Clean technology is ever-changing, with new innovators, particularly among women, making their mark in a traditionally male-dominated field. In this occasional series, we shine the spotlight on the most savvy and accomplished women pioneers in cleantech and sustainability. Some are building their own start-ups, others are climbing the ranks of high-profile companies, and still others are investors. Whether they are on the front lines or behind the scenes, they inspire us to keep striving forward, to break the ever existent glass ceiling, and change how the world lives.

As always we are open to your suggestions of who you feel are the female game-changers. Who do you think should be on the list?

*Special thanks to Shawn Lesser of Watershed Capital for his support and mentorship for this series.

1. Virginia Klausmeier, CEO, Sylvatex

Quite possibly the youngest CEO in the biofuel/Green chemistry industry, Virginia Klausmeier has spent the past five years developing the Sylvatex fuel technology with her late father, Dr. William Klausmeier. Sylvatex is currently commercializing a proprietary renewable fuel for the US diesel and biodiesel markets. The company has won numerous awards at industry conferences and venture funding competitions, including Silicon Valley LAUNCH and PortTechLA, as well as funding and support through San Francisco’s Greenstart accelerator program. Virginia earned her B.S in Chemistry and Physiology and M.S. in Biomechanics at the University of Oregon and has is also active in San Francisco’s BioDiesel Task force and Biodiesel Coop.

2. Kef Kasdin, CEO, Proterro BioFuels

Kef Kasdin is CEO of Proterro, a venture-backed start-up located in Princeton, New Jersey. It develops non-plant-based, noncellulosic fermentation-ready sugar feedstock, which enables the economical and scalable production of biofuels and chemicals. The company, which is transitioning from discovery to the engineering phase, has functioning prototype sucrose-producing organisms and a working model bioreactor system.  Proterro’s Protose sugar is a sustainable, inexpensive, geoflexible, feedstock that can be used to produce a variety of commercial scale fuels and chemicals through standard industrial fermentation methods. Before Proterro, Kef spent nine years at 3Com Corp, including managing $1B division. She also spent 10 years as venture capitalist, and is general partner/cofounder of Battelle Ventures and affiliate Innovation Valley Partners, with company-creation, lab-spinout, and energy-market expertise.

3. Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones, CEO and Co-Founder, LiveFuels

Lissa Morgenthalter-Jones leads strategic planning and corporate development for the LiveFuels, a company with the goal of developing the most efficient and scalable algae-based biofuel process. Since 1990, she has also specialized in biotechnology investing since 1990. After learning about turning algae and animal waste into fuel, she started her own clean energy venture capital fund in 2004. She raised $10 million from the Quercus Trust and individual investors in May 2007.  To date, her company has established pilot operations across the U.S., generated extensive intellectual property, and is well on its way to producing an economically feasible and sustainable algal fuel.

4. K’ Lynne Johnson, CEO, Elevance Renewable Sciences

K’Lynne is leading Illinois based Elevance, with her 19 years of experience in the oil and petrochemicals industry (Amoco, BP and Innovene). The company is striving to be the first to successfully bridge the renewables and chemicals industries. With its Nobel-prize winning technology the company transforms natural plant-based oils, like soybean, rapeseed (canola), palm, corn, or algae, into specialty high-performance, cost-effective commercial products, such as advanced biofuels, deterents and cleaners, personal care products, and others.

5. Jennifer Case, co-founder and CEO, New Leaf Biofuel

In 2010, co-founder Jennifer Case took the helm at New Leaf Biofuel as CEO. She has helped grow the company to 24 employees and increase its customer base, including US Navy, the City of Chula Vista, Allied Waste, and dozens of other commercial and municipal fleets in Southern California. Jennifer Case obtained a BA in Political Science from UC San Diego, and a law degree from Pepperdine University. In her legal practice, Jennifer represented individuals, business and public entity clients in such areas as general business litigation, real estate, construction and technology. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Case was an administrator of a start-up fiber optics company in the Silicon Valley.

6. Pamela R. Contag, Ph.D, microbiologist, Founder of Xenogen Corp and Cobalt Biofuels

Cobalt Technologies, located in Mountain View, CA, is leading the transportation industry for cleaner, more efficient renewable fuels. It is a venture-backed company that produces biobutanol from renewable feedstock. Xenogen Corp, located in Alameda, CA,  was founded in 1998, and is a leader in the field of biophotonic imaging. Pamela R. Contag, Ph.D., is a microbiologist who has been called a “serial entrepreneur,” having founded two biotech and two biofuel startups.  She is the founder of Xenogen Corp. and Cobalt Biofuels, Inc. She is also the founder and CEO of Cygnet Biofuels and ConcentRX, Inc.,  a biotechnology company developing a unique cancer therapy.  She founded Xenogen Corporation with two colleagues while at Stanford University, where they invented in vivo biophotonic imaging. Pamela has filed a patent on a process she developed that utilizes algae to produce polysaccharides that can be easily converted to alcohol fuels or to biolipids, and then to biodiesel. She was also named one of the “Top 25 Women in Small Business” by Fortune Magazine.

7. Cynthia (CJ) Warner, President, of Sapphire Energy
Cynthia (C.J.) Warner joined Sapphire Energy in February 2009 as President. She brings more than 27 years of experience in the energy, refining and transportation industries. At Sapphire Energy, Ms. Warner is tasked with driving the company’s initiative to transition technology trials and research into commercial-scale crude oil operations. Using only sunlight, CO2 and non-potable water, Sapphire Energy is one of the world’s largest leaders in algae-based crude oil.  A chemical engineer by training and one of the very few senior women in the oil and gas industry, CJ served as an executive with energy industry giants British Petroleum, Amoco Oil Company and UOP.  CJ is currently a member of the National Petroleum Council. She is a featured leader in the 2008 book ‘Becoming a Resonant Leader: Develop Your Emotional Intelligence′ (Harvard Business School Press). CJ has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and an MBA from Illinois Institute of Technology.

8. Dr. Claire Kinlaw, Lead Product Development, TerViva BioEnergy

Claire is an MBA-trained scientist and currently Project Lead for TerViva BioEnergy, a startup commercializing the high oil seed tree pongamia in the US as a feedstock for biodiesel refining.  Pongamia pinnata, a nitrogen fixing tree native to India that grows on marginal soils. TerVia is working to commercialize this tree as a renewable source of diesel fuel, planting across the southern USA on pasturelands and other lands not used for food production. Claire leads the R&D effort to improve the underlying asset, the tree for even greater, more predictable oil production and good growth characteristics in US locations. Prior to joining TerViva in 2010, Claire developed commercial strategies for biotechnology startups and small businesses, negotiated and managed research and business agreements, directed the USDA Institute of Forest Genetics, and led life science research projects with molecular genetics and genomic science focus. Claire holds an MBA from UC Berkeley, a PhD in biochemistry from Rice University, and a BA in chemistry from the University of Virginia.

9. Nicole Kennard, co-founder and former CEO, New Leaf Biofuel

Nicole Kennard founded New Leaf Biofuel in 2006 with four co-founders, with the aim to be the biggest provider of biodiesel in San Diego County, a dream that involves trucking tons of used fryer grease from 900 area restaurants to New Leaf’s San Diego processing facility and converting it into B99 (99 percent biodiesel fuel), which is then purchased by government and business fleets across the county, such as Sun Diego Charter Co and C & D Towing, and the Regional Transportation Center, San Diego’s only alternative fueling station.  She built the company to 10 employees and a company capacity to produce 140,000 gallons of fuel a month. Nicole has BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from UC San Diego and an MS in Mechanical Engineering with an emphasis on Renewable Energy from San Diego State University. Formerly, Nicole was the Coordinator of the Department of Energy’s Industrial Assessment Center (IAC), located at San Diego State University. She is also a renewable energy adviser and biodiesel consultant for the San Diego City School District and a co-founder of the Biofuels Action and Awareness Network, a student action group at UCSD focused on community outreach and education.

10. Susan B. Leschine, Founder and Chief Scientist, SunEthanol

Susan Leschine founded and was the Chief Scientist of SunEthanol, now QTeros. Currently, Dr. Leschine is a senior faculty member in the Microbiology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Dr. Leschine is internationally-known as an authority on the biology and diversity of cellulose-digesting microbes. Her research formed the basis for SunEthanol’s Q Microbe biodigesting technology.

© 2012, Lisa Ann Pinkerton. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by by David Gold, Lead Partner for Access Venture Partners Cleantech Investments. Read’s David Blog – Green Gold.

After decades of venture capital investment, growth and exit, the traditional focus areas of venture capital (such as IT, web and software) have developed strong entrepreneurial ecosystems. A high percentage of start-ups in these traditional areas come to market with one or more experienced entrepreneurs or with a strong and active network of investors/advisors who have “been there, done that.” They know what it takes to raise capital and to build a great fast-growing business. Cleantech companies, however, are much more likely to be led by first-time entrepreneurs who often struggle to create an ecosystem of experience people around them.

As a venture capitalist, I review hundreds of business plans each year and physically meet with roughly a hundred entrepreneurs seeking capital. I have the advantage of doing this through the eyes of someone who has been on the other side of the table, having raised venture capital for my own start-up before becoming a VC. And while there are certainly numerous exceptions, there are themes I see across cleantech start-ups that are not specific to their technology or market but which nonetheless impede their ability to raise capital. Here is the top five…

Technology is necessary, but not sufficient.

Many cleantech entrepreneurs are engineers or scientists. Although not the result of a formal survey, my perception is that many more have PhDs than what you find in internet start-ups. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of having achieved such a lofty degree, but many seem to believe that their phenomenal technology and their outstanding technical skills alone should justify an investment in their company. It isn’t. Weak entrepreneurs can take the most game changing technology in the world and drive it into the ground. Conversely, outstanding ones can take a good, but not great, technology and make a world-class business out of it (anyone heard of Microsoft?). So… in scientific terms, having compelling technology is a necessary but not sufficient condition for entrepreneurial success. Human capital must always precede venture capital.

Your 50-page business plan is a waste of time.

Will someone please tell all the college business professors that the traditional business plan is a dinosaur! No VC has time to read such a tome. Nothing ever turns out completely as expected, so writing a long document as if it will prescribe the future is silly. And by the time you finish investing the time to create such a detailed document it is most assuredly out of date.

Conversely, too little time is invested into building a robust spreadsheet financial model. Not a static five-year P&L – that is almost useless. Rather, what an early stage company needs is a financial model that can be used to run “what-if” scenarios, e.g. “What if our margins are less?” “What if it takes us a year longer to get to market?” A tool like this accepts that the future is uncertain and that entrepreneurship is about taking risk. As an entrepreneur, which would you rather have, a 50-page wish or a model of your potential risks?

The thought process that goes into fleshing out the basic elements of a business plan (e.g, market, competitive advantage, go-to-market strategy, financial model, etc.) is what is paramount. Entrepreneurs that recognize this look at their business strategy and financial model as planning tools more than as fund-raising tools. And they realize that communicating the results of that thinking must be done concisely.

Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Start-up businesses are no different.

Related post: “Cleantech Financing Strategies in the Global Economy“, covers some of the global aspects affecting cleantech financing and looks at various challenges and opportunities lying ahead.

A real advisory board isn’t just a list of cool names.

