Tag: pollution

A Tesla Model S electric vehicle charging
Internet of Things (IoT)

3 Ways Electric Cars Are Changing More Than the Way We Drive

Part 1 of 3 on the Future of Transportation and the Internet of Things

The world is moving away from cars based on the internal combustion engine (ICEs). The future is electric. With Tesla leading the way on what’s possible with electric vehicles, more traditional auto manufacturers are following suit.

Volvo has announced that all of its cars will have electric motors by 2019. Aston Martin is planning the same by 2025. General Motors plans to have at least 20 electric vehicles (EVs) by 2023. The list goes on.

Much of the pressure is coming from countries banning ICE sales in the not-too-distant future (The Netherlands by 2025; China, India and Germany by 2030; France and the UK by 2040). Industry and consumers, however, want electric as well.

When everybody wants something, it tends to happen. The question is, what will be the ramifications? One safe bet is that the market for your ICE -based car will be drying up quickly – so think about selling now. But beyond concerns for personal finance, we can also expect EVs to have a dramatic impact in a number of areas including climate conditions in cities, the automotive industry in general, and energy distribution worldwide.

Lower emissions

The obvious benefit of electric cars – the reason countries, industries, and individuals everywhere are pushing for them – is lower emissions. One of the cities most concerned about emissions is Beijing. Back in 2015, the notoriously thick smog of the city disappeared quickly when authorities banned driving  for two weeks in preparation for a World War II commemoration parade. The day after driving resumed, the smog returned.

Today, Beijing is planning to replace the city’s nearly 70,000 taxis with EVs. Doubtless, this is a step in the right direction. Yet, while Beijing tends to get the lion’s share of press coverage when it comes to smog, other cities face similar challenges. From Paris to Mexico City and all around the world, lower emissions from electric vehicles will help to improve health for citizens locally and fight climate change globally.

Industry change

The automotive industry is not just General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the rest. It’s also made up of countless suppliers of parts and components. But when you move from a traditional ICE to the electric engine, you lose about 90% of the parts. Electric engines are just simpler.

This means that for companies in the automotive supplier ecosystem, much of the market is going away soon. The simplicity of electric engines will also be felt further down the value chain. Service centers, for example, will feel the hit.  Many of these centers – particularly the large chains – use the inexpensive 3,000-mile oil change as a loss-leader to upsell customers on needed maintenance. But without oil in the electric engine – and without as much need for maintenance – many of these chains will have to rethink their business models to survive.

New energy horizons

One of the most significant impacts of EVs will be on the way energy is distributed – because in addition to being modes of transportation, EVs will also act as energy sources that can plug directly into the grid.

This will help address the challenge of “demand response.” The problem to solve here is one of grid stability in the era of renewable energy. Traditionally, large centrally located energy generation plants –  coal, gas, and nuclear – have churned out a steady supply of energy that results in a fairly stable grid.

However, the renewable energy paradigm – based mostly on solar and wind – is neither centralized nor steady. Rather it is distributed across rooftops, solar farms, and mountain tops. And it is variable according to weather conditions.

With renewables, in other words, utilities have less control over the supply side of the equation – meaning how and when energy is generated. This has the potential to lead to instability on the electricity grid. If you can’t manage the supply, then you have to use demand side management, also known as demand response. This can be done using through incentives, and the technology is advancing such that increasingly the process is becoming automated.

By providing a storage mechanism that can both take energy in and send it out, car batteries on EVs can act as frequency regulators for the grid. This is a big deal that has the potential to change energy distribution forever.

At night, say, when the wind is blowing, a car battery can store energy generated by wind turbines. Or, in the middle of the afternoon when everybody wants air conditioning on a hot day, the same batteries can distribute some of their energy. This leads to improved grid stability.

