A Week Where Solar was in the Ascendant

From my perspective, last week was a good week for the sun.

We are in the process of picking vendors for a BT Americas employee solar program. As recently as last Wednesday, conversations with the short listed vendors reflected the prevailing view that the expired Investment Tax Credit (ITC) would not be renewed until some time next year. ITC offers residential solar customers an offset against income tax. By Friday morning, the credits were not only renewed, but were significantly expanded as part of the bailout bill signed into law.

Meanwhile, despite the economic situation facing the country, both the key providers in our corporate implementation at our head office in El Segundo were the beneficiaries of major investments. Our integrator, EI Solutions was acquired by Suntech, one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the world and our finance provider, Solar Power Partners (SPP), announced that it has closed $100M in financing and all this before the ITC extension was announced on Friday morning.

Visible construction began on the installation in our headquarters parking lot (previous work was below ground on the foundations). You can see it here. Select ‘previous week’ in the ‘animation viewer’ to see the supporting pillars going in at the far end of the lot towards the end of the animation.

And closer to home (my home at least), was the annual Metro Washington DC tour of Solar Homes. We are certainly no California, but it was an impressive event with over 50 homes displayed in Maryland, Virginia and DC over two days. I visited a couple of the houses in Virginia where there were dozens of people walking through. Some were clearly dedicated environmentalists, but many regular folks attended who are starting to consider solar for their homes and wanted to see it in practice.

How Many Mobile Phone Users Does it Take to Power a Light Bulb?

It depends on the screen technology and the type of light bulb.

I spoke at the Green ICT Workshop of the European American Business Council last week. The main theme was how the role of ICT in the environment should inform government policy. It was interesting being in a forum that included both European and American perspectives. Although there are some contrasts in approach, the overwhelming sense was of the common ground of the potential for the industry to help drive energy efficiency and reduce emissions.

In the process, speakers shared some interesting statistics that show how much potential there is for our industry to continually reduce emissions. For example, Jennifer Sanford of Cisco noted that the carbon emissions of a single plane flight are equivalent to 97 telepresence sessions.

What about the mobile phone users to whom I first referred?

Asfaw Negeri from Ericsson said that today’s mobile phones produce about 24kg of CO2 per year – already a significant order of magnitude decrease on older generations of handsets, and forecast to continue decreasing. 24kg CO2 for the year is about the same as driving a mid-sized car for an hour.

Cheryl Schwartzman, speaking for Qualcomm, described one way some of those future reductions might be achieved. Their new Mirasol display screens for mobile phones and hand-held devices consume 1mW to operate, compared with 240 mW for the standard screens that we have on our phones today. Cheryl explained that screens are such a significant part of the drain on displays that the benefits can increase battery life by 30%.

And where do the light bulbs come into it ?

Bill Morin from Applied Materials referred to the potential future energy reductions from LED-based light bulbs, according to the Next-Generation Lighting Industry Alliance. LEDs are anticipated to be twice as efficient as even CFLs.

Loads of potential from known technologies, let alone from what is yet to come.

Why Value the Green IT Market ? It's All About Timing

I am frequently asked what I think the green ICT market is worth. This question has always troubled me.

Market value is determined by the number of potential customers and how much they are prepared to pay. However, a company that holds that catastrophic climate change will occur if emissions are not kept below very challenging thresholds must believe that close to 100% of the market needs to go green to abate those emissions and minimize that risk.

That said, it is a necessary step in business to put a value on a market. At a strategic level, it is a contributing factor towards assessing if that market is a priority compared to others you could serve. At the operational level, it allows you to make determinations on business cases bidding for limited investment money available for individual products and services.

By articulating a green market value smaller than its total market value, a company is accepting that not all customers buy with green criteria taken into account. What troubles me is the implication that it isn’t necessary to plan energy efficiency into all product design right now. From a business perspective, if you make the investment and develop the products and services ahead of their time, you may not gain enough business to cover the investment and so lose money or even go under, albeit in a blaze of moral glory. Someone else copies you a few months later when the market is ready and reaps the benefits as the second mover. If we all leave it too long though, or if the market realizes too late, then we get catastrophic climate change, and we all lose.