Some cleantech entrepreneurs get advice along the way that they should form an advisory board: Get some people with cool experience and ask them if you can slap their names in your business plan. That’s not an advisory board – it’s just a list of cool names.

A real advisory board not only has relevant experience and business contacts but also is actively engaged in the business, albeit on a very limited basis. They meet regularly with company leaders, have provided concrete material assistance to the company and they have a specific personal interest in the company. Such personal interest can take many forms, such as a stock option, a direct investment, a future executive role, prior significant personal relationship with a founder or clear strategic interest for their current employer.

Volunteer advisors who have no economic, business or personal connection to the company are cute. They are like the parsley on your breakfast plate – they make it look nice, but add little substance and… at least for this VC… leave a bad taste in my mouth!

25% gross margins and growth to $20M in seven years aren’t exciting

At the highest level, there are three types of start-up companies. There are high-growth businesses with venture potential. There are downright bad businesses. And there are steady growth businesses, which are not “bad” businesses – they just aren’t great venture investments.

Venture capital funds are mostly 10-year partnerships. We need to target businesses that we believe can generate huge multiples (typically 10x or more) on our investment in less than that timeframe so we get both liquidity and sufficient returns to make up for those investments that aren’t as successful. That means companies that can use our capital to drive extraordinary growth, unfair competitive advantages and healthy margins yielding an exit return far beyond a simple discounted cash flow analysis on the business.

My second cousins are billionaires. They built one of the first mail-order office supply companies to a dominant leader in its industry over 40 years (you can read their story in this book). They never raised a penny of equity capital. It was a great steady growth business that made them extraordinarily wealthy. Steady growth businesses can lead to phenomenal personal wealth, but that doesn’t make them good venture capital investments.

Last, but by no means least…raising capital is a social sport.

Quick quiz: What is the single most important element of raising venture capital? Your pitch deck? Your technology? No, no… your management team’s experience, right? Wrong… it’s your relationships with potential investors. Who you know is often more important than what you know in business.

The classic fund-raising mode for most cleantech entrepreneurs is to send their business plan to lots of funds, pitch at various cleantech business plan events and then wait to see who pursues them. They let the VCs drive the process. Few look at this as the sales process that it is. Don’t spam slews of potential investors. Rather, identify the funds that should be your top targets based on the investment interest they describe on their website. Pursue them like you should a prospective customer: qualify them, identify their hot buttons and always be closing on a time-bounded next step with them. And, as all great sales people know, getting an introduction is infinitely better than a cold call.

So, does that mean that only entrepreneurs who already have VC relationships can get funded? No, but that sure as heck helps a lot! And in this day and age, if you can’t get an introduction to me or another VC, you then you aren’t a very good entrepreneur. There are almost 500,000 people who know somebody who knows me on LinkedIn and can get you an introduction. Many VCs are equally well-connected – it’s part of what we do. So, which business summary do you think I take more seriously — the one that comes in from our website without an introduction or the one referred to me by someone I know?

And with that, you now have as a perk for reading my blog, a free roadmap for increasing your odds of raising capital from me!

Related post: “Early Stage Cleantech Venture and the Next Billion Dollar Businesses“, looks at how cleantech has the potential to produce the next billion dollar companies and become the engine of growth for the US.

POWER

© 2011, David Gold. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Chris de Morsella, Green Economy Post Chris is the co-editor of The Green Executive Recruiter Directory. Follow Chris on Twitter @greeneconpost

Researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the DOE’s Office of Science in 2007, have identified a potential new advanced biofuel that could replace today’s standard petroleum derived Number 2 (D2) diesel fuel. Using the tools of synthetic biology, a JBEI research team engineered strains of two microbes, a bacteria and a yeast, to produce a precursor to bisabolane, a member of the terpene class of chemical compounds that are found in plants and used in fragrances and flavorings. Preliminary tests by the team showed that bisabolane’s properties make it a promising biosynthetic alternative to Number 2 (D2) diesel fuel.

Unlike D2 diesel fuel the newly identified advanced synthetic biology derived biofuel is a renewable resource that could be produced domestically in the United States from bio-sources. The US military is has stated that they are willing to be an early adopter of biofuels to replace jet fuel as well as diesel if it can be produced it in large enough quantities. The military recognizes the strategic value of being able to secure a reliable domestically controlled supply of fuel and realizes better than just about anyone else the precarious situation of the global liquid fossil fuel supplies and the uncertainty of the region from where most of it comes from.

“This is the first report of bisabolane as a biosynthetic alternative to D2 diesel, and the first microbial overproduction of bisabolene in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae,” says Taek Soon Lee, who directs JBEI’s metabolic engineering program and is a project scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Physical Biosciences Division. “This work is also a proof-of-principle for advanced biofuels research in that we’ve shown that we can design a biofuel target, evaluate this fuel target, and produce the fuel with microbes that we’ve engineered.”

Lee is the corresponding author of a paper reporting this research in the journal Nature Communications entitled “Identification and microbial production of a terpene-based advanced biofuel.” Co-authoring this paper were Pamela Peralta-Yahya, Mario Ouellet, Rossana Chan, Aindrila Mukhopadhyay and Jay Keasling.

The rising costs and growing dependence upon foreign sources of petroleum-based fuels, coupled with scientific fears over how the burning of these fuels impacts global climate, are driving the search for carbon-neutral renewable alternatives. Advanced biofuels – liquid transportation fuels derived from the cellulosic biomass of perennial grasses and other non-food plants, as well as from agricultural waste – are highly touted for their potential to replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. Unlike ethanol, which can only be used in limited amounts in gasoline engines and can’t be used at all in diesel or jet engines, plus would corrode existing oil pipelines and tanks, advanced biofuels are drop-in fuels compatible with today’s engines, and delivery and storage infrastructures.

“We desperately need drop-in, renewable biofuels that can directly replace petroleum-derived fuels, particularly for vehicles that cannot be electrified,” says co-author Keasling, CEO of JBEI and a leading authority on advanced biofuels. “The technology we describe in our Nature Communications paper is a significant advance in that direction.”

Related post: “12 Synthetic Biology Biofuel & Biochemical Companies to Watch“, reviews 12 U.S. based synthetic biology, biofuel & biochemical companies that are developing third and fourth generation biofuels, bioindustrial & household chemical, and food additive products; using synthetic biology to produce engineered microorganisms and specialty enzymatic products.

JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the DOE’s Office of Science in 2007. Researchers at JBEI are pursuing the fundamental science needed to make production of advanced biofuels cost-effective on a national scale. One of the avenues being explored is sesquiterpenes, terpene compounds that contain 15 carbon atoms (diesel fuel typically contains 10 to 24 carbon atoms).

“Sesquiterpenes have a high-energy content and physicochemical properties similar to diesel and jet fuels,” Lee says. “Although plants are the natural source of terpene compounds, engineered microbial platforms would be the most convenient and cost-effective approach for large-scale production of advanced biofuels.”

In earlier work, Lee and his group engineered a new mevalonate pathway (a metabolic reaction critical to biosynthesis) in both E. coli and S. cerevisiae that resulted in these two microorganisms over-producing a chemical compound called farnesyl diphosphate (FPP), which can be treated with enzymes to synthesize a desired terpene. In this latest work, Lee and his group used that mevalonate pathway to create bisabolene, which is a precursor to bisabolane.

“We proposed that the generality of the microbial FPP overproduction platforms would allow for the biosynthesis of sesquiterpenes,” Lee says. “Through multiple rounds of large-scale preparation in shake flasks, we were able to prepare approximately 20 milliliters of biosynthetic bisabolene, which we then hydrogenated to produce bisabolane.”

When they began this work, Lee and his colleagues did not know whether bisabolane could be used as a biofuel, but they targeted it on the basis of its chemical structure. Their first step was to perform fuel property tests on commercially available bisabolene, which comes as part of a mixture of compounds. Convinced they were onto something, the researchers then used biosynthesis to extract pure biosynthetic bisabolene from microbial cultures for hydrogenation into bisabolane. Subsequent fuel property tests on the bisabolane were again promising.

“Bisabolane has properties almost identical to D2 diesel but its branched and cyclic chemical structure gives it much lower freezing and cloud points, which should be advantageous for use as a fuel,” Lee says. “Once we confirmed that bisabolane could be a good fuel, we designed a mevalonate pathway to produce the precursor, bisabolene. This was basically the same platform used to produce the anti-malarial drug artemisinin except that we introduced a terpene synthase and further engineered the pathway to improve the bisabolene yield both in E. coli and yeast.”

Lee and his colleagues are now preparing to make gallons of bisabolane for tests in actual diesel engines, using the new fermentation facilities at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit. The ABPDU is a 15,000 square-foot state-of-the art facility, located in Emeryville, California, designed to help expedite the commercialization of advanced next-generation biofuels by providing industry-scale test beds for discoveries made in the laboratory.

“Once the complete fuel properties of hydrogenated biosynthetic bisabolene can be obtained, we’ll be able to do an economic analysis that takes into consideration production variables such as the cost and type of feedstock, biomass depolymerization method, and the microbial yield of biofuel,” Lee says. “We will also be able to estimate the impact of byproducts present in the hydrogenated commercial bisabolene, such as farnesane and aromatized bisabolene.”

Ultimately, Lee and his colleagues would like to replace the chemical processing step of bisabolene hydrogenation with an alkene reductase enzyme engineered into the E.coli and yeast so that all of the chemistry is performed within the microbes.

“Enzymatic hydrogenation of this type of molecule is a very challenging project and will be a long term goal,” Lee says. “Our near-term goal is to develop strains of E.coli and yeast for use in commercial-scale fermenters. Also, we will be investigating the use of sugars from biomass as a source of carbon for producing bisabolene.”

Related post: “Why You Need to Pay Attention to Bio Natural Gas“, suggests that biologically derived natural gas is a potentially disruptive renewable energy technology that may be poised to expand out of the niche markets it has so far been constrained in.

JBEI is a scientific partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and including the Sandia National Laboratories, the UC campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

© 2011, Chris de Morsella. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Angela Parker, co founder of Realized Worth and Chris Jarvis, Senior Consultant for Realized Worth, Follow Chris on Twitter @RealizedWorth

When you decide to venture out past Facebook there is a lot to learn about social media. At first it seems daunting, but everyone learns the same way: by doing. Just remember, each social media platform has unique rules and processes for communication. They are all relatively similar and once you get the hang of it, youʼll find it becomes fairly intuitive.

Learn the rules

Remember, the rules of society are essentially the same within social media:

• Listen and learn – a lot!
• Be gracious & generous
• Reciprocate & Connect people
• Be personable & Engage others
• Offer actual value
• Donʼt sell stuff

Here is a great infographic on the Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media we found on http://visual.ly/

Find your community

We love using twitter. But starting out it can be pretty tough finding quality people to follow. Here are some links that offer great information and lead to other sites with great information. Take some time to browse through them – youʼre community of quality people will increase effortlessly.

Check out our related resources: What Twitter Does for Corporate Social Responsibility and The Ultimate Green Twitter Hashtag List: Build Your Online Green Twitter Following that provides 150+ Twitter hashtags that can help you gain Twitter followers interested in cleantech, sustainability, green building, climate change and other green topics.

