Green Button/Apps for Energy winners announced

Back in April I reported on Green Button, a US initiative to provide households with access to data about their energy use with the click of an online ‘Green Button’. The idea is that providing easy-to-understand information about how they’re using energy will help consumers save power and reduce bills.

The US Department of Energy had also announced an ‘Apps for Energy’ contest to spur the invention of tools and services around the Green Button initiative, and winners were announced last week. They were:

Best overall app - grand prize:  Leafully

From Seattle-based “two developers with an idea”. Leafully helps utility customers visualise their Green Button data as a variety of units, such as the number of trees needed to offset energy usage. Leafully encourages users to set energy savings goals and to share their progress on Facebook.

Best overall app - second prize:  Melon

DC-based startup Melon describes itself as the first company to utilise Green Button data to simplify the process of evaluating the energy performance and obtain an Energy Star benchmark for commercial buildings.

Best overall app - third prize:   Velobill

Cleantech software and services company Zerofootprint’s Velobill app makes it easier for utility customers to view their energy usage and compare it to that of their peers. Users can then create a tailored energy saving action plan.

Best student app - grand prize:  Wotz

The Wotz app, from the University of California, Irvine, lets users explore and play with Green Button data, with games based on the ‘shape’ of the data. It also provides creative comparisons to illustrate usage, such as how many cheeseburgers worth of energy you used last Tuesday from 5-6 pm.

Best student app – second prize:  Budget it yourself

A collaborative project from Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. The app helps users track their energy usage and make energy-savings goals.

There are three prizes still to be awarded. The first and second place Popular Choice awards are down to a public vote, via the Apps for Energy web site, on all 57 entries (voting ends May 31st). There’s also a Peak Energy Usage Award that will go to the best app that addresses energy usage during peak demand. These remaining winners will be announced on June 6th.

 

Great stuff. I’m still of the opinion that consumers are not going to make significant savings from smart meters until they become an integral part of a smart grid. But I hope I’m wrong and these sorts of apps should certainly help to raise interest in what the data is telling consumers and what they can do about it.

Trending now: green computing is not an option

A guest post from Larry Vertal, a Principal with the Enterprise Business Solutions group of Fujitsu America, a member of Fujitsu’s Global Sustainability Team and Founding Director of The Green Grid.

 

The drive to green computing is a business necessity, not an option. Those that ignore it do so at their peril.

IT has become central to the competitiveness of most corporations. But with the cost of energy to run data centres and the rest of the IT infrastructure likely to exceed the cost of the equipment, IT is a huge and growing corporate cost centre.

The possibility of CAPEX IT investments becoming smaller than the OPEX energy costs is a sobering thought and an issue which, if not addressed, threatens the competitive position of a company. Stopping this OPEX spiral is a green computing issue because the resource footprint of IT is an efficiency issue, which is part of green computing.

Yet most companies lack hard data and metrics to understand where to focus, much less to enable, a strategy for fast ROI. This is compounded by disconnects between IT, Operations and the C-level management, which result in excessive OPEX.

You can’t start addressing a problem without knowing where you are. And you can’t manage what you don’t measure. From addressing a company’s data centres to the entire scope of corporate IT, from servers to PCs, action needs to begin with fact, data driven analysis and metrics to set the baseline for tangible improvements and measured returns.

A well-designed assessment methodology for all of an enterprise’s IT, or one more narrowly focused on client devices or data centres, is essential. It sets the basis for an on-going Sustainable IT Framework that targets cost, energy, resource and operational optimization.

A metrics-driven, formal assessment makes obvious both the actions that can offer rapid benefit and provides the justification to the C-Suite for undertaking them. Without such an approach it is easy to miss low hanging fruit.

For example, in data centres the magnitude of the benefits of changes in thermal airflow, power layouts, temperature and humidity set points are often not understood, or cannot be justified, without a formal assessment. Additionally, an analysis can also make clear the value of projects focused on server consolidation, server replacement, virtualization and cloud computing, which all tend to be another side of green IT.

It is not unusual for such assessments to identify 30% or greater savings in data centre energy costs, with ROI’s as short as six months. And in the case of office and PC equipment, where typically desktops, printers and other devices can account for 40% of the office power bill, 50% reductions can be achieved through proper power management.

While optimizing IT OPEX, these types of savings also release previously trapped capital for investments to further increase the competitiveness of a company. And in some cases the savings can reduce or defer previously planned CAPEX for a data centre expansion or new build.

This is a competitive advantage and one reason why green computing is a business necessity.

Of course focusing on energy also addresses greenhouse gases, one of the key components in a corporation’s environmental footprint, as the generation of the electricity has a significant carbon footprint. And while energy efficiency is the chief area of focus for many companies today, there are other variables such as water, waste and lifecycle management which are part of a comprehensive green computing stewardship.

Indeed for many multinational corporations in particular a full corporate wide Sustainable IT Framework which includes on-going measurement and metrics is already a business requirement. Deeper understanding, measurement and reporting are often required to comply with current or emerging carbon regulations or taxes. And for companies of all sizes, demands by customers for environmental reporting by suppliers are becoming the norm.

Be it driven by energy or cost optimization to support a corporations competitiveness or by the need to comply with regulations or customer requirements, those that wish to keep their companies and organizations from withering have no option but to implement green computing.