Industry convergence

Let’s just note, however, that the entities with the closest relationships to the owners of the batteries so critical to grid stability would not be the utilities but EV manufacturers. What’s stopping Elon Musk from enticing Tesla customers from sharing their batteries? Tesla could enable its customers provide energy from their batteries – and then sell it on the grid for a profit. Customers make money. Tesla makes money. Utility companies make money. Everybody is happy.

This transforms the automobile industry into an energy industry. At SAP we talk a lot about digital transformation as a response to digital disruption. This is disruption at its most dramatic.

Elon Musk has stated aims to make 500,000 Tesla’s in 2018. Let’s say he falls disastrously short and only hits half his target. Let’s also assume an average 80 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery size in the EVs – (Tesla cars today have battery sizes ranging from 60 -110 kWh). 250,000 cars x 80 kWh – and you’ll see that this fleet would have the capacity of 20 gigawatt hours of storage. For comparison, a gigawatt is roughly the output of a nuclear power plant. So, Tesla will be producing the equivalent of 20 nuclear power plants worth of storage, at least, per year.

Electric vehicle manufacturers will be able to aggregate the energy on their networks, and sell access to their “virtual power plants”. It is a whole new world.

Stay tuned for more on how the transportation industry is changing forever.

 

Photo credit Tesla

Trends & Concepts

Friday Green Numbers round-up 05/07/2010
Green numbers
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here are this week’s Green numbers:

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

by-sa

Trends & Concepts

Investors, the EPA and now the SEC are making pollution an increasingly unattractive option

Shareholder
Photo credit Neubie

A perfect storm consisting of the EPA, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and investors is pressuring companies to come clean on their environmental risks and performance.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about FaceBook’s decision to use a primarily coal-burning utility to power its new data center where I asked should FaceBook’s investors be worried about the decision.

Now the SEC has started taking an interest in this area as well and recently clarified that companies’ have responsibilities [PDF] to report on:

  1. the direct effects of existing and pending environmental regulation, legislation, and international treaties on the company’s business, its operations, risk factors, and in Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations
  2. the indirect effects of such legislation and regulation on a company’s business, such as changes in demand for products that create or reduce greenhouse gas emissions and
  3. the effect on a company’s business and operations related to the physical changes to our planet caused by climate change — such as rising seas, stronger storms, and increased drought. These changes to the environment could have a number of material effects on corporations, such as impairing the distribution and production of goods and damaging property, plant, and equipment

In announcing the clarification SEC Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar stated that the SEC will begin to be far more proactive on environmental reporting:

The Commission’s action today is a first step in an area where the Commission will begin to play a more proactive role, consistent with our mandate under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, to consider the environment in our regulatory action. The National Environmental Policy Act charged the Federal Government “to use all practicable means” to, among other things, “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.”

Noting the interest of the SEC and their clarification around companies’ environmental risk reporting requirements, investors are now becoming more vocal and are increasingly asking companies to report more information about their environmental risks and responsibilities. These investors need to look after the long term interests of their funds and the last thing they want is to have their monies disappear in some environment-related mishap like the Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill or a class action litigation.

Ceres, the non-profit network, reported recently that investors filed a record 95 climate change resolutions, a 40% increase over the 2009 proxy season! And these are serious investors. Jack Ehnes, CEO of CalSTRS for example, manages $131 billion dollars in assets. That’s billion, with a b!

As Ceres notes:

Many of the investors are part of the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), an alliance of more than 80 institutional investors with collective assets totaling more than $8 trillion.

$8 trillion! Investors with a war chest of $8 trillion wield a lot of clout.

Combine this with the fact that on Dec 29th 2009 the EPA’s Mandatory Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Rule came into effect and it states:

suppliers of fossil fuels or industrial greenhouse gases, manufacturers of vehicles and engines, and facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more per year of GHG emissions are required to submit annual reports to EPA. The gases covered by the proposed rule are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), perfluorocarbons (PFC), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and other fluorinated gases including nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and hydrofluorinated ethers (HFE).

