sustainability Archives - Page 3 of 8

SAP are now starting to let their customers tell their Sustainability story

May 20, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Centrica's Smart Meter Analytics implementation

I attended SAP’s SapphireNow conference this week. At previous Sapphire conferences SAP went strong on Sustainability – having guest speakers like Al Gore and Richard Branson and also having both Co-CEO’s address the topic strongly in their talks. This year however, they went a different route.

This year the main themes discussed by guests and Co-CEO’s were mobility and in-memory computing with sustainability merely referenced a couple of times in passing. On the other hand, a search of the online agenda shows that there were 60 sessions at the event which were Sustainability themed. What’s more, as SAP’S VP Marketing for Sustainability Solutions Marty Etzel pointed out to me, 80% of those sessions were customer or partner led.

I think it shows a certain maturity and confidence by SAP that they are willing to step back from the previous top-down approach to Sustainability that they have espoused and to allow their customers and partners to bottom-up tell the story on their behalf. It is always a far more convincing story when it is your partners and customers are talking up your solutions.

Due to meetings, I couldn’t get to as many of the sessions as I wanted to but fortunately many of them were recorded for replay on the SapphireNow so I’ll be able to catch up with them over the coming days.

It is a gutsy move by SAP to let their customers tell their Sustainability story – but it is one which is vital for the credibility of their solutions.

Disclosure – SAP paid my travel and expenses to attend this event

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

Have HP’s senior executives lost interest in Sustainability?

March 22, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I attended a HP analyst summit last week in San Francisco and I have been putting off writing down my impressions of the event because I was, frankly, very disappointed.

Writing recently about HP’s announcement of their new Energy and Sustainability Solution, I noted that HP’s new CEO L?o Apotheker’s legacy from his time at SAP, is SAP?s deep commitment to sustainability. And I went on to speculate that it looks like he is bringing his sustainability stamp to HP as well. Sadly, I set myself up for a bit of a fall!

Jeff Katzenberg speaking at the HP Summit

Jeff Katzenberg - HP Summit

The first day of the two day event was a series of talks from HP execs, starting, after the introduction, with L?o’s Keynote. After that there was a series of exec talks on Cloud, Connectivity, Digitization and Security followed by guest speaker Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks over lunch. During this he screened the trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2, which looked great!

In the afternoon there were talks on HP Services, Go To Market and HP Labs followed by a brief break and then back for a Q&A with L?o and the rest of the execs.

I waited the entire day and the first mention of the word Sustainability was by Prith Banarjee, director of HP Labs in the final session where he made a brief reference to it. The funny thing was that that was when Prith became most passionate and enthusiastic!

Earlier in the day, in the talk on digitization, Vyomesh Joshi (aka VJ) did mention that 200bn pages are going digital annually but he then ruined it by talking about one HP printing station which is printing 80m pages a month (that’s a lot of dead trees!) but worse was when he went on to gleefully talk about how many “gallons of ink” that requires. And, in fairness to her, Ann Livermore did mention energy efficiency when discussing servers and data centers but it was a very brief mention, when so much more could have been said. However, the fact that during a full day of senior executive presentations, from one of the largest technology companies in the world, only one exec made any passing reference to sustainability was, to me a huge let down.

HP do have some good sustainability stories to tell – for instance, the fact that over the last five years HP managed to reduce the energy its products need to operate by 50%. Also, there is the previously mentioned HP Energy and Sustainability Management solution and then there is HP’s recycling efforts when it comes to its ink jet cartridges (HP recently announced that it has made more than 1 billion ink cartridges from recycled plastic) – the fact that ink cartridges are themselves totally unsustainable, is a whole other discussion.

HP TouchPad

HP are in a funny position. They are ostensibly a printing company and now with the acquisition of Palm, they are set to become a devices company too (Smartphones and Tablets using Web OS). Neither of these businesses is particularly environmentally friendly and yet HP’s founders spoke of [PDF] HP’s commitment to the environment as far back as 1957 in HP’s first statement of corporate objectives, The HP Way.

I’m not sure why HP executives shied away from talking about sustainability at the HP Summit but for anyone attending the event, the lack of any mention of Sustainability was a surprise. Does it demonstrate a lack of commitment from HP executives to Sustainability, or does it signal that HP are abandoning their previous role as good corporate citizens? I don’t think either of those is the reason why but until I start to hear HP’s senior management talking about sustainability, I will have my doubts as to how seriously they now view it.

