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SAP’s Peter Graf discusses his role – Chief Sustainability Officer

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ERP software maker SAP is, according to Wikipedia, the world’s 4th largest software co. in the world (presumably after Google, Microsoft and Oracle).

It is a big deal then when a company of SAP’s size announces the creation of the position of Chief Sustainability Officer, as SAP did earlier this month.

In the same announcement SAP also announced targets to reduce carbon emissions by 51% and to help their customers reduce their emissions.

Having talked to SAP previously, I know this is not a sudden conversion on their part but I was interested to talk to their new Sustainability chief, Peter Graf to ask him about the announcements.

We recorded three videos on the three parts of the announcement – this is the first one where Peter discusses the new role.

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IBM hits the Green ball out of the park!

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Al Zollar on Smart Grids

I attended Pulse 2009, the IBM service management conference, in Las Vegas during the week. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t know much about service management software before going to the event so my expectations of what to expect from the conference were low! However, IBM hit the Green ball out of the park at this conference. Almost every speaker who stood up to speak mentioned smart grids, energy or efficiency and Al Zollar, GM of Tivoli Software above, even had a slide on demand response!

The turnout for the event was around 5-6000 I’m told and I have no reason to doubt it as the general sessions were thronged.

It really is tremendous to see Oracle, SAP and IBM all heavily touting their Smart Grid software solutions – it looks like the dream of the intelligent energy network and the massive efficiencies which will accrue, is not far off.

I met a ton of interesting people there and video’d a couple of them so I’ll be posting more in upcoming posts.

[Disclosure: IBM paid my travel and expenses for this trip]

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James Farrar on SAP and Sustainability

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Report

Photo credit photobunny

[audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/JamesFarrarSAPonSustainability.mp3]

My guests on this podcast are James Farrar and James Governor. James Farrar is Vice President of Corporate Citizenship at SAP while James Governor is the co-founder of RedMonk.

SAP recently published their Sustainability Report and both James Governor and I were keen to chat to SAP to learn more about how SAP views Sustainability.

We invited James onto the show and despite/because of some ribbing and rigorous questions what resulted was, I think a great conversation.

Listen in and let me know what you think…

Download the entire interview here
(25.7mb mp3)

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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.

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GreenMonk interviews AMEE and thinks about collaboration!

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Gavin Starks, founder and CEO of AMEE, is one of the speaker’s presenting at this year’s it@cork Green IT conference on November 26th. GreenMonk are a sponsor of the conference, hence our interviewing the speakers in the run-up to the conference.

We have written about AMEE several times before on GreenMonk because we are strong believers in their philosophies.

From the AMEE website:

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform to measure and track all the energy data on Earth. This includes aggregating every emission factor and methodology related to CO2 and Energy Assessments (individuals, businesses, buildings, products, supply chains, countries, etc.), and all the consumption data (fuel, water, waste, quantitative and qualitative factors)

Because AMEE provides standardised access to emissions factors and methodologies you have to think they are a natural partner for many companies/organisations and indeed they currently count the UK govt, the Irish govt, Google, Radiohead and Morgan Stanley among their users!

Thinking about my recent trip to San Antonio for the SAP for Utilities conference, AMEE would seem an obvious choice to help SAP with their Energy Capital Management program.

AMEE keeps global factors and methodologies updated and maintained as a managed service, saving its clients time and resources, so there is logic for SAP to use AMEE for this service, for example.

Since AMEE also enables its clients to add their own methods, AMEE’s API approach is a valuable consolidation platform.

Collaboration could help stimulate new markets that cross-over between smart-grids, business footprinting, consumer initiatives, and policy trends. AMEE could support and compliment the aims of the Lighthouse Council, by extending the reach and demonstrating best practice.

This would enable (controlled) data mining and benchmarking in a collaborative environment, whilst maintaining privacy.

A collaboration between SAP and AMEE could demonstrate thought-leadership and generate new data marketplaces. It would also present a tangible way to accelerate reductions and efficiencies through data portability and by increasing transparency in the system.

The output could inform corporate strategy and government policy. This may be particularly timely and relevant to the new US administration.

