It used to be that “going green” meant simple recycling, reusing, and reducing. It was a series of actions, a checklist of to-dos. Complete steps 1, 2, and 3, and congratulations, you’ve gone green! With the advent of technology and development in options and resources, possibilities have come about due to more of a shift in lifestyle and mentality, going deeper than just a mere checklist. The act of going green now calls for a more comprehensive understanding of your actions and consequences of those actions. No longer the simple task of recycling, the process of becoming more green and sustainable has broadened to a shift in mentality in the choices we make for our businesses and lifestyles.
A well-crafted green lease provides an opportunity to improve landlord/tenant collaboration on sustainability issues, leading to increased building performance, including energy efficiency. Green commercial leases provide incentives to reduce energy use and water, and increase recycling and the use of sustainable materials. A green lease detailing the sustainable use of a building by landlord and tenant is critical to the performance of a green building.
Smart meters, which are meters that are hooked up to a network so that they can deliver information about current usage in a timely manner, are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Smart meters will enable real time energy decisions in response to current conditions. They form a critical cornerstone of the smart grid; in fact in many ways they are the “smart” in the smart grid. This opens up a whole slew of new opportunities for smart software developers and smart entrepreneurs [no pun intended] to build the software applications and services to support and to add value to these new smart networked grids. What kinds of software opportunities exist in this newly opening sector?
Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.
Many people in the software industry have heard the buzzword cloud computing. Cloud computing promises to revolutionize how computing is done and huge investments are being made by the major players in the industry to stake out a portion of this sector. The infrastructure that underlies the cloud is a massive energy consumer. What is needed is for the idea of a green cloud to also catch on within the industry. A green cloud is cloud computing that uses intelligent power management and cooling to minimize its energy needs for some given level of service.
Over at JustMeans, Dave Stanis, of the Campbell Soup Company, speculated that based on current trends, carbon accounting will be a growing, in demand, career specialty. He recommends taking classes in carbon accounting. I think he is on to something because Groom Energy has declared 2009 the Year of Enterprise Carbon Accounting and a recent Greenhouse Gas Management Institute study revealed that the industry is suffering from a profound skills shortage. For those of you who have never heard of carbon accounting, it is the accounting undertaken to measure the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents that will not be released into the atmosphere as a result of Flexible Mechanisms projects under the Kyoto Treaty.
After a run of some years of heady double digit growth the Solar PV sector in the US has hit a period of slower growth in which some of the weaker players are being shaken out of the market. This year will be characterized by consolidation as more successful firms and better capitalized firms build their market share and absorb weaker players. This shakeout was inevitable and is natural, but it was undoubtedly triggered by the financial crash of late 2008 coupled with the bursting of the oil futures speculative bubble and the temporary collapse in prices on the oil spot markets.
Many believe that the green economy will be powered by the wind and by the sun. But fewer people are aware that to make this possible we need to profoundly transform the current electric grid to control and manage renewable energy supplies. Balancing load and demand is a quite a challenge with renewable supplies that are intermittent and depend on the weather. Without a robust ability to continuously balance energy supply and demand, wind or solar energy sources can have a profoundly negative impact on grid operations, reliability and power quality and force grid operators to make costly and inefficient adaptations to current spot conditions.
In February, Dan Smollen over at Sturdy Roots polled green executives to find out their interest in participate in live seminars and webinars, attending networking events and in enrolling in courses designed to develop their green skills. I little under 100 executives participated and they released their results earlier this week, with 100% of participants saying that they would attend networking events.b