By the way, the photo at the top of this article was the table of bottled water at the Environment, Energy and Sustainability session on day two of the Summit!

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Photo credits Tom Raftery

I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home

March 13, 2011 by Tom Raftery

HP's Energy and Sustainability Management

Above is a screenshot of one of the slides from HP’s webinar announcing their new Energy and Sustainability Management solution.

What is most interesting about it for me is that, front and center there is a focus on Facilities and Buildings. We have already seen that IBM has identified Smarter Buildings as one of the major planks of its Smarter Planet program, now with HP chasing this sector as well, we are likely to see some major improvements in global building stock’s energy efficiency in the coming years.

It is nice to see HP re-discovering its interest in sustainability especially, since former CEO Mark Hurd eviscerated any programs related to sustainability in HP during his tenure. As my colleague James noted, the real legacy L?o Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, left SAP (where he was formerly CEO) is SAP’s deep commitment to sustainability. It looks like he is bringing his sustainability stamp to HP as well, but I digress.

As I noted in the post about IBM:

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions ? and then there is the market size to consider ? every building on the planet potentially.

Though there is one qualification to that – I suspect in the cases of both HP and IBM, when they refer to Smarter Buildings, they are primarily referring to commercial real estate, not residential buildings. This is understandable, given that the commercial market is a far easier one to address – a single contract can be for hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate, whereas the residential sector, by definition, is far more fragmented. However, according to the IPCC, the residential sector is responsible for 1,500MtC of carbon emissions compared to 1,000MtC for commercial buildings.

How do we square this circle?

Well, one player addressing precisely this market is Living PlanIT. In their model city in Portugal, they are creating residential buildings which are net energy positive! They are also creating a platform for the development of sustainable urban technologies and licensing them so they can be used globally. I spoke recently to Living PlanIT’s CEO recently about their plans and will be writing that up in a separate post.

However, the takeaway is that, while the commercial market is a hugely important one to address, it really is the low hanging fruit in terms of the global built environment’s energy footprint. We need to be actively chasing the residential space, at least as vigorously as the commercial one.

I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home. When we all have one of those, then we’ll have made some real progress.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

Blogging for social sustainability – the why’s and how’s

February 2, 2011 by Tom Raftery

This is another blog post cross-posted from my Social Sustainability blog

In my first post on Social Sustainability, where I talked about the importance of sharing, I mentioned that I had been thinking of writing a post about blogging – well, here it is!

I know this will be the proverbial “teaching granny to suck eggs” posting but seeing as blogs are such a fundamental tool in your social media armoury, I couldn’t leave them unaddressed. In fact, there are so many things to write about blogs and blogging that I can see many more posts on the topic in my future. This brings me to a question – what aspect of blogging would you like me to write about next?

I’m going to start off though with a quick ‘why blog’ and then a discussion of whether to go for a hosted or a self-hosted blog (and the differences between the two).

I won’t spend too much time on the ‘why blog’ question – I’m assuming if you are reading this it is because you are interested in Social Sustainability – if that is the case, then you probably already know that the primary tool of social media is a blog. I wrote a bunch of posts a few years ago on the advantages of blogging for a business – here’s one to have a firkle through if you are still not convinced (read down through the comments as well to get full value).

On the question of whether to go for a hosted or self-hosted blog, I’m not going to make a recommendation either way – rather, I’ll list their relative advantages and let you decide which is more appropriate for you:

Hosted blogs (like WordPress.com which this blog runs on, and Blogger.com) advantages:

Speed – a hosted blog can be setup in a matter of seconds

Reliability – hosted blogs are very rarely offline (the last time WordPress.com had an outage was in June 2010)

Simplicity – hosted blog providers generally look after hosting, updating, security, spam and malware protection

Branding – hosted blogs now allow you to brand your blog with your own domain name (e.g. no longer tomraftery.wordpress.com, now simply tomraftery.com) and

Price – most hosted blog platforms are free

On the other hand Self-hosted blogs (such as GreenMonk.net)have these advantages:

Flexibility – With your self-hosted blog you can extend the functionality of the blog with themes and plug-ins

Ad free – most hosted blogs will display ads in your blog – with self-hosted, you can go Ad-free, or roll out Ads and benefit from the revenue yourself!

