Tag: EcoJam

Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 02/12/2010

Green numbers
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

  • Iberdrola Renovables SA, the world’s largest operator of wind parks, agreed to buy Spain’s largest wind farm from Gamesa Corporacion Tecnologica SA.

    Renovables, based in Valencia, paid Gamesa 320 million euros ($441 million) for 244 megawatts of power capacity in Andevalo, Spain

    tags: iberdrola, iberdrola renovables, gamesa, Wind farm, greennumbers

  • IBM recently ran a ‘Jam’ – an online discussion – on environmental sustainability and why it is important for CIOs, CEOs and CFOs to address it. The Jam involved thousands of practitioners and subject matter experts from some 200 organisations. It focused primarily on business issues and practical actions.

    Take a look at the check list below and it becomes rapidly apparent, C-level management need to tackle the issue before it is foisted upon them.

    IBM’s Institute for Business Value will fully analyse the 2080 Jam contributions, but this is the essential CIO checklist derived from comments made during the Eco-Jam.

    tags: ibm, ecojam, eco jam, cio, greennumbers

  • Data centers are, thankfully, getting a lot of attention when it comes to making them more efficient. Considering that roughly 60% of the electricity used at a data center goes to keeping the servers cool, focusing on smart cooling tactics is essential. HP has taken this to heart and has opened it’s first wind-cooled data center, and it’s the company’s most efficient data center to date.

    In this piece, HP claims that their data center is the world’s first wind-cooled data center – I’m not sure just how valid this is as I have heard BT only do wind-cooled data centers!

    tags: hp, bt, data center, datacenter, wind cooled, air cooled, greennumbers

  • “Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.

    The founder of the Virgin group, whose rail, airline and travel companies are sensitive to energy prices, will say that the ­coming crisis could be even more serious than the credit crunch.

    “The next five years will see us face another crunch – the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well,” Branson will say.”

    tags: richard branson, oil crunch, peak oil, virgin, greennumbers

  • “Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished making it much harder to grow crops around the world, according to a study by the University of Sydney.

    The study, reported in The Daily Telegraph, claims bad soil mismanagement, climate change and rising populations are leading to a decline in suitable farming soil.

    An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”, the report found.

    Soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes, in Europe 17 times faster and in America 10 times faster.

    The study said all suitable farming soil could vanish within 60 years if quick action was not taken, leading to a global food crisis.”

    tags: greennumbers, soil, topsoil, soil fertility

  • In response to an environmental lawsuit filed against the oil giant, Chevron has fortified its defenses with at least twelve different public relations firms whose purpose is to debunk the claims made against the company by indigenous people living in the Amazon forests of Ecuador. According to them, Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon between 1964 and 1990, causing damages assessed at more than $27 billion.

    tags: chevron, ecuador, greennumbers, amazon rainforest, amazon, toxic waste, pollution

  • Indian mobile phone and commodity export firm Airvoice Group has formed a joint venture with public sector body Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam to build 13GW of solar and wind capacity in a sparsely populated part of Karnataka district in south west India.

    The joint venture is budgeting to invest $50 billion over a period of 10 years, claiming it to be the largest single renewable energy project in the world.

    tags: greennumbers, india, airvoice, solar, wind, renewables, karnataka, renewable energy

  • Using coal for electricity produces CO2, and climate policy aims to prevent greenhouse gases from hurting our habitat. But it also produces SOx and NOx and particulate matter that have immediate health dangers.

    A University of Wisconsin study was able to put an economic value on just the immediate health benefits of enacting climate policy. Implications of incorporating air-quality co-benefits into climate change policymaking found coal is really costing us about $40 per each ton of CO2.

    tags: greennumbers, coal, sox, nox, particulate matter, greenhouse gases, health

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

by-sa

IBM Global Eco-Efficiency Jam Day 2

IBM Eco Jam Screenshot

Today is the final day of IBM’s Global Eco-efficiency Jam (it finishes at 6pm CET today) and it has been awesome.

There have been hundreds of discussions on all manner of Eco-related topics – everything from LEED certification, to Green software engineering, to Energy Efficiency certificates to Smart cities and collaboration.

People have been asking questions like:

If environmental reporting and efficiency actions becomes the norm, what kinds of incentives and rebates are available to help improve the time to value and return on investments?

Currently this question has had 8 replies.

The question with the most replies (right now) is –

Would you use a mobility car service – like the bicycle rental scheme in Paris but with a small, probably electric vehicle – rather than public transportation or a taxi?

and so far it has had 78 responses!

Often answers to questions directly contradict one another – such as the following answers to the mobility question above:

Yes, I would. But more for fun or visiting a city. Visiting clients on e-bike wearing business dress is difficult

and

When Montreal introduced its version of Vélib, called Bixi, most people anticipated tourists would be the prime users. But looking around the city on a nice summer day, most the bikes are used by men and women in business suits, going from one building to the next. For short rides of 2-4 km, you needn’t even break a sweat.

These kind of contradictory answers are inevitable when the participants come from over 100 countries reflecting their country’s culture and infrastructure.

