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Green bits and bytes for Jan 27th 2011

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Green bits & bytes

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Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

  1. This year’s annual Transmission & Distribution Europe and Smart Grids Europe conference will be held in Copenhagen from 12-14 April. More than 30 utilities, as well as utility experts, regulators and technology giants from all over Europe, as well as the USA, South Africa, Japan and Australia, will be attending. I hope to be there too!
  2. Synapse Energy Economics released a report this week which outlines in detail the enormous hidden health and water impacts of coal and nuclear power in the US.

    Some of the costs mentioned in the report include 200 billion gallons of water withdrawn from America?s water supply each day ? annual costs to society from premature deaths due to power plant pollution so high that they are up to four times the price of all electricity produced in the U.S. ? and four metric tons of high-level radioactive wastes for every terawatt of electricity produced by nuclear reactors, even though there is no long-term storage solution in place.

  3. Optimum Energy, maker of heating, ventilating and air conditioning software solutions, has rolled out a new partner program with enhanced project development tools and training resources. Optimum Energy’s software maximizes the energy reduction potential of high-efficiency, variable speed heating and cooling systems, leading to energy savings for customers and the ability to improve overall project return on investment.
  4. Tropos Networks, maker of wireless IP networks for Smart Grids, has added two new products to its portfolio – the Tropos 1310 Distribution Automation (DA) Mesh Router and their Directional Radio Systems to deliver economical long range, high capacity wireless communications for sparse suburban and rural areas or as backhaul for Tropos Mesh networks.
  5. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg launched an Urban Technology Innovation Center at Columbia university. The center brings together academia, the public sector and companies like IBM to design and deploy new technology that will help the city’s buildings save energy, water and other resources. The challenge is to use advanced IT systems – analytics software and powerful new hardware – to create facilities that reduce energy, streamline operations and optimise real estate use.

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Photo credit .faramarz

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Green bits and bytes for Jan 13th 2011

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Green bits

Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

  1. Invensys IMServ, a UK-based carbon and energy solution provider has launched a new programme to help UK schools increase their energy efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint and save money on their energy bills.
  2. SAP Americas was named 2010 Smart Grid Integrator of the Year 2010, North America by The New Economy.
  3. Enterprise energy management company JouleX has upgraded its network-based agentless product JEM to version 2.5. The new version supports a broader set of IT infrastructure devices, improves energy measurement and accuracy, JouleX Mobile allows employees to become more engaged in company’s sustainability initiatives, “load adaptive computing” allocates computing resources based upon system and application utilisation and has significantly upgraded its reporting capabilities.
  4. Tropos Networks, a company which sells wireless broadband network infrastructure, announced the other day that they were selected by more utilities as the company of choice for their smart grid communications infrastructure than any other vendor. Tropos’ CEO Tom Ayers, whom I video interviewed previously here, said

    I expect that 2011 will be a banner year of growth for our company and smart grid deployments globally.

    Good for them!

  5. UK based Greenstone Carbon Management made me aware recently that Asian-based investment bank Nomura have selected Greenstone’s Acco2unt carbon accounting software to help measure, manage and report its carbon emissions across the Bank?s operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
  6. After a successful pilot, ARRA recipient Burbank Water and Power (BWP) has selected energy management company Trilliant to implement its smart metering communications infrastructure. Trilliant is partnering with GE for meters, eMeter for Meter Data Management, and Siemens for integration. BWP will utilise Trilliant?s solution to help manage service requests, customer inquiries, meter reading and service interruptions.

Photo credit lissalou66

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Green bits and bytes for Dec 16 2010

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Green bits & bytes

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Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

  1. We have written previously about the savings made possible by rolling out Digital Lumens Intelligent Lighting System (ILS) in a high-bay environment – well they have done it again! Their latest sale is to United States Cold Storage Inc., who deployed the ILS in its Hazelton Pa facility.

    USCS installed the lighting system in their recently built, 88,000-square-foot addition, and they can now light their facility for 3.5? per square foot per year, compared to 46? per square foot with traditional alternatives. USCS expects a return on investment of 14.6 months.

  2. SAP and PlaNet Finance’s joint project to help improve the incomes and living conditions for rural Ghanian women engaged in the Shea nut harvesting and Shea nut butter business posted a nice piece of good news during the week. Stanford University published a case study [PDF] which uncovered significant improvements in nut and butter quality. It also mentions how the women involved have organised into a network so they have a stronger negotiating position and they are achieving higher prices for their produce.
  3. JouleX is a company which helps organisations to monitor, analyse and manage the energy use and waste of IT systems connected to its internal network. JouleX announced this week that its JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) software has been accepted into the Cisco EnergyWise partner program – this enables Cisco to offer JEM as an energy management solution to its customers.
  4. Viridity, a data centre energy resource management software solution provider announced the appointment of Arun Oberoi to the position of President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective immediately.
  5. According to a news release from Tropos Networks, Silicon Valley Power (SVP), the City of Santa Clara?s municipal electric utility, has selected Tropos? GridCom as the distribution area communications network for its smart grid program, SVP Meter Connect. SVP serves over 50,000 customers and it expects the SVP Meter Connect project to increase reliability of the utility?s distribution system and finally
  6. ERP software company Epicor announced [PDF] the release of their on-demand carbon accounting solution, Carbon Connect. Carbon Connect is a SaaS delivered carbon accounting solution which allows companies to identify, analyze, audit, track, manage, benchmark and report on their carbon emissions /environmental impact and energy consumption.

Photo credit .faramarz

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Green Bits and bytes!

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Green bits

Photo credit lissalou66

A few announcements crossed my desk in the last week so I thought I’d wrap them up in a Bits and Bytes post:

  1. AlertMe, a company providing online energy management software, was named the winners of the “Software in Design” category at the Institution of Engineering and Technology Innovation awards recently. The prize was conferred on AlertMe for its “use of advanced software techniques within an engineering design process?. Entries were judged on innovation in the context of social, economic and personal impact as well as its novelty (new to humanity) and process.
  2. Logica just published their 2009 Sustainability Report. It is written using the GRI index and achieves an A rating. The report is a 16.8mb PDF download (which unfortunately failed to download for me which downloaded fine today and is a well presented, 70 page document outlining Logica’s CSR initiatives in 2009) – it would certainly benefit Logica to publish it online next time (if only to get feedback on how people read it).

    3. and

  3. Tropos Networks was selected by Burbank Water and Power to be a supplier for their Smart Grid rollout. Tropos? GridCom architecture will be used as the high performance wireless distribution area network, providing secure connectivity for multiple utility Smart Grid applications.

    Not familiar with Tropos? See my interview with their CEO, Tom Ayers here

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Smart Grid Heavy Hitter series – Tropos Networks CEO, Tom Ayers

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In this, the fifth of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to the CEO of Tropos Networks, Tom Ayers. Tropos develop wireless broadband networks for Smart Grid applications and offer complete network management, as well as enhanced security features. Tropos is the only wireless broadband network provider with FIPS 140-2 certification.

Tom and I had a great chat, we talked about:

  • Tom and Tropos’ definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
  • Why we need Smart Grids and the efficiency gains we will achieve from them
  • The security issues round wireless Smart Grids
  • Tropos IP, Smart Grid standards and open protocols
  • Best practice Smart Grid rollouts