• Find anything on twitter:# http://search.twitter.com/
• Find lists of people to follow on twitter: http://tweepml.org/
• Find the right people/places/issues: http://www.twellow.com/
• Find topics and communities: http://www.tweetizen.com/
• Find executives to follow: http://exectweets.com/
• Find people and communities: http://mrtweet.com/
• Find anyone, anywhere: http://www.peekyou.com/
• Discover lists of people on Twitter: http://listorious.com/
• List interests and find others who share them: http://wefollow.com/
• Lists created by other people and easy to follow with just one click: http://tweepml.org/
• Find more executives you want to follow (be sure to check out the ‘lists’ for even more people to follow): http://twitter.com/#!/exectweets
• Figure out what the hashtag means: http://tagal.us/
• Find upcoming trends and perform custom searches http://twitterfall.com/
• 8 Easy Ways to Network on Twitter http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/8-easy-ways-to-network-on-twitter/

More ideas

If you want to find and connect with an incredible online community focused on CSR, Corporate Citizenship, Sustainability, Employee Volunteering, and all things Green – here are 16 great sites that will help you build your network.

If you want to connect to stakeholders using social media here are some new realities to remember.

If you’re planning on putting together a conference and you want to know how to make it social media friendly, read this.

If you’re planning an awards program for CSR, Corporate Citizenship or Corporate volunteering these tips may come in useful.

Related posts: “Tapping Social Media’s Potential To Muster a Vast Green Army“, looks at rapidly expanding universe of citizens’ groups, researchers, and environmental organizations are making use of social media and smart phone applications to document changes in the natural world and to mobilize support for taking action.

About the Authors

by Angela Parker, co founder of Realized Worth and Chris Jarvis, Senior Consultant for Realized Worth, Follow Chris on Twitter @RealizedWorth

Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing: An Unofficial, Practical Guide to Selling & Developing B2B Business on LinkedIn - Free 40 Page Preview

© 2011, GEP- Admin. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Elaine Cohen, Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd. Read Elaine’s blog. Follow Elaine on Twitter. Elaine is the author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices

The GRI has published its fifth Sustainability Report covering the fiscal year July 2009 – June 2010. It’s a departure from the join-the-dots indicator-by-indicator style reporting of previous reports (where the report used the GRI Index as a template and responses are number by number). Instead, this report actually has a (nice) title other than “Sustainability Report” and it has around 16 pages of narrative, 15 pages of GRI Index and 10 pages of Annex (a collection of data tables and a governance description). It is a self-declared not-externally-assured report at Application Level A.

This report is entitled “Paper, Planes and People“, the “three things that are important to ongoing success of the GRI”. (Ice-cream apparently is not essential for the GRI). GRI’s consumption of all these “things” has been increasing as the organization has been growing and expanding in reach. 12 staff were added in fiscal 09/10 (30% more people) and 1,082 kg of paper (23% more than prior year). CO2 emissions resulting from air travel were 613 tonnes (double 2007/8 but a 13% reduction over prior year, excluding GRI conference -related travel).

For those of us who have an interest in the success of the GRI – organizational stakeholders, sustainability reporters, sustainability professionals etc – the GRI own report does provide some nice insights about the workings of the organization, a 52 strong staff based in Amsterdam. Clearly, GRI is conscious of its own direct sustainability footprint and is doing many of the right things to keep it in check. These include:

• producing an annual sustainability report;
• offsetting all GRI conference emissions;
• increasing amount of recycled materials in communications to 92%;
• use of Webex and Skype to avoid business travel;
• staff commuting is via bicycle, bus, train or walking shoes;
• diversity in hiring;
• health and safety (ergonomics) benefits for employees;
• etc.

The report is also includes details of GRI’s financials for the year.

GRI’s sustainability performance goals for 2010/2011 include offsetting business travel emissions, providing more precise and comparable data on energy consumption, sustainable procurement policy, finalizing the sustainability, environmental, diversity and human resources policies and improving sustainability performance management methodology. Improving gender balance on the Board is also stated as an aspiration.

This is all great and exactly what we could expect of an organization whose core message is sustainability and transparency. It’s good to see GRI walking the talk in this way.

The real questions for me as I consider the GRI report is to what extent we, GRI Stakeholders, should be content with a report about direct impacts and outputs (the things that the GRI is saying, doing, using) versus a report about the outcomes the GRI can reasonably claim to have influenced. To what extent should we expect the GRI to be a model of reporting, delivering a balanced representation of its impacts and outcomes, as a showcase for all current and potential reporters of what can be done with the GRI Framework? Now, in fairness, the GRI published earlier this year a Year in Review report which covers the same timeframe and describes the activities of the GRI – the reach of the Reporting Framework and the way reports are used, with case studies and details of advocacy activities etc. To get the whole picture, you need to look at both reports. My thoughts below, about what I might have expected from the GRI GRI report, relate to both reports, as if they had been published as one.

Use of a Materiality Matrix: The important issues for an organization and its stakeholders should be reflected in a Materiality Matrix (as recommended in the GRI framework). In the GRI GRI Report, the material issues are listed as a set of 11 generic issues (such as “materials”, “energy”, “transport”, “employment” etc) which were developed for the GRI report covering the year 2007. Once again, the GRI writes “Following internal discussion, it was decided that the same issues remained material for GRI in this reporting period.”. Ideally, one would expect some external stakeholder engagement in the determination of material issues.

Equally, material issues do change from year to year. Between 2007 and 2010 the world, and the business world, as well as the GRI itself, has changed quite signifcantly. The global financial crisis and pressures on sustainability budgets. The rise of social media. The development of online reporting. The stronger moves to integrated reporting with new organizations taking a new lead. The changes in local legislation relating to reporting in several countries. The publication and development of ISO26000 and other sector codes and frameworks including the changes in the UN Global Compact reporting requirements. Geopolitical changes and the development of emerging economies. New pressures from investor groups. Personnel changes at the GRI. There are a whole host of issues which could be immediately tabled as issues important to the sustainability of the GRI as an organization and of importance to GRI stakeholders, beyond the direct impact of the GRI and how many kg of paper the organization recycles. I believe this should be reviewed more thoroughly for the next GRI Report.

Related post: “The New Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)3.1 Guidelines Explained“, describes the new Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) 3.1 guidelines covering the new GRI Technical Protocol.

A review of risks that the organization faces: This is required by Reporting Indicator 1.2 and the GRI claims to report this in full. However, the word risk does not appear in the GRI report with the exception of the GRI Index. Disclosure of the risks the organization faces should be part of sustainability reporting. This might include: Reputation risks, Funding risks, Lack of increased reporting uptake risks, Travel risks, Currency Risks, People, paper and planes risks, Climate change risks, Ice cream overdose risks (Ok, that one may only apply to my business).

Commentary on the number of GRI-based reports published: This is the top-of-mind hard measure that reflects the outcome of GRI activity. The GRI downloadable reports list shows 1,121 GRI-based reports published in 2008, 1,519 in 2009 and 1,865 in 2010. This represents substantial growth and expansion of GRI influence. The GRI often claims that significantly more reports are influenced by or inspired by the GRI Framework, even if the GRI Index is not included and I believe this is true. Also, new reporters take some time to deliver first reports so there may be quite a number of new reports in the pipeline. Overall, so far, an estimated 6,000 reports are published annually, globally, so the GRI share is still small, through growing at a faster rate than overall growth. Having said that, the real potential is with those tens of thousands of companies which are not yet reporting and the step change in reporting numbers has not advanced beyond relatively small incremental changes in the number of reports each year. The reach of reporting is covered to some degree in the Year in Review report which also contains some interesting perspectives about how reporting contributes to delivering improved performance and impacts on society. However, the deadline for the GRI’s objective to have every large and medium sized company in OECD countries required to report on sustainability performance by 2015 is looming dangerously close.

Commentary on the quality of GRI-based reports published: I have, of course mentioned report quality before. It fact, it’s sort of a mantra. The GRI’s Mission is “To make sustainability reporting standard practice by providing guidance and support to organizations.” This doesn’t refer to quality, so maybe quality of reports is not an acceptable measure for the GRI. But can GRI really have no interest in the way the framework is used? Is it just about pushing out reports or is it about creating a useful, comparable, decision-making-platform level of business transparency which also supports sustainability performance improvement? If it’s the latter, some commentary about GRI approach to reporting quality and use (and abuse) of the guidelines might be appropriate.

Assurance: Assurance is part of the credibility process of transparency. Even limited assurance is a stepping stone. GRI doesn’t assure its report due to “budgetary constraints”. However, limited assurance by a stakeholder panel, which I am sure GRI would have no trouble in organizing, would not have to cost so much money, if any. I am sure there are many who would do this pro bono. For GRI, this, I feel, is more about demonstrating a commitment to assurance rather than about actual verification of the numbers, which are not overly complex or significant in a small organization. GRI does say it aims to use assurance for the next report.

Report publication timing: My personal view is that a reasonable timing for the publication of an annual Sustainability Report is up to six months after the end of the reporting period. For a small organization, where a global roll-up of data is not necessary (GRI includes only the Amsterdam hub and not other global Focal Points), this could be even quicker. Clearly, GRI is a very busy organization and achieves much with a small team. Reporting always needs resources, not only budgets, and in small organizations, this is probably the most difficult thing to allocate when facing a multitude of priorities. However, as reporting is the backbone of the GRI message, perhaps it could be managed in a more timely way in future. This GRI report is published in August 2011 for a reporting period ending in June 2010. 14 months.

It does seem, however, that GRI is considering some changes to its reporting in future and has established an internal Sustainability Management and Reporting Team (SMART). Things such as wider stakeholder consultation and assurance as mentioned above appear to be on the SMART to-do list. Perhaps some of the points I mention above might also become agenda items for the SMART discussions. In the current report, CEO Ernst Ligteringen states: “GRI’s biggest impact is helping more organizations to report and thereby help change their sustainability performance.” As a GRI Organizational Stakeholder, and reasonably seasoned reporter, I make no apologies for hoping that GRI will to aspire to exemplary reporting. OK. Just one small apology. Sorry!

Related post: “Setting a Strategy for Sustainability“, argues why businesses should move beyond the duality of environmental concerns and making money to expos the false divide between environmental and business thinking.

© 2011, Elaine_Cohen. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

By Ferris Eanfar, Financial Policy Council; TMax Capital

From London to Athens, Dublin and Madrid, the Euro Zone has been rocked by riots and political turmoil because global banks and Western politicians have driven their economies into the ground. Although the situation in The Middle East is even more tragic, most Americans have believed their lives are relatively unaffected by the suffering in distant places with names like Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, and Tehran.

From London to Athens, Dublin and Madrid, the Euro Zone has been rocked by riots and political turmoil because global banks and Western politicians have driven their economies into the ground.i ii Although the situation in The Middle East is even more tragic, most Americans have believed their lives are relatively unaffected by the suffering in distant places with names like Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, and Tehran.

In Periods of Crisis, Normalcy Bias is Your Worst Enemy

Normalcy bias causes people to severely underestimate the impact of a crisis. They blindly assume crisis conditions will improve despite being exposed to well-substantiated reasons to believe that inaction will lead to severe damage. This creates cognitive dissonance in their minds, which can only be eliminated in two ways: a) Become a victim of normalcy bias and ignore the warnings and evacuation recommendations or b) overcome the normalcy bias and escape the danger.