Accor announces carbon optimiser for meetings and seminars

France-based hotel group Accor has produced a carbon optimiser to help meeting and seminar organisers calculate and cut the carbon footprint of their events. Accor has meetings and seminars venues in around 2,000 hotels.

The interactive carbon optimiser takes into account the number of participants, the number of nights they plan to stay, how long the seminar will last, how big the meeting rooms are and the energy mix in the host country. It also factors in food services, i.e. the type of food and whether meals are buffets or table-served. The environmental footprint report the company published in December 2011 provided the necessary data to build the carbon optimiser.

Accor argues that there is no other tool that is so comprehensive. Calculators often only measure emissions from production processes and energy consumption to power hotel equipment. Accor’s solution includes indirect emissions associated with organising seminars, including waste treatment, paper and food, which is a substantial source of carbon emissions. Customers can choose menus based on their carbon footprint.

The carbon optimiser was developed to meet customer expectations. A guest survey run in six countries last year showed that 84% of business customers are sensitive to sustainable development – compared to 76% of all customers. Business customers are also more aware of large business firms’ responsibilities and 57% of them say that they take sustainable development into account when they choose a hotel. By the end of 2012 all Accor sales teams will have access to the tool to help their customers organise their seminars.

 

Bearing in mind that Accor is the world's leading hotel operator (or was before it sold 1,100 hotels in North America the other day) and market leader in Europe, this is a significant move. It will help those who are already concerned about their carbon footprint to focus on the issues and take appropriate decisions, but the fact that it exists at all will create awareness among less carbon-concerned event organisers.

What would be even better would be to have a similar calculator available online for anyone booking a hotel room. That doesn’t seem to be on the cards at the moment, but no doubt it will come.

Approximate computation means greener computer chips

Researchers have unveiled an ‘inexact’ computer chip that improves power and resource efficiency by allowing for occasional errors. Prototypes unveiled at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Italy a couple of weeks ago are apparently at least 15 times more efficient than current microchips.

The research was carried out by Rice University in Houston, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Switzerland’s Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the University of California, Berkeley. It was selected as best-paper at the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) conference.

The idea is that power use can be reduced by allowing processing components — like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes. By managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, it’s possible to both cut energy demands and boost performance.

One example given is ‘pruning’, trimming away some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits. The prototype chip showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct value by an average of 0.25%.  Study co-author Avinash Lingamneni said that “When we factored in size and speed gains, these chips were 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips. Chips that got wrong answers with a larger deviation of about 8% were up to 15 times more efficient.”

The inexact hardware is also a key component of ISAID’s (Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics) low-cost I-slate educational tablet designed for Indian classrooms with no electricity and too few teachers. Pruned chips are expected to cut power requirements in half and allow the I-slate to run on solar power from small panels. The first I-slates to contain pruned chips are expected by 2013.

 

When you first read that the new chip ‘challenges the industry’s 50-year pursuit of accuracy’ you start to wonder what’s going on here and the information coming out of these research institutes does help much.

But project co-investigator Christian Enz, who leads the CSEM arm of the collaboration, made things a little clearer when he pointed out that “Particular types of applications can tolerate quite a bit of error. For example, the human eye has a built-in mechanism for error correction. We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54% were almost indiscernible, and relative errors as high as 7.5% still produced discernible images.”

In fact it’s imaging that is the only real example given in the news release (I haven’t read the research paper itself). Other examples of how ‘inaccurate’ computer chips could be applied would have been useful. No doubt there are many things that computers do that don’t require 100% accuracy and these sorts of margins of error are acceptable. But I’m surprised that we haven’t yet seen headlines in some parts of the press pointing out the consequences when it comes to calculating your phone bill, or docking with the international space station.

Intel has announced a London-based smart cities institute

Intel, Imperial College London and University College London have announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding for the creation of an Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities research, based in London. The new Institute will be part of the Intel Labs Europe network of Research and Development, Product, and Innovation Labs.

Between them the three organisations bring together expertise in technology, user experience, business model innovation, the built environment and commerce. Research will draw on these areas, with details of individual projects expected to be confirmed by the end of June.

Intel’s CTO, Justin Rattner, said “The collective goal is to establish a new, open, collaborative research institute focused on understanding and enhancing the sustainability of cities and their inhabitants’ quality of life. Intel and the two universities are already hard at work defining a robust research agenda including plans to engage the communities in and around London in defining the future of sustainable city life.”

 

It’s good news for the UK and London. Smart cities are a significant element in moving to a more efficient, low-carbon economy, although it’s not always clear how much is about doing things ‘better’, as opposed to saving energy and emissions. But it’s certainly generating a lot of interest around the world - IBM, among others, is doing great business in the market and I guess Intel is looking for a bigger slice of the action. 

The signing took place at 10 Downing Street before a discussion on advancing UK competitiveness. At the moment any new business investment in the UK is seen as an achievement by the government, hence the publicity, although I bet the newly re-elected Mayor of London, who often talks of London becoming a greener city, would have liked to have been in on the act.

A five minute voice call on O2 is the carbon equivalent of making a cup of tea

O2 has had its carbon footprints independently verified by the Carbon Trust and says it’s the first mobile network operator to have done so. The bottom line is that the carbon footprint of making a one minute voice call on the O2 network is 3.6g CO₂e and transferring one megabyte of data is 11g CO₂e. So making a five minute call is the carbon-equivalent of boiling water to make a cup of tea.

The company used the Carbon Trust’s Footprint Expert tool to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in the lifecycle of its voice and data services.

