy efficient.

Tom Raftery: So, you are also going beyond not just in terms of presentation and interactivity, but you are also going beyond what most of the companies are doing as well by reporting not just once a year or not just once every two years as some companies are doing, but once every quarter?

Peter Graf: That?s correct. And we?ve just announced our first quarter results. We have a 6% increase in carbon for the first quarter of 2011, which we can easily track to a 5% increase in employees and we have had a very, very good performance last year in terms of carbon, so we need to keep on our toes and do the right things.

I want to highlight one element which is our increasing renewable energy, which went from 16% to 48% last year globally. Again, you can see the type of charts we used. Below the line, we have fossil and nuclear sources for electricity; above the line, we have renewable sources like wind and hydro. So there is a big shift going on between 2009 and 2010, how we source our electricity and the beauty of this chart, below the chart we show how we do less bad and above the chart we show how we do more good and the change is pretty significant.

I mean, look in 2009, we had probably 16% total renewables and the number has grown so much. While in addition, the absolute number of gigawatt hours of electricity we consume has been reduced to 268 from 301. So, our strategy is to reduce the distance from this point to that point and at the same time shift the whole thing up.

Tom Raftery: Are you doing any — or have you plans to do any integration with your financial reporting?

Peter Graf: This report is actually launched in an integrated fashion with our financial report. So for example, if I go and look at the overall performance and I?m interested in revenues for example, if I click on that what is happening is that I?m branching out to SAP?s annual report. So, there is no redundancy and the way how these reports are designed you know, there is — from a layout perspective the same kind of branding and so, the two reports are interconnected, so we avoid redundancy.

We are not yet in one report, but we have taken a significant step, because we are launching these reports at the same time on the web and they are linked with each other. So, that?s an intermediate step, but the trend certainly goes to what one report is.

Tom Raftery: Last question, I?m a big user of Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook as you know and I see a little Fs and Ts up there in the top right. I assume this means that I can take parts of the report and drop them into Twitter and Facebook and I see a LinkedIn link there as well?

Peter Graf: Yes, exactly. So first of all, it?s interesting to see that there are really conversations going on, on the right. People can rate these and you can look at things from a time perspective or most popular. You can always share comments and when you do, you are asked to use your credentials in one of those social websites to go and leave a comment.

So, for example, I can now login in Twitter and use my Twitter account here and sign in. At that point in time, I?m brought back into the application, now I?m logged in into the report and when I share something now, I?m actually putting something out there.

I don?t want to type in this is a test, but when I do, you are getting the question, if you want to tweet it at the same time as leave your comment on the report. And in this way, we get a lot of traffic, because these comments go out on Twitter and on the web into Facebook and people come back to the actual site.

The other beautiful element of the logging in is that you can really ensure that your voice is heard. So for example, this is our materiality matrix and it?s a way for us to have structured feedback from people that go to the report. You can see how over time materiality changed, so things became more important, things became less important and this is a real time feed.

So, I can actually go in, open this matrix and drag and drop points there according to what I think is important for me and for things that I think that are important for SAP. And when I go and save this, very interesting things happen, this data comes back to SAP and we can actually go and look at the navigated view and that?s what I can show you right now.

So, if I go to real time this is the aggregate of all the hundreds of people that went there and communicated to us what they deemed to be important and what not. And people are really making up their mind; there is a lot of ?Yes or No.? It?s pretty clear what?s in and what?s not so important and we like that, they are better — that?s a great feedback for us.

There is one more thing Tom that I would like to highlight, which is the impact we have now taken, not just our own operational impact, but really the impact we have on a greater scale. And we have done some estimates in terms of what is the impact of SAP through its customers on the world.

So, for example, we believe that our sustainable supply chain solution help about 800 million consumers live safer and healthier. In other words, the product safety capabilities that SAP brings to the table combined with the large amount of customers in the consumer space of SAP have delivered significant value to everybody and that?s how we are describing that.

These are estimates and we want people to comment to how we get to the number, because we explain it in detail, this is how we get to this number and we really would like more feedback from everybody in terms of how we measure that and how that could be improved.

So, if anyone has a comment, please leave it up here.

Tom Raftery: Cool, Peter that?s been fantastic. Thanks a million for that, thanks for coming on the show.

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The International SAP for Utilities event – focus on renewables and in-memory computing

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Joschka Fischer

I attended the International SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim recently. This was the fourth SAP for Utilities event I have attended and it was by far the best. This was the first time I was attending the event as a speaker, not just an analyst and that may well have coloured my opinion of the event, but I don’t think so, to be honest. Why?