Normalcy bias causes people to severely underestimate the impact of a crisis. They blindly assume crisis conditions will improve despite being exposed to well-substantiated reasons to believe that inaction will lead to severe damage. This creates cognitive dissonance in their minds, which can only be eliminated in two ways: a) Become a victim of normalcy bias and ignore the warnings and evacuation recommendations or b) overcome the normalcy bias and escape the danger.

Europe’s Fires Will Spread to the U.S.

The Euro Zone is deteriorating rapidly and there is no rational reason to believe that conditions will improve any time in the foreseeable future. The World Bank, IMF and ECB will not be able to magically solve the structural economic challenges that are causing the problems in the Euro Zone. Even relatively strong countries like Germany are being pulled down into the flames and will not escape unscathed due to the interconnected economies within the European Union.v Europe is burning, but it is a relatively small smoldering ember compared to the raging economic and political infernos that are very likely to start sparking up all over the United States later this year.

The Euro Zone is deteriorating rapidly and there is no rational reason to believe that conditions will improve any time in the foreseeable future. The World Bank, IMF and ECB will not be able to magically solve the structural economic challenges that are causing the problems in the Euro Zone. Even relatively strong countries like Germany are being pulled down into the flames and will not escape unscathed due to the interconnected economies within the European Union.v Europe is burning, but it is a relatively small smoldering ember compared to the raging economic and political infernos that are very likely to start sparking up all over the United States later this year.

Comparing the Great Depression with Economic Conditions Today

When you walk down most streets in America today it may not seem like a Great Depression is upon us, but there is no escaping the reality that the fundamental social and economic conditions throughout the world today actually have more catalyzing force to trigger a global economic crash than the conditions that triggered the Great Depression that began in 1929. Major market collapses are rarely perceived as obvious trends when we are living through them. Not until years after the event when historians impassively summarize the speed and magnitude of a crash are we able to clearly see the trends. This is because historians are compelled to conceptually compress all the discrete events that comprise the “crashing process” into a singular “crash” so that the events and accompanying lessons can be more easily understood by our posterity.

Most Americans and Europeans are currently living the story of the frog in the frying pan: When the water is gradually heated to the boiling point very few frogs perceive the heat; so they do not try to escape the frying pan until it is too late. Historian John Brooks captures this psychological process in his description of the Great Depression years in 1929-1933:

The following table compares the economic conditions in the U.S. and most other countries around the world today with the conditions at the beginning of the Great Depression:

The economic conditions that led to the global economic collapse in the late 1920s were bad, but there is no question that the fundamental economic conditions today are significantly worse.

The following chart illustrates the debt problem in the U.S. by providing some historical context and by identifying the sources of debt that are crushing the U.S. economy. Any one of the sources of debt depicted in the chart, which are even higher in 2011, would be enough to drag down the productivity and economic prosperity of a nation. However, when combined, these massive amounts of debt represent an insurmountable national crisis that is virtually guaranteed to end in economic collapse, devastating wars, widespread riots, and a prolonged economic depression that is likely to last at least a decade.

The following chart simplifies the data in the previous chart to help illustrate the magnitude of the debt problem in the U.S. today. The debt problems are even worse in the Euro Zone nations and elsewhere where riots have already begun to erupt frequently.

Sources: U.S. Treasury, Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics

The following chart illustrates how the Nixon Administration’s decision to abandon the gold standard in 1971 has culminated in economic disaster.

U.S. Treasury Bonds are NOT a Safe Haven

Investing in U.S. Treasuries is not a safe strategy at all. Bill Gross of PIMCO, the world’s largest mutual fund, has already dumped all his U.S. Treasuries, and he said, “I cannot conceive of lending money to the U.S. government for 30 years” because of the growing debt burden and unprecedented spending by the U.S. government. Warren Buffet and many other prominent investors are jumping out of the Treasuries game as well.

Anybody who thinks U.S. Treasuries are still a safe haven is suffering from a severe case of normalcy bias. The cumulative debt burden illustrated above has resulted in U.S. federal government debt exceeding 100% of U.S. GDP, total U.S. debt (government, consumer, and corporate) exceeding 300% of GDP, and various other problems. Even if we ignore all the political factors that significantly diminish investor confidence in the U.S. Government’s ability to manage its finances responsibly, which the ratings agencies include in their analysis, the U.S. debt burden alone will force all the ratings agencies to downgrade U.S. Treasuries. Truly independent ratings agencies like Weiss Ratings have already announced multi-notch downgrades of U.S. Treasuries and have accused Moody’s, S&P and Fitch of negligently under-stating the risks associated to investing in U.S. Treasuries.

The inevitable ratings downgrades on U.S. Treasuries will continue to occur, which will mandate increased interest rates for the U.S. Government thus making it much more expensive for the U.S. Government to fund its endless budget deficits. This will inevitably push the national debt to nearly $20 trillion by 2015. In fact, this is probably an optimistic figure because it does not take into account the inevitable rating downgrades and corresponding financial burden from interest rate hikes, nor the inevitable increases in consumer household debt and corporate debt between now and 2015.

“Inevitable” is the operative word here to emphasize that no amount of wishful thinking or “but, what if . . .“ theories will reduce the inevitability of these risks to global investors. The risk of direct default and/or indirect default (through inflating away the debt) by the U.S. Government is inevitable, which means that U.S. Treasuries will perform terribly over the next 10 to 30 years. The recent investor flight into Treasuries is merely a knee-jerk response based on the market’s collective normalcy bias, i.e., millions of people still insist on assuming the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government will protect their investment, but there is absolutely no rational reason to believe that U.S. Treasuries will keep pace with inflation, which will inevitably result in real investor losses caused by the ongoing economic crisis now and into the foreseeable future.

Economic growth in the U.S. and most Western nations will be flat or negative during the next decade as both private and public credit freezes. Even if Western nations suddenly adopted a savings mentality like there was up until the 1980s, it would take at least a decade to save enough money to start lending in volumes that would significantly increase economy-wide productivity. It is not enough for a handful of large companies to squeeze a few more percentage points of profitability from automation, workforce reductions and other efficiency gains and call that “economic growth”, which is what self-interested politicians and bullish pundits have been trying to do since the 2008 spasm of this ongoing global economic crisis.

The United States Has Lost Control of Its Destiny

The following chart illustrates the declining value of the U.S. Dollar since 1973. When the USD declines in value, two major consequences occur: 1) all your existing cash and non-cash assets become worth much less (asset deflation) and 2) everything you buy and consume on a regular basis becomes much more expensive (CPI inflation) because the U.S. is completely dependent upon foreign countries to produce everything you see in your homes and supermarkets. Literally everything in mainstream America today is dependent upon the manufacturing and petroleum production capabilities of other countries that do not have America’s best interests at heart.

The following chart illustrates two critical dynamics that have forced the U.S. to relinquish substantial control of its economy: The U.S. trade deficit and the corresponding sell-off of U.S. assets to foreign investors. This correlation between the trade deficit and foreign-owned U.S. corporations, real estate, and other assets is an inevitable consequence of running long-term trade deficits. The reason these consequences are inevitable is because nations holding USD-denominated foreign reserves can only use those reserves in two ways: 1) Buy U.S. Treasuries (finance our debt) and 2) buy U.S. companies, real estate, and other assets.

The massive sell-off of U.S. assets over the past 30 years to foreign investors, amounting to over $20 trillion (only U.S. securities depicted in the chart above), has forced U.S. policy makers to lose their ability to effectively act in the U.S.’ own self-interest, which has resulted in the U.S. effectively losing its sovereignty.xiii This is one of several reasons why U.S. politicians have been impotent to avert the economic crisis that is threating the U.S. economy today despite the fact that hundreds of economists and business leaders have publicly predicted everything that is happening today. Given the conflicting interests imposed upon American policy makers from domestic and foreign special interest groups, there is no rational reason to expect these trends to change in time to avert an economic collapse. In fact, this trend will certainly accelerate.

During an Economic Crisis Commodities are Precious

The only reason anybody would continue to keep their cash and cash equivalent assets tied to the sinking U.S. Dollar is if they are (1) ignorant, (2) in denial, or (3) brain-dead. Normalcy bias is one of the most powerful delusions, which often keeps people tied to the U.S. Dollar until it is too late and their portfolio is totally worthless. Do not allow normalcy bias or the falling U.S. Dollar consume your wealth and destroy your ability to afford the quality of life you desire.

At my firm we tell clients to immediately convert their funds into Swiss Francs to protect their principle and then invest the funds in an investment vehicle that is primarily focused on gold. The gold investment vehicle does not necessarily need to be 100% backed by stored physical gold as long as:

1. The fund manager’s overall strategy does not depend on the rise and fall of the stock market, which is sometimes called a “non-correlated” or “negative beta” fund.
2. The fund manager has access to deeply discounted commodities pricing.
3. The fund manager’s strategy is exclusively focused on buying and selling gold and other strategic commodities that will provide an effective hedge against the falling U.S. Dollar, inflation, and realistic potential to capture some profit from the buying and selling of the actual physical commodities.

h2>Price is Paramount

In today’s unpredictable economic environment and into the foreseeable future, if you can consistently protect your principle from the falling U.S. Dollar and inflation and capture a few percentage points of profit you are doing very well. However, for a gold and commodities-based strategy to work, the fund manager absolutely must have direct access to deeply discounted prices on the commodities; otherwise the unpredictable fluctuations in the spot price of gold and other commodities will create too much acquisition risk and your portfolio could still be crippled by negative returns.

Also keep in mind that your returns will not suffer significantly when the price of gold occasionally falls as long as the firm can acquire gold substantially below the London Bullion Market spot price. This will enable the firm to make profits regardless of the price of gold as long as the fund manager adopts a strict “First-In-First-Out” inventory management policy to ensure optimal timing of the transactions and maximum profitability for their investors.

Advantages of Investing in a Gold Fund

To illustrate the advantages of investing in a properly structured gold investment fund, below is the same table of current adverse economic conditions presented previously. However, this time each adverse condition is accompanied by a brief explanation of how investing in a gold fund helps your portfolio perform well even in the worst economic conditions.

Conclusion: Creating Financial Certainty by Snatching Profits from the Jaws of Inflation & Deflation

Many people are confused about whether the U.S. is facing an inflationary or deflationary environment. The answer is “yes” to both. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) has and will continue to rise faster than in previous years because of inflationary pressure caused by the Fed’s aggressive quantitative easing and a declining USD relative to other global currencies. This will cause prices of imported and domestic consumable goods to rise significantly as foreign nations seek to offset the weakening USD.

However, virtually every hard asset you own except for precious metals is going to continue to suffer constant downward deflationary pressure for the foreseeable future. This virtually guarantees that all asset preservation strategies will be worthless because virtually all markets are going to fall, which means that all passive portfolio diversification strategies will fail to preserve your wealth.

Western nations will continue to see violent and sporadic bear market rallies and the people afflicted with normalcy bias will jump into them believing they have reached the end of the recession. They will be wrong and they will lose money. The only strategy that is guaranteed to work in this environment is active participation in the physical commodities markets where buying as low as possible and selling as high as possible can be repeated over and over again, regardless of what price the commodities may be trading at during any given period.