This dilemma is reflected in a recent report by The Register - “Dell: We went green too early”.

Floating Data Centers

There are some creative data center ideas floating around. Google has apparently applied for a patent for a “water-based data center” that uses the ocean to provide power and cooling.

Bill St. Arnaud has been arguing for some time in his blog that, rather than bring the electricity from where it is generated to where the data center need is, we should instead bring the data center to where the electricity is generated. The underlying principle is that it is more energy-efficient to transport data over optical networks than to transport energy over power networks, so you minimize the distance you transport the power, and extend the distance you transport the data.

Perhaps we could combine these two ideas and position floating data centers underneath offshore wind turbines.

Of course, we also need to ensure we pay attention to unintended consequences. While discussing the Google floating data center idea recently at a sustainability meeting, I was asked whether data center equipment "buzzed" and, if so, would a floating data center interfere with the communications of whales. As the proposed barges use seawater for cooling, the average temperature around the barge would be higher than that of the surrounding water. Perhaps, someone speculated, that would attract algae and create a coating on the barge which would act as a sound absorber, so the whales would be OK!

Although I have presented these ideas in a light-hearted spirit, I think they, and the subsequent exchange, illustrate both the immense scope of the possibilities ahead of us to reduce emissions if we allow ourselves to think outside of the box. But, also the complex interactions that result, and which need to be taken into account as we move forward.

Global Super Sector Leader

The 2008 results of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index came out on September 6th. BT is the Global Super Sector Leader for the Telecommunications sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. For eight years running. And it is a grand sounding title if ever I heard one, per the supporting commentary on BT from the DJSI team.

Criteria for the award cover economic, social and environmental sustainability dimensions. Of the 12 primary criteria, BT was the lead company in the sector on only four, so we cannot rest on our laurels as that leaves 8 criteria where at least one other company in the sector is ahead of us – just not the same company for each criterion.

In fact, I recall from last year that the DJSI commentary mentioned the competition was heating up (my words not theirs) and other players were narrowing our lead. This is all healthy competition, of course, because it means that the industry is forging ahead on sustainability. But, if sustainability is aligned with business benefit (and I believe it is), then it is a competitive advantage, too, and we want to stay ahead of our competitors.

On that note, I don’t see any American headquartered companies in the telecommunications sector. I assume that means they didn’t apply, but I don’t know why that would be. I see plenty in the technology sector including Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel and IBM (Intel is the Super Sector Leader).

I'll be discussing this report and the impact of ICT on the environment on September 24 at the European-American Business Council's Smart Energy Panel on Green ICT in Washington, DC.

Good Carbon Emissions from Starbucks

I just picked up a copy of a carbon emissions leaflet from Starbucks produced by 'Good' magazine. It is the first in a series and is simply a great graphic depiction of the US carbon chain from both the producer and consumer ends. Although you can see it on the web, it is worth dropping by for a copy since it better lends itself to viewing on a large sheet of paper.

This is a strong example of a non-media company using its brand image to inform and influence the wider community on a sustainability topic. Coffee drinkers are invited to follow-up at Starbucks' social networking site. It will be interesting to see what impact it might have on customers who are climate change skeptics.

Computerworld’s Green IT Checklist: Make Room for the Biggest Opportunity

Following on from my previous post, "The IT Green Team – What’s Next?" as one of the finalists in the Computerworld Green IT Awards, BT was included in some of the real life examples in Mary Pratt’s Computerworld report “A green IT checklist: From first steps to stretch goals."

It is a great checklist, which, as the title says, is arranged in categories ranging from low-hanging fruit (limit paper use) through stretch (monitor and manage data center usage) to longer-term (build green). But, I still think it misses the biggest opportunity for the ICT vertical. Direct emissions are important at 2-3% of world emissions but, in order of magnitude, the most material contribution we can make is what I call leveraged, or indirect, emissions reductions. According to SMART 2020 these represent as much as a 15% reduction opportunity in global emissions. (And SMART 2020 is one of the most conservative reports on the topic. Others identify even higher potential for savings).