Cheap – although you have to pay for the hosting – there are free blog platforms (such as WordPress.org) you can download to run your blog and

Security – if you can control the country and hoster your blog is hosted with, you run far less risk of falling foul of spurious (or otherwise) take-down notices

One possible suggestion, if you are still undecided, is to start off with a hosted blog. If, after a while, you find the limitations of your hosted blog too frustrating, you can always export all your blog posts and comments and import them into a self-hosted one and go from there.

Either way, happy blogging.

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

Friday Green Numbers round-up for Jan 14th 2011

January 14, 2011 by Tom Raftery

And here are this week’s Green numbers…

2010 ties 2005 for warmest year on record

Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record for global surface temperature, US government scientists said in a report on Wednesday that offered the latest data on climate change.

The Earth in 2010 experienced temperatures higher than the 20th century average for the 34th year in a row, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

Overall, 2010 and 2005 were 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit (0.62 Celsius) above the 20th century average when taking a combination of land and water surface temperatures across the world, it said.

Those two years were also the highest in temperature since record-keeping began in 1880.

Last year was the wettest on record, NOAA said citing Global Historical Climatology Network which made the calculation based on global average precipitation, even though regional patterns varied widely.

When it came to hurricanes and storms, the Pacific Ocean saw the fewest number of hurricanes and named storms, three and seven respectively, since the 1960s.

But the Atlantic Ocean told a different story, with 12 hurricanes and 19 named storms, which include tropical storms and depressions, marking the second highest number of hurricanes on record and third highest for storms.
IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years

IBM formally unveiled the fifth annual “Next Five in Five” ? a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:
? You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D
? Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
? You won?t need to be a scientist to save the planet
? Your commute will be personalized
? Computers will help energize your city
Chris Tuppen’s 20 year CRS reflection

Chris left BT after a long and influential career in the company to pursue new pastures in sustainability. He kindly agreed to provide some personal reflections after a 20 year career in the field.

Reflecting back over twenty years of corporate sustainability and then attempting to summarise that into a 500 word blog is an almost impossible task.

Much has changed. Twenty years ago…
GE buys 3rd energy co. in 3 months – Lineage Power for $520m

General Electric has made its first move into the fast-growing business of cutting electricity consumption by the telecoms and computer industries, buying Lineage Power for $520m from The Gores Group, a private equity firm.

The deal is GE?s third acquisition of an energy business in the past three months, as the group implements its plan to focus on infrastructure markets and reduce its reliance on financial services.
Top 10 Carbon Reporting Trends in 2010

Corporate greenhouse gas emissions reporting continues to evolve at a rapid pace. As we celebrate the New Year, it’s instructional to take the opportunity to reflect on the highlights of 2010 and their impact on this market. Many of the changes are healthy as sustainability and emissions reporting moves away from “feel good” disclosures towards risk identification and competitive advantage.

Here is my list of the top 10 Carbon Reporting Trends in 2010…
Siemens constructing 65km 2GW HVDC line between France and Spain

Siemens Energy is currently erecting the power converter stations for a high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) transmission link between Baixas, to the west of Perpignan in France, and Santa Llogaia, south-west of Figueras in Spain, as important components of the Trans-European Network for electrical power. The installation can transmit a rated power of 2000 megawatts (MW) ? enough to transport large amounts of electric power with a minimum of transmission losses.
Why Greentech Money Is Sliding From Supply to Demand

With 2010 finally behind us, and a full year of data to play with, it appears that green technology investments are firmly shifting from the supply side of the equation to the demand side. In other words, solar and wind power were on the outs last year, and energy efficiency was the up-and-comer.

That?s the conclusion I draw in my weekly update at GigaOm Pro (subscription required), and while it may not come as a surprise to industry watchers, it?s nice to have some numbers to back it up. Although solar startups continued to draw the most money in venture capital investment last year, energy efficiency startups garnered…

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Photo credit millicent_bystander

Are SAP execs really committed to Sustainability?

December 14, 2010 by Tom Raftery

I attended SAP’s 2010 Influencer Summit last week in Santa Clara and was quite impressed by the quality (though not necessarily the quantity) of the Sustainability-related information which was imparted there.

The event got off to a very good start when the company’s co-CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe, addressed the event remotely from Germany instead of flying in. Now, while this was not specifically for sustainability-related reasons, it does clearly demonstrate that physical presence is not a necessity in addressing conferences. Even more heartening was to hear Jim referring to Sustainability themes in his keynote (I attended a Symantec event a few weeks back where the CEO and business unit leads made no mention of Sustainability, at all!).

