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Today’s Energy & Sustainability show had a Water theme

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Today’s GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability Shaw had 41 live viewers and plenty of interaction with the viewers.

The show is every Monday 4:30pm CET, 3:30pm GMT – if you haven’t participated in the live show, please do – you can help make it better and drive the direction!

Here is the chat stream from today’s show (including a quick chat at the end about an idea I have to move the show to a virtual word to increase the ability for people to interact):

04:32 TomRaftery : Can you hear me now?
04:32 mikeTheBee : reloading
04:33 mikeTheBee : still ‘Off Air’
04:33 TomRaftery : Anyone hear me?
04:33 watching-4232 : not me
04:33 Suki_Fuller : No
04:33 ustreamer-85861 : “Off air”
04:33 TomRaftery : Ok, I’ll log out & back in – two secs
04:33 mikeTheBee : I see that chat
04:33 watching-4232 : BTW, I got my iPhone app running, how can I join this stream?
04:34 mikeTheBee : Give it a go
04:34 TomRaftery : Logging back in
04:34 mikeTheBee : Now says found
04:34 TomRaftery : Apologies about this
04:34 mikeTheBee : On Air
04:34 mikeTheBee : no pic yet
04:34 mikeTheBee : Off Air
04:35 mikeTheBee : On Air ….. Off AIr
04:35 mikeTheBee : 11 in Chat
04:35 TomRaftery : Anyone hear me now
04:35 mikeTheBee : Voila
04:35 verowhite : Hi everyone
04:35 mikeTheBee : pic no sound
04:35 mikeTheBee : Sound
04:36 Suki_Fuller : I see you
04:36 Suki_Fuller : Sound
04:36 Suki_Fuller : Hey Tom
04:36 mikeTheBee : I have sound and vision
04:36 ustreamer-85861 : pic + sound here, just fine
04:36 verowhite : Hear you and see you Tom
04:36 mikeTheBee : 15 viewers
04:36 TomRaftery : http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/flashindex.html
04:38 monkchips : talking about water today huh?
04:38 Suki_Fuller : yeapper
04:39 verowhite : The sound is a little bit low, Tom
04:39 TomRaftery : video working?
04:39 verowhite : Image perfect, though
04:39 mikeTheBee : No sound or v.low volume
04:39 monkchips : video working great
04:39 monkchips : but i seem to be having sound problems too
04:39 verowhite : I think we’re hearing the output of your headphones
04:39 ustreamer-85861 : video working (sound is probably only coming via your headset mic?)
04:41 TomRaftery : http://www.physorg.com/news156506896.html
04:41 mikeTheBee : 14 viewers
04:41 Suki_Fuller : holy cow
04:41 Suki_Fuller : 2000x
04:41 verowhite : I heard about a campaign going on against bottledwater
04:42 verowhite : Didn’t know the numbers were that crazy, though
04:43 TomRaftery : http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html
04:43 mikeTheBee : 16 viewers
04:44 TomRaftery : http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26922.wss
04:44 mikeTheBee : It forms an ‘Island’ I believe
04:47 cgarvey : same audio problem
04:47 monkchips : LOVING the way the show is evolving though.
04:47 cgarvey : (hearing your PC speakers via your mic, i think)
04:48 verowhite : yup, cgarvey, I would say he has to change the output from his mic to the osx playback
04:48 TomRaftery : http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/20/tech/main4880629.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_4880629
04:49 verowhite : Hey! I’m from Asturias 🙂
04:49 verowhite : Gijon is in Asturias!
04:50 verowhite : Didn’t expect Asturias to be any sci-fish (no pun intended) 😉
04:50 TomRaftery : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1163125/Schools-robofish-sniff-pollution-Thames.html
04:51 verowhite : Is an amazing place, if you have the change to visiti, BTW
04:51 cgarvey : excellent pun
04:52 cgarvey : excellent video, surreal!
04:52 mikeTheBee : 17 Viewers
04:52 verowhite : omg
04:52 monkchips : my bloody windows machine isn’t playing flash audio for some reason
04:53 monkchips : 🙁
04:53 TomRaftery : http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26921.wss
04:54 verowhite : I used to live in Aviles, near Gijon. My city was REALLY polluted. I can see why they’re investigating there
04:54 Suki_Fuller : Oh my that robotic fish video is wicked cool
04:55 mikeTheBee : 16 Viewers
04:55 mikeTheBee : 18 viewers
04:59 mikeTheBee : 17 Viewers
04:59 TomRaftery : http://greenmonk.net/roll-your-own-green-job/
05:00 cgarvey : one quick Q
05:01 cgarvey : SmartBay data .. is it online somewhere, or just research still
05:01 cgarvey : ok, that’s good enough for me, cheers!
05:02 TomRaftery : [email protected]
05:02 cgarvey : cheers Tom .. love the format of this, by the way
05:02 mikeTheBee : Cheers Tom. cheers all.
05:02 verowhite : Nice show, Tom. Thanks
05:02 Suki_Fuller : Thank you – I love the format and I as always learned new things
05:02 TomRaftery : Thanks a million everyone for joining in
05:02 TomRaftery : and making it a great show
05:03 Suki_Fuller : Now going to make all my friends drink tap water
05:03 TomRaftery : Superb
05:03 TomRaftery : btw, thinking of running the show out of Second Life
05:03 TomRaftery : That would allow for more interactivity
05:03 mikeTheBee : SL or ReactionGrid?
05:03 TomRaftery : Could also pipe back into Ustream
05:04 TomRaftery : for those with no SL client
05:04 mikeTheBee : I’m not on SL but am on homcamp
05:04 TomRaftery : I’m agnostic about SL or ReactionGrid tbh Mike
05:04 mikeTheBee : I’m using Hippo
05:04 verowhite : I tried SL on my mac in the past
05:04 verowhite : not a big fan
05:04 TomRaftery : It depends on which is easier to pipe back to Ustream
05:05 mikeTheBee : homecamp.org.uk
05:05 verowhite : but if you are still streming it here, may work, who know 🙂
05:05 TomRaftery : Yup, I’m on the HoeCamp one as well
05:05 mikeTheBee : Intersted in the idea, yes, details l8r
05:05 TomRaftery : oops!
05:05 Suki_Fuller : I’d rather here but whatever you decide
05:05 TomRaftery : HomeCamp that was supposed to be!
05:05 Suki_Fuller : I hope so.
05:05 cgarvey : lol, that was an impressive typo
05:06 TomRaftery : LOL
05:06 verowhite : lol
05:06 mikeTheBee : Its still Green 🙂
05:06 TomRaftery : Yup – I’m interested in getting people more involved
05:06 Suki_Fuller : That roll your own video very nice and short
05:06 mikeTheBee : Cheers Ctach you l8r
05:06 TomRaftery : If you can come to a venue in SL
05:06 TomRaftery : And participate that way, it may feel more real
05:07 TomRaftery : more like you are participating
05:07 verowhite : bye Mike, thanks for helping me earlier
05:07 cgarvey : I’m off to read about SmartBay .. cheers for the show Tom