The footprinting exercise came after research commissioned by O2 showed a lack of awareness of the environmental impact of mobile networks. Since emissions associated with its mobile services make up the majority of O2’s carbon footprint, the company is trying to address the issue.

The next stage for O2 is to provide customers with the tools to calculate the CO₂ associated with the services they use and provide comparisons with various activities.

 

The story harks back to the Sunday Times report in 2009 that performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea. The claim was subsequently denied by the originator of the research and Google, understandably, took exception to the accusation, coming back with the comment that "....in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query".

The O2 figures seem to be a lot more reliable, given the Carbon Trust endorsement. And it’s a good idea to give customers the means to check the CO₂ from the services they use, but it strikes me that putting the figures on individual bills would be a significant step forward.

A draft Electricity Market Reform Bill has been published in the UK for comment

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has published a draft of the anticipated Energy Bill. The Bill is described as establishing a legislative framework for delivering secure, affordable and low carbon energy.

The primary focus of the Bill is Electricity Market Reform (EMR). The Bill puts in place measures to attract the £110bn investment that the government believes is needed to replace current generating capacity and upgrade the grid by 2020, and to cope with a rising demand for electricity.

One of the main elements is the Feed-in-Tariffs with Contracts for Difference (CfDs) - long-term instruments which the government believes will provide stable and predictable incentives for companies to invest in low-carbon generation. The Bill also covers energy security, the move to renewables, and emissions performance standards for next generation power stations.

In addition to EMR, the Bill has measures to ensure that the Government and market regulator Ofgem are working to the same ends through a Strategy and Policy Statement (SPS). Other aspects include formalising nuclear regulation, in the form of the interim Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and enabling the sale of the Government Pipe-line and Storage System (GPSS).

This is only a draft Bill, though. The Energy and Climate Change Committee will examine it with a view to reporting back soon after the House rises for the summer recess. The idea is that the Committee’s conclusions and recommendations can feed into a real Bill in the autumn. The Committee is asking for written evidence on any aspect of the draft Bill (as soon as possible, since time is tight), and plans to hear oral evidence in June.

 

Why is time tight? Surely one of the most important pieces of legislation that the government will introduce and yet there’s just a couple of weeks to submit written comments.

I have no doubt there will be lots of input, though. Many organisations and companies have views as well as vested interests in the final legislation. I’ve received a couple in the last 24 hours:

“The finalisation of Electricity Market Reform has been long awaited and it is great to see this hugely significant piece of legislation published.  The EMR highlights the government’s commitment to cleaner energy and its dedication to deliver secure, clean, and affordable electricity, and ensure prices are fair . It’s great to see the government looking for ways to encourage renewable generation and reduced energy consumption. 

However all these technological changes will put an immense strain on our national grid. For the network to cope with the strain, careful investment is needed.  Priority areas that need to be considered include successful management of the extra stresses on the grid, and a focus on ‘measure, analyse, manage’ as the principle we need to follow. Some areas of the network such as the LV section are currently not monitored continuously which needs to be addressed if a truly smart grid is to be realised.  Intelligent systems will also need to be deployed to get the important information and alerts out of the data produced when the DECC smart meter rollout is complete.”

Mark England, CEO, Sentec

“The Draft Energy Bill is markedly lacking in further policy on efficiency, despite that being the fastest and cheapest way for the UK to bring down bills and emissions.

Of course, power generation is an essential aspect of driving the low carbon economy, but it needs to be driven in tandem with energy use mitigation.

Government has set out its ambitions for the smart meter roll out to address UK energy efficiency.  A clear strategy that tackles the issues that coincide with such a challenging roll out, such as security and interoperability, will be key to helping the nation make full use of demand management technologies. The provision, management and interpretation of accurate consumption data that smart meters provide will be the difference in the UK’s search to decarbonise the energy supply chain.

As stated in the impact assessments, Smart metering brings the opportunity to save around 10% on energy bills and concentrating on efficiencies may help the UK reduce the expenditure that is required in power generation.”

Nigel Hughes, Director, Itron

Green data centre technology reduces GHGs by 13% – Greenpeace argues for renewable power

A new report from cleantech market research firm Pike Research says that the widespread adoption of data centre technologies and best practices could significantly limit the growth of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from data centres through to 2016. Emissions are expected to total 1326 million tons if no action is taken, but green data centre best practices could reduce that total to 1156 million tons, a saving of 13%.

Corporate computing requirements continue to grow, consumer IT is expanding and the adoption of IT in emerging countries is escalating. At the same time, the adoption of cloud computing is pushing more of the IT into data centres. Pike estimates that the data centre industry now consumes around 1.5%% of the world’s energy.

The research firm believes that addressing these issues represents an annual market opportunity that will be worth more than $45bn worldwide by 2016. Double-digit revenue growth is projected for Europe and North America (CAGRs of almost 27% for both markets), with even higher estimates for the Asia Pacific region.

 

At first glance the savings of 13% seem relatively small, given the opportunities there are to reduce data centre power use, such as server consolidation and virtualisation, running machines hotter to reduce cooling, using external air to cool and so on. But the sobering thought is that, with data centre capacity growing so rapidly, the impact of these green data centre actions only limits the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by less than 15%. It’s a reminder of how far there is yet to go in reducing ICT emissions.

