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Carbon accounting meet lifestreaming II

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Dopplr calculates my travel Carbon footprint

In my last post I postulated that social software could be used to capture people’s lifestream information and that this could be used by companies to help calculate their carbon footprint.

The case I put forward was more suited for the increasing numbers of people working from home. However, I neglected to point out another painfully obvious example – Dopplr.

Dopplr markets itself as the travel serendipity engine –

Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer and mobile phone. It links with online calendars and social networks.

However, potentially far more useful is how Dopplr have teamed up with AMEE (the world’s energy meter) to produce a chart of your travel-related carbon footprint (see the chart above of my travel footprint).

This ties in completely with my earlier post about the potential synergies attainable from combining lifestreaming software and the requirements of carbon accounting.

Can you think of any other use cases for the intersection of lifestreaming and carbon accounting?

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Carbon account, meet lifestreaming. Lifestreaming, meet carbon accounting!

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Some of the places I publish

I come from a Social Media background. I use blogs, Social Networks, Microblogs, Photo Sharing sites, Video Sharing sites, Livecasting apps, Social bookmarking sites etc. everyday. I generate a constant stream of updates about things happening in my life which can be followed via RSS or on my Friendfeed page (a feed aggregator) or on the individual sites.

Cool. Interesting enough I hear you say. So what? Well, lets just park that for a second.

Carbon accounting is rapidly coming down the line. Already we are seeing companies like BT and Verizon requiring lower carbon footprints from their suppliers. This is because carbon accounting will take supply chains into account.

Carbon accounting will be incredibly granular and will attempt to take everything into account in the life-cycle of goods and services. This will include electrical power usage, road mileage and air miles alongside expenses and financial returns.

To get buy-in from staff, reporting total power and energy usage will have to be made as simple as possible so that it doesn’t interfere with the natural flow of people’s work.

This is where lifestreaming applications come in. Encourage the people in your organisation to use applications like blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, et al. Then you can capture that output and route it through the carbon accounting software and ta da! carbon usage information accounted for.

Obviously it won’t be as easy as that, but if your employees are using Twitter, say, set up your company’s carbon account software with a Twitter account. Then instruct staff on how to message the software with what you are doing at any point in time i.e. “@bt-carbon-accounts – putting on the kettle for a cup of coffee” or “@ibm-carbon-accounts – hot today, setting the aircon to 19C”. This would also be especially useful for capturing the carbon footprint of people working from home.

IBM’s master inventor Andy Stanford-Clark has already done some work in this area. His house has a Twitter account and regularly sends updates like:

the phone is ringing (mobile)
electricity meter reading: 32100 KWH
outside lights turned off
outside lights turned on

etc. to Twitter automatically!

Will carbon accounting software and its requirement for constant inputs from all levels of business bring lifestreaming applications into the Enterprise 2.0 fold?

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More reasons for agreed standards and lower carbon footprints

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Verizon
Photo Credit runway27r

I was at a BT analyst briefing during the week and at this meeting I was delighted to hear Donna Young, BT’s Head of Climate Change say that amongst other things, BT are going to start requiring suppliers to follow the BT ethos on carbon footprinting. They will be auditing suppliers on a scale of 0-3 where 0 means the supplier hasn’t started working on their carbon footprint yet and 3 indicates that they have auditable results. Further, BT will be using this scale to rule companies into or out of tender processes. Excellent.

Then this evening via April and via Bo in Nortel I came across the release from Verizon where they announced that from January 1st 2009 their target is for new gear from their suppliers to be 20% more energy efficient.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president-corporate network and technology said:

The Verizon network requires power costing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to provide the most advanced services available anywhere in the world. The energy dollars are well spent, as the network supports consumers and businesses in dynamic new ways. For example, our customers engage in energy-efficient activities like videoconferencing and e-commerce every day over our network.

Aside from the potential cost reductions involved, as a responsible corporate citizen, we want to be part of the drive toward greater energy efficiency. Part of our plan to accomplish this is to request our suppliers’ help in meeting our conservation goals.

Verizon are ahead of the curve in this respect. In fact, as I noted previously, there are no agreed standards against which to measure equipment so Verizon went ahead and wrote ther own:

Verizon established a series of Telecommunications Equipment Energy Efficiency Ratings based on formulas that test the consumption of equipment in various operating conditions and settings. Test data are entered into formulas developed for each type of equipment, which will indicate whether or not they achieve the target rating…. The concepts and measurement methods have been submitted for consideration by appropriate standards bodies, such as ATIS’ Network Interface, Power and Protection Committee (NIPP).

There is still a dearth of agreed standards around carbon accounting and energy efficiency. It is interesting to see, in the absence of such standards, companies coming up with their own and starting to use these measures as part of their purchasing process. Increasingly your company’s carbon footprint will not alone affect your energy costs but will also start to affect your sales.

More reasons for agreed standards and lower carbon footprints!