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Reducing printers’ energy/ carbon footprint – Tivoli’s David Bartlett & Ricoh’s Mark Minshull

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Tivoli and Ricoh had a stand at Pulse 2009 where they were showing how it is possible to reduce a company’s carbon footprint by actively measuring and managing printer usage across organisations, through software!

I asked the guys there to talk me through the process and to give a demo to camera.

Oh, and there was free beer at the conference, hence the bottle in my hand!!!

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

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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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IBM’s Rich Lechner on energy, sustainability and the Smart Planet

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One of the people I met at the IBM Pulse 09 event was Rich Lechner. Rich is IBM’s VP Energy & Environment. Rich gave a tremendous presentation on Sustainability and the role of IT – I posted many quotes from the presentation on Twitter and they received a lot of attention.

I asked Rich if he’d be willing to do a video with us about Energy, Sustainability and IBM’s Smart Planet vision and he very graciously agreed to.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Corporate Social Responsibility – tech companies reviewed!

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Corporate Social Responsibility

According to its Wikipedia definition, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

is a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, as well as the environment. This obligation is seen to extend beyond the statutory obligation to comply with legislation and sees organizations voluntarily taking further steps to improve the quality of life for employees and their families as well as for the local community and society at large.

Companies are now starting to report on their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives in greater numbers. Drivers for this include the rise in ethical consumerism, socially responsible investing, employee recruitment and loyalty, changing laws and regulations, increased scrutiny and transparency and risk mitigation.

