Search Results for: "smart grid"

post

Big emphasis on mobility at the SAP for Utilities conference

by

SAP for Utilities

I attended the SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio last week. I gave the closing keynote (which I’ll write-up in another post).

I was interested though by the fact that two themes recurred in all the opening keynotes.
1. All of the opening keynoters made mention of Social Media – this was a huge relief because my closing talk was due to be on Social Media, so the speakers were setting the stage nicely! And
2. Mobility was talked up big-time by the speakers

I had expected some talk of mobility, along with HANA, Smart Grids Cloud and Analytics – the usual gamut of topics at these events and they were indeed all addressed, but there was a definite emphasis on mobility over all other topics.

It is understandable – with the advent of tablets and smartphones, computing is going mobile, no question about it. I think it was Cisco’s CTO Paul De Martini who dropped the stat that 200,000 new android devices are being activated daily.

This impacts utility companies on two fronts:
1. On the customer front, utilities can now drop the idea of in-home energy management devices and, instead, assume the vast majority of their customers has access to a smartphone or tablet and
2. On the employee front, utilities have lots of mobile workers – the ability to connect them easily back into corporate applications will be game changing.

In my talk on social media strategies for utilities – I suggested that utilities equip every truck-roll with a smartphone. That way, when they get to site to repair a downed line (or whatever), they can take a quick video of the damage, the people working on-site, and in the voice-over give a rough estimated time of recovery. This can be uploaded to YouTube at the touch of a button on the phone and so, call center operators, and social media departments can direct enquiries to the video – immediately helping diffuse the frustration of having power cut.

Programs like this can even be pro-active and the customer service benefits of rolling this out should not be under-estimated.

Utilities are entering a new, more challenging era. Mobility solutions (especially when combined with social media) will be a powerful tool to help them meet these challenges.

Full disclosure – SAP is a GreenMonk client and paid travel and expenses for me to attend the conference.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

post

Hints for competitors in EDF’s 2012 Sustainable Design Challenge

by

Eiffel Tower

I was in Paris earlier this week as one of the Judge’s for EDF’s Sustainable Design Challenge. If you are not familiar with EDF, they are the world’s largest utility company and while they operate in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle-East and Africa, they are headquartered in Paris.

There were 31 entries in the competition coming from a variety of design schools, universities and even an American high-school. As well as prize money, the eight selected finalists will be helped develop their projects over the next year and they will be displayed at the EDF pavilion at the 2012 London Olympics. This is even more impressive when you realise that the EDF pavilion at the Olympics will be one of only five pavilions there.

The quality of the thirty one entries was, in general, quite high. The thing which disappointed me though was the seeming lack of engineering knowledge amongst the entries. Many seemed to be of the opinion that small piezoelectric generators can generate vast qualities of electricity (they can’t!).

More disappointing though was that three fundamental energy technologies were totally ignored. While some of the entries used wind generation, none used solar as a key technology. Similarly, none referenced energy storage and not a single entry used any smart grid technologies.

Part of this has to come down to the fact that the participating schools were more design than engineering schools, but still, these were fairly big technologies to have been ignored.

Other than that, the competition was spectacularly well run and kudos to EDF for raising awareness of sustainability in design in the running of this competition. This will be an annual competition, so for participants in the 2012 EDF Sustainable Design Challenge – you now know what you need to work on 😉

This was the entry by the US high school – it was one of 8 selected to be a finalist:

Photo credit Tom Raftery

post

Logica and SAP in exclusive joint bid for UK Smart Meter data provisioning

by

Smart meter

The UK has an interesting Smart Meter infrastructure model. Data from all the country’s Smart Meters will flow to a centralised data repository (called the DCC), from where, energy retailers will pull the data for billing purposes. The beauty of this system is that consumers dictate who has access to their data, and so switching energy providers, is not held up by data ownership issues.

The build-out of this system is still at very early stages with RFP’s expected towards the end of the year but SAP and Logica have come out of the blocks early with an announcement that they are going to put in a joint bid to become the data service provider for the DCC.

Logica and SAP are both heavily involved in the utilities sector in the UK, so it makes sense for them to bid for this – the interesting aspect is that they agreed to bid together and that their joint bid is exclusive.

The six main suppliers in the UK are all either involved in trials, or in the process of starting to trial smart meters. All six are using Logica’s head-end system for their trials, so if Logica and SAP win the bid, the transition to the DCC system should be relatively painless.

Talking to Tara McGeehan, Logica’s Head of Utilities UK on Monday, she said that the idea behind the bid was to move the debate away from technology and comms, onto the power of the data to affect things like micro-generation, energy efficiency and smart grids.

Having seen Centrica’s Smart Meter Analytics application, which runs on SAP’s HANA, earlier this year, the proposition that there is gold in them thar data, certainly rings true.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

post

Green bits and bytes for April 28th 2011

by

Green bits & bytes

.