Active participation in the commodities markets means directly buying the physical commodities (or futures contracts) from suppliers and selling them directly to buyers, not purchasing securities that merely represent fractional ownership of a company that produces commodities. In an economic crisis environment, consistent profits can only come from the actual sale of commodities, not from the sporadic or non-existent appreciation of securities. Additionally, futures trading on the automated exchanges does not offer consistent price arbitraging opportunities due to the inherent price discovery efficiency of high frequency algorithmic trading systems. As a result, the only guaranteed strategy to make significant and consistent money in even the worst economic environments is to have unique access to deeply discounted physical commodities and sell them at substantial premiums directly to buyers.

Unfortunately, very few people have direct access to commodities suppliers for any valuable commodities, which means most people will not be able to profitably participate in the commodities markets. That means the only truly safe asset preservation strategy available to most people is to invest in a hedge fund that actively buys and sells commodities. However, hedge funds are typically very exclusive investment vehicles reserved only for select accredited investors; so most people will not have access to this form of investing. But for those who qualify, it can transform a nightmarish economic collapse into a very satisfying investing experience, yielding stable and positive returns.

About the author

Mr. Eanfar is on the Board of Directors of the Financial Policy Council and he is the Chief Operating Officer at TMax Capital, which specializes in gold, commodities transactions, and project financing. His professional experience spans diverse environments including technical development, media, finance, military and government affairs. Mr. Eanfar can be contacted at the website: http://tmaxcapital.com.

© 2011, GEP- Admin. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Jim Greenberger, Executive Director, National Alliance for Advanced Technology Batteries (NAATBatt), a not-for-profit trade association of companies involved in the manufacture of large format advanced batteries for automotive and grid-connected energy storage applications. Connect with Jim on Linkedin.

Over the past few months several analysts have predicted dire times for the U.S. advanced battery industry. Most negative assessments point to a purported government-funded overbuilding of manufacturing capacity for advanced lithium-ion batteries relative to the small and slowly developing domestic market for such products.

It is certainly true that the domestic market for electric vehicles and grid-connected energy storage, which was the target of much of the recent capacity build-out, will be slower to develop than many had hoped. The domestic automotive and electricity markets are among the most mature and complex sectors of the American economy. In mature markets, new technology tends to bring incremental improvements to systems that already work quite well. As a consequence, appetite for risk in these sectors is low. New technologies are adopted slowly and carefully and with a degree of deliberation that often seems agonizingly slow.

But analysts who have looked at these mature U.S. markets and predicted doom for domestic advanced battery manufacturers have overlooked a potentially important factor: export markets, particularly in the developing world.

At first blush, the idea of finding lucrative markets in developing countries for advanced U.S. technology that the domestic U.S. markets are still largely unwilling to adopt sounds bizarre. But there is logic to it. In developing countries where the electricity grid is not large, complicated and reliable, investments in grid-connected energy storage will have a noticeable and immediate impact on reliability. Moreover, even relatively expensive grid-connected energy storage systems may be seen by developing world grid operators as a less expensive investment than investing in the incumbent technology necessary to bring their grid to First World standards.

The obvious analogy is to wireless telephone technology. Many developing countries have simply given up on building the large and complicated fixed-line telephone infrastructure that is still the core of First World communications systems. As a consequence, the ratio of mobile phone subscriptions to fixed-fixed line phone subscriptions in the developing world is significantly higher than in much of the developed world.

A similar phenomenon may also develop in electric vehicles. To date, China has invested more money in electric drive technology than any other country. Driving that investment is the Chinese government’s calculation that existing petroleum supplies and infrastructure will be insufficient to permit Chinese consumers to adopt motor vehicles at rates enjoyed by developed world consumers. Electric drive is a way to bridge that gap. The governments of other, if perhaps not quite as rapidly growing, developing countries will undoubtedly make the same calculation.

The interest of the developing world in electricity storage, both grid-connected and mobile, could be a big opportunity for U.S.-based advanced battery manufacturers. Rather than being defined, and having their fates dictated, by mature and slowly growing domestic markets, those manufacturers may be able to take advantage of an export market that could, in the short term, represent a much better opportunity than domestic sales.

Related post: “Fifteen Grid Scale Energy Storage Solutions to Watch“, looks at fifteen kinds of utility or grid scale energy storage solutions that are either in wide use or have significant potential to supply the energy storage capacity that will help make the grid both more efficient and more robust.

The U.S. government is waking up to this possibly good news story. At the 2011 NAATBatt Annual Meeting and Conference on September 7-8, 2011 in Louisville, representatives of the U.S. Department of Commerce, The Export-Import Bank of the United States and the International Finance Corporation (a division of the World Bank) will talk about programs and incentives which can help U.S. battery manufacturers take advantage of growing foreign markets for their products. In addition, Terry Copeland, CEO of Altairnano Technologies, and Chris Cowger, CEO of Ener1 will talk about how they see opportunities for advanced energy storage in the export market. Both Altairnano and Ener1 have recently been focusing on those market with some success.

All of this, of course, may leave a number of New York-based analysts (none of which, other than Needham and Lux, have registered to attend the meeting in Louisville) with egg on their faces. While the success of U.S. advanced battery manufacturers in foreign markets is by no means assured, it is the kind of opportunity that can produce needed sales for the industry. The opportunity must be explored. Go to the link for the 2011 Annual Meeting and Conference on www.naatbatt.org to see how to be part of that exploration.

Related post: “Storing Wind Energy as Hydrogen“, makes the case for coupling hydrogen production with wind farms in order to deliver more dispatchable power; lessen the need for transmission capacity; as well as other important bottom line benefits.

POWER

© 2011, James Greenberger. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Julius Neudorfer, CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies, Inc. (NAAT). He has written numerous articles for various IT and Data Center publications and has delivered seminars and webinars on data center power, cooling and efficiency and is the author of the Hot Aisle Insight blog. Connect with Julius on Linkedin.

A report just released has indicated that the rise of energy usage in the data center from 2005 to 2010 was not as high as expected. The report, released Aug. 1, was written by Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D., consulting professor at Stanford University, and was commissioned and reported by The New York Times.

If correct, it would seem that the dire predictions of data centers being the scourge of the earth, energy-wise, may not be as high as the often-cited original 2007 EPA report to Congress, which projected as much as a 100 percent increase over the 2006 to 2011 time period.

The 24-page Koomey report was based on a series of prior reports by Professor Koomey (Koomey 2007a, 2007b, 2008b), as well as other well-documented sources. However, the underlying basis of the calculations seemed heavily focused on the number of “volume servers” shipped, as well higher-performance servers and other IT equipment (storage and networking gear), from 2010 information supplied by IDC.

Key Excerpts from the 2011 Koomey report:

The report’s conclusions seemed reasonable in showing that energy growth was less than expected and the methodology looked sound at first blush. Moreover, it even references the EPA’s Energy Star Data Center survey in 2009 (1.93 PUE) and the Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey in 2011 (PUE average of 1.83) and the positive impact of the improving PUE numbers (from an assumed 2.0 used in prior reports).

Related post: “Top 10 Things Data Centers Forget About PUE“, points out ten areas that are not being captured in PUE analysis; some of which have significant implications for PUE measurements.

However, for all the well-compiled and analyzed information the report seems to have utilized, it ignores another view of the data center industry energy usage … the actual data center itself.

While I have no detailed quantifiable evidence to question the results, I feel that other factors in the data center industry, such as the massive and ongoing growth of mega-size data centers, makes me believe that there is a larger increase in total energy usage than the report indicates. I would therefore suggest that there are several alternate (or at least additional) data sets that could also be used to more effectively analyze energy usage and trends in the data center:

• The buildout of new and larger data centers (total square footage of white space for new and existing sites).
• The rising average power density of all data centers.
• The shipments of new UPSes (and their total capacities), as well as the installed operational base.
• The shipments of backup generators, as well as the existing installed base.

The Bottom Line

While I recognize that what I suggest is not a perfect data set, nor is it all readily available, it seems that these additional figures could provide a more complete basis for analyzing the actual power being used by data centers, rather than the volume server shipments that are the primary underpinnings of the report.

So while virtually all players in the industry are working to improve data center energy efficiency (and I do hope that the report conclusion is correct that the overall rate of rise is not as high as was originally projected by the EPA report), there may be higher and still-rising data center energy demands on the immediate horizon.

Related post: “Is it Time for a Bio-Mass Powered Data Center?“, suggests that huge power hungry data centers should consider incorporating on-site biomass electricity generation as an integral part of their operations systems.

Green Computing Beyond The Datacenter

© 2011, Julius Neudorfer. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Frank-Martin Belz, Professor at the Technische Universität München (TUM School of Management) and Ken Peattie, Professor at Cardiff Business School, and Director of the Research Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS). Both authored the award winning book, Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective. Read their blog, Sustainability Marketing.

One of the arguments put forward in Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective is that companies need a new, more strategic, long-term and open approach to thinking about sustainability and innovation. Conventional strategic thinking, popularised by Michael Porter and Claas van der Linde in their 1995 Harvard Business Review article ‘Green and Competitive’, is that green innovations will allow companies to generate a competitive advantage and more effectively market themselves to those customers who are concerned about the environment. Such thinking would naturally encourage companies to innovate competitively and keeping tight control of their intellectual property, since gaining an advantage over their competitors was a prime objective. From a sustainability perspective however, such thinking is far from ideal. One company innovatively improving their products, production processes or business model is a good thing, but substantive progress towards sustainability will depend upon whole industries changing and innovating. Economic purists might argue that eventually the ‘good’ companies should be able to leverage their advantage to force the others to innovate or even force them out of business. However, the imperfections and inertia in markets is such that if we rely on a form of pseudo-Darwinian evolution of companies towards more sustainable technologies and business practices, then the impacts of climate change will probably have intervened in the market in a big way long before the process is complete. Progress towards sustainability is going to require companies to adopt a more collaborative perspective and a more open approach to innovation. There were some early developments in key industries during the 1980s and 1990s when the major players in the electronics industry collaborated with the goal of eliminating CFCs as a solvent in electronic assembly processes; and the quest for low emission vehicle technologies created some unprecedented levels of information sharing between the ‘Big Three’ car manufacturers . However, such collaborations were a long way from truly ‘opening up’.

More recently open innovation has become fashionable amongst a wide range of businesses large and small (Chesbrough 2003 2006). It is often however promoted in terms of the benefits that companies themselves get from being open. It is seen as a way of spreading cost and risk, and getting a wide variety of new ideas into a company. It is becoming increasingly common for companies and government departments to sponsor open innovation competition to solve particular problems. Starbucks for example ran the ‘betacup’ contest for innovations to reduce paper cup use on the collaborative idea platform www.jovoto.com, attracting thousands of ideas between April and June 2010, including the winning ‘Karmacup’ design. Similarly Graham Hill, founder of TreeHugger.com launched an $70,000 open innovation competition called ‘LifeEdited’ to design him a low carbon New York apartment to live in. There are plenty of good examples of open innovation, particularly related to sustainability, on the IdeaConnection website. Open innovation and the ‘crowdsourcing’ (a sort of open version of outsourcing) of ideas and design services has also been significant recently in the automotive industry in creating more sustainable vehicles. At last year’s Sao Paulo Auto Show Fiat launched the Fiat Mio, the world’s first crowd sourced concept car, and Local Motors in the USA is using crowdsourcing to develop new and more sustainable approaches to vehicle design and assembly.