According to the Sustainable Investment Research Analyst’s (SIRAN) 2008 report (pdf warning):

  • 86 of the S&P 100 companies now have corporate sustainability websites, compared to 58 in mid-2005, an increase of 48 percent;
  • 49 of the leading U.S. companies produced a sustainability report in 2007, an increase of 26 percent from 39 in 2005

In an attempt to define standards and make these reports cross-comparable, the Global Reporting Initiative has come up with a sustainability reporting framework. According to Wikipedia:

The GRI Guidelines are the most common framework used in the world for reporting. More than 1000 organizations from 60 countries use the Guidelines to produce their sustainability reports.

A quick search of tech sites reveals:
IBM’s stellar Corporate Responsibility site – IBM’s site has a ton of good information and a downloadable CSR report (pdf) and includes the Global Reporting initiative (GRI) index. If there is a tech company with a better CSR site than this, please tell me, I haven’t found it yet!

From the Dell site you can see dell has been producing Sustainability reports back to 1998 (called Environment reports back then). The 2008 CSR report (pdf) is linked to from the company Values page and is a really good example of how to do these reports well.

SAP’s Sustainability site is pretty bare bones (and though found by Google, I couldn’t find a link to it on the corporate website! Having said that, their Sustainability report (pdf), linked to from their Sustainability site, is very good for a first effort. It includes a GRI index and while SAP admit that the report is prepared to GRI Application Level C, they give a commitment to producing a “report to GRI B+ standard externally assured and audited in second quarter 2009”.

Cisco’s CSR site includes a great 5 minute video on CSR from Cisco CEO John Chambers and some of his CSR related staff. Unfortunately the video is not embeddable and is all rights reserved or I would embed it here 🙁 Cisco’s CSR 2008 report is available in a Flash interactive version or the more traditional (and easier to consume) pdf version! Again this report has a GRI index included.

Sun’s excellent CSR site includes a podcast, lots of great links to relevant information and its superb 2008 CSR report (pdf) – again with the GRI index data.

Oracle also has a good CSR site. Oracle’s site links to its 2008 Corporate Citizenship report (pdf) but it doesn’t include a GRI index link.

HP’s Global Citizenship site looks good until you check out their CSR report – it dates to financial year 2007 (which ended October 31, 2007). In its defense, it does include a GRI index but guys, come on, 2007?

Neither Intel nor AMD have reports for 2008. But while Intel have a very comprehensive downloadable pdf report on their CSR initiatives for 2007, the AMD offering consists of a disappointing four tables of performance indicators across the last few years.

If you are looking for Microsoft’s CSR report, you will find it buried under Resource Center -> Awards and Reports -> now click on the Reports tab on their Corporate Citizenship site. The most recent report is dated 2007-08. It is a 5 page document of mostly images, there is no mention whatsoever of GRI, there is no executive involvement, and in comparison to previous years reports, it looks like Microsoft’s limited focus on CSR has waned completely.

Having said that, at least Microsoft has produced a report! Apple didn’t even do that. When As You Sow, recently tabled a shareholder resolution that would require Apple to publish a corporate social responsibility (CSR) report, The company issued a proxy filing asking shareholders to vote against this resolution, saying that the publication would be an unnecessary expense that would “produce little added value.”

Having said that, at least Apple have a section on their site dedicated to their environmental efforts, Amazon don’t even appear to do that. Their filed reports page makes no effort to include any reports about environmental stewardship or corporate citizenship although given the story which came out before Christmas about Amazon’s shocking employment practices, that can hardly be any surprise.

Ironically Google’s CSR efforts are supremely difficult to find! They do have a corporate website dedicated to their Green Initiatives but like Apple, they too don’t have any CSR report (that I could find!).

Who’d I miss? Who is better? Who is worse?

Original photo by ATIS547

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More info please IBM…

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IBM Green Data Center in Second Life

Speaking of data centers, I was delighted to read this morning of a partnership between IBM and Indian bank Kotak.

According to the release, IBM is helping the bank consolidate its server rooms into one data center and Kotak will save:

over US$1.2 million in operational efficiency and reduced energy costs over the next five years

I’d like to see some of the calcs behind those data – $1.2m over five years sounds low to me unless it is a modest data center.

Intriguingly, the release refers to:

a chilled water-based cooling and an automatic floor pressurization system

If that is water cooled servers (as opposed to water cooled air handling units) then this is nice. I’d love to know what an ” automatic floor pressurization system” system is. Anyone know? My guess is that it is something for maintaining underfloor airflow integrity but if it is that, then it sounds like traditional air cooled servers, not water cooled 🙁

Hello? Anyone from IBM have any more info on this?