So, the EPA is requiring the reporting of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the top 10,000 emitters in the US, the SEC now has environmental risk reporting and transparency in its sights and investors with considerable resources are looking for more details on possible environmental risks from companies they invest in. You have to think that this is not a good time to be in the pollution business!

by-nc-sa
Trends & Concepts

Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 02/26/2010
Green numbers
Photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

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

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

by-sa

Featured Posts, Trends & Concepts

Should FaceBook’s investors be worried that the site is sourcing energy for its new data center from coal?
Mountain-top removal
Photo credit: The Sierra Club

Should FaceBook’s investors be worried that the site is sourcing energy for its new data center from primarily coal-fired power?

FaceBook is fourth largest web property (by unique visitor count) and well on its way to becoming third. It is valued in excess of $10 billion and its investors include Russian investment company DST, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital and Microsoft.

FaceBook announced last month that it would be locating its first data center in Prinville Oregon. The data center looks to be all singing and dancing on the efficiency front and is expected to have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.15. So far so good.

However, it soon emerged that FaceBook are purchasing the electricity for their data center from Pacific Power, a utility owned by PacifiCorp, a utility whose primary power-generation fuel is coal!

Sourcing power from a company whose generation comes principally from coal is a very risky business and if there is anything that investors shy away from, it is risk!

Why is it risky?

Coal has significant negative environmental effects from its mining through to its burning to generate electricity contaminating waterways, destroying ecosystems, generation of hundreds of millions of tons of waste products, including fly ash, bottom ash, flue gas desulfurisation sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals and emitting massive amounts of radiation.

And let’s not forget that coal burning is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO2 in the air [PDF].

The US EPA recently ruled that:

current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases–carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)–in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Note the wording “the public health and welfare of current and future generations”

Who knows what legislation the EPA will pass in the coming months and years to control CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants in the coming months and years – and the knock on effects this will have on costs.

Now think back to the litigation associated with asbestos – the longest and most expensive tort in US history. Then note that climate change litigation is gaining ground daily, the decision to go with coal as a primary power source starts to look decidedly shaky.

Then GreenPeace decided to wade in with a campaign and FaceBook page to shame FaceBook into reversing this decision. Not good for the compay image at all.

Finally, when you factor in the recent revolts by investors in Shell and BP to decisions likely to land the companies in hot water down the road for pollution, the investors in FaceBook should be asking some serious questions right about now.

by-sa

Trends & Concepts

Do risk and compliance have a part to play in reducing pollution?

Do risk and compliance have a part to play in reducing pollution? EQ2 certainly thinks so.

Steve Burt, the founder and CEO of EQ2, is a former economist having worked at senior levels with Dun & Bradstreet and British Petroleum. His approach, which he calls Granular Resource Economics (GRE), enables companies to quickly see at a glance the entire spectrum of their emissions down to parts per million.

Why is this important?

Well, consider one of the verticals Steve is looking at – the aviation industry (see EQ2’s excellent Sustainable Flying Report – PDF) . As Steve says, a single flight taking off from an airport, in pollution terms, is not a significant event. But when an airport handles hundreds of flights per day. What is the accumulated pollution from all the flights, incoming and outgoing, it has ever handled? Now project this forward for all the flights it is going to handle…

When you think of pollution from planes, you typically think in terms of CO2. EQ2 go well beyond that though and in the case of aviation, for example, you will also see the numbers for SOx, NOx, and other constituents emitted from jet fuel such as mercury, selenium, arsenic, particulates, etc. When you start to run those numbers for even moderately sized airports, the results can be quite sobering. For airports located near water this could be especially troubling.

And it is not just airports – all organisations need to find out what their liabilities are with respect to their accumulated emissions. A recent report for the UN has found that the world’s top firms caused US$2.2 trillion of environmental damage in 2008 alone. This is obviously unsustainable and is merely a preface to more restrictive pollution controls being enacted which:

is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage

Imagine for a sec if communities in the vicinity of Drax or Kingsnorth coal-fired power plants in the UK decided to sue for the environmental damage wrought on them by these power plants. The kind of information EQ2 can provide would be invaluable in helping these facilities reduce their emissions and minimise the increasing risks associated with being a polluter.