Related post: “Green Marketing Should Focus on The People“, argues that green organizations should put greater focus on social solutions that are built around people.

Realising the full potential of open innovation is not just a question of opening up companies’ innovation processes in order for them to get better ideas in, it will also depend upon companies being more open about allowing their ideas, innovations and designs out into the world to be utilised by others. This will be particularly important in getting sustainability innovations out of market niches to allow them to spread throughout an industry. This is something that Nike sought to promote by making its ‘Environmental Apparel Design Tool’ publicly available with the aim of spurring the adoption of more sustainable processes across the industry. This software-based tool helps designers make real-time decisions that shape the environmental impact of their products, and led to the sustainability orientated football shirts worn at the South Africa 2010 World Cup (see our post “An Outstanding Performance with No Environmental Penalty?” from June 5, 2010).

The notion that making progress towards sustainability will depend upon openness among big market players received a dramatic boost this month when Facebook announced that it would share the design secrets of its new highly energy-efficient data centre in Prineville Oregon, with its rivals. This facility uses 38% less power than existing data centres, and spreading this technology could bring a significant improvement to the IT industry’s carbon footprint. The level of energy consumed by Facebook’s data centres is slightly ironic given the original argument that moving our lives into the digital domain would ‘dematerialise’ them and reduce environmental impacts. The logic was that the storage of photos online, for example, instead of printing physical copies, would protect the environment by eliminating all the harmful chemicals (like boric acid and benzene compounds) and water used in photo processing. What people overlooked about this brave new digital world was that the infinite numbers of digital photos people would leave undeleted on their Facebook pages and other sites would accumulate and spin on into eternity on data servers somewhere, gradually clocking up an environmental impact in terms of carbon footprint. By 2020 Greenpeace estimate that the total global energy use of data centres will reach 2 trillion kw/h based on current growth patterns and technologies. Facebook hope to improve this situation through its initiative, called the Open Compute Project, which will provide open access to the specifications and mechanical drawings of the Prineville buildings and servers. This is a marked departure from the rest of the industry who have traditionally kept the design of data centres highly secret. The company has already started using the media to pressurise some of its competitors to follow suit, and it represents and interesting example of the type of Sustainability Marketing Transformation that we discuss in chapter 11 of our book.

Prineville is Facebook’s first custom-built data facility, created at a cost of $188m. The building’s architecture takes advantage of natural air currents for cooling instead of depending on air conditioning, and stripped-down energy efficient versions of the servers have been built to handle the data. A number of big companies have already signed up as partners to the Open Compute Project including Dell, HP, AMD and Intel. The hope is that companies big and small can benefit from the cost savings and environmental benefits that come from sharing sustainability orientated innovations. Although Facebook have attracted some environmentalist criticism for not opting for more sustainable energy choices in terms of their suppliers, their attempts to dramatically reduce the amount of energy they use is to be applauded, or at the very least rewarded with a click on the “Like” button.

Read more in detail about Facebook’s innovative new data center in our related post: “Facebook Open Compute and the PUE Trifecta“.

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© 2011, GEP- Admin. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Dave Levitan , Yale Environment 360

It seems like the ultimate in green technology for an emissions-savvy citizen of the 21st century: solar panels on your roof, providing carbon dioxide-free electricity whenever the sun is shining. But as huge utility-scale solar and wind projects continue to make news and the economy continues to struggle, the state of the residential solar sector in the United States remains decidedly mixed.

From the first quarter of 2010 to the fourth quarter, installations of U.S. residential solar systems rose from 62 megawatts to 74 megawatts (enough to power about 15,000 homes), and the Solar Energy Industries Association reports that the first quarter of 2011 saw similar gains over the same period in 2010. Considering that the total installed solar capacity in the U.S. — residential, commercial, and industrial-scale of all types included — still hasn’t cracked 3,000 megawatts (enough to power roughly 600,000 homes), this feels like progress.

Prices of solar panels are steadily coming down, but are still not low enough to prompt a mass movement to solar.

Yet if you look at residential solar’s share of the total U.S. solar market, the picture is less bright. In 2009, 36 percent of all installed solar systems were on homes; this dropped to 30 percent in 2010, and some experts think that will continue to fall.

“The way the U.S. solar market is really headed is toward utility projects,” said MJ Shiao, a solar markets analyst with Greentech Media Research. He noted that the growth from the first quarter of 2010 to 2011 was about 14 percent in the residential market, compared with an impressive 119 percent for non-residential sectors. Just last week, the U.S. Interior Department approved First Solar’s 4,100-acre solar project in the California desert, which is expected to generate enough electricity to power 165,000 homes.

“These other market sectors are really taking off,” Shiao said. “That’s not to say that residential isn’t growing. It’s sort of plodding along.”

In some European countries — most notably Germany — generous government incentive programs and ambitious renewable energy targets have created a far more robust solar sector, including residential solar. In 2010 alone, Germany installed 7,400 megawatts of photovoltaic systems — more than double the entire existing solar capacity in the U.S. About 700 megawatts came from 100,000 small, residential-sized systems. Shiao said that Germany’s and Italy’s solar markets have traditionally been driven by residential and small commercial installations.

The primary issue stopping most U.S. homeowners from putting solar panels on their roofs is cost. Solar systems are expensive — on the order of $20,000 to $25,000 or more, depending on the system’s size and other factors. And even though these systems can end up paying for themselves in the long run with lower electricity bills, most families cannot find tens of thousands of dollars for the upfront costs. Prices of solar panels are steadily coming down, but are still not low enough to prompt a mass movement to solar, especially at a time of economic stagnation.

Because of this, the main drivers of residential solar installations are state and federal incentives that help defray those costs, yet even these are in jeopardy as governments at all levels slash budgets. Everyone in the country can take advantage of a federal renewable energy tax credit; this reduces the costs of a solar installation by 30 percent, and since 2009 there is no maximum on the total amount. Beyond that, several states dominate the market because their incentives are so strong.

The California Solar Initiative has helped make the country’s biggest state also the biggest residential solar market. So far, more than 50,000 installed systems have a total capacity of more than 240 megawatts; another 10,000 applications are waiting to add another 50 megawatts to the total. The initiative allows homeowners an upfront rebate based on how many installed megawatts the state has — the idea being that as the market takes off and as costs of solar drop, people will need less government help to prosper and the rebate will drop in value. At the moment, the initiative is in step 8 out of 10, meaning that a residential system can get back 35 cents per watt; this is down from $2.50 per watt when the program began. A typical installation ranges from two to 10 kilowatts, meaning the rebate can be upward of $2,000.

In related post: “Nine Reasons Why Solar Power Costs a Lot Less Than People Commonly Believe“, looks at the many important benefits that result from increasing the use of distributed solar power, and how when these are accounted for distributed solar costs a lot less than most people think it does.

The unanswered question is whether solar can thrive without strong state and federal financial incentives.

While California matches its sunny reputation with a relatively strong solar market, other states have emerged as less likely solar powerhouses. New Jersey trails only California in total installed solar power, and as of late July the state surpassed 10,000 total installed solar arrays. The bulk of the market is for commercial-sized projects, like a giant 9 megawatt array on the roof of the Gloucester Marine Terminal, but state policies have also pushed residential solar. However, under Gov. Chris Christie, New Jersey ended its upfront rebate program last year, although it still offers ongoing incentives through the Solar Renewable Energy Certificates program. Christie also abandoned the previous administration’s goal of getting 30 percent of the state’s power from renewable sources by 2020, reducing that target to 22.5 percent.

Looking a few years out, the federal 30 percent tax credit for commercial solar projects will drop to 10 percent in 2016, and may disappear altogether for residential projects. The unanswered question is whether the solar industry can thrive without such strong federal and state financial incentives.

Some experts, though, don’t think the incentives are the only driver of the residential solar market. According to Michael Woodhouse, an analyst with the National Renewal Energy Laboratory, the economics of solar photovoltaics are better than many make them out to be.

“When people say PV will never compete without subsidies, that is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me,” Woodhouse said. “That’s a really incomplete picture.” The key, he said, is to look at the cost of electricity on a regional and state level rather than overall. Woodhouse has conducted analyses of several specific locales. For example, in Santa Barbara, California, he said that right now, when the 30 percent federal tax credit for solar is included, residential solar power costs about 13.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average price of electricity across the state, meanwhile – meaning, from all sources – is 15.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. In other words, solar power might already have achieved “grid parity” in Santa Barbara.

In other places, solar power is not close to grid parity. In St. Louis, Missouri, the cost of residential solar power is more than double the 8-cent per kilowatt-hour average of traditional electricity sources.

“The best economics for PV are in places where you have a good solar resource and expensive traditional electricity,” Woodhouse said. “There is no simple answer for this: when will PV compete with fossil fuels? It already does, it just depends on where we’re talking about.”

The most promising trend in residential solar power is the third-party ownership model.

For one subset of the population, there is a way around at least some of the upfront costs involved with a home installation: install it yourself. In recent years, do-it-yourself solar has begun to go mainstream, with stores like Home Depot now selling solar installation kits. At Lowes, a package of 13 185-watt panels (enough for a small 2.4 kilowatt system) and all the hardware required to install them costs $9,219.

On the other end of the spectrum from the do-it-yourselfer lie people who would like to have solar panels on a roof in theory, but don’t want to pay for them, install them, or even have the responsibility of owning them at all. Enter the most promising trend in residential solar power: the third party ownership model.

Adam Shuster of Ashland, Massachusetts took advantage of this model, under which a company installs, maintains, and owns a home’s panels and charges a fixed rate for the electricity they generate. In 2008, Shuster looked into putting solar panels on his family home’s roof, but decided it simply cost too much. But his ten-year-old son, Kenny, kept pushing him to look a bit harder.

“At one point I said to [Kenny], ‘You know, it could look kind of ugly on the house,’” Shuster recalled. Kenny countered: “Would you rather have an ugly planet and a good-looking house, or a good-looking planet and an ugly house?” In September 2009, the ten-year-old got to flip the switch that turned on a 20-panel, five-kilowatt photovoltaic system. His family is now generating about a third of its home’s power needs from the sun, saving about $75 per year on total electricity bills, and producing a third less carbon emissions as a result.

Several companies – notably SunRun, Sungevity, and Solar City – now will install a solar system on a homeowner’s roof for little or no upfront cost. The homeowner pays a set price to the installing company for the electricity the system generates, and the company also takes care of maintenance and repair.

Susan Wise, a spokesperson for SunRun, said her company grew at 300 percent in 2010 and expects to at least double again in 2011; she says that they now install $1 million of solar panels every day. “We let homeowners switch to solar without having to put thousands of dollars up front,” she said. “And they don’t have to deal with owning the technology. That’s a huge thing for lots of people. They don’t want the panels, they just want power.”

Though SunRun’s installations rarely are big enough to produce all of a home’s electricity, Wise said, the price of the solar portion of a home’s power tends to be five to ten percent lower than the utility’s portion at the start of the contract. Also, the third-party owners offer 18- and 20-year contracts with a locked-in price. Since utility electricity rates historically have risen consistently, a homeowner could save thousands of dollars over the life of a contract.