However, following Jim’s talk, the execs who spoke after him made no reference, at all to Sustainability which was a big missed opportunity. SAP’s Rainer Zinow, for example, mentioned that the new version of SAP’s Netweaver product had been optimised for cloud and for multi-core architectures. When I asked him subsequently if it were also more energy efficient, he said “Absolutely” and offered to get me the info. This fact was confirmed to me the following day by Peter Graf in an energy efficiency event I attended.

Why wasn’t it part of the talk though – even if only a throwaway comment?

Scott Bolick at the 2010 SAP Influencer Summit

In fairness to SAP, there was a full Sustainability track the first afternoon with talks from SAP’s Peter Graf, Scott Bolick, Jeremiah Stone and Sami Muneer amongst others but how hard would it have been for the likes of Vishal Sikka, Sanjay Poonen or Raj Nathan, all of whom spoke after Jim Hagemann Snabe, to even throw in a sop to Sustainability in their presentations, even if only to keep the thought alive until the afternoon track.

The fact that the only senior manager to address sustainability was Jim Hagemann Snabe (with the exception of the Sustainability team, obviously), could lead one to wonder if Jim is alone in SAP in his commitment to Sustainability.

Having talked to many of the SAP execs about Sustainability over the years, I know this is not the case. But others present who haven’t had those conversations might now be wondering.

Symantec need to stop hiding their Green light under a bushel

October 6, 2010 by Tom Raftery

I attended Symantec’s Vision 2010 event in Barcelona yesterday and I found it to be hugely frustrating!

Symantec are one of the world’s largest computer security companies with 31,000 customers, 18,400 employees (PDF), and revenue in 2009 of $6.2 billion.

At yesterday’s Vision event however, they missed lots of great opportunities to talk up their Green story! I sat through the keynote from CEO Enrique Salem and presentations from the business unit leads and there was not one mention of the word Sustainability or even Green.

Deepak Mohan at Symantec Vision 2010

Deepak Mohan, SVP of the Information Management Group came closest when he mentioned efficiencies associated with de-duplication, eliminating redundancy, reducing data transfer and more efficient (that word again) search. Guys, these are obvious Green wins!

Things improved considerably in the afternoon when Fujitsu, a Symantec customer, spoke about the payback from installing a hosted email filtering solution from Symantec. Before the installation, Fujitsu were receiving in excess of 2m emails per day. Between 90-95% of these emails were spam. After the rollout of the email filtering solution, Fujitsu are now receiving 5-10% of their previous email load per day. As a consequence they were able to reduce their email infrastructure from sixteen servers down to two. Furthermore, they were able to reduce their network link requirements and their storage requirements for email. And finally they were able to free up IT resources who previously were tasked with managing the email infrastructure. This is a big Green win!

My Symantec Vision 2010 conference badge

Later in the afternoon I was especially heartened to have a one-to-one session with Symantec VP of Global Solutions, Jose Iglesias. Jose is the guy raising/waving the Green flag within Symantec. He informed me that Symantec have used their own technologies to reduce the electricity bill in their data centers by $3m (10%) per annum!

How do they do this?
Symantec has software for helping manage computer clusters which can help you reduce the number of computers in a cluster without affecting your SLA’s.

Also, according to Jose, storage costs can represent between 25-75% of a data center’s energy spend. To help with this Symantec have storage management products which give deep visibility of use of storage. This can highlight overallocation, help reclaim storage space and defer the purchase of new storage.

Other technologies like dynamic storage tiering can significantly reduce the amount of energy used in storage while data deduplication can free up large amounts of disk space.

Symantec also have software which can put computers to sleep after a set period of inactivity and they have partnered with TechTurn to manage end of life computers

Finally, Symantec see a large role for themselves in helping secure the Smart Grid.

With all these Green credentials, why aren’t Symantec screaming their Sustainability story from the rooftops?

Possibly because they don’t see it as core to their customers’ needs. That is changing. Fast.

Another good reason for Symantec to strt talking up their Green credentials is that companies with a good record on Sustainability have an easier time attracting and retaining employees – something which is vital to the long-term sustainability of any company.