Well, there were two main take-aways for me from the event

  1. There was a much higher focus on renewables and
  2. There was a lot of discussion of in-memory computing

And neither of those had anything to do with the topic of my own talk (The New Power of the Customer’s Voice).

I knew I was in for an interesting conference when the opening keynote was from Joschka Fischer. Fischer used his keynote to make a blistering attack on the nuclear industry. Fischer, the former German vice-chancellor and Foreign Minister said “we must say goodbye to nuclear energy – it is not safe, and we don’t know the costs”. He went on to state that Germany “is going to phase out of nuclear energy”. Bear in mind that many of the utilities who were in the room would have significant nuclear plants in their generation fleet.

What will Germany use to replace its nuclear power? Renewables and energy efficiency will be key, he said. Germany will need super grids and a smart grid with gas as a backup technology (from diverse regions because, he said, Russia is not a reliable source).

In his opening keynote, Klaus Heimann, apart from talking up two new SAP Energy Management products, declared that “more than ever before we wish we could generate all of our electricity from renewables” and he went on to assert that “if we spent our resources learning how to capture and store natural power, we’d be in a very different place now”.

And this was the first two talks of the conference!

SAP Research director Orestis Terzidis

SAP Research director Orestis Terzidis

Scarcely a talk went by without some reference to renewables – understandable given that this was taking place in the immediate aftermath of the Fukashima nuclear disaster.

The most data-rich talk on renewables, perhaps not surprisingly, came from Orestis Terzidis, VP SAP Research EMEA. He referenced peer-reviewed research throughout his presentation to make his case that large-scale wind, water and solar systems can reliably supply all of the world’s energy needs at reasonable cost.

Interestingly, on the renewables front SAP has put its money where its mouth is. From SAP’s independently verified Sustainability Report you can see that SAP increased its purchase of renewable energy from 16% in 2009 to 48% in 2010.

Nice – obviously 100% would be better than the current 48% but renewables are not available for purchase in all geographies. Yet.

The other core topic heavily referenced in the event was in-memory computing (In-memory computing moves data off traditional storage and into RAM, providing a performance boost over reading data off disks).

Given that utility companies deploying smart grids will be moving from a maximum of one meter read per month to a situation where they will have more data coming from smart meters (more data fields) and coming in more often (one read every 15 minutes means around 2,880 reads per month), utilities are about to face in influx of data like they have never seen before.

In-memory computing is a natural fit for performing any kind of real-time analytics on this tidal-wave of data. Not surprising then that one of SAP’s first in-memory products is going to be a Smart Meter Analytics for Utilities solution.

The next SAP for Utilities event will be the US one this coming September in San Antonio. Given that this one was so good – the pressure is really on conference organisers The Eventful Group to try to exceed, or even just to match this conference.

Full Disclosure – SAP are a GreenMonk client and SAP paid for me to attend and speak at the SAP for Utilities event.

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Unfortunate EV choice won’t help SAP’s Greenhouse Gas reduction commitments

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SAP's 2010 Global Greenhouse Gas Footprint

The graph above is taken from the Greenhouse Gas Footprint page of SAP’s Sustainability Report and it shows SAP’s global GHG footprint for 2010. Of particular note in this graph is that globally SAP’s 2010 carbon footprint for corporate cars is 24%. This is up from 23% in 2009 and 18% in 2008. This is obviously a problem for SAP who have publicly committed to reducing their Greenhouse Gas Emissions 51% (from their 2007 baseline) by 2020.

In an effort to help address this SAP decided to embark on a small scale Electric Vehicle (EV) project called Future Fleet. Future Fleet uses a fleet of 30 EV’s charged solely from renewable sources supplied (along with the charging infrastructure) by project partner MVV Energie.

SAP Future Fleet electric vehicle

SAP Future Fleet electric vehicle

SAP are using this project to test employee attitudes to EV’s but also to test their own EV eMobility charging and fleet management software which is being developed, and tested in tandem with the project. The software allows employees to log in and book cars for specific journeys between SAP sites in Germany, or for a day or a week at a time. The software also intelligently prioritises charging of cars based on expected upcoming journey duration, current battery state and other factors.

All good and laudable stuff. However, one major issue I have with the project is that for purely political reasons SAP chose an electric car for the project which seemed to be designed with the distinct purpose of turning drivers off EV’s. This happened because the project was part-funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and they insisted that SAP use a German-made car for the project. I have no idea of the legality of this stipulation but at first glance it would seem contrary to EU legislation.