With that in mind, how many firms can afford to remain ignorant of the full spectrum of their emissions?

by-nc-sa

Trends & Concepts

Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 02/19/2010
Green numbers
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

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

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

by-sa

Business

New version of Eye on Earth site – more data, less visible!

Eye on Earth

Photo credit Tom Raftery

We last wrote about the Eye on Earth site in July 2008. If you can’t remember that far back, a quick recap – Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency (EEA) signed a non-exclusive five year deal with a goal to “make environmental information more accessible to citizens in Europe”.

EyeOnEarth, the first product of that agreement was launched on July 30th 2008 as a site listing water bathing quality for beaches and waterways throughout Europe. What was unique about the site was that it contained historical data going back as far as 1991 as well as the ability for anyone browsing the site to give their own feedback on beaches/waterways. A superb way to capture and present grassroots water quality data.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been major changes to the EyeOnEarth website. The site has been moved to Microsoft’s new cloud computing services platform Windows Azure, and data from 6,000 air quality monitoring stations across Europe is now also included in the site. The air quality data includes information on ozone, particulate matter (PM10) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) but, curiously, doesn’t include sulphur dioxide (SO2) or carbon dioxide (CO2).

The site has now been combined with Bing Maps and Silverlight controls which work quite well once you realise that you have to type in the name of the location you are interested in into the search bar at the top to see any data. Intuitively I initially clicked on air and water stations on the map but this failed to do yield any data. This appears to be a function of your zoom level because once you zoom in far enough, a click on an air or water station will yield the information.

The fact that the site is written in Silverlight is disappointing as the number of computers with Silverlight installed is somewhere between 32% and 47%. There is a non-Silverlight version of the site available but I failed to get this to work either on my Vista PC or on my iPhone.

The lack of a working platform for mobile is a big disappointment, frankly. Back in 2008 Microsoft’s Director EU & NATO, reassured me that:

We haven’t tested or adapted the site for mobile access now due to time constraints but mobile access is a core component of our vision for the Observatory portal as we like to offer an alerting/subscription service

I took this to mean that there would be a mobile version of the site developed.

However, what Microsoft and the EEA have now delivered is an SMS service whereby you can text a command to a UK number (+44 7786 201 106) – this allows you to receive instant updates on air and water quality for any location in the EEA member countries, however, as far as I can tell there is no way to add data to the site from your mobile, something I’d be very keen to do if I had the option.

The addition of the air quality data to Eye on Earth is a very welcome development, however making the site less accessible, and not having a mobile version of the site means that this update of the site would appear to be a case of one step forward and two steps back.

UPDATE: Just thinking now that if there were an api to this data and if it were geotagged, it would make a really interesting Augmented Reality Layar for a mobiles.

by-nc-sa

Climate Change

CO2 emissions vs income

CO2 vs GNP 1975-2002

I generated this graph on Prof Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org site.

The data shows, somewhat surprisingly that the increase in carbon emissions in countries like Ireland and the US from 1975 to 2002 are not in any way mirrored by any increases in China or India.

In the recent Bali talks (and the Kyoto talks before that) the US held up the developing countries as major polluters and refused to sign Kyoto (and created all kinds of fuss at Bali) because of the amounts of pollution being emitted by developing countries.

This is obviously delaying tactics for Bush’s friends in the oil business in Texas and Saudi. The US Ambassador to Ireland conceded that China may exceed the US’s total emissions in 2008. Compare the income per capita between the US and China again and even if Chinese total emissions do exceed the US in 2008, they are still far less polluting per capita than the US.

And the Chinese were looking for a stronger agreement at Bali than the US.

The sooner Bush and his oil cronies are out of office, the sooner we can move on with trying to clean up the planet.