Friday Green Numbers round-up 07/16/2010

July 16, 2010 by Tom Raftery

Photo credit XcBiker

And here are this week’s Green Numbers:

Smart Grids

GE announces $200M Smart Grid challange

GE wants to spark a revolution in the way we create and distribute electricity, and seizing on a critical underfunding of grid investments by the U.S. government (a paltry $3.4 billion) the 2nd largest company in the world (as ranked by Forbes) wants to do something about it.

GE is partnering with four major venture capital firms, including Al Gore-advised Kleiner Perkins, to issue the $200 million challenge to “…businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to share their best ideas and come together to take on one of the world?s toughest challenges ? building the next-generation power grid to meet the needs of the 21st century.”

tags: ge greennumbers electricity $200 million challenge smart grid
Smart Grid Spending To Plateau at $35 Billion in 3 Years

The smart grid has been a lumbering but steady and inevitable presence in the utility industry, with a speedy uptake in the number of start-ups interested in creating everything from energy storage technology to user dashboards for home energy consumption and a somewhat slower uptake in the number of smart grid pilot projects popping up nationwide. Less than two years ago it was expected to grow to at least $65 billion by 2013. Cisco has identified at least $20 billion in potential business opportunities around the grid, which the company says will be bigger than the Internet, and $3.4 billion of stimulus money was to be dished out to 100 projects. So why the projection from Pike Research that the spending will top off at $35 billion by 2013?

tags: greennumbers smart grid investments spending
Trilliant Raises $106 Million of Capital

Trilliant Incorporated, a leader in delivering Smart Grid solutions that enhance energy efficiency, utility operations, and renewable resource integration, today announced that it has closed financing totaling $106 million from a global syndicate of industry and financial leaders.

The financing round was led by two highly-respected financial investors, Investor Growth Capital (the wholly-owned venture arm of Investor AB of Sweden) and VantagePoint Venture Partners and two leading global grid-related equipment companies, ABB and GE. The financing, which was coordinated by Deutsche Bank, also includes a significant credit facility from a major venture credit provider as well as continuing financial support from existing investors MissionPoint Capital Partners and zouk ventures. The new investment will be used to finance Trilliant?s continued growth in North America and globally.

tags: trilliant smart grid financing round investment greennumbers

Policy and Regulation:

Europe needs to reduce emissions by 30%

An excellent article by the UK climate change secretary, German federal environment minister and French environment minister:
Europe’s current focus on recovery from recession must not distract us from the question of what kind of economy we want to build. Unless we set our countries on a path to a sustainable low-carbon future, we will face continued uncertainty and significant costs from energy price volatility and a destabilising climate.\nThis is why we today set out our belief that the European Union should raise its emissions target. A reduction of 30 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 would represent a real incentive for innovation and action in the international context. It would be a genuine attempt to restrict the rise in global temperatures to 2?C – the key climate danger threshold – stiffening the resolve of those already proposing ambitious action and encouraging those waiting in the wings. It would also make good business sense….

tags: europe eu low carbon emissions 30% 20% carbon greennumbers
Cutting UK central Government carbon emissions by 10%

“The new Coalition Government has pledged to be the ?greenest government ever? and has committed to reduce carbon emissions across the central Government estate by 10% within 12 months. Launched at the end of May, our Central Government Carbon Management Service is already working with twenty one Central Government bodies to help them meet this challenge.”

tags: uk govt greennumbers central Government estate Central Government Carbon Management Service
China to Invest $3.7 Billion in Smart Grid this Year Alone

The state-owned electric transmission company in China, State Grid, has moved forward with establishing a set of industry rules, standards and favored technologies for the growing smart grid industry in China. But the aggressive move to establish industry standards has competitors in the nascent smart grid sector a bit concerned.

tags: china smart grid state grid greennumbers

Sustainability

The Seven Triads of Sustainability

Seven ‘Triads of Sustainability’ – where seven issues (participation, decision-making, partnership, governance, knowledge and information, continual improvement, and lifestyles) leading to sustainability are explained in detail with case studies . These triads are key ingredients that define and drive sustainability, particularly at the local level.

tags: sustainability triads Seven Triads of Sustainability greennumbers
Eurosif – European Sustainable Investment Forum Remuneration Report

Eurosif partnered with EIRIS for the Remuneration theme report.