In any case, SAP went to several large German manufacturers who were unable to provide EV’s for the project. They then found a local co. who took Suzuki car bodies (if memory serves) and installed a purely electric drive-train. This resulted in electric cars which have a number of issues:

  1. the cars’ look ugly – giving lie to the idea that EV’s are small, ugly, box-like cars
  2. the cars’ are incredibly basic inside – no electric windows, no electric mirrors, and a manual transmission (no, really!) and
  3. the cars’ energy management interface is horrible – it is an unreadable single-line LED, as opposed to the Windows-type UI now normal on commercially available EV’s and hybrids

This wouldn’t be so bad except that with SAP’s carbon emissions from corporate cars on the rise, SAP needs to be making EV’s an attractive proposition for its employees. With these cars, SAP risks turning its employees off EVs, and sabotaging its own GHG reduction commitments.

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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SAP announces two new energy management products

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I attended the International SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim recently and was surprised when in his opening keynote, Klaus Heimann introduced two new SAP energy management products.

The first is a customer portal for Utility companies which helps utility companies roll out online self-service sites for their customers. This is being made available for utility companies both as a product, and as a service!

And the second is an Enterprise Energy Management application. This is a product to help large organisations better manage their energy – and as Klaus explains in the video above, by energy, SAP is referring to all forms of energy, not just electricity. And water too. SAP hopes to sell this to utility companies, so they can offer it as a service to their larger customers.

I was intrigued by the announcements so I asked Klaus if he’d go on camera to say a few words about them. See the resulting video above and the transcription below…

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at the SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim and with me I have Klaus Heimann. Klaus you brought up in your keynote two new announcements from SAP, two very interesting announcements, can you tell me a bit more about them?

Klaus Heimann: Yes, for sure. The first one was about customer online services. That’s easily explained. 750 million households are currently receiving bills from their utilities that are actually produced by our software. And many of these consumers now are in a deregulated market increasingly getting into the smart grid. And so the number of contacts they have to the utility is increasing and the utilities are getting very concerned about the cost of their call centers, they want to switch to internet. And our offering is here that we want to develop internet self services made-to-order for each utility as they want it, that refers back to the SAP for utilities instance that our customers are running.

Tom Raftery: So this means that the utility companies have an internet portal for their customers?

Klaus Heimann: Yes. The interesting thing is actually we can run that portal for them. And now that’s a longer story, but it’s really a not only an IT product, it’s also an IT service that SAP is thinking about to really help reducing the cost of our customers and make their consumer, customer service more attractive. The second announcement I made is about enterprise energy management. It’s not really a utilities application, it’s actually across industry application that helps big enterprises, number one to save energy, so save kilowatt hours, number two to better give —

Tom Raftery: You were explaining to me earlier this — when are saying energy, you mean, you actually mean energy, you are not talking just electricity.

Klaus Heimann: I mean energy in any kind, actually I also mean water. So primarily I mean energy like electricity and gas, it could also be oil, it could be petrol, it could be water. So we are looking to everything, but clearly the biggest savings are in the area of electricity and gas, that’s why we focus on it. And as I said it’s a cross-industry solution that helps our big enterprises to save energy and also to do a better procurement, a better planning for energy demand and we are presenting this here at this conference, because we do believe this could become a service that our utilities customers use themselves to help their big customers to improve their energy efficiency, because if the utilities don’t do it then somebody else does it, and I think it’s an attractive business especially for retail utilities.

Tom Raftery: Fantastic. Klaus that’s been great, thanks a million.

Klaus Heimann: Thank you.

Disclosure – SAP are a GreenMonk client. They paid for me to attend, produce videos from and speak at the International SAP for Utilities event.

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

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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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SAP’s new NetWeaver 7.3 has a nice energy efficiency story

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Green Code

If, like me, you have been using technology for a while now, you will be used to the constant release-by-release bloating of software. The first time I installed Excel it was version 2.2 and at the time it fit comfortable on a 1.4mb 3.5″ floppy disk – remember floppy disks?

In a pleasant bucking of that trend, SAP’s Holger Faulhaber told me in a recent call, that the latest version of their NetWeaver platform (v. 7.3) is a much leaner beast! While it is unlikely to fit on a floppy disk, it does have some significant performance wins, along with the simplified architecture and the functionality improvements you’d expect from an upgrade.