The findings give some support to Greenpeace’s green cloud campaign to get more renewable energy used in data centres. Last week Greenpeace activists barricaded themselves in an ‘iPod’ at Apple’s headquarters to protest against the company’s coal-powered iCloud.

The protest seems to have had an impact. On Friday Apple’s website said that by the end of 2012 all the needs of its Maiden, North Carolina, data centre would be met by renewable energy – 60% from its own generation.

Preparing your organisation for IT power management

A guest post from Barclay Bicksler, Senior Manager of Customer Success at Verdiem .

When organisations start thinking about introducing power management into their IT environment, they tend to focus on how they will put systems into a lower power state (sleep). But how and when to wake systems is just as important.
That’s why it’s worth taking time to consider the entire power management life cycle - when to put the systems to sleep, how and when to wake them up, what systems to measure and manage and what level of involvement users have in the power management process.

In a properly deployed power management solution, the impact to end users should be minimal, but it’s important for organisations to think about work and usage patterns, how their users interact with their computers and how needs may differ across the business.
It’s also important to set proper goals and expectations. What will project success look like? What systems need to be measured and managed? Are there any systems or processes that should be excluded from the power management process?

Key power management implementation considerations
Before starting a power management project, organisations need to consider what low power state will work best for them and which waking approach they will use. At Verdiem, we strongly recommend implementing Sleep as the primary low power state for computers.

Assuming that Sleep is the preferred low power state, there are two main ways to wake a system: by a scheduled event at the operating system level, or by Wake on LAN. Wake on LAN technology is a network-friendly approach that does not require any configuration by the IT department. It is also implemented without requiring any ports to be enabled – avoiding potential security risks.

Two common wake-related questions that you may want to consider are ‘How do you want to handle systems when users arrive in the morning?’ and ‘Do you need your systems to wake at times for IT purposes?’
In answer to the morning question, the most energy-efficient way to implement a low power state is to keep the computer in that state until the user wakes it up with a keyboard or mouse click. The other option is to wake the systems prior to users arriving. The key decision factor here is what level of user involvement you want in the power management process.

With regard to waking systems for routine maintenance, most IT updates and processes – such as software updates, virus scans or disk defragmentation - are scheduled to run in the middle of the night. With power management, the systems that used to be kept on 24x7 now only need to be awakened for these maintenance windows. Some power management solutions support the inclusion of maintenance windows in its policies. So, in your preparations for power management, make sure IT has the opportunity to map out the times they need the systems to be awake.

With proper preparation and planning, your power management solution can be fast, user friendly and benefit all levels of your organisation, from the energy and cost savings, to increased IT efficiency.

Drivegain saves £560 a year in fuel costs

DriveGain is an iPhone application that helps you save fuel as you drive (which I first mentioned a year ago). For one driver it has resulted in using 24% less fuel, which adds up to a saving of £560 a year (in UK prices).

DriveGain uses the iPhone’s GPS to calculate how efficiently a vehicle is being driven. It combines information about the rates of acceleration, driving smoothness and overall speed with the car specifications, giving the driver feedback on how they can reduce fuel consumption.

There’s also a free version that offers a miles-per-gallon (and presumably Kilometres per litre) reading and a JourneyScore out of 100 for each trip. You can buy other displays, such as the  Cost Meter and Fuel Savings Meter as add-ons.

The real-world fuel savings data from using Drivegain comes from a Dutch driver who has increased his mileage from one tank of fuel from 370 miles to 490 miles. Ed de Tollenaer said “To get these savings I just followed the audio feedback and the visual displays the app gave me. Changing your driving style requires breaking some old driving habits so having the app constantly giving me encouraging feedback helps a lot”.

 

Well it’s a great product from this London-based start-up company, formed in 2008, although it does currently rely on Apple products – primarily an iPhone. Other smart phones have now caught up.

But as I said when I first reported on the product, Drivegain is no doubt very good at helping you develop more fuel-efficient driving habits, but once you have the habit there’s no real need for the app.

If you don’t have an iPhone and want to save money and the planet, I would suggest you simply find out more about eco driving, from, for instance, ecodrive.org. I did.

GridKey delivers a stepping stone to UK smart grids

GridKey, the collaboration between Selex Galileo and Sentec, has announced the first delivery of its low voltage network monitoring system to Electricity North West (ENW) in the UK. ENW will be installing GridKey systems in one hundred substations as part of a Low Carbon Network Fund project. The substation monitoring system is seen as the first step to a smart grid.

Last September Sentec, the smart grid and smart metering specialist, announced its collaborating with Selex Galileo, which designs and manufactures sensors. GridKey is the result of that collaboration, with the low voltage (LV) monitoring solution based on Sentec’s Iris sensor technology.

GridKey provides continuous remote monitoring of substations. It can be retro-fitted without interrupting supply to customers and will fit most installations. It gives Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) more detailed information on the state of their LV grid so they can manage the network better.

ENW is installing GridKey as part of a Low Carbon Network Fund project. The £500 Fund was established by gas and electricity regulator Ofgem for DNOs to try out new technology and commercial arrangements to help them understand what they need to do to adapt to a low carbon economy.

 

We’re going to see a lot more of these collaborations, establishing new organisations to address smart grid requirements. They need extensive information and control systems to be in place to be effective, so its a huge opportunity for a whole range of suppliers of hardware and software. If they’re really successful such organisations will be floated away from their owners, which may well be what they have in mind in the first place.