Research highlights and recommendations for shareholders and regulators include:

?- 29% of FTSE Eurofirst300 listed companies have some commitment to linking remuneration to ESG performance ? although concerns exists around the extent to which performance targets are set as ?soft targets? thereby guaranteeing a minimum level of bonus
?- Financial institutions account for 23% of the FTSE Eurofirst300 index but only 16% of financial institutions have an ESG-linked remuneration system
?- Shareholders should engage with companies by voting against unacceptable remuneration packages and calling for and taking part in shareholder dialogue in determining remuneration policy,
?- Regulators should promote active dialogue between companies and shareholders by legislating for a binding ?say on pay? vote and setting appropriate guidelines to promote good remuneration practices and disclosure.

The report examines critical challenges and opportunities for companies in relation to remuneration, incentives and long-term sustainability.

tags: remuneration remuneration report eurofirst300 greennumbers
Accounting rules could force businesses to disclose environmental impact

Companies could be asked to publish details of their environmental and social impacts alongside their financial accounts under new rules being discussed with the organisations that set accounting standards.

News of the initiative ? which would mean that businesses have to account for the impacts they have on local water quality, plants and animals ? emerged as a major report for the UN is published today. It warns that companies are causing vast damage to the “living fabric of this planet”, raising threats to society and their own profits, but also that the business opportunities to make money from improving the environment are forecast to quadruple over the next decade.

tags: environmental impacts social impacts csr corporate reporting greennumbers accounting standards
AT&T Rolls Out Its 2,000th Alternative Fuel Vehicle and 1,500th Compressed Natural Gas Vehicle in Its Corporate Fleet – Yahoo! Finance

AT&T today announced the deployment of the 2,000th alternative fuel vehicle and 1,500th compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicle in its corporate vehicle fleet, giving it one of the largest CNG vehicle fleets in the U.S. These milestones are part of a $565 million planned investment announced in March 2009 to replace more than 15,000 fleet vehicles with alternative fuel models through 2018. Currently, the AT&T corporate fleet includes more than 75,900 vehicles.

AT&T anticipates purchasing approximately 8,000 CNG vehicles over a five-year span, at an anticipated cost of $350 million. AT&T expects to spend an additional $215 million through 2018 to replace 7,100 fleet passenger cars with alternative fuel models. According to the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), AT&T’s alternative fuel vehicle initiative will:

– Save 49 million gallons of gasoline over the 10-year deployment period.
– Reduce carbon emissions by 211,000 metric tons ? the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing 147,929 passenger vehicles from the road for one year.

tags: at&t att cng compressed natural gas vehicle fleet greennumbers

Renewables

Africa?s Largest Wind Farm Opens in Morocco

Earlier this week, Morocco?s King Mohammed VI officially inaugurated a wind farm in the town of Melloussa.?? With 165 turbines and a production capacity of 140 megawatts, the farm is touted as Africa?s largest wind farm. Besides significantly reducing CO2 emissions, the farm is expected to save over 125,000 metric tons of oil annually.

tags: morocco wind farm greennumbers
Germany targets switch to 100% renewables for its electricity by 2050 | Environment | The Guardian

Germany could derive all of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2050 and become the world’s first major industrial nation to kick the fossil-fuel habit, the country’s Federal Environment Agency said today.

The country already gets 16% of its electricity from wind, solar and other renewable sources ? three times’ higher than the level it had achieved 15 years ago.

“A complete conversion to renewable energy by 2050 is possible from a technical and ecological point of view,” said Jochen Flasbarth, president of the Federal Environment Agency.

“It’s a very realistic target based on technology that already exists ? it’s not a pie-in-the-sky prediction,” he said.

tags: germany electricity renewable energy greennumbers fossil fuel
10 Myths About The Gulf Oil Well Blowout And Offshore Drilling

Is shutting down offshore drilling more risky than carrying on? What about jobs that real families depend on? Do we have to choose between dolphins and employment? What are the real issues in the Gulf? Here?s 10 Questions that were fielded by Andy Sharpless, the CEO of Oceana at a recent TedxOilSpill conference. We?ve let Andy speak in his own voice here unedited.

tags: Andy Sharpless TedxOilSpill oilspill offshore drilling greennumbers
Gulf Oil Spill Investigation Now Includes Tens Of Thousands Of Abandoned Wells

A lead congressional committee investigating the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has broadened its inquiry, now checking if tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells are leaking or even being monitored for leaks.

tags: salazar oilspill Gulf of Mexico oil wells gas wells abandoned oil wells greennumbers

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 06/25/2010

June 25, 2010 by Tom Raftery

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

Six Infrastructure Projects to Save 1.3 Billion Gallons of Water in Australia

Australia is no stranger to tight water supplies, and fortunately that means smart water conservation strategies are being devised all the time. Australia is leading the way in everything from strategies to combat desertification to using renewable energy for desalination plants, and now it is putting that knowledge to work on six new infrastructure projects that can save 1.3 billion gallons of water.

tags: greennumbers, australia, smart water, water conservation, desalination, renewable energy, desertification
Girls now begin puberty aged 9

GROWING numbers of girls are reaching puberty before the age of 10, raising fears of increased sexual activity among a new generation of children.