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How Green is Cloud Computing?

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Australian Open web traffic

This is a graph of traffic to the website of the Australian Open tennis championship. As you can see, the traffic spikes in January every year and then all but disappears for the other 11 months of the year. It is also important to note that the height of the traffic spike is increasing year on year.

If the owners of this site want to be able to serve all the traffic at the top peak of the peak, they can spend a fortune on servers capable of handling that level of traffic but these servers will be almost entirely idle for eleven months of the year. The alternative is that the owners put the site on a cloud platform and dial up the resources associated with it, as and when needed. This is obviously a vastly more efficient option for the site owners. However, that doesn’t mean that cloud computing itself is Green or efficient.

For cloud computing to be efficient, the individual servers need to be doing more work than they would be doing if not in a cloud infrastructure. The main cloud providers include Amazon, Google, IBM and more recently, Microsoft. As far as I know, none of these companies are providing utilisation data per unit, so it is not possible to know just how efficient cloud computing actually is.

There is another consideration. There are a number of start-ups who say that they couldn’t have built their infrastructure if it wasn’t for cloud i.e. theirs is additional consumption which wouldn’t haven’t existed without the cloud. Does this newly facilitated consumption mean that cloud computing is less Green?

And without usage data from the cloud providers will we ever truly know if cloud computing is Green?

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What is your company’s Sustainability Communications Program like?

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Sustainability

Photo credit _ A l v a r o _

I guess the first question should be does your company have a Sustainability Communications Program? If not, why not?

As I mentioned in my last post, it is now time for everyone to

band together not only at national levels, but at company and community levels to do everything we can to work to reduce our impact on the planet. Don’t rely on your politicians to do it for you. Get together with friends, neighbours, co-workers and make a change.

So, what is your company doing about sustainability? Some companies invest heavily in this space. Others roll it under the marketing umbrella and still more, don’t even have a sustainability policy.

How do you improve your company’s sustainability policies? I don’t know! But more than likely, you or others in your organisation have great ideas about ways your company can be more environmentally responsible. Why not poll them?

Roll out a bottom-up Sustainability Suggestions Wiki in your organisation today. Most people have excellent ideas on how to improve things in their company but assume they will not be listened to. A wiki allows people to make suggestions in a transparent, meritocratic manner.

Incent people to do so. Give prizes for best suggestions every month. Prizes could be anything from something small like a CFL light bulb, or a Current Cost meter, all the way up to sponsorship of an MBA in Sustainable Business, or any number of things in between.

Go further, video and podcast interviews with winners – make them heroes in the company. The rewards for the company will often be cost savings through efficiencies but also a more highly motivated workforce, who see the company as being responsible and caring of what they (the employees) think.

Enabling bottom-up suggestions in this manner (and subsequently acting on them) promotes a “We are all in this together” spirit and empowers people to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, a difference which they may be unable to make as individuals.

Why wouldn’t you do this?

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The temperature imperative!

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Global Temperature Rise

Graph courtesy of the UK’s Climate Research Unit

The graph above, taken from the UK’s Climate Research Unit, is very sobering. I first noticed the graph when Joseph Romm did an excellent analysis of it on his Climate Progress site.

A few points to note from Joe’s piece:

  • * the 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s
  • * since the 1990s were only 0.14°C warmer than the 1980s => global warming is accelerating
  • * 2008, though cooler than most of the 2000s is on track to be almost 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s as a whole
  • * The 2000s will easily be the hottest decade in recorded history
  • * The “coming decade” (2010-20) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally
  • * The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960
  • * The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade — similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot“)

In case anyone had any doubts that global warming is occurring, this should set those doubts to rest.

Governments are acting too slowly on this. It is up to individuals and companies to take actions to reduce our impact on the planet.

The companies we cover on this blog: IBM, Microsoft, HP, Siemens, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Dell, SAP, Oracle, Nortel, Cisco, etc. are all making significant efforts to reduce their impacts on the planet (or we wouldn’t be covering them!).

However, as the graph above indicates, our way of life is under threat. Now, as George Monbiot says,

We need to resurrect the old-fashioned virtues of uniting in the face of a crisis, of resourcefulness and community action

We all need to band together not only at national levels, but at company and community levels to do everything we can to work to reduce our impact on the planet. Don’t rely on your politicians to do it for you. Get together with friends, neighbours, co-workers and make a change. Today.