This corner of the market seems to be the fastest growing. Shiao of GTM Research said that in January of 2010, none of the solar installations in Colorado — which is among the top states for total solar installations — were third-party owned; only a year later, third party ownership accounted for 35 percent of the solar arrays installed. Notably, though, these companies rely on federal and state incentives, as well, and tend to follow the money to certain states. SunRun currently installs systems in nine states; Sungevity is in eight.

Another promising long-term trend for residential solar is that solar panels continue to drop in cost, and fairly drastically. Woodhouse said that in 2008, the price of a manufacturing a solar panel was about $4 per watt. Now, $1.50 per watt or below isn’t out of the question.

“The cost reductions in PV are really remarkable,” he said. “And there is every reason to believe that they will continue. We’re not even close to hitting the bottom of cost reduction potential.”

About the Author

Dave Levitan is a freelance journalist based in Philadelphia who writes about energy, the environment, and health. His articles have been published by Reuters, SolveClimate, IEEE Spectrum, and Psychology Today.

Related post: “The Summer Rooftop Solar Goes Big“, outlines the new DOE initiative to promote rooftop direct grid connected solar power in the U.S.

POWER

© 2011, Yale Environment 360. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Silvio Marcacci, Director of Outreach and Public Relations at energyNOW!,Bloomberg Television. Follow Silvio on Twitter @Silvio_Marcacci; connect with Silvio on Linkedin.

Polling data shows the percentage of Americans concerned about climate change is falling, down 12 percent over the past 10 years, according to a recent Gallup Poll, and in some parts of the country the term “global warming” is practically taboo. So why then are some of the states with the biggest populations of global-warming skeptics also some of the states making the biggest investments in renewable energy?

energyNOW! correspondent Lee Patrick Sullivan visited Kansas, where some clean energy advocates say they’ve figured out what it takes to convince climate-change skeptics to invest in renewables and energy efficiency. Their advice: stop talking about global warming and change the conversation to energy conservation. You can watch the full video below:

Polling data shows the percentage of Americans concerned about climate change is falling, down 12 percent over the past 10 years, according to a recent Gallup Poll, and in some parts of the country the term “global warming” is practically taboo. So why then are some of the states with the biggest populations of global-warming skeptics also some of the states making the biggest investments in renewable energy?

energyNOW! correspondent Lee Patrick Sullivan visited Kansas, where some clean energy advocates say they’ve figured out what it takes to convince climate-change skeptics to invest in renewables and energy efficiency. Their advice: stop talking about global warming and change the conversation to energy conservation. You can watch the full video below:

“Almost half of all Kansans don’t really buy into the whole global warming idea,” said Dorothy Barnett of the Climate and Energy Project, a group working to reduce fossil-fuel use in Kansas. “They don’t buy the climate science.” But Barnett’s group is avoiding the climate change controversy by offering cash incentives for communities to reduce energy use.

The new approach seems to be working, says one town competing for the $100,000 top prize in the Climate and Energy Project’s “Take Charge!” challenge to lower energy use. Goodland, a small town located in western Kansas, has reduced its energy use by five percent. “I would say primarily the motivation here is people who want to help their pocketbook, maybe earn the community some cash on the back end and also have a good competition with their neighbors,” said city manager Douglas Gerber.

Saving money isn’t the only motivator to cutting energy use in the state – religious faith is also playing a big role. The Kansas Interfaith Power and Light Initiative has signed up more than 10,000 congregations who pledge to incorporate creation stewardship and energy efficiency measures into their practices since 2008. But the effort has run into resistance because of its acceptance of the theory of global warming, says one of the initiative’s founders.

“I did bring it (the IPL pledge) to my Pastoral Council, but we couldn’t get it signed,” said Father Kerry Ninemire, of St. Mary’s Church in Salina, Kansas. His parishioners refused to sign it, he said, because of the climate change language contained in the pledge. Father Ninemire was able to convince his parish to take the Initiative’s energy efficiency advice, and reduced energy use in the church and high school 10 percent by switching to efficient lighting and programmable thermostats.

This shift in thinking isn’t limited to conservation, however. Wind energy is growing across the state, creating green jobs and emission-free electricity. Kansas currently gets seven percent of its electricity from wind, and the state has the second-highest wind energy potential in the U.S. behind Texas. To many Kansans, all those potential electrons from the near-constant wind look like dollar signs. “We don’t need to produce wind energy, necessarily, for anything other than the economic side of it,” said Mark Richardson of the Reno County Energy Task Force.

Our related post: “Energy Issues Could Help Define the 2012 Republican Primary“, argues that energy and environmental issues, and the candidate stances on them, will play a large role in the 2012 presidential election.

© 2011, Silvio Marcacci. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Nathan Schock, Director of Public Relations for POET, the largest producer of biofuels in the world. Read his blog, Greenway Communique, follow him on Twitter @nathanschock, or connect on LinkedIn.

The latest report from ecoAmerica is titled “up start with people.” The report states that the environmental community has not been successful at wining the hearts and minds because they have focused mostly on government regulation and intervention. The non-profit sees more success being had by those in the movement who are focused on social solutions that are built around people.

ecoAmerica wants to encourage this shift by bringing together NGOs and others for large-scale public engagement programs targeting mainstream Americans with unquestionable benefits. So far, that has been carried out through higher education initiatives like the President’s Climate Commitment and green college ratings with the Princeton Review, public outreach like Nature Rocks, along with several others listed in the report and soon will include the Center for Social Solutions on Climate.

Seems like a no-brainer. If you want PEOPLE to care about the environment, you should probably also focus on people, right?

Well, it might take a little more convincing to get the environmental community on board. The Spring issue of Nature Magazine had a cover story about Nature Conservancy chief scientist Peter Kareiva suggested that it was time to move past the man vs. nature debate and get people to understand that nature benefits them.

Related post: “Green Marketing Not Over, Just Misdirected“, explores the issue of green marketing not connecting with people arguing that green is not being marketed in the best manner.

When I read the article a few months ago, I thought it was a very pragmatic approach and one that could obviously have a broader appeal than trying to protect nature from man. I also wondered what the response would be from the readers.

Well, you would have thought they published an OpEd in the Catholic News suggesting the Pope convert to Protestantism. Although there were some letters in favor, they overwhelmingly castigated Kareiva, saying “people are the problem,” comparing the Nature Conservancy to Exxon and, of course, threatening to take their funds and go play somewhere else. The Nature Conservancy set up a special place on their web site to continue the debate and the comments there are even more lopsided against Kareiva. My personal favorite was this gem: Ok, let me first say that I will NOT be supporting Nature Conservancy with donations until Peter Kareiva is fired.

No, please. Tell me how you really feel.

If the environmental community wants to broaden their appeal and convince more people to join their movement, they would be wise to follow the lead of ecoAmerica and Kareiva. Instead, it appears that they’re going to act like the activist wing of a major political party that wants to crucify their candidate for moving toward the center in a presidential general election.

If you want to govern, you first have to win. For the environmental community, if they want to be successful, they’ll first have to win the public debate. They’ll have an easier time winning that debate protecting something for people rather than from them.

See our related resource: “The Ultimate Green Twitter Hashtag List: Build Your Online Green Twitter Following“, which lists 150+ Twitter hashtags that can help you gain Twitter followers interested in cleantech, sustainability, green building, climate change and other green topics.

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© 2011, Nathan Schock. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Tyler Caine, Project Manager and Sustainability Adviser at Lubrano Ciavarra Architects. Tyler is the author of the blog Intercon, a forum for critique and discussion of sustainability. Follow him on Twitter @InterconGreen. Connect with Tyler on Linkedin.

The integration of natural flora and fauna into the cities has been a challenge for architects and planners since the beginning of buildings. The task becomes even more difficult when the urban spaces in question are part of our country’s neglected, post-industrial landscape. The winning entry to the recent Gowanus Lowline Competition explores the process of mending broken pieces of aged, urban fabric while dealing with not only the vacancies created by absent industry, but sites riddled with the environmental scars of a previous era.

The scheme probes at the possibility of new urban spaces, utilizing both natural systems of remediation and the active density of a modern city. Wetlands and cityscape: two realities commonly assumed to be so diametrically opposed that their overlap is all but implausible. The former harnesses natural processes to provide an ecology with no net waste or squandered resources and supports a myriad of species in close proximity. The latter is the function of fabricated infrastructural systems that levy an indisputable tax on natural resources as it bleeds energy to support a single species in close proximity. The prospective benefits of synthesizing the accolades of both environments are far-reaching, but given their respective needs of space and circulation the question becomes, how can these ecologies co-exist without one decimating the function of the other?

The Post-Industrial Canvas

The competition centered on the Gowanus Canal, completed in 1869, one of the countless industrial relics that lay scattered across our country’s cities. When New York was still a city of production, the canal was carved into the heart of lower Brooklyn to allow for sea traffic to pierce deeper into the district of warehouses and factories. Barges could give and take their wares before returning to the bay and beyond, allowing for intra-city commerce to spread further beyond the coastline. Of course, New York would fall prey to the same forces of industrial decline that befell the rest of the U.S. Much like the Highline, by the 1960’s, the canal was all but useless with fabricators and vendors having left the shores of the East and Hudson rivers for lands of cheaper labor. In time, the bustling warehouses would grow vacant and traffic dwindled down to a crawl.

The life of the canal did not come without costs, however. Throughout its tenure of work, three of the tenants of its banks were coal gas plants; charged with the task of creating synthetic, flammable fuel from coal and served largely as the predecessor of natural gas. One byproduct was a substance called coal tar that was unceremoniously dumped into the canal and its shores for years—and still sits there today along with cement, oil, mercury and lead. Since its inception the Gowanus Canal was also a dumping ground for the sewage of the swiftly growing city around it, constantly battling against concentrations of waste (a battle it is long since lost). It comes as little surprise that the Gowanus Canal has recently landed itself a place on the EPA’s National Priority List, earning the title of one of the most polluted sites of the country. Its waters are so dark and deprived of oxygen that it is virtually unable to sustain life of any kind.

New Fertile Ground

In this project, I had the good fortune of working as part of a great design team including Brandon Specketer, Luke Carnahan and Ryan Doyle. Some of our early inclinations were to craft new urban strategy built around wetland systems that could cleanse the area of the canal over time. Many natural ecosystems contain components that are adept at mitigating pollutants from water, air and soil—particularly wetland environments. These complex combinations of organisms can provide remediation processes that are arguably more successful (and often less expensive) than their manufactured counterparts. On the other hand, the proximity of nearby Prospect Park made it redundant to turn the canal into a park or preserve, potentially inhibiting its ability to contribute to the density of Brooklyn. The challenge presented itself as how to provide remediation for one of the most polluted sites in the country while creating the framework for a pedestrian-driven environment that restores activity and density to a vacant patch of the urban fabric.

The outline of the original estuary over the present day urban fabric

Our process began by looking at the natural estuary that originally formed a series of ponds and creeks that later became the Gowanus Canal. When the outline of the fertile land of the tidal marsh basin was laid over the grid of today, the result boldly highlighted the abrupt change in building scale from tight row houses to large industrial space. The correlation made sense given that the estuary soil was once prime for farming and likely developed long after the surrounding residential neighborhoods. It seemed appropriate to use this violent shift in built form as the definition of our site for a new urban intervention.