It’s good to see that GridKey has a British pedigree. Sentec is Cambridge-based and Selex Galileo is now a UK/Italian firm. GridKey is based in Essex.

HP opens a technology renewal centre in Scotland

HP has announced the opening of a technology renewal centre in Erskine, Scotland. The centre will allow enterprise customers to acquire certified legacy HP products and participate in equipment re-use programmes, regardless of equipment type or manufacturer. The facility will renew old IT equipment that could otherwise be destined for a landfill.

The new facility provides customers with a range of IT asset management and reuse services focused on helping large business enterprises handle the life cycle of IT equipment. Renewal services are a key component of the centre’s operations, with IT equipment put through a process that includes reconditioning, testing and certifying back to original manufacturing standards before they are remarketed.

The facility is owned and operated by HP Financial Services, the company’s leasing and asset management subsidiary, which is apparently the second largest captive IT leasing company in the world, managing and remarketing more than 2.3 million used computers each year. As customers deploy new technology solutions, HP Financial Services will remove and dismantle old or end-of-life equipment that no longer meets strategic needs.

 

HP, and other IT manufacturers, have always had enterprise asset management programmes that include taking back equipment at end-of-life. (They now also have obligations under European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment – WEEE – legislation). What is evolving, as demonstrated by this facility, is the increased focus on renewing old equipment to get it back into the market. Re-use is by far the most environmentally sound action at product end-of-life.

This is going to increasingly be a focus area for IT companies to demonstrate their green credentials. How much equipment is taken back, from what sorts of customers and what proportion is refurbished for reuse?

To its credit, HP already provides some figures in its Global Citizens report:

• Hardware reuse programmes in 53 countries

• Hardware recycling programme in 49 countries

• 30,000 tonnes (3.8 million units) of hardware recovered for reuse and remarketing

The transparency is good, but there’s clearly a long way to go yet in remarketing and reuse programmes.

Energy Star loses support

According to a report in Business Week last week, some electronics manufacturers are threatening to leave the Energy Star scheme because recent changes have made it too costly.

The Energy Star energy efficiency labelling scheme is a joint program of the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy. Energy Star says that the labelling system helped save enough energy in 2010 in the US alone to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 33 million cars — while also cutting nearly $18bn from utility bills.

The main complaint that’s emerged is that products now have to be tested in independent laboratories. Previously they were self-certified by the manufacturers, but in 2010 an investigation from the US Government Accountability Office (GOA) concluded that the self-certification program was vulnerable to fraud and abuse. The GOA managed to obtain Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock. As a result the EPA no longer relies on an automated approval process.

But now the Consumer Electronics Association, which represents companies such as Apple and Sony, says that its members are re-evaluating whether it's worth participating. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers and the Information Technology Industry Council (members include Dell and Texas Instruments) have also apparently complained.

 

I can imagine that some electrical and electronic equipment manufacturers, with smaller markets and cheaper products, may find the independent testing process arduous and expensive, but I don’t see what the IT companies can complain about. Most have been bending over backwards to be seen as greener than green, do they really want to go back to a system where the labels have been shown to have much less value? I can see the headlines now: ‘Dell opts out of energy efficient products’ – it doesn’t seem very likely.

Also, bear in mind that the Energy Star labelling has been extended to Europe through an agreement between the European Commission and the EPA. The EU Energy Star web site, which is managed by the European Commission, holds a database of products based on the US EPA list, with the addition of EU-registered models. The EU might well think twice about this association if it reverts to self-certification.

Energy Star labelling is used as a selling point for IT equipment, although maybe not as prominently as it should be, for which some blame should go to Energy Star and the manufacturers. But it is helping to improve energy efficiency over time as certification requirements become progressively more strict. All that will be lost if prominent IT suppliers withdraw from the scheme and it would be a black mark against the industry.

I would have hoped, even expected, that respected IT manufacturers such as Dell and HP would be actively campaigning for the labelling to stay as is. Let’s hope so.

Microsoft plans to be ‘carbon neutral’ next financial year

Microsoft has announced that from fiscal year 2013 (which starts on July 1 this year) the company will be carbon neutral across all its direct operations, including data centres, labs, travel and offices.

The company plans to make carbon awareness an element of every part of its business through an accountability model that makes all business units responsible for the carbon they generates.

To achieve it Microsoft is putting an internal price on carbon based on market pricing for renewable energy and carbon offsets. For emissions not eliminated through efficiency measures, Microsoft will purchase renewable energy and carbon offsets and charge the cost back to the business divisions.

The carbon price and charge-back model is designed to provide an economic incentive for business groups to reduce carbon emissions through efficiency measures and increased use of renewable energy. The operations impacted by the carbon price include data centres, software development labs, office buildings, and business travel.

There’s more detail in a white paper published by the company - Becoming Carbon Neutral: How Microsoft is Becoming Lean, Green, and Accountable.

 

Microsoft has been rethinking its plan to reduce carbon emissions after announcing disappointing progress in its CSR report published last October. The plan was that by mid 2012 the company would have reduced carbon emissions per unit of revenue by 30% compared with 2007. But the CSR report showed that emissions were up 16% in calendar 2010 and revenue up just 12% for the financial year to June 2011, which meant that emissions per unit of revenue took a step backwards.

There are two advantages to this new plan to achieve carbon neutrality. Firstly, its an absolute figure, not related to revenue, and its an absolute figure we ultimately have to achieve. Secondly, it puts responsibility directly in the hands of business divisions, so it is creating an awareness across the business at ground level.