I haven’t done a Green bits and bytes posting in a while so here are some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this last few weeks:

  1. Siemens has started a Smart Grid Innovation Contest, basically you submit new ideas that could be implemented in the near future, add supporting material (images, business plan, etc.), tag it and submit. You can submit more than one idea and all ideas can be viewed, commented on and rated. And there are lots of prizes to be won too.
  2. Switch Lighting have announced a new LED technology “that produces the brightest warm light LED replacement bulb available. The switch bulbs are dimmable and were designed with Cradle-to-Cradle principles in mind, according to Switch. ?The unique design of Switch bulbs signals the company?s intention to offer brilliant lighting as a service for humanity,? says William McDonough, who developed the Cradle to Cradle protocol with German chemist Michael Braungart. What’d be great is if they had a way to buy the bulbs on the site!
  3. Sandbag issued a report [PDF] outlining how the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is building up a mountain of surplus pollution permits, instead of reducing the growth of emissions. These banked permits will allow pollution to grow unchecked for years.

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit .faramarz

post

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

by

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

post

SAP announces two new energy management products

by

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.

post

IBM’s Dave Bartlett on his vision for Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities

by

I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities. I posted the first part of it yesterday – in today’s post, we discuss the future for Smarter Buildings and cities

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at IBM’s Pulse 2011 Conference. And with me I have IBM’s Dave Bartlett.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We talked earlier about the state-of-the-now with smart buildings and that kind of stuff, but where is all this going? Sure, right now we can see the energy information coming from buildings. What are we going to be doing with this kind of stuff in five, ten years time? Where is it all going?

Dave Bartlett: Well, that’s where it gets really exciting. I mean, we have talked about how there is opportunity today to save significant energy, but if you think about the bigger play, the smarter planet play, the smarter city play, buildings is a key building block for those plays.

I mean, every building has meters. So you can take advantage of the Smart Grid Initiatives as they become realized, not only to take advantage of different time of day based pricing, but also help the city cope with or prevent brownout conditions and make sure energy is available to the core infrastructure.

Tom Raftery: So you would have buildings participating in demand response programs automatically and shifting load and that kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: Exactly! I mean, if you are running a city, the key thing, you want to keep the traffic system up, you want to keep the hospitals up. Maybe you don’t care about running the pool pumps in the hotel pools as an impending brownout occurs, so that you can start to make tradeoffs like that.

So it turns out smarter buildings is a great building block to create the smarter city and do that with —

Another example is emergency response. Let’s say there is a building that’s on fire. If it’s connected to a smarter transportation system, the transportation can be rerouted away from that block so that the engines actually can get to the building and not be prevented from traffic from getting there as soon as they could be.

You could also automatically power off the buildings. You could possibly decrease water pressures in the surrounding areas to maximize water pressure in that area.

So it’s a combination of the smarter water system, the smarter transportation system, the smart grid system, working with a smart building system, to really increase the efficiency of your emergency response team in the city.

Tom Raftery: Okay. You mentioned another example earlier which fascinated me. It was around just taking in weather information.

Dave Bartlett: Right. So a lot of times we operate our buildings without any thought to what the weather is doing, but if a cold front is coming within the next hour or two hours, you could make decisions as to whether or not to turn the air conditioning on or turn it off in anticipation of that.

We are also implementing a lot more free air cooling, kind of getting back to the days when we used to open windows right? A big new idea [laughs]. So unbolt some of those windows.

So being able to forecast the weather, being aware of what’s happening in terms of humidity and temperature and turn off the air conditioning and start leveraging free air cooling, not just for office environments, but for manufacturing uses, for the big chilling towers, a huge opportunity to save energy.

You don’t want to be toggling these systems back and forth. If you are really tied in a close way to weather forecasting, even on an hourly basis, you can make really good decisions when to toggle between free air and the system. So just a much smarter way to run our buildings, our manufacturing plants, our offices.

Tom Raftery: So it seems like right now the state of the now in smarter buildings that we are looking inside and the state of the future is the buildings themselves will be looking outside.

Dave Bartlett: Looking outside, because the buildings will then become — each of them will become a participant in creating or building a smarter building.

I like to say, how do you get a smarter city, one smarter building at a time. So they can become the building blocks; building blocks for — actually smarter buildings can become new eco-cubes within the city. The eco-cubes can then populate to make the subsections of a city, and then the city as a whole. So it’s a little bit easier way to approach it.

Buildings are a natural connection point for the electric grid, for water, as transportation hubs, security, and video feeds. So it’s just a natural building block. So I see, we can get going today and then have all those connection points in place and all of a sudden realize a smarter city very quickly.