“Flowlands” proposes the co-existence of two ecologies that are often thought of as restricted to markedly different locales. The two systems respond to each other much like a double helix—not combined, but rather intertwined; linked through function, but not homogeneous.

The proposed solution integrated layers of urban activity into a wetlands ecology. Using the elevation difference between the canal and the grid of roads around it, the surrounding lots were terraced into a series of levels that stepped down to the water’s edge. Each layer fostered a different micro-climate of wetlands activity that, in turn, provided different methods of remediation. While poplar trees could pull chemicals and heavy metals from the earth by the street, the lowest layer fostered oyster beds that could clean toxins from the canal as one of nature’s most talented water purifiers. Together, the wetland layers work together to clean not only the polluted waters of the canal, but store and filter stormwater runoff to prevent further polluting of the canal via Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) (see how much sewage they spit into our country’s waterways).

A diagrammatic section of the proposed wetland and pedestrian systems (click to enlarge)

New pedestrian activity would exist over the more fragile environment of the wetlands by way of a network of elevated thoroughfares that provide access from the streets to the edges of the canal and all points in between. Paths of metal grating allow for movement over natural ecosystems while allowing for air, water and sunlight to penetrate below. Beside each wetland street, strips of greenery are pulled upwards to become green roofs for the retail and commercial space inserted beneath, accessed by the network of public circulation.

Related post: “Green Roofs are Starting To Sprout in American Cities“, examines how green roofs are becoming increasingly common in U.S. cities, with major initiatives in Chicago, Portland, and Washington, DC.

The final piece is seven high rise towers of residential space with bases of retail and community program to tie into the green, wetland paths. The towers offer the prospect of a population that can call the neighborhood home, providing a steady stream of pedestrians—the lifeblood of any streetscape. Together, the seven towers can hold enough residents to bring the net population density of the district within striking distance of neighboring Park Slope—yet at the same time operate beneath a layer of greenscape rather than the impervious layer of tar roofs, asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks.

Though the competition was merely a very schematic attempt at formulating ideas, the possibilities for the interconnections of such a system are boundless. It is easy to imagine geothermal heating and cooling as a key component to both the street level program and the larger towers. The southern face of each residential spire could provide ample square footage for solar panels or hoist wind turbines up hundreds of feet off the ground where wind speed is higher and more consistent. In order to maintain the goals of the community at large, greywater systems could be tied into the various wetland components to filter portions of water on site and provide water for non-potable uses in return. Eventually, these two systems could be woven into a new, unified ecology. This is the mark of the important difference between a truly green city and merely a garden city.

While the Gowanus Canal may epitomize the extreme of polluted, industrial sites, brownfield property is far from a rarity in the U.S., making it important to search for solutions to remediate and repopulate these artifacts so they can contribute to their surroundings once again. Perhaps the most interesting idea that our design team came away with was the opportunity for a new relationship between remediation and urban living. For as much as I praise the Highline (and I do, it is fantastic), it is arguably an industrial relic transformed into a destination that attracts people for an event. Instead of only being a destination icon whose function happens to provide remediation for the area, a new Gowanus neighborhood could make the process of remediation not some distant event that occurs on a separate site or behind tall fences, but outside someone’s front door or next to where you buy food. Having remediation be more of a part of our daily lives could leave us all with more of a reminder and impression as to why the remediation is necessary in the first place.

Related post: “Farming the Concrete Jungle, Feeding a Green Economy“, explores the growing movement to increase the amount of food produced within the urban and periurban environments and how it is becoming an important part of the urban food supply, a swell as helping to make cities more livable.

© 2011, Tyler Caine. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by John Addison, publisher and editor of the Clean Fleet Report and author of Save Gas, Save the Planet.

$380 Billion in new Green Scissors 2011 Report

Millions of Americans are demanding common sense fixes to our broken economy. Wasteful spending needs to be cut, free giveaways of our natural resource stopped, and tax dodging corporations to start paying the same rates as middle-class taxpayers.

Senator Dirksen is attributed with the famous quip, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money?”

$380 billion of wasteful government spending, subsidies, and loopholes is detailed in the new Green Scissors report. The amount is for 2012 to 2016. I’m not sure which is most surprising, the common sense distilled to 32-pages or the fact that the report is sponsored by both conservative and environmental groups. Green Scissors 2011 is published by four organizations: progressive environmental group Friends of the Earth, deficit hawk Taxpayers for Common Sense, consumer watchdog Public Citizen and free-market think tank The Heartland Institute.

The report does not pretend to solve everything. It focuses on wasteful spending and subsidies that both harm the economy and the environment. The sponsoring groups make it very clear that they do not agree on all issues. They agree on the analysis and recommendations in Green Scissors. The report is balanced in pinpointing specific waste in subsidizing oil drilling and hybrid car buying, dirty coal and dangerous nukes, giving away land and giving away gold.

The report is likely to be popular with citizens who want to shrink the deficit, protect our global competitiveness, and not subsidize the destruction of our future. It will not be popular will oil executives whose companies pay no income tax, mining companies that extract gold from public lands for free, and farmers paid to use massive energy to make ethanol that contains less energy. These powerful companies will ask that we protect their jobs and their profits, yet the more that we do, the more the United States as a whole suffers lost jobs and profits.

Related post: “The Catastrophic Downside Risk of Nuclear, Oil, Gas, and Coal“, examines the catastrophic downside risk of nuclear and fossil energy and questions why the taxpayers and the public must bear the burdens in order to protect these industry’s profits.

$61 Billion in Subsidies to Oil and Related Fossil Fuel Giants

Green Scissors 2011 states, “For nearly 100 years we have given generous government subsidies to the incredibly lucrative fossil fuels industry. The lion’s share of these subsidies comes in the form of tax breaks that cost the government tens of billions of dollars annually. This tax spending is particularly advantageous for the industry because most of it is permanent law and does not require regular review from Congress. Thus, it can be counted on year after year.” The report identifies specific oil and other fossil fuel subsidies that, unless eliminated, will cost taxpayers over $61 billion. Here are some specific examples:

• Last In, First Out Accounting 29,661,000,000
• Domestic Manufacturing Tax Deduction for Oil and Gas Companies 6,679,000,000
• Intangible Drilling Costs 6,268,000,000
• Percentage Depletion Allowance for Oil and Gas Wells 4,657,000,000
• Oil Royalty Relief 4,033,000,000
• Deductions for Foreign Tax — Dual Capacity 3,896,000,000

This focused report identifies many more specifics. The report tries to focus on what is politically feasible, ignoring the even bigger costs of offshore drilling damage, such as the $40 billion BP Gulf Oil damage. Ignored are externalities like the damage of pollution to health and the damage of draughts, wildfires, and crop failures that correlate with global warming.

The U.S. is now paying more to borrow due to our credit rating being downgraded to AA+ by Standard and Poor’s and to A by Dagong, Asia’s largest credit agency. We owe trillions to people and governments who experienced the recent threat of not getting repaid and the reality of getting repaid with cheaper dollars. The government shutdown threat was lead by extremists who want to “starve the beast of government” and stop new revenue in any form. This approach is keeping fossil fuel giants on welfare, thereby funding their damage to our health and polluting our future.

Quotable Conservatives and Environmentalists

Former Representative Robert Inglis (R-SC) pointed out that protecting the fossil fuel industry hurts innovation and global competitiveness. Protecting aging industry hurts our future revenue and jobs from the innovative leaders of tomorrow.

“At a time when working families are expected to belt-tighten, so too must wasteful public investments in mature, polluting technologies,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “For too long lobbyists kept these undeserving programs and tax preferences for the fossil fuel and nuclear industry funded.”

“The Green Scissors report documents the breadth and depth of damage that government spending does to our environment,” said Heartland Institute Vice President Eli Lehrer. “Cutting government in the right places can make for a cleaner, healthier environment.”

“We can go a long way toward solving our nation’s budget problems by cutting spending that harms the environment, and this report provides the Super Committee with a road map,” said Friends of the Earth climate and energy tax analyst Ben Schreiber. “At a time of great polarization, Super Committee members can and should find common ground by ending wasteful polluter giveaways.”

“These common sense cuts represent the lowest of the low hanging budgetary fruit,” said Taxpayers for Common Sense President Ryan Alexander. “Lawmakers across the political spectrum should be scrambling to eliminate these examples of wasteful spending and unnecessary tax breaks that are squandering our precious tax dollars while the nation is staring into a chasm of debt.”

Our related post: “Energy Issues Could Help Define the 2012 Republican Primary“, argues that energy and environmental issues, and the candidate stances on them, will play a large role in the 2012 presidential election.

© 2011, John Addison. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Christopher Gleadle, author of Sustainable Growth through Sustainable Business, and senior partner at the CMG Consultancy a sustainability performance agency. Follow Christopher on Twitter @cmgconsultancy; connect with Christopher on Linkedin; connect with him on Facebook.

Best strategies for a business are to make clear choices and the allocation of its resources, this being comprised of: ‘ the steady accumulation of frameworks promising to unlock the secret of competition advantage’ – Walter Kiechel: The Lords of Strategy, Boston MA – Harvard Business School.

A sustainability strategy forces choices delivering clear actions and positive outcomes for the optimisation of resources.

This leads to environmental planning and strategic planning working together in understanding what the year ahead and future horizon looks like in terms of accountability life cycle as well as developing clear key performance indicators and budgets. Additionally, it protects the company from random environmental projects creating a sustained process with intended actions, clear outcomes, and business benefits.

By transcending the duality of environmental concerns and making money, an organisation exposes the false divide between environmental and business thinking.

Whilst business is not typically attuned to the feasibility and necessity of triple bottom line reporting: that of economic, environmental and social, the real truth of the matter lies in using considered environmental metrics with a commitment to work in a three dimensional way. With sustainability and overall corporate strategy linked, sustainability is given visibility, as it becomes part of the overall planning, budgeting and accountability processes. Thus, the business can operate successfully, and thrive, in an increasingly resource constrained world.

Whilst financial projections are important for allocating capital resources, and understanding trend analysis, when looking at adding corporate value, by creatively reallocating resources; effective implementers dismantle the internal barriers to corporate strategy implementation, see: Sustainability – a new business paradigm – Christopher Gleadle

Therefore, it is essential that managers should forge much stronger links between corporate strategy and other key management processes to ensure that strategy results in meaningful actions. And, if business leaders, whether large corporate, or importantly SME, are to overcome biases towards immediate short-term solutions and switch to longer term thinking, then they will have made significant progress in adopting an attitude suited to the mitigation of increasingly complex and interdependent sustainability risks and developing a cycle of continuous improvement.

So, setting a sustainability strategy is a deliberate action to achieve deliberate outcomes – lower costs, drive innovation, team building, customer service, brand and reputation, sales and marketing, talent attraction, and competitive advantage. Thus, sustainability will help deliver the ability to beat the market.

Related post: “Lessons for Creating Your Sustainability Report: An EMC Case Study“, examines some of the issues and challenged that crop up in sustainability reporting.

It is important to understand sustainability addresses the three Cs of strategy – Competitors, Customers, Company.

Competitors – by driving innovation, meeting stakeholder expectation, and creating clear differentiation.

Customers – as pressure for meeting and delivering against sustainability issues transcends the supply chain, sustainability