As much as IT departments should be managing and reducing direct footprint, it must not be at the expense of also thinking more strategically about the contribution their services can bring into their organizations to leverage improvements in the broader energy efficiency of the company. I therefore would have liked to have seen some reference to these included in both the stretch and long-term goals, but it’s a great start and the core premise of the report should be commended.

The IT Green Team – What’s Next ?

There are IT "Green Teams" at every one of our customers, and they are making great headway at tackling such things as vendor selection, virtualization and renewable energy.

Sustainability initiatives launched from central corporate responsibility teams made evident the synergies between sustainability and business opportunity. In response, functional business units picked up the mantle. Thus, we saw the establishment of green teams in IT and also procurement, fleet management, product design, etc.

This allowed the role of the central team to become more strategic, and less operational. It worked particularly quickly in the environmental space, where environmental results require effective action at the operational level.

So where does the IT Green Team go from here?

I think we will see the same evolution continue. As the operational benefits of the IT green team’s direct energy reduction and cost-saving initiatives prove their value to the business, they become business as usual. Energy consumption and emissions will become one of the standard criteria for decision-making for everyone within IT. The IT green team can, in turn, start to think less tactically and more strategically (thin client vs thick client; outsource or outsource data center operations; new IT technologies that will improve the energy efficiency of the core business).

The IT green team should be encouraging this evolution. Push the tactical initiatives out into the business and create some space for strategic planning.

Avoided Emissions are Just Fat-Free Equivalents

I am always suspicious of companies that quote their "emissions avoided" as the primary measure of their environmental achievements, i.e., "If we hadn’t done this or that then our emissions would have been so much worse."

As supplementary information to reduced emissions, avoided emissions can be a valuable measure to help employees, customers and other stakeholders understand the relative contribution of energy reduction activities.

We do this at BT. Our absolute emissions have been reduced from 1.2 M to 0.6M tonnes CO2 since 1996. In fact, last year we avoided 97k tonnes CO2 through our use of teleconferencing and about 50k tonnes through encouraging telecommuting. That helps employees really understand the contribution they are making to the whole, when they avoid traveling for a meeting and attend by teleconference instead – and that understanding is a great motivator. But, what really counts is the 0.6M tonnes CO2 absolute emissions. The avoided number is meaningless without the absolute reduction achieved. So, next time you see a company quote an achievement in terms of "avoided," look for the absolute number and, absent that, don’t give the avoided number any credence.

So, what does that have to do with "fat-free?" It reminds me of the claims I sometimes see on food stating, "95% fat-free." It’s the emissions that count, just like it’s the 5% fat that counts. The 95% avoided, while perhaps technically accurate, only tells half the story!

Sunny Side Up

In February, we held the groundbreaking for a 2000 module solar PV installation for our American HQ in El Segundo, Calif. We had some honored guests at the groundbreaking, including HRH Prince Andrew, The Duke of York.

Once completed, the system is expected to generate approximately 917,000 kWh per year and reduce carbon emissions by 642,000 pounds annually, which represents at least 15% of the site’s emissions. You can find more details in the press release .

We have had some delays that I gather impact many building projects, and most of the work since has been on the foundation. so there has been little to see. But now, at last, panels are starting appear on the roof and there is a camera in place monitoring progress.

Click on "animation viewer" and you will see progress from the current day. Even better, select "previous week" in the animation window to see the progress over the past week. I feel like a kid with a new toy!

When the roof is done, the camera will be rotated to cover the parking lot where the tracking panels will be placed. At the moment, the vendor is working on foundation there, so not much to see yet, but I will add the occasional post when there is some especially good progress to share.

BT's Carbon Stabalization Intensity Target

Large corporations can produce long lists of great environmental initiatives and large claims of reduced emissions. Smaller companies have shorter such lists and fewer reduced emissions, but maybe their efforts are proportionately greater – how does one really know?

What really counts is how much a company contributes towards solving the problem. And the test? What would the outcome be if every company did likewise?