Tom Raftery: Awesome! Dave, thanks a million! Thanks for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

You should follow me on Twitter here

post

Friday Green Numbers round-up for March 11th 2011

by

Green Numbers

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

  1. Progress Energy investing approximately $520 million dollars in smart grid technologies

    IBM today announced that it has been selected by Progress Energy as the lead systems integrator for the utility’s smart grid program. Together the companies will transform Progress Energy’s networks by improving power efficiency, increasing power quality and reliability, and enhancing capabilities for renewable energy, energy storage systems and plug-in electric vehicles.

    Progress Energy is investing approximately $520 million dollars in smart grid technologies through its two utilities that serve approximately 3.1 million customers in the Carolinas and Florida. The total investment includes $200 million from a read on …

  2. FIRST Green ‘e-Watt Saver’ 7W LED Lightbulb (Product Review)

    For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is a non-profit founded by inventor Dean Kamen over 20 years ago. It aims to inspire young people to learn about science, technology, engineering and math through challenging robotics competitions. To raise funds, they sell FIRST branded energy-saving LED lightbulbs (better than chocolate!). I had the chance to get my hands on one, so here’s my review read on …

  3. Can a Whole City Go Zero Waste?

    We’ve already seen how pay-as-you-throw trash metering can cut landfill waste in half, and we’ve witnessed whole cities make composting mandatory. So there’s little doubt that much, much more can be done by most cities to cut waste, and keep precious resources out of landfill. That’s why an announcement from my hometown that it will completely eliminate waste to landfill within three years is particularly exciting. But is it enough? read on …

  4. Carbon emissions from every public building in England and Wales

    The carbon emissions of every public building in England and Wales have been released, thanks to an FoI request by the Centre for Sustainable Energy. See what the data says about the read on …

  5. When Earth’s Human Population Was 18,500!

    Scientists have calculated that for a period lasting one million years and beginning 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably between 18,500 to 26,000 individuals capable of breeding (and no more than 26,000). This made them an endangered species with a smaller population than today?s species such as gorillas which number 25,000 breeding individuals and chimpanzees (21,000).

    Researchers have proposed a number of explanations , such as read on …

  6. $44m Energy Efficiency savings whets AT&T’s appetite for more

    When John Schinter joined AT&T in 2009 as the company’s first energy director, he was charged with revamping the way AT&T manages energy consumption and developing programs to reduce use.
    In 2010, the telecommunications giant implemented a whopping 4,200 projects aimed at improving energy efficiency, AT&T announced today. The effort has generated $44 million in annualized energy savings, setting the stage for an even more aggressive read on …

  7. February Arctic Sea Ice Ties For Record Low As Global Snow Cover Remains High

    New data coming out of the National Snow and Ice Data Center reveals two things which may at first seem contradictory at first but aren’t: The extent of Arctic sea ice in February tied for a record low, while at the same time snow cover for January and February in the Northern Hemisphere remained extensive, ranking in the top six extents on record.

    Resolving the apparent but erroneous contradiction first, in the NSIDC’s words:
    Both linked to a strong negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation. A strongly negative AO favors outbreaks of read on …

  8. ABB wins $50 million solar order in Italy

    ABB has won a $50 million order from Phenix Renewables to deliver a 24 megawatt (MW) photovoltaic (PV) solar power plant in Lazio, central Italy.

    Once connected to the grid, the Phenix solar plant will supply up to 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity a year, avoiding the generation of over 25,000 tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the annual emission of over 10,000 European cars.

    ABB will be responsible for the read on …

  9. IBM Names First 24 Recipients Of Smarter Cities Challenge Grants

    IBM today selected 24 cities worldwide to receive IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants. The grants provide the cities with access to IBM’s top experts to analyze and recommend ways they can become even better place in which to live, work and play.

    The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program in which IBM is awarding a total of $50 million worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide over the next three years. Teams of specially selected IBM experts will provide city leaders with read on …

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

post

Power Assure automates the reduction of data center power consumption

by

Data centre

If you’ve been following this blog in the last couple of weeks you’ll have noticed that I have profiled a couple of data centre energy management companies – well, today it is the turn of Power Assure.

The last time I talked to Power Assure was two years ago and they were still very early stage. At that time I talked to co-founder and CTO, Clemens Pfeiffer, this time I spoke with Power Assure’s President and CEO, Brad Wurtz.

The spin that Power Assure put on their energy management software is that, not only do they offer their Dynamic Power Management solution which provides realtime monitoring and analytics of power consumption across multiple sites, but their Dynamic Power Optimization application automatically reduces power consumption.

How does it do that?

Well, according to Brad, clients put an appliance in each of the data centres they are interested in optimising (Power Assure’s target customer base are large organisations with multiple data centres – government, financial services, healthcare, insurance, telco’s, etc.). The appliance uses the management network to gather data – data may come from devices (servers, PDU’s, UPS’s, chillers, etc.) directly, or more frequently, it gathers data directly from multiple existing databases (i.e. a Tivoli db, a BMS, an existing power monitoring system, and/or inventory system) and performs Data Centre analytics on those data.

