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Friday Green Numbers round-up for July 8th 2011

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Green Numbers

With the summer slowdown in travel, I’m re-instating the Friday Green Numbers Round-up – and so without further ado…

  1. Whitehall surpasses 10% CO2 reduction target

    Whitehall has surpassed its target of slashing its CO2 emissions by ten percent in one year, achieving a cut of almost 14 percent.

    Prime minister David Cameron said central government emissions have fallen by 13.8 percent in the past year, reducing energy bills by an estimated ?13 million.

    Topping the table was the Department for Education, which achieved a 21.5 percent cut, while the… Read on

  2. Britain’s richest man to build giant Arctic iron ore mine 300 miles inside Arctic Circle

    Lakshmi Mittal’s ‘mega-mine’ is believed to be the largest mineral extraction project in the region but threatens unique wildlife

    Britain’s richest man is planning a giant new opencast mine 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle in a bid to extract a potential $23bn (?14bn) worth of iron ore.

    The “mega-mine” ? which includes a 150km railway line and two new ports ? is believed to be the largest mineral extraction project in the Arctic and highlights the huge… Read on

  3. Amazon Resists Pressure To Disclose Data On Carbon Footprint

    Amazon revolutionized the retail industry in the United States, and for several years has had a strong presence in Europe and Asia. Its market cap among retailers lags only behind Walmart.

    Despite its successes, the e-commerce giant has attracted criticism for a perceived lack of transparency of its carbon footprint…. Read on

  4. Facebook in the top 10 most hated companies in America

    Business Insider posted an article titled ?The 19 Most Hated Companies In America.? The data was based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which releases industry results monthly and updates its national index quarterly.

    Facebook was placed at number 10. I decided to take a look at just the 2010 data, which is the latest available if you want to see ratings from all the companies in the US…. Read on

  5. 7 ways cloud computing could be even greener

    Forrester Research is the latest organization to explore the link between cloud computing and green IT.

    Forrester notes that by its nature, cloud computing is more efficient. But here are seven ways that an IT professional can make his or her cloud computing even greener ? regardless of whether or not the approach is public or private:…. Read on

  6. E-On investing $600 million in Illinois wind farms

    Northwest of Kokomo, along U.S. 24 near the Indiana-Illinois state line, the horizon is broken by the sight of dozens of wind turbines slowly turning in the breeze.

    There, in the small town of Watseka, Ill., E-On Climate & Renewables is putting the finishing touches on the Settler’s Trail Wind Farm, and the company soon will start work on the Pioneer Trail Wind Farm in a neighboring portion of Iroquois County.

    E-On also plans to construct a major wind farm across parts of Howard, Tipton, Grant and Madison counties.

    Construction on Phase 1 of the Wildcat Wind Farm is…. Read on

  7. UK’s two biggest solar installations start generating energy

    A huge solar farm in Lincolnshire and another in Cornwall started generating green electricity on Thursday to become the UK’s two biggest solar installations, as developers rushed to beat an imminent cut in government subsidies.

    The 1MW Fen Farm solar park and the 1.4MW Wheal Jane park in Truro are two of several such large-scale projects rushing to connect to the grid. They are trying to benefit from a…. Read on

  8. Missing: 163 Million Women

    AMidway through his career, Christophe Guilmoto stopped counting babies and started counting boys. A French demographer with a mathematician’s love of numbers and an anthropologist’s obsession with detail, he had attended graduate school in Paris in the 1980s, when babies had been the thing.

    He did his dissertation research in Tamil Nadu.

    As it turned out, Tamil Nadu was in fact one of the states where girls had a better prospect of survival, while in 2001 the northwest, a wealthy region considered India’s breadbasket, reported a regional sex ratio at birth of 126?that is, 126 boys for every 100 girls. (The natural human sex ratio at birth is 105 boys for every 100 girls.) The cause for this gap, Guilmoto quickly learned, was that pregnant women were taking advantage of a cheap and pervasive sex determination tool?ultrasound?and aborting if the fetus turned out to be female… Read on

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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US and UK governments prioritising Green technologies in patent applications

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Patent

Photo credit adulau

I was talking to Paul Craane of Chicago law firm Marshall, Gerstein & Borun today. Paul is a patent attorney an interest in Green technologies.

Paul got in touch because he wanted to highlight the fact that the US Green Technology Pilot Program, a special program announced by the US Patent and Trademark office at the start of December, has had an underwhelming response!

The pilot program was created to accelerate the examination of certain ‘green’ technology patent applications.

?Every day an important green tech innovation is hindered from coming to market is another day we harm our planet and another day lost in creating green businesses and green jobs,? Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos said. ?Applications in this pilot program will see a significant savings in pendency, which will help bring green innovations to market more quickly.?

Green technologies with pending patent applications will be expedited which will reduce the time it takes to patent these technologies by an average of one year. According to the announcement in December:

Under the pilot program, for the first 3,000 applications related to green technologies in which a proper petition is filed, the agency will examine the applications on an accelerated basis.

According to Paul the USPTO has received petitions to fill only a third of the 3000 positions available so it should still be possible to petition to have your application included in the program.

As this is a pilot program, the chances of it being repeated obviously diminish if it is under-subscribed.

Why has it been under-subscribed to-date? Well, Paul speculated that it may have been due to the timing of the announcement, coming as it did just before the the Copenhagen Climate meeting, followed by the holiday season.

Paul also pointed out that the US is not the only country with such a program – the UK announced a similar initiative under which the time to get a patent granted would be reduced from a typical 2-3 year average down to 9 months! More details of the UK Intellectual Property Office accelerated services is available here. [PDF]

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RealtimeCarbon.org gives realtime CO2 intensity of electricity generation in the UK

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RealtimeCarbon

If you actively select for cheaper electricity, you are de facto selecting for greener electricity because cheaper electricity has a higher % of renewable energy in the mix.

I wrote previously that it would be great if utility companies were mandated to publish realtime generation mix (% from coal, % for nuclear, % from wind, etc.).

Then if you had a truly open market for electricity, it should be possible to dynamically switch suppliers on the fly, based on the price and the realtime generation mix. If people were actively selecting for greener electricity (and given that cheaper electricity typically has a higher % of green, why wouldn’t they?), imagine the demand signal that would send to the suppliers! There would be an enormous rush to build more renewables and Kingsnorth would be shelved quicker than you can say “dirty coal”.

That idea is a step closer to reality today with the launch in the UK of RealtimeCarbon.org. This is a site which gives a realtime feed of just how “carbon intense” UK electricity is at any given moment. The data behind the real time feed comes directly from the computer systems that manage the UK’s electricity trading market. This data tells RealtimeCarbon.org how much electricity each type of power generator (e.g. coal power stations or wind farms) are currently producing during any particular 5-minute interval.

One of the beauties of this site is that they provide an xml feed of the realtime carbon intensity data (see the pdf on how to access the feed for more info). The xml feed will allow organisations to programatically monitor the CO2 emissions associated with electricity generation in the UK. Thus it will be possible to have devices programmed to automatically respond to realtime CO2 intensity signals coming from RealtimeCarbon.org i.e. shutting down when highly carbon intensive and starting up when carbon-light. This will be a big help in reducing the organisation’s carbon footprint.

RealtimeCarbon.org also has a forum where people can get involved suggesting methodology improvements, ways to improve the numbers (calculation or display) and how to use the data.

Now they just need to build this out for every other country on the planet!

[Disclosure – one of the companies involved in this project (AMEE) is a GreenMonk client]

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