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Don’t Read That, Read This. Hey Grumpy.

grumpyOne of my favourite environmentally minded blogs is From The Grumpy Old Man. There is some great stuff in there, but Eddy is worried his readership is not picking up quickly enough. All I can say is, keep it up Eddy. The community will come.

Sample:

“I’ve seen somebody drinking O2 water the other day. Not only it had artificial kiwi and apple flavour but also extra oxygen added. According the ‘manufacturer’, it uses patented technology from Life Technologies, Inc. to put extra oxygen into ordinary water. The resulting beverage has 10 times more oxygen (72mg) as ordinary water and provides an extra boost of energy by increasing the amount of oxygen in your blood. What a load of crap!”

Grumpy by name…

2008 05 12 monkchips Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Reduce your carbon footprint using virtual worlds

One of Credit Agricole\'s training rooms in Second Life (photo courtesy of Stonefield Inworld)

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life are largely dismissed as trivial and a waste of time by many people (myself included until recently!).

However a recent conversation with Pierre-Olivier Carles changed all that for me. Pierre is the co-founder and CEO of Stonefield Inworld - a company which builds things for people in virtual worlds.

For example, the photo above is a training room for the French banking group Crédit Agricole. According to their Wikipedia entry, Crédit Agricole are the 8th largest bank in the world! Stonefield have purpose built training rooms for Crédit Agricole on the bank’s private island in Second Life.

In a pilot program rolled out for a small part of the group, Crédit Agricole expect to save between €200,000 and €300,000 this year on travel expenses alone by holding training sessions in-world. If this is rolled out to the group, annual savings would be in the order of €5-€6m. I’m not sure what that is in terms of reduced CO2 emissions but you can take it that it is a pretty big number!

And that is just in travel expenses. When companies start to be taxed for their carbon emissions, the savings from holding in-world training will be even greater.

Of course, the success of something like this is all in the execution and from talking to Pierre-Olivier, Stonefield seem to have nailed it. They have audio (for the presenter), video, slideware, and whiteboards in the training room. They take ‘coffee’ breaks to allow for the networking which happens in ‘real’ training as well as the opportunities for one-on-one with the trainer (”what you said in there is all very well in theory but in the case of our org…”).

The trainees can even give feedback on their understanding of the topic by migrating to the green side of the room to indicate all is going well or moving to the red side to signal that they are falling behind. As someone who gives talks and has done training, this kind of trainee feedback is invaluable to the successful running of a class.

Then there is the added benefits to the trainee of not having to worry about getting through security, catching that plane, lost luggage, traffic jams, breakdowns or worse. Does anyone have any statistics on the number of employees lost to work-related travel accidents annually?

With travel making up such a large part of our global CO2 emissions and companies increasing requirements to upskill their employees on an ongoing basis, initiatives like this are going to be vital for cost efficiencies and reduced carbon footprints.

Cross-posted from LowerFootprint.com

2008 05 12 Tom Raftery travel Comments (2) Permalink

The sooner oil hits $200 per barrel, the better!

Four bucks a gallon
Creative Commons License photo credit: johnmarkos

Back in 2004 the government’s worst case scenarios had oil reaching $26 per barrel by 2025. This afternoon oil reached $125.98, the fifth day this week we had a record high price for oil. And we are not even halfway through 2008 yet.

Goldman Sachs recently pronounced that oil may soon reach $200 per barrel. I hope they are right. In fact the sooner the better, to my mind!

Why do I say that?
We need to get off our dependence on carbon as an energy source. The CO2 given off by burning oil for energy is poisoning the planet and wiping out animal and plant species at a hitherto unprecedented rate.

We have known this for quite some time now. Scientists were discussing Global Warming and climate change up to 40 years ago. The reason we have done very little to move off oil is that the alternatives were always too expensive. This also meant that raising money for research into renewable power sources was difficult and so alternative energy sources remained high cost.

However, now with oil at $126 per barrel and rising, renewables are starting to look very attractive. Suddenly money is pouring into companies who are trying to research and commercialize Green energy. This is a good thing! This will only continue as long as it is perceived to be profitable. In other words, as long as oil is expensive.

The worst thing that could happen right now for the future of the planet is if oil prices dropped. Roll on $200 per barrel, I say.

2008 05 09 Tom Raftery climate change
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IPv6: Towards a Greener Internet

As you probably know by now, we’re very interested in the idea of what might constitute a green API or protocol, so I was very interested when I received a link via twitter from @Straxus (Ryan Slobojan).

The Aon Scéal? (That’s Any News in Gaelic) blog by Alastrain McKinstry points to this piece by Yves Poppe which argues that IPv6 could save 300 Megawatts.

Easy to forget that most mobile devices used by Time Square revelers were behind IPv4 NAT’s and that always on applications such as Instant Messaging, Push e-mail, VoIP or location based services tend to be electricity guzzlers. It so happens that applications that we want always to be reachable have to keep sending periodic keepalive messages to keep the NAT state active. Why is that so? The NAT has an inactivity timer whereby, if no data is sent from your mobile for a certain time interval, the public port will be assigned to another device.

