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November chat with IBM’s Rich Lechner

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Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP of Energy and Environment.

He is a regular interviewee here where we discuss various matters related to energy and environment. This interview was recorded while I was at the SAP TechEd 2009 event in Vienna in a crowded interview room so I apologise in advance for the poorer than normal audio and video quality.

In this show we discussed IBM’s recently released Solution Architecture For Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE) and we had a quick chat about the recently published Green IT for Dummies book.

[Disclosure] The Green IT for Dummies book was written with input from IBM and I served as technical editor for the book. Having said that, I hadn’t seen the completed book until Rich held it up during the video and the link to the book on Amazon above is not an affiliate link – I get no monies from its sales.

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Get Rich Quick: a green roundup from IBM’s VP Energy and Utility – Show 1: Water

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Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP Energy and Environment.

I first met Rich at the Pulse 09 event in Las Vegas earlier this year where he gave a great talk on Sustainability & the role of IT.

Rich has agreed to come on the GreenMonk show monthly to give us a state of the ‘sustainosphere’ from an IBM perspective!

This is month one and we are talking Water – among the many interesting water-related items, watch out near the end for Rich’s alluding to using Demand Response for water flow management!

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Sustainability & the role of IT – Rich Lechner’s Energy & Efficiency Keynote at Pulse 2009

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Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP for Energy and Environment. He gave this presentation at the Pulse 2009 conference last week. I thought it was so good I asked him for a copy to put up on SlideShare – he very graciously agreed, so here it is.

There were some amazing statistics in the talk. Here are just a few of the highlights for me from the deck –

Slide 8:

In 2001, there were 60 million transistors for every human on the planet… by 2010 there will be 1 billion transistors per human. In 2005 there were 1.3 billion RFID tags in circulation…… by 2010 there will be 30 billion

Slide 10:

Our personal information footprints will grow 16 times between now and 2020

Slide 13:

an estimated 170 billion kilowatts are wasted by consumers each year due to insufficient power usage information

Slide 15:

Forty-five percent of traffic on the busiest New York City streets is circling the block looking for parking …congested roadways cost $78 billion annually in the form of 4.2 billion wasted hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted gas

Slide 17:

U.S. CPG companies and retailers lose $40 billion annually due to inefficient supply chains

and Slide 19:

In the U.S., a typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles, a potato 1,200 miles, a beef roast 600 miles …grocers and consumers throw away $48 billion worth of food every year

Slide 21:

Industry accounts for about 22% of freshwater usage today …the combined direct consumption of five food and beverage giants in 2007 was enough to serve the daily basic water needs of everyone on the planet

and Slide 42:

42% of IBM’s employees do not regularly come into an office saving $100M annually in real estate costs
Last year IBM saved $97M in travel costs by using online collaboration
Process improvements in the chip making process in Burlington, VT are saving 20M gallons of water, 15 thousand gallons of chemicals and over 1.5M kilowatts of electricity annually….achieving $3M in annual savings and increasing manufacturing production over 30%

What part of the presentation did you find most interesting?

[Disclosure – IBM paid my travel and expenses to attend Pulse 2009]

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What’s your Crazy Green Idea (for $25,000)?

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Excellent! I see that the X Prize Foundation are offering a prize of $25,000 for “Your Crazy Green Idea”!

From the site:

The X PRIZE Foundation and Prize Capital, LLC are offering $25,000 for the best video proposing a new Energy and Environment X PRIZE. Contestants need to submit a 2-minute video via www.youtube.com/xprize. Entrants will be narrowed down to 3 finalists by the X PRIZE Foundation. Once the 3 finalists are identified, XPRIZE.org users will vote to determine the winner. The winner will be announced on XPRIZE.org in December 2008.

The winning video must answer the following three questions:
1. What is the specific prize idea?
2. What is the Grand Challenge or world-wide problem that you are trying to solve?
3. How will this prize benefit humanity?

The fact that this prize is open to anyone and that you use YouTube to submit your ideas is a spectacularly good idea – creating online buzz, crowdsourcing the ideas and being totally transparent about it. X Prize ftw!

As of this writing 30 videos have been submitted. Check them out and then submit your own! But hurry, the deadline for submissions is Oct 31st.

The X Prize Foundation is an educational nonprofit who came to prominence in 2004 when the Foundation awarded the Burt Rutan-led team, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, $10 million for building and flying the world’s first private spaceship.

The X Prize foundation are also behind the Progressive Auto X Prize competition – a competition with a $10m prize to develop a radically fuel efficient car.