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GreenMonk interviews Stefan Engelhardt about SAP’s vision for Smart Grids

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One of the more interesting keynote talks at the recent SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio TX was the one given by Stefan Engelhardt, SAP’s Head of Industry Business Unit Utilities.

In his keynote he discussed decarbonisation and SAP’s vision around Smart Grids and Smart Meters. I asked him if he’d be willing to come on camera to talk about some of these topics and he very graciously agreed.

With the vast majority of the world’s utilities using SAP’s software, they have their fingers firmly on the pulse of this sector. What was pleasantly surprising to me was the amount of interest SAP is seeing from their utility client companies in Smart Grids. As Stefan himself said in the interview:

For the next couple of years we see a clear trend towards the deployment of Smart Metering technology in the Utilities industry… and that means we have to adapt the existing business processes to this new technology

It was also fascinating to hear Stefan’s predictions around how Smart Grids will be rolled out gradually by utilities. Polling of smart meters by utilities will be ramped up bit-by-bit from maybe once a day to once every 10-15 minutes and this will have huge implications for the amount of data utilities will have to manage. Previously they may have collected 1 terabyte every 10 years. With smart meters reporting energy usage every 10-15 minutes they could be collecting 1 terabyte every month, or less!

With the roll-out of Smart Grids, utility companies will be able to publish energy prices in realtime based on supply and demand. This is important because electricity is more plentiful when renewables are contributing to the mix, so cheaper electricity should also track closely with Greener electricity!.

Utilities will now be able to offer new products like critical peak pricing for peak shaving in times of electricity shortage and even demand stimulation, to encourage people to consume electricity when supply is exceeding demand. This will encourage people to shift some of their loads to times when renewables are contributing more, thereby reducing the CO2 emissions associated with that load.

[Disclosure – SAP covered my expenses to attend this conference]

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Smart Grid management software

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One of the key challenges for any new technology, like Smart Grids, is finding intelligent ways to manage them.

Smart Grids contain new assets for utilities (Smart Meters) which collect data about energy usage and pass it back to the utility. They should also be capable of receiving data from the utility (price signals) and communicating that with the household.

Because this is an extremely immature technology as yet, there are many new entrants in the field with solutions around managing Smart Grids.

At the SAP for Utilities conference, I spoke to Krishna Kumar of Space-Time-Insight and he demonstrated their Smart Grid management software. I was impressed at the way the software used Google Maps and was able to zoom in or out to report at the city/block/individual residence level!

The fact that it also allows for the management of assets like wind turbines makes this an interesting piece of software for utilities, I suspect.

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Smart Grid demo at the SAP for Utilities Conference

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I attended the SAP for Utilities conference last week in San Antonio and was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the Utilities attending were thinking about rolling out Smart Grids or were already running pilot Smart Grids. There were even a couple who were well underway with their Smart Grid rollout project.

Demand Response was being discussed extensively and was cited by most as one of the principal advantages of Smart Grids.

Smart Grids and Demand Response are topics we have covered extensively here on GreenMonk.net and they are core to the Electricity 2.0 talk I gave in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo. The importance of Smart Grids and Demand Response cannot be overstated when it comes to energy efficiencies and energy demand management.

SAP are working closely with utilities through the Lighthouse Council, to ensure that whenever a utility wants to go from a traditional grid to a smart grid infrastructure, SAP will have the necessary software pieces in place for them (Enterprise Asset Management, Customer Relationship Management, and the newer Energy Capital Management).

In the video above, Russell Boyer demonstrates a Smart Grid in action. In this use case, Russell acts as the utility call center for a customer who is moving out and wants their power disconnected. The Smart Grid allows the agent to take a meter reading, and shut off power to the meter remotely. This isn’t the best demonstration of the potential of Smart Grids but it was the first time I saw Smart Grid technologies live in action and I have to admit to being wow’d by it.

[Disclosure – SAP covered my expenses for attending this conference]

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Build carbon software efficiently (practice what you preach!)

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motion gears -team force
Photo Credit ralphbijker

I have been having some very interesting conversations with people in the carbon software sector these last couple of weeks.