The downside is that the company is talking about offsets, which are not the favourite way to do it for many people (including me). Offsets do not have a great reputation for achieving their objectives, i.e. reducing carbon emissions. And in this case it seems like a business cost that Microsoft’s divisions could potentially plan for and achieve through financial savings elsewhere.

It’s a commendable scheme, but to ensure it achieves its objectives of reducing emissions it would be better as an internal cap and trade scheme, i.e. the available offsets should be limited and reduced over time to achieve the real efficiency savings objectives, with departments having to bid against each other in auction to acquire the rights to offset. If a department doesn’t achieve carbon neutrality under that scheme then the head of the business unit goes.

Global Solar Council fights international trade restrictions

A number of leading international companies in the solar photovoltaic industry announced last week the formation of the Global Solar Council, a CEO-level industry body with the aim of expanding the growth of sustainable and cost-competitive solar energy.

The Council will engage with policy makers on the substantial successes already achieved by solar and the importance of a public policy environment that will allow the development of solar energy, bringing with it job creation and economic growth.

Founding members of the Global Solar Council come from all areas of the industry and include Applied Materials, Dow Corning, DuPont, First Solar, Lanco Solar, Phoenix Solar and Suntech. (Siemens was apparently reported by some sources as being a member but is actually still making up its mind).

Roland-Jan Meijer, Executive Director of the Council said, “The Global Solar Council is an important and timely industry initiative.  It demonstrates a strong commitment by key players in the sector to work together to continue to make solar energy a global success.” The Council sees its role as complementary to trade associations and other stakeholders.  Members will work in concert with organisations such as EPIA, APVIA, and SEIA to support their efforts on a global level.

 

It seems to be the global aspect that’s driving this initiative. The Council has also released a white paper that talks of the industry’s dependence on international trade for its continued success. But, according to the white paper, there is a growing threat from restrictive trade measures in some countries that hinder access to markets. The view is that for solar to reach its potential as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, and so provide the maximum economic and environmental benefit, global markets need to remain open.

Of course the significant players in the market do not want trade barriers because they will restrict their potential sales. On the other hand, the larger the accessible market the more cost-effective it will be for the suppliers, and hence, hopefully, cheaper for customers, which in turn means wider adoption and lower carbon emissions.

The question is, does having fewer, global players make the industry more sustainable - would local suppliers in local markets be better in the long term? This looks like a real trade-off between a low-carbon economy and a sustainable future. But since climate change is the more immediate threat, I guess the Global Solar Council has a point.

EPEAT expands registration capacity with global alliances

It’s been a while since the green electronics rating organisation EPEAT first announced plans to expand by working with international standards and testing operations. But EPEAT has now announced that four organisations with global reputations for technical excellence will participate as trust providers in the EPEAT system.

The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), from the Green Electronics Council in the US, is the green electronics rating system based on the IEEE 1680 family of Environmental Assessment Standards. The programme evaluates computer desktops, laptops and monitors on 51 environmental criteria and awards EPEAT Bronze, Silver or Gold certification. EPEAT now covers 41 countries, 45 participating manufacturers and more than 3,200 environmentally preferable electronic products.

The four new Product Registration Entities (PREs) are:

Dekra SE – The Swedish company’s focus is safety, quality and environmental protection services, including consulting, product testing and certification. Dekra operates in more than 50 countries, with over 27,000 employees.

Intertek - Provides quality and safety solutions for a range of industries around the world, from auditing and inspection to testing, quality assurance and certification. The company has a network of more than 1,000 laboratories and offices and over 33,000 people in more than 100 countries.

UL Environment – Offers a range of environmental services including product certifications, environmental product declarations, indoor air quality certification, product emissions testing, organisational sustainability certification, and consulting. Part of the US company UL, a global ‘safety science’ company.

VDE - Verband der Elektrotechnik, Elektronik, Informationstechnik e.V. (VDE) is the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies based in Germany. It operates the VDE Testing and Certification Institute, internationally active for over 90 years and accredited by multiple organizations worldwide.

These organisations will work directly with manufacturers to register products and verify their environmental attributes.

These organisations worked with EPEAT to flesh out the certification model that enables products to be registered against environmental performance criteria and monitored after registration. It’s the need to expand that certification and monitoring that has led to this collaboration. “Ramping up capacity through alliances with these superbly qualified organisations enables EPEAT to scale rapidly to meet demand for greener products around the globe, and supports the ongoing credibility of the EPEAT system,” said Robert Frisbee, EPEAT’s CEO.

 

Given the time it’s taken, and the fact that not all the organisations with whom EPEAT announced a Memorandum of Understanding almost 18 months ago are now included, I guess it hasn’t been an easy process getting these organisations on board. But then it was never going to be easy to ensure that products were assessed and monitored to EPEAT’s standards.

Hopefully, this expanded EPEAT will give an impetus to the international growth of the standard. I’ve not seen anything else as comprehensive, but perhaps the organisation could also do more promotion. Whilst EPEAT labels do often appear at the product point of sale, they’re not given much prominence or very clearly explained, as far as I can see. Some buyer education might be in order.