One of the main reasons for the improvements are SAP’s dropping of its two-stack approach in favour of a single Java stack for NetWeaver 7.3. This significantly reduces the amount of hardware which needs to be deployed and also because messages only need to be stored once, compared to 3-7 times previously, you get even more energy savings.

To demonstrate this, SAP carried out testing of their new NetWeaver Platform using the SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS).

SAP defined a medium-sized landscape as being 37,500 SAPS for a NetWeaver Process Integration (PI) customer. Based on that they found that the savings potential for PI is in the region of:
– 60% less energy consumption or around 18,000 kWh/yr
– 16 tons of CO2 savings per landscape/year and
– ?6.5k saving potential per landscape/year

The numbers for NetWeaver Portal 7.3 are for an SAP defined medium sized landscape of 30,000 SAPS. In that case, you see a savings potential of:
– 30% less energy consumption, 13,000 kWh/yr
– 6.5 tons od CO2 savings per landscape/yr and
– ?2.6k saving potential/yr

While for NetWeaver Business Process Management 7.3 the potential savings for a 30,000 SAPS medium sized customer are:
– 57% less energy consumption, 24,000kWh/yr
– 12 tons of CO2 savings per landscape/yr and
– ?6k saving potential per landscape/yr

The new software was tested on identical hardware to the previous version to rule out any efficiency gains from improved hardware according to Holger. He went on to mention that SAPs Quick Sizer [PDF] tool to help customers design their SAP landscape – has been updated for 7.3 so you don’t overspec your SAP installation.

“One of the main learning for SAP from this exercise is that I/O is expensive. For current tasks, it is nearly 3 times more expensive than utilising the CPU”, according to Holger. “Because of this we are now telling developers not write to locks, don’t write to the db – dropping locks increases performance” he continued. It will be interesting to see if SAP can move developers towards writing more energy efficient code.

This is a big potential win for SAP customers. Now they can gain significant performance and energy gains with a simple software upgrade, as opposed to having to buy any new hardware.It’d be great to see more companies adopting this type of approach to software development.

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Photo credit Marjan Krebelj

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Friday Green Numbers round-up for Jan 28th 2011

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Green Numbers

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

  1. 50% rise in companies using software to monitor sustainability performance, says new survey

    The proportion of companies that use software to monitor their sustainability performance increased by 50 percent between 2006 and 2010, according to the results of a new international survey released today, Thursday 27 January 2011, by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

    Experts from GRI say this means that guidance for people producing sustainability reports should be kept up to date with emerging trends in software use and digital reporting.

  2. Efficiency could cut world energy use over 70 per cent

    Simple changes like installing better building insulation could cut the world’s energy demands by three-quarters, according to a new study.

    Discussions about reducing greenhouse gas emissions usually concentrate on cleaner ways of generating energy: that’s because they promise that we can lower emissions without having to change our energy-hungry ways. But whereas new generation techniques take years to come on stream, efficiency can be improved today, with existing technologies and know-how.

  3. AZ Republicans and Democrats Agree, Energy Efficiency Saves Billions

    Much has been made in recent weeks of the stark political controversies that haunt Arizona politics. There, intense debates over immigration, over healthcare, over a host of issues, have led to a growing sense that Arizona?s politics have left the mainstream behind.

    But there is another Arizona, an Arizona of bipartisan unanimity and progress hidden beneath the saddening headlines of late. That hidden story of Arizona reveals a state that is leading the country down the new and much-needed road to energy efficiency, with standards that are among the most ambitious in the nation. It is a story that has been lost. But it is a story that Arizonans of all political stripes deserved to be celebrated for and a story the rest of us need to hear.

  4. Dow Moves to Make Nature Part of the Bottom Line

    Dow Chemical and the Nature Conservancy (TNC) announced a partnership on January 25 during a press conference at the Detroit Economic Club to develop tools and demonstrate models for valuing nature in business. Dow committed $10 million over the next five years to the collaboration with TNC. Jennifer Molnar, manager of TNC?s Analysis Team, called the partnership a ?breakthrough.?

    The partnership will use scientific models, maps, and analysis for biodiversity and ?ecosystem services?, a Dow press release states, and apply them to the company?s business decisions. The partnership will also ?inform Dow on setting new policies and approaches in the areas of land and water management, siting considerations, the benefits of natural resources on Dow lands and waterways, and more explicit management of biodiversity.?

  5. GM takes $7 million stake in battery startup Envia

    General Motors Co has invested $7 million in Envia Systems, a California-based start-up that has been developing more powerful and cheaper batteries for electric vehicles.