You cannot blame the NAT for this inconvenience, after all, its role in live is to redistribute the same public addresses over and over; if it detects you stopped using the connection for a little while, too bad, you lose the routable address and it goes to someone else. And when a next burst of data communication comes, guess what? It doesn’t find you anymore. Just think of a situation we would loose our cell phone number every time it is not in use and get a new one reassigned each time.

Nokia carried out the original study. Good work Nokia researcher guys! Another way of looking at the saved energy, which I think we’d all vote for, is potentially longer battery life of our mobile access devices. I am sure the folks at Nortel, who are so enthusiastically driving the green agenda for competitive advantage, would be interested in this research, and quite honestly its one of the first arguments I have heard that makes me think ah yes IPv6 lets pull the trigger. There are some good skeptical arguments in the comments here, but on balance I can definitely see the value of the initial research. Its surely worth further study.

While writing this article I also came across the rather excellent Green IT/Broadband blog. The author Bill St. Arnaud clearly believes in our Bit Miles concept, even if he doesn’t call it that.

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The current preferred approaches are to impose “carbon” taxes and implement various forms of cap and trade or carbon offset systems. However another approach to help reduce carbon emission is to “reward” those who reduce their carbon footprint rather than imposing draconian taxes or dubious cap and trade systems. It is estimated that consumers control or influence over 60% of all CO2 emissions. As such, one possible reward system of trading “bits and bandwidth for carbon” is to provide homeowners with free fiber to the home or free wireless products and other electronic services such as ebooks and eMovies if they agree to pay a premium on their energy consumption which will encourage them to reduce emissions by turning down the thermostat or using public transportation. Not only does the consumer benefit, but this business model also provides new revenue opportunities for network operators, optical equipment manufacturers, and eCommerce application providers.

European IPv6 Day, hosted by the EU is on the 30th May. Come to think about it the guy I should talk to about green IP is Vint Cerf of Google.

2008 05 09 monkchips "bit miles"
co2
datacenter
energy demand management
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global warming
transportation Comments (0) Permalink

Carbon Dioxide Kicks Off Java One

The keynote began this morning with the James Gosling and John Gage show and the usual cod(e) humour. They used the opportunity to show off the new JavaFX technology. The application was very cool. The entire Moscone Center is wired up with censors to monitor carbon dioxide and energy consumption, with the results of the monitoring visualised on screen. Although Sun provided very little information the company has long talked about an Internet of Things. That is an internet where all devices are connected to the network. From an energy demand management perspective monitoring in incredibly important. Hopefully Sun will start bringing environmental measurement technology to market.The more we monitor the more we can manage…

As Sun pointed out, in a room this size if the carbon dioxide saturation was three times higher it couldn’t support life. Sobering thought.

2008 05 06 monkchips Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

A Nokia brick that turns itself off: EnergyCamp todos

Nokia Charger
Another great spot from our pals at GreenBang.

Earlier this week at our EnergyCamp unconference we were talking about chargers for laptops and mobile phones. You know they keep consuming electricity when they are not plugged into the device, right? If not please unplug them when not in use. Its a small thing that will cut your electricity bill.

David Berlind said: “wouldn’t it be great if you could get a charger that switched itself off when your laptop was fully charged?” Great idea David! Well it seems Nokia at least is way ahead of us.

Well done Nokia for innovating in this area. Now a request - please stop screwing us with proprietary power inputs. Its not even remotely funny that my N95 has a USB port for data and a separate pin for power. In order to cut waste in raw materials (namely metals) the Chinese government has mandated standard USB ports for data and power. You want to do business in China, right? Well please fix your manufacturing processes, and cut your addiction to revenues from proprietary power interfaces. USB power for the win.

From an innovation standpoint you’re hurting yourself with the addiction to these high margin cables. Compare with the iPhone. Power is not the only lifeblood - so is data. When you plug an iPhone into a Mac or PC it synchronises data, and charges the phone. If Nokia wants to encourage a similar synchronicity it should go with the standard. Energy and Data are both lifebloods.

Give it two years and iPhones will be 50 quid. What then? Start the fightback- make synchronisation more natural. And you’ll have an advantage if you make the plug a self turn off model.

2008 05 02 monkchips Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Energy Demand Management on TV!

Well, TechWebTV! I was over in Las Vegas this week attending EnergyCamp and InterOp.

I spoke about Energy Demand Management (EDM) at EnergyCamp and was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest in this topic. In fact there was so much interest that TechWebTV asked if I would go on camera to discuss EDM with Fritz Nelson!

It is a very brief discussion of quite a complex concept. We never really got into discussing the industrial implications of demand stimulation, for example. What will you do when energy prices fluctuate based on supply and demand? When electricity is extremely cheap or even negatively priced would it make sense to create hydrogen, only to burn it for power later when electricity prices go back up?