Other discussions were more straightforward

Looking beyond basic power policies on the operating system, do you have any form of PC power management operating on your PC at home or at work?

There is plenty of discussion on water as well with people discussing the merits of water metering, water harvesting and town/city water policies.

While I am contributing a bit to the discussions (I have added 39 posts and had 37 replies so far), I am learning a huge amount and coming into contact with participants I might never otherwise have met.

IBM should make this a regular event, no question.

[Disclosure] IBM asked me not to use the names of Jam participants in any blog posts I make here because IBM hadn’t sought their permission so I removed the names from the image above and didn’t credit people quoted above. If I have used your content and you are happy to have me credit you, let me know in the comments or by email (tom@redmonk.com) and I’m more than happy to do so.

by-sa

Can Apple make Home Energy Management sexy?

Apple iPad

Will Apple move into home energy management, and if they do, can they make it sexy and front-of-mind for everyone?

I made this point in a reply to a post earlier on the IBM Global Eco Jam and I thought it could well do with being fleshed out to a full post here to see what others think.

In case you were hiding under a rock yesterday, to tremendous fanfare and hype, Apple launched their latest device, the iPad.

The extremely desirable tablet-like iPad is aimed squarely at the home user market, what with its base price of $499, its beautiful form-factor and its concentration on music, video, games, etc.

While you probably did hear about the iPad, you may not be aware that Apple has lodged a patent application for a Home Energy Management system, joining Google’s PowerMeter and Microsoft’s Hohm.

Apple’s application talks of using powerline communications to control appliances’ energy consumption around the house.

Unlike Google and Microsoft though, Apple have an amazing track record of making sexy devices/applications. If there is anyone who can make home energy management sexy, it would be Apple software running on the iPad.

Let’s hope they make it so – what are the chances?

by-sa

IBM Eco Jam kicks off later today with an impressive line-up

Jam
Photo credit justmakeit via Flickr

The IBM Global Eco Efficiency Jam kicks off this afternoon (January 27th) at 9am EST (14:00 GMT, 15:00 here in CEST) and continues right on through until Friday afternoon.

According to the IBM site the Jam is

a web-based event which will provide an unrivalled opportunity for thousands of public and private sector sustainability leaders, from medium to large organizations around the world, to pool their knowledge and experiences through a series of focused discussions and exchanges of best practices with each other, with practitioners and influencers and with acknowledged subject matter experts.

The objective of this jam is to enable senior representatives from organizations of all sizes to cooperatively determine the best actions that can be taken to meet our goals for a sustainable future for our organizations, our customers, our suppliers, our stakeholders and society at large

There are almost 1000 companies from 45 countries around the world (ranging from Argentia to Brazil to Finland to Hungary to India to Malaysia to Peru to Slovakia to UK to USA to Vietnam) signed up to participate. Typically in IBM Jams several reps from each company participate. The types of roles who have signed up for this Jam include: CIO, Chief Sustainability Officer, COO, Facilities Manager, CFO, Manufacturing Operations, Environmental Affairs, Fleet Manager, Real estate and site operations, IT manager, data center manager, and city planner.

More than 250 subject matter experts from IBM, Green Sigma Coalition partners, industry analysts, energy & environment experts, and leading edge companies are taking part. Some of the non-IBM experts who have signed up to share their expertise are:

  • Dian M. Grueneich, Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission
  • Joel Makower, Chairman/Executive Editor, Greener World Media, Inc.; Senior Strategist, GreenOrder; and Co-founder and Principal, Clean Edge, Inc.
  • Dan Esty, author of Green to Gold
  • James Watson, Managing Editor, Industry and Management Research, Economist Intelligence Unit
  • Clay Nesler, Vice President, Global Energy and Sustainability, Johnson Controls
  • Andreas Schiernbeck, President & CEO, Building Automation, Siemens AG
  • Patricia Calkins, Vice President, Environment, Health and Safety, Xerox Corporation
  • Amit Chatterjee, CEO, Hara
  • Chris Lloyd, Executive Director, Public Policy and Strategic Alliances, Verizon
  • Jim Sinopoli, Managing Principle, Smart Buildings
  • Kamal Meattle, “Fresh Air” activist and CEO, Paharpur Business Centre & Software Technology Incubator Park, New Delhi, India
  • Dr. Terry Yosie, President & CEO, World Environment Center
  • Carl Gaurdino, President and CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group
  • Carol Baroudi, Green & Sustainability Research Director, Aberdeen Group, and author of Green IT for Dummies
  • Andrew Winston, founder of Winston Eco-Strategies and co-author of Green to Gold
  • Tom Raftery, analyst and blogger, GreenMonk/RedMonk
  • Chris Mines, Senior Vice President, Research Director, Forrester
  • Simon Mingay, Research VP, Gartner
  • Vernon Turner, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Computing Research, IDC

To learn more about the Eco Jam check out the Eco Jam page on the IBM website or request an invite by sending an email to: ecojam@us.ibm.com.

I wonder how this will affect the number of people tuning into Apple’s big announcement later on today, not to mention President Obama’s State of the Union 2.0 address!

by-sa