Greenstone releases portal to share responsible sourcing information

Greenstone Carbon Management has launched SupplierPortal, an online portal for suppliers and their buyers to share and monitor environment, labour, health and safety, and anti-bribery and corruption information. Suppliers can record their responsible sourcing information once and then publish it to multiple buyers. SupplierPortal will also calculate suppliers’ carbon, waste and water footprints based on business consumption data uploaded to the portal. 

For buyers, SupplierPortal is an information management platform providing individual supplier reports, group comparisons and customisable benchmarks. It enables buying organisations to monitor and compare supplier performance.

For suppliers, the web-based tool can address multiple buyer information requests through a single portal response. The data can be published to existing, new and prospective customers as required. The solution also includes a data entry wizard for suppliers to record, calculate and report their annual carbon, waste and water footprints.

 

For suppliers the cost is £175 (+VAT if applicable) to register online with SupplierPortal, enter company’s details and upload data. For that suppliers also get tools to help calculate carbon and other footprints, downloadable reports as well as a range of user guides and support materials. There’s no charge to buyers.

 

Once you include the supply chain into various aspects of sustainability monitoring – from low-carbon to health and safety – then managing the data can become a real  problem for buyers and suppliers.

SupplierPortal is a good idea, but much will depend on take-up. Buyers will need to see lots of suppliers signed up in order for it to be worthwhile using the service, and suppliers won’t pay unless there are real benefits from buyers using the information. It’s going to take some encouragement from Greenstone to set the ball rolling. No doubt there are (or will be) other similar services vying for the attention of buyers and suppliers.

$5m US investment in ‘plug and play’ solar

As part of the ‘Sunshot’ initiative to reduce the cost of solar energy systems, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has made up to $5m available this year to develop ‘plug-and-play’ photovoltaic (PV) systems that can be purchased, installed and operational in one day.

The aim of Sunshot is to bring down the cost of generating solar energy in the US by about 75% so that it is cost-competitive with other forms of energy (without subsidies) before the end of the decade. That would bring the cost down to roughly $1 a watt - six cents per kilowatt-hour – so that solar energy systems could be broadly deployed.

The plug-and-play funding is part of the DoE’s strategy to reduce the ‘soft’ costs of solar power deployment, such as installation and interconnection, which currently make up more than half of the total cost of residential systems. The funding is aimed at driving innovations to change the design and installation of residential PV systems.

The plug-and-play idea follows the lead from the computer and automotive industries, where products and systems can be quickly and easily connected. For solar generation the idea is to make the whole process of buying, installing, and connecting solar energy systems faster, easier, and less expensive. Plug-and-play PV systems could be installed without special training or tools, and simply plugged into a PV-ready circuit, through which an automatic detection system would initiate communication between the solar energy system and the utility.

As part of a planned five-year funding program, the Energy Department will invest an initial $5m this year for two projects that will develop prototypes. A further $20m will be available over the next four years to support these efforts. 

 

In Europe, most of the government encouragement for the adoption of renewable energy seems to be around deciding what tariff levels should be set for energy fed back into the grid system. But changing levels of tariffs have created issues in the UK and Germany (although the generous tariffs did have a positive impact on the renewable industry in Germany).

But you do wonder whether initiatives like this one in the US would be a better use of some of the government investment in Europe. Until the real cost of solar energy matches other sources of power, renewables are never really going to take off. Subsidies are, at best, a short term solution. Helping make solar cheaper – and that means installation too – is a better way forward in the long term.

Dell ‘fresh air’ servers mean less cooling in data centres

The trend towards using external air to cool data centres comes with the problem of what happens if it gets too hot outside. You don’t want the once-every-twenty-years heat wave to bring your data centre to its knees. It’s something that server manufacturers have been working on.

Dell carried out a series of tests to see whether its PowerEdge servers could withstand higher temperatures without impacting performance. The net result is that ‘fresh air’ specifications were built into every platform of the latest generation of the servers, launched in February. Customers can choose to raise the temperature in a data centre to take advantage of the operational savings or can even build their next data centre completely without chillers.

Dell analysed climate data from the US, Europe and Asia and found that, to enable the widespread deployment of minimal cooling requirements in data centres, IT equipment should be able to withstand short term temperature peaks of up to 45C/113F. So Dell’s new servers can tolerate 900 hours of 104°F (40°C) operation per year and up to 90 hours at 113°F (45°C). Most commercially available IT equipment is rated at a maximum temperature of only 35C.

It does raise complications - network equipment such as switches often share a data centre rack with servers and storage, but no equipment can run at higher temperatures unless everything can. So Dell also offers fresh air capable storage, networking and power products to make sure nothing is holding back the hotter-running facility.

 

Dell has talked about this range of hotter running servers for a while and no doubt other manufacturers will follow. It should open the way for at least wider adoption of free-air cooled data centres.

In fact it’s been generally accepted for some time that most IT equipment can run hotter than the manufacturers’ specifications without problems, but data centre managers are understandably reluctant to take responsibility should anything go wrong. The supplier needs to guarantee that the equipment will withstand the temperature and provide standard support if there are any problems.

Even for these new Dell servers there is a limit on the time that the equipment can run hot. It means data centre managers will need to closely monitor temperature levels to ensure these manufacturer maximums are not exceeded and vendor support lost. I suspect that some (if not many) will stick with lower temperatures as a result.

Wind power = global warming?

On the subject of wind farms (see previous post), SmartGridNews.com reported this week on an article in Nature Climate Change entitled ‘Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature’. The academics that wrote the paper carried out a study of an area in west central Texas where four of the world's biggest wind farms are located. They found that the local temperature increased as the turbines drew warmer air higher up in the atmosphere closer to the ground.