Or how about governments and/or utilities? Shouldn’t they be massively subsidizing plug-in hybrids so they can act as distributed storage (a nationwide battery) sucking in power when there is an excess and selling it back to the grid when supply starts falling off?

Discuss.

2008 05 02 Tom Raftery energy demand management Comments (0) Permalink

Sustainability/Energy Agenda Accelerates

People ask about greenwashing and vendor hypocrisy. I don’t see it like that. If resources are being applied to managing electricity demand, or addressing broader sustainability issues, that is all to the good. The space is heating up almost as fast as the planet.

Today IBM announced a swathe of services and tools, and is clearly beginning to tie together its various IT energy management strands. Thus for example, it touts data center efficiency:

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager (AEM) tracks energy consumption in data centers and helps customers monitor power usage and make adjustments to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The new software allows IT managers to control — even set caps on — their energy use for servers, storage, and networking as well as the air conditioning and power management systems that keep the data center running.

IBM is also pushing into certification. I think the firm needs to think bigger though and to take on bigger challenges (not often I say that). Data center energy optimisation is interesting, but IBM should be looking at driving power improvements in supply chains, manufacturing plants, building central heating and so on. IT currently accounts for around 3% of world energy consumption. Lets get to work on the other 97%.

Nortel is going after Cisco “ruthlessly” based on better power performance of its gear. This is the most agressive use of a energy benchmarking I have seen so far in the industry. Great - bring on competition on the basis of power consumption.

I am liking SAS pitching its BI tools for the triple bottom line. with Global Reporting Initiative indicators and KPIs based relating to environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Excellent! I need to go chat to SAS - a very interesting privately held firm with a real culture of innovation and a high R&D budget to match. I wonder if they talked about this today at the

Boston is going green, which I am sure Stephen will appreciate.

With the triple bottom line in mind The FT reported yesterday that “The German government plans to make the country’s first trademark for good business behaviour, as a complement to “Made in Germany” as a respected global brand.”

Today my old mucker Dennis Howlett has been in Boston with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and a number of software companies discussing sustainability rights, responsibilities and opportunities. Next week at Sapphire 2008 in Orlando, SAP is hosting AccountAbility,  (BSR), and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) in launching a dialogue on sustainability. I have been involved in planning, web 2.0 support, and will join the dialogue in Berlin. I’d like to see SAP in future set up industry vertical sustainability groups based on its successful Industry Value Network program, for best practice sharing. James?

GreenMonk appreciates change needs to be top down, as well as bottom up. All this of activity is goodness. We need to move on, and watching CSR evolve from a PR initiative to one driving corporate strategy is pleasing.

Climate Change
Creative Commons License photo credit: openDemocracy

2008 05 01 monkchips SAP
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EnergyCamp: An Intimate Event

Our inaugural EnergyCamp on Monday in Las Vegas worked out really well. By the end of the day we had a built a vibrant little community, buzzing with ideas and thinking about how to implement them. This was a tribute to the calibre of the people that took the time to participate. We had vendors, business people, and IT folks and they all brought something to the party. We kicked off the day with a chat between me and Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s new chief sustainability strategist. Rob is whip smart and will make a real impact at Microsoft. The fact the company gave the job to someone that had been working as general manager of a business unit indicates how seriously it takes the new role. What I most admire about the approach he plans to take is that it goes far beyond “the green data center” and really asks broader questions about how we live now, and how we’ll live tomorrow. Transport, Housing and heating, Energy Management - those are the areas where software can make a differerence. Rob gave the example of a new Korean water turbine energy project, which would have been inconceivable without powerful HPC modelling of tidal currents. Then the community took over. And I have to say Jason Hiner writes it up better than I ever could…

“The event started with a more traditional presentation to kick things off, but then attendees were invited to take markers and paper and write down their idea for a discussion topic. Each person who had written something went up to the front of the room, took the mic, and explained their idea to the audience. Then the attendee taped the idea into a slot on the grid. After all the ideas were up on the board, the attendees gathered around and consulted about which ideas were similar enough to group together, with the permission of the people who originally submitted the idea. Some of the topics that made the cut included:

  • Alternatives to business travel
  • Building a hyper-energy efficient data center (case study)
  • Best layouts for data centers while staying green
  • Operationlizing green practices
  • It’s the people, stupid
  • HVAC distribition in the data center
  • Best practices for recycling and refurbishing electronics

Our wiki from the unconference is here. David Berlind and Angela Bole did an oustanding job of logistics for the event. Tom Raftery was a superstar. Thanks guys! I have a bunch more follow up posts to write. Here is David and his energy:

2008 05 01 monkchips Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

More Pushback: Green Vegas

Craig Bender is a good friend of mine. He knows everything about Sun’s SunRay product line (which also happens to have great environmental characteristics compared to PCs.) He lives in Vegas. This is what he had to say about the city.

thing guy vegas

2008 04 25 monkchips energy
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