Scientists believe the phenomenon could be linked to obesity or exposure to chemicals in the food chain, and is putting girls at greater long-term risk of breast cancer.

A study has revealed that breast development in a sample of 1,000 girls started at an average age of 9 years and 10 months ? an entire year earlier than when a similar cohort was examined in 1991.

tags: greennumbers, girls, puberty, obesity, chemicals, food chain, breast cancer
Coal-fired power was the big loser in the economic downturn | Grist

There’s some interesting new data out on recent shifts in electricity demand and consumption, courtesy of the DOE/EIA.

In 2008, total U.S. power generation was 4.1 million GWh. In 2009, that fell by 4 percent, to 3.9 million. That’s a 4 percent reduction — clearly the result of the economic slowdown. Nothing surprising there.

What’s interesting, though, is how generation shifted by fuel type. Over the same year, coal-fired power generation fell by 11 percent, from almost 2 million GWh to just under 1.8 million.

tags: greennumbers, fuel, type, coal-fired power generation, coal, DOE, EIA, U.S. power generation, electricity demand, electricity consumption
New Microsoft App Can Cut PC Power Consumption By 80%

Just how important is turning off computers at the end of the day in an office building? Very, if a company wants to save big bucks on electricity bills. According to UC San Diego researchers, 50-80% of a modern building’s electricity use goes to IT equipment, particularly desktop computers. A report last year showed that not shutting down PCs equated to $2.8 billion in wasted electricity. Still, many offices don’t encourage their employees to hit shut-down on their PCs for a variety of reasons, including updating software while everyone is out or being able to keep the computer attached to the network so information on the machine can be accessed at any time. However, Microsoft’s new Sleep Proxy system claims it can help cut energy consumption by 60-80%, without getting in the way of office systems.

tags: greennumbers, IT equipment, electricity use, Sleep Proxy
RWE npower: wholesale electricity prices ?must double? to meet UK targets

At a presentation at the Oxford Energy Futures conference on June 11th, Andy Duff, non-executive chair of RWE npower, made some controversial assertions about the future of electricity in the UK. He focused on three propositions.

a)????? The UK cannot meet its carbon targets without new nuclear

b)????? Electricity demand will grow at 1% less than GDP growth

c)?????? The UK will not have enough electricity capacity by the latter part of this decade unless UK society accepts a doubling of wholesale electricity prices, which is the minimum required to free the capital investment required to 1) meet demand and 2) decarbonise sufficiently fast.

In summary, we need nuclear and we all need to accept a substantial rise in electricity prices to pay for it.

tags: Oxford Energy Futures, greennumbers, npower, nuclear, electricity demand
60% of Chinese Consumers Sceptical of Companies’ CSR Communications: Global Poll

Chinese consumers are becoming as cynical as those in the West about the way companies communicate about their social and environmental performance, according to the latest wave of GlobeScan’s annual global tracking research on public views of corporate social responsibility.\n\nThe study, which interviewed over 30,000 people across 34 countries, finds that while in 2005 more than 80 per cent of Chinese consumers felt that companies communicated ‘honestly and truthfully’ about their social and environmental performance, this has now fallen sharply, with only 40 per cent feeling this way in this year’s study.

tags: CSR Communications, csr, china, consumers, GlobeScan, greennumbers
E-mail from BP engineer called Deepwater Horizon rig a ?nightmare well? six days before explosion

Today, the chief executives of the five big oil companies ? including BP?s Tony Hayward ? are going to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. According to an e-mail released by that Committee yesterday, a BP drilling engineer warned that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was a ?nightmare well? that had caused the company problems in the past. The e-mail came just six days before the well exploded:

tags: bp, oilspill, deepwater horizon, Macondo well, Gulf of Mexico, nightmare well, greennumbers

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