Data centre

The optimisation module links into existing system management software to measures and track energy demand on a per applications basis in realtime. It then calculates the amount of compute capacity required to meet the service level agreements of that application and adds a little bit of headroom. From the compute it knows the number of servers needed, so it communicates with the load balancer (or hypervisor, depending on the data centre’s infrastructure) and adjusts the size of the server pool to meet the required demand.

Servers removed from the pool can be either power capped or put in sleep mode. As demand increases the servers can be brought fully online and the load balancer re-balanced so the enlarged pool can meet the new level of demand. This is the opposite of the smart grid demand response concept – this is supply-side management – matching your energy consumption (supply to the demand for compute resources).

A partnership with Intel means that future versions will be able to turn off and on individual components or cores to more precisely control power usage.

The software is agentless and interestingly, given the customer profile Brad outlined (pharmas, financial institutions, governments, etc.), customers log in to view and manage their power consumption data because it is SaaS delivered.

The two case studies on their site make for interesting reading and show reductions in power consumption from 56% – 68% which are not to be sneezed at.

The one client referred to in the call is NASA and Power Assure are involved in a data centre consolidation program with them. Based on the work they have done with Power Assure, Brad informed me that NASA now expects to be able to consolidate their current 75 Data Centres significantly. That’ll make a fascinating case study!

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit cbowns

post

Friday Green Numbers round-up for Feb 4th 2011

by

Green Numbers

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

  1. Europe’s Energy

    Member States of the European Union have agreed on targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by cutting energy consumption by 20% and increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix to 20% by 2020. The ‘Europe’s Energy’ project gives users a set of visual tools to put these targets into context and to understand and compare how progress is being made towards them in different countries.

  2. Survey results: Utilities executives on Energy Efficiency and the Smart Grid

    The survey asked 106 utility executives ? the people that arguably know more about the energy supply and demand challenges our nation faces than anyone else ? a range of questions on the smart grid, energy efficiency and related topics and issues.

    We issued a press release today with some of the highlights, but to help put this week?s news into context, we also wanted to share a full breakdown of the results. Nothing earth shattering, but worth keeping in mind as the week progresses?

  3. 10 Smart Grid Trends from Distributech

    The annual smart grid event Distributech kicked off in San Diego Tuesday morning and ? as expected ? unleashed a whole series of news from smart grid-focused firms. From new home energy management products, to plug-in car software, to distribution automation gear, this is a list of trends and news from the show.

  4. US Venture Capital Investment in Cleantech Grows to Nearly $4 Billion in 2010, an 8% Increase From 2009

    US venture capital (VC) investment in cleantech companies increased by 8% to $3.98 billion in 2010 from $3.7 billion in 2009 and deal total increased by 7% to 278, according to an Ernst & Young LLP analysis based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource. VC investment in cleantech in Q4 2010 reached $979 million with 72 financing rounds. VC investment in cleantech in Q4 2010 reached $979 million with 72 financing rounds, flat in terms of deals and down 14% in terms of capital invested compared to Q4 2009.

    “In comparison to the early days of cleantech, the 2010 US VC investment results reflect a turning point in the industry due to improving credit and capital markets, the deployment of stimulus spending and increasing corporate cleantech adoption,” said Jay Spencer, Ernst & Young LLP’s Americas Cleantech Director.

  5. A jump at the pump – bad news for more than motorists

    Few trends cast shadows on economies and politicians like a rise in the cost of petrol. Barack Obama?s presidency, so far a minefield of crises, can add one more in the form of higher prices at the pump. Entering the last full week of January the average price of a gallon (3.7 litres) of petrol stood at $3.11, up 40 cents from a year earlier. Fuel has never cost so much in January, but that is unlikely to be the highest price Americans pay for it this year.

  6. Arctic Oscillation brings record low January extent, unusual mid-latitude weather

    Arctic sea ice extent for January 2011 was the lowest in the satellite record for that month. The Arctic oscillation persisted in its strong negative phase for most of the month, keeping ice extent low.

    Arctic sea ice extent averaged over January 2011 was 13.55 million square kilometers (5.23 million square miles). This was the lowest January ice extent recorded since satellite records began in 1979.

  7. Despite emails and cold winter, 83% of Brits view climate change as a current or imminent threat

    The public?s belief in global warming as a man-made danger has weathered the storm of climate controversies and cold weather intact, according to a Guardian/ICM opinion poll.

    Asked if climate change was a current or imminent threat, 83% of Britons agreed, with just 14% saying global warming poses no threat. Compared with August 2009, when the same question was asked, opinion remained steady despite a series of events in the intervening 18 months that might have made people less certain about the perils of climate change

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit kirstyhall