    Newark, California-based Envia has developed cathode technology for lithium-ion batteries that it says will make them both cheaper and more powerful.

    GM said Wednesday it also reached a separate licensing agreement to use the Envia cathode technology in future electric vehicles.

  6. What I Learned in Two Years of Running GridWise Alliance

    As I take my leave as president of the GridWise Alliance, I feel pride in our accomplishments and gratitude for having been involved in a period of enormous growth in the industry and organization. Alliance membership grew during my tenure from 70 to 150 members. These new members included stakeholder groups like the automotive and buildings sector that could join forces with the existing ICT, telecom, and manufacturing components and the utility and system operator member base.

    We started building relationships with consumer groups and were founding members of the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative, bringing together regulators, consumer advocates, and industry leaders.

  7. EnerNOC Acquires M2M Communications and hundreds of megawatts of demand response capacity

    EnerNOC, Inc., a provider of energy management applications, has acquired M2M Communications, a provider of wireless technology solutions for energy management and demand response.

    According to EnerNOC, its solutions reduce real-time demand for electricity, increase energy efficiency, improve energy supply transparency in competitive markets, and mitigate emissions. Some of the energy management applications offered by EnerNOC includes DemandSMART for comprehensive demand response, EfficiencySMART for data-driven energy efficiency, SupplySMART for energy price and risk management, and CarbonSMART for enterprise carbon management.

    By acquiring M2M Communications, EnerNOC plans to expand its portfolio of automated resources, thereby augmenting third-party automated demand response.

  8. SAP reduces 2010 Greenhouse Gas Emissions despite double-digit revenue growth

    SAP today announced its preliminary report of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2010. The company?s worldwide GHG emissions for 2010 totaled 430 kilotons, a four percent decrease from the 450 kiloton level of 2009. In its third year of consecutive reductions, SAP has cut GHG emissions by 24 percent from its peak levels in 2007, putting the company well on track to achieve its target of reducing emissions to 2000 levels by 2020.

    Using its own software to measure, report and reduce its carbon footprint, SAP can attribute the emissions decrease to a variety of efforts and investments in energy and carbon efficiency projects. Contributing factors to the company?s footprint reduction also include changes in employees? commuting practices and the purchase of renewable energy.

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Green Bits and Bytes for January 20th 2011

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Green bits & bytes

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Here are a few of the Green announcements which crossed my desk this week:

  1. A new scheme called SunShare launched in the UK this week. The scheme allows home-owners to invest in solar panels for their home for only a part of the upfront installation costs. This means that qualifying UK homes can now get a fully installed solar PV system for as little as ?3,999, they will benefit from free electricity and they will also be able to earn more than ?1000 a year from the government backed Feed-in Tariff scheme.

    The UK Feed-In Tariff scheme is one of the most generous in Europe, paying 41.3p per kWh of electricity produced, regardless of whether it is used by the home-owner or not. The tariff is guaranteed for 25 years and it is index linked for Solar PV Systems.

    ?The government will review the scheme in 2012, which is likely to see The Feed-in Tariff rates changed from April 2013 for any new homes applying for it. There is therefore a window of opportunity now for consumers to take advantage of the current rates on offer? according to Mark Wynn, Managing Director Avoline PLC, the company which launched SunShare.

  2. Semitech Semiconductor, a Power Line Communications (PLC) chip maker with chips designed to enable communications for the Smart Grid announced yesterday that they had completed its Series A financing raising AU$3.4 million.
  3. The Institute for Transport and Development Policy released a report on Wednesday entitled Europe?s Parking U-Turn: From Accommodation to Regulation [PDF]. The report examines European parking policies over the last fifty years and found that European cities are reaping the rewards of innovative parking policies, including revitalized town centres; reductions in car use; drops in air pollution and rising quality of urban life.
  4. SAP’s rollout of e-mobility infrastructure which I wrote up just before Christmas has now been extended to their German HQ in Walldorf. SAP, in conjunction with local utility MVV Energie, have taken delivery of 30 electric cars and will be testing use of them by their employees as part of their Future Fleet project.

    The cars will be powered exclusively with electricity from renewable sources and this will be important given that over 80% of SAP’s direct CO2 emissions in EMEA come from company cars.

  5. On-demand environmental software maker Locus Technologies, announced this week that they have been certified as compliant with SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70). Given that Locus are a SaaS company (i.e. they host their clients environmental information) this is a vrucial certification to have achieved – it gives confidence to Locus customers and potential customers that their data is safe with Locus.

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