In the climate change space, the desired outcome is climate stabilization. From the 2007 Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists, there is pretty good consensus over the maximum allowable level of carbon in the atmosphere and the 50% reduction in absolute emission levels that needs to be achieved to get there.

It is fairly straightforward to calculate what that looks like in relation to anticipated GDP growth. An 80% reduction in global emissions per unit of GDP by 2050 is required - slightly higher for developed countries, slightly lower for developing countries. So, if we can work out our contribution to GDP, corporations should be in a position to work out what it really means to do their part.

BT has started down this path with our recently announced CSI – Carbon Stabilization Intensity target. The intensity is calculated in relation to our "value-added" as a company. Value-added is a measure of a corporation’s contribution to GDP – a published figure in the UK. Consistent with the reduction required from developed countries, our objective is to reduce emissions per unit of value-added by 80% by 2020. If everyone does the same, we should be well on-track for the reductions required.

This changes the paradigm for sustainability from one in which we judge a company’s actions by how long their list of actions or how sizable their emissions avoided, to one in which action can be planned and assessed within the context of solving the larger problem.

Postscript: August 2009 - A report from the CDC The Carbon Chasm highlights that for the most part even leading companies are not doing enough to avert catastrophic climate change.

Postscript: November 2009 - Autodesk has announced a target using a very similar approach called C-FACT - Corporate Finance Approach to Climate-stabilizing Targets. Read a guest post from Autodesk's Emma Stewart on their new target.

Rain-Powered Energy ?

In Sensing the Environment with ICT on July 7th, I noted that "We need to look towards the development of very low-cost wireless devices that can be distributed widely, last indefinitely and run independently of the electricity grid". I had sun-powered devices in mind, but it seems that there is a potential complement to this with rain-powered devices. "French scientists have built a piezoelectric material that generates voltage when it is bent by the impact of a raindrop. Large drops can generate enough power to run small outdoor sensors" (Popular Mechanics May 2008). A more scientific description can be found at Physorg.com.

Don’t think that this will bring enough power to be an alternative to solar or wind power for large scale energy use. But, if it is enough to support an outdoor sensor, it provides a complementary capability for remote sensing devices to provide monitoring of environmental and other important sustainability criteria. There might be applications to the agricultural industry and oil and gas sector, among others.

Prize for Best Paper on Broadband and Sustainability

It was just brought to my attention that the Telecommunications Society of Australia is running a competition offering a AUD $10,000 (US $8,655.00) prize for the best paper on the application of broadband to a sustainable environment.

Three of last year's four winners focused on the environment, offering papers on (1) Distributed energy services (2) Travel avoidance by commuters and (3) Availability of broadband to rural and remote communities to enable agriculturists to use Landsat, Geo-positioning and Agronomy to better manage the environment. The fourth took a broad look at sustainability, covering social, environmental and economic sustainability. No new topic areas, but some in-depth analysis of the possibilities.

Closing date for this year's entries is October 6th so there is still time for any aspiring applicants. You can read the reports from last year's winners there, too.

Sensing the Environment with ICT (Cont'd)

Since I posted ‘Sensing the Environment with ICT’ on July 7th, I have been looking for corporate examples of the application of ICTs to environmental monitoring. I was intending to identify some down-to-earth examples, such as monitoring wastewater flows out of a factory. I am still looking for a good case study.

However, I recently spoke with Dan Thoma, executive vice president of marketing at Iridium Satellite LLC, and learned about a far from down-to-earth example. Iridium is developing a solution that tries to monitor climate and other environmental metrics in a holistic way, without requiring large numbers of sensing devices on the ground and then having to collect information from them. They are planning on including the sensing devices in a network of new satellites so the whole thing is pretty much self-contained: altimeters for measuring wind speed, sea surface height, wave height; radiometers to measure the earth's radiation budget; GPS radiation occultation (not sure I fully understand what that is, but it's such a great word I had to include it!) to measure temperature and humidity and imagers to measure deforestation and desertification. You can find some great visuals and more examples of applications in a presentation they gave as part of an event at the Royal Society.

I am still looking for examples within other industry sectors of using monitoring for environmental benefit. If you have any, please share them.