According to SmartGridnews.com, one of the authors said that the warming effect was local and small compared to the background year-on-year land surface temperature changes. Most likely the wind turbines do not create any net warming but just redistribute the air’s heat near the surface.

But that didn’t stop Fox News from publishing a story under the headline "New research shows wind farms cause global warming." There was no coverage of the author’s comments and the Fox item went on to say that the research is "casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power".

Just so you know.

Energy management app competition announced

US Home energy management company Tendril and Netherlands-based energy supplier Essent, part of the RWE Group, are collaborating on what is described as the first-of-its-kind smart energy application crowdsourcing project.

The idea is to use the Tendril Connect platform to link some of Essent’s smart meter-enabled residential customers with web and mobile application developers from around the world. The app developers will use Tendril’s platform to access usage data from energy meters and create innovative consumer applications for the program participants.

After new apps have been tested, Essent will make them available to participating households, who will be able to provide feedback to developers and even rate the applications. The added incentive for developers is that novel applications could grab the attention of Essent’s parent company RWE, one of the top five European energy companies.

To help jumpstart the effort, Essent planned to give €1,000 to the developer who builds the best app using Tendril’s APIs at The Kings of Code Hack Battle in Amsterdam last week. Essent will also provide prizes for the app that receives the best rating from consumers in the crowdsourcing program.

App developers who want to take part in the app project should visit www.essent.nl/co-creation.

 

Certainly a step in the right direction. I very much agree with the comment from Arjan van der Eijk, director, smart energy, Essent, who said that “For consumers, the real value of smart meters comes not from the meter itself, but from innovative, compelling applications that use analytics and other information to turn meter data into a relevant message and action for the consumer”.

Absolutely. There is a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of smart meters as if they were an end in themselves. But smart meters are really only a gateway to providing energy consumers with a lot of interesting capabilities to manage energy use in the home. Much of this won’t happen until full-blown smart grids are in place, still a long way off in the UK, despite a firm smart meter implementation plan.

On the one hand, the meters will ultimately enable consumers to match power use with differential tariffs, so you can do the washing when energy is cheaper, for example. On the other hand, the meters can be at the centre of a home energy management system that could potentially run a range of novel applications to control household equipment. There’s a lot such apps could do, hopefully this competition will demonstrate a few.

UK and US collaborate on deep-water floating wind turbines

According to the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the UK and US are going to collaborate on the development of floating wind turbines designed to generate power in deep waters where the wind is much stronger. These conditions are currently beyond the capabilities of conventional turbines.

The announcement was made alongside the meeting of Energy Ministers from around the world in London last week to talk about the move to clean energy technologies. The US/UK collaboration was expected to be one of a number of bilateral agreements around renewable technology made by the UK government.

Offshore wind represents a significant source of renewable energy for the UK, but exploiting the opportunity, particularly in deeper waters off the west of the country, requires significant technology developments. The waters can be too deep for fixed structures but benefit from consistently higher wind speeds.

The Energy Technologies Institute in the UK is in the process of commissioning a £25m offshore wind floating system demonstrator. The objective is to produce, by 2016, an offshore wind turbine that can produce 5-7MW. In the US, the Department of Energy has recently announced $180m of funding for up to four Advanced Technology Demonstration Projects in US waters – which could also include a floating wind demonstration.

 

The opportunity to benefit from the wind energy potential in deep waters is one that the UK can’t afford to ignore, so efforts to move in that direction were inevitable. Developing the technology with the US, or anyone else with the technological capability that could help spread the financial, load makes sense. Let’s hope it’s as much action as talk.

Internal green IT could fund itself

CDW Government (CDW-G), a subsidiary of US technology services company CDW that focuses on the government, education and healthcare sector, released a report a couple of months ago showing that the efforts by US government agencies to cut IT costs are effectively a self-funding route to green IT.

The online survey was carried out by research firm O'Keeffe & Company and covered 303 state and local IT managers in late 2011. The final report, called The Efficient Agency, focused on the need for agencies to cut costs and how they were achieving the goal.

Four particular areas of IT were identified as the main route to making savings; server virtualisation, document management, storage virtualisation and cloud computing. This was the order in which the various technologies were likely to be adopted and ranged from over 90% using server virtualisation to just over half adopting cloud computing. 

What’s interesting is that, according to the survey responses, the return on investment over the lifetime of these technologies was:

• server virtualisation – 140%
• document management – 139%
• storage virtualisation – 134%
• cloud computing – 269%

The report concluded that implementing these solutions could be almost self funding – the savings from server virtualisation could fund nearly all the investment for document management, storage virtualisation and cloud computing.

 

OK, so this is primarily about cost cutting, rather than green ICT, but the end result is the same. All these technologies achieve savings primarily through reducing power use, which means reducing emissions.

There is an interesting omission here, though. PC power management software can also save significant amounts of money/emissions, but with machines spread around the company and the IT department not necessarily responsible for power bills, it seems it’s not on the radar of these Government sector IT Managers.

There’s a lot of mileage in this self-funding message. Assuming the IT department gets all the savings benefits, its a powerful incentive for a program of efficiency improvement. It really needs to be part of a corporate sustainability program, though, so that some routes to potential savings are not overlooked.

Thanks again to greenit.fr.