The first was with Michael Meehan of Carbonetworks (which I blogged about here) and we discussed their offering which is a “carbon strategy platform”. From my blog post about Carbonetworks:

The app at its most basic helps companies understand what their carbon footprint is, and then helps the companies translate that into a financial bottom line. The app helps companies see what options they have to reduce their carbon footprint and helps them create a carbon strategy from a managerial perspective on how to proceed in the carbon market.

Then I talked to Stefan Guertzgen, Marketing Director for Chemicals and Franz Hero, vp, chemical industry business unit both at SAP. They were talking about the SAP Environmental Compliance application which, in their words:

enables companies to gather information on the use of energy, in all its forms, throughout the enterprise, identify areas for energy reduction, monitor the implementation of energy excellence projects, and make the results available throughout the enterprise

Earlier this week I was talking to Kevin Leahy, who is a director in IBM’s IT Optimization Business Unit about IBM’s House of Carbon for which they have also developed carbon reporting software for their client base.

Finally, yesterday I was speaking to Gavin Starks, founder and CEO of AMEE. We have talked about AMEE several times before on this blog. AMEE is an open-source, neutral, platform for

measuring the Energy Consumption of everything… aggregates “official” energy metrics, conversion factors and CO2 data from over 150 countries… is a common platform for profiling and transactions (there’s a transaction engine at the core of AMEE)

Noticing a common thread here? Guys, stop re-inventing the wheel.

IBM and SAP (and anyone else thinking of embarking on carbon software) STOP NOW! It has already been done and done well by companies with open api’s (and open data in AMEE’s case).

Get on the phone to Carbonetworks and AMEE, and instead of building another carbon app, use their already comprehensive infrastructures and api’s to get a jump-start and bring best-of-breed carbon software to market efficiently!

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IBM’s coming on board will speed up the rollout of Smart Grids

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Light House

The observant amongst you may have noticed that we have talked quite a bit about smart grids here on GreenMonk. That is because we believe fundamentally in what it is they are trying to achieve and how they are going about it.

And we are not alone in that!

SAP’s AMI Lighthouse Council is all about Smart Grids and hence SAP are holding their SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio Texas in October where there will be a major focus on Smart Grids.

As well as SAP, not surprisingly the utilities are all over this space because Smart Grids will give them the ability to far better manage their energy supply and the demand, thereby reducing the number of outages. It seems that every day brings news of a new Smart Grid trial by some utility.

ComEd are looking at Smart Grids in Chicago, Manitoba Hydro is testing about 4,500 smart meters in Winnipeg, Xcel Energy has announced plans to make Boulder the first SmartGridCityTM, PEPCO has rolled out a Smart Grid trial in 1,000 homes in Washington DC, Austin Energy plans to have all its meters converted to Smart Meters by December 2008, etc. In fact, here is a Google Map of all the Smart Grid projects currently underway globally!

As well as the utilities, because this is a whole new area, there are literally hundreds of startups in this space from the likes of SynergyModule in Ireland to more established names like Echelon and Itron in the US.

Because of the involvement of these myriad players, IBM has also come on board to try to bring some standards to the table. According to this recent article in CNet,

The idea is to create a common set of communication protocols and data formats that utilities and smart-grid start-ups can adhere to.

With these technical blueprints, based on standards like TCP/IP, new technologies can be plugged into the grid on a large scale…. What’s happening now is a patchwork of smart-grid trials using differing products, an approach that prevents fast technology change.

This is great news for the rollout of Smart Grids globally. If we have a universally agreed set of standards that everyone adheres to then the creation and integration of smart grids and smart grid devices suddenly becomes far less complex.

It will still take some time before there are the devices in place, and the regulators and utilities sign-up to convert completely to Smart Grids but a heavy weight like IBM’s coming on board can only help move things along.

[Full disclosure: SAP have invited me to attend the SAP for Utilities conference, I am a sometime unpaid advisor to SynergyModule and IBM are a RedMonk client, though not a GreenMonk client!]

Photo Credit MumbleyJoe