Becoming a Winner in a Low-Carbon Economy

I don’t know how, but I missed a report that was published in May by the WWF in Sweden and sponsored by HP, "Becoming a Winner in a Low-Carbon Economy - IT solutions that help business and the planet."

Compared to SMART 2020, this report takes a less analytical view of the numbers. For example, it doesn’t try to quantify the total carbon abatement opportunity, but it does a great job of reviewing the current literature and is chock-full of excellent examples (with appealing illustrative graphics to break up the text a bit) of the many ways ICT can make, and is already making, a contribution. Although it is not specifically targeted at companies, if you are looking for a ten-point checklist of ideas, "Becoming a Winner in a Low-Carbon Economy" has it! Try not to print it out though – it’s 109 pages.

So What is the Market Worth ?

Tony Chan at Green Telecom Live wrote a great review of the report, “Communicating Green: Telecommunications Value in Promoting Environmental Improvement, 2008-2013,” on his blog. The report notes that the telecommunications industry has the potential to abate as much as US$1.2 trillion worth in carbon emissions in the next five years.

I was interested in how the forecasts of "Communicating Green" compare with SMART 2020, about which I wrote on June 27th. SMART 2020 reports that ICT services have the opportunity to abate 7.8 GtCO2 in 2020.

I spoke with Daniel Bauer, program director at Insight Research Corp, and one of the primary researchers and authors of the report. “Communicating Green’ forecasts the opportunity for the ICT industry to abate 9.8 GtCO2 in 2013. This is pretty bold compared with SMART 2020. However, as I identified in my June 27th post, SMART 2020 is one of the more conservative reports so far.

By trying to estimate a market value for green ICT services, this report has certainly moved the ball forward from previous reports. We do need to take market values with a pinch of salt because so much depends on what you include. Case in point, a service that BT provides to a customer that stands on it own two feet commercially, like the wireless devices in vending machines that I wrote about on July 30th. Now, we identify a carbon footprint benefit to that solution, too. Does the whole value of the solution get attributed to the market for green ICT services, some proportion of it, or perhaps none as the solution existed anyway?

That difficulty, though, doesn’t negate the importance of trying to attribute a market value. "Communicating Green" attributes a value by tying a price of carbon to emissions abated. So, whichever way you look at it, as the report from Insight Research Corp. shows, there is a market out there and it is big. That market value represents the cost of carbon to government, corporations and consumers if they don’t take action. So beware any ICT company, or for that matter any IT department, that is not building this into their strategy.

Sensing Stock Levels

More on my theme of sensing, but, rather than sensing water levels, this example is about sensing stock levels. It comes from implementation of a wireless-based system that BT implemented for one of our customers, Britvic, a softdrink producer and distributor. Wireless devices were installed in Britvic’s soda machines. Previously, drivers would have to drive around to the machines to check and restock those that required it.

Collecting and processing data from the wireless devices in each machine, Britvic was able to eliminate the journeys to those machines that didn’t need restocking. That reduced the mileage logged by their fleet by 10%. Knowing in advance what stock was required in the machines allowed them to stock their vehicles more efficiently and thereby reduce their loads by 30%. Assuming a mileage reduction of 10% equates to an emissions reduction of 10%, and that 30% reduction in vehicle load equates to an emissions reduction of 10%, we have about a 20% reduction in carbon footprint for the fleet as a whole.

Of course, we also have to consider the emissions of the wireless devices, the network and application hosting and perhaps the screen and computer at the customer’s operations center. But, we only get an allocation of most of these components as they are also being used by other applications. Added together, the footprint of the solution represents only a very small proportion of the emissions saved from a 20% reduction in driven miles.

And, the beauty of a solution like this is that it makes commercial sense even without the emissions reduction benefit -- just in terms of the cost savings and increased revenue from improved vending machine stock levels.

That said, as per my previous post, “RFID: A Double-Edged Sword in Sustainability,” it is always valuable to consider emissions benefits in your solution design, or what seems like a good solution can backfire on you.

To Host or Not to Host? That is the question

Network-hosted solutions surely offer a reduction in the energy consumption on the users’ premise, but do they reduce overall consumption or do they just move it from the users premise to the carrier’s premise? I just spoke about this with Dean Parker, president and CEO of Callis Communications . Callis is a hosted telephony and managed IP communications service provider serving small and medium-sized businesses throughout America’s Gulf coast region and has tried to quantify the difference.

Callis estimates the energy consumption of an individual premise-based IPT solution at 20-30 amps. A hosted solution removes this consumption from the customer’s premise to the carrier’s and reduces the customer’s direct consumption due to telephony by about 74%. In comparison, a partitioned hosted solution running within Callis’ network operates at 80 amps, but with a capacity of up to 500 customers. Breakeven comes at about 20 customers.

Additionally, moving the IPT phones and the premise switch from independently powered to powered over ethernet reduces the consumption from 12 amps to 3 amps for a 24-phone Cisco system, taking the switch and the handsets into account.

Combining the energy benefits of a hosted solution and power over ethernet and assuming Callis puts 250 customers on their hosted solution, that represents more than an 80% reduction in overall energy consumption, compared to a premise-based, independently powered solution. Sounds good to me and plenty of justification to consider multi-tenanted hosted solutions.

This Year’s Greenest Conferences

We are a little over halfway through the year, and I have spoken on sustainability-related issues at several industry conferences - links to most of these events are noted in the “on the road” section of this site.

Comparing subjectively the extent to which each conference sponsor attempted to mitigate the environmental impact of their event, CERES and Freedom to Connect stand out.

CERES took a comprehensive and sophisticated approach and went to great efforts to work across their vendors, the hotel, transport and catering providers to do so. But, CERES is a devoted sustainability organization, so it should come as no real surprise that they did this so effectively.

In contrast, Freedom to Connect has no specific environmental sustainability mission. The event is organized by David Isenberg and is a meeting of self proclaimed ‘netheads’ engaged with “Internet connectivity and all that it enables…shaped by universal connectivity and the plunging capital requirements of information production…changing many of our fundamental economic and social assumptions.”

However, there was plenty of room on the agenda to cover environmental issues; there was no conference literature at all in hard copy - agenda and all other conference details were provided in soft copy; the conference was connected on the web and so it was possible to attend remotely (the quality of the webcast was poorer than expected, but it was a great first step).

Most importantly, taking up most of a giant screen was a chat session. Attendees had their laptops open and were chatting - reflecting on what the speaker was saying. This provided the potential for an attendee to avoid travel and participate remotely almost as actively as many of the in-person attendees by watching the broadcast and joining in the live chat.

I am sure it helped to have a highly technically literate audience and a limited budget. It certainly left an impression on me of what is possible if we rethink our approach to conferences.

Sensing the Environment with ICT

A short program ran on NPR a couple of weeks ago that illustrated the social and economic disadvantages faced by farmers in Ethiopia, unable to get frequent and reliable weather forecasts. The reason – the network of weather sensors is not nearly as granular as is available to forecasters in industrialized nations (West Africa 16 countries, 28 stations, UK 1 country, 31 stations). Common wisdom has it that, as a result, the forecasts are no more reliable than looking out the window. Listen to the report 'Developing countries and weather forecasts’ (it's only 4 minutes).

The World Technology Environment Center produced a report in 2006 called Sensors for Environmental Observatories. It is a comprehensive review of the application of networks and sensing devices to monitor environmental activity from water levels in river beds to pollution. “Sensor networks will produce a revolution in our understanding of the environment by providing observations at temporal and spatial scales that are not currently possible”.

To make more extensive use of these devices both to support farmers in a developing nations and scientists trying to make more sense of climate change patterns, we need to look towards the development of very low cost wireless devices that can be distributed widely, last indefinitely and run independently of the electricity grid. We also need a widely accessible mechanism of networking, that will allow a sensor anywhere to communicate – even if only intermittently. Symbiotic networks is one conceptual solution. If we can receive weather reports from Mars, we must be able to find a way to receive them from Central Africa.

I am exploring a couple of real life solutions for a future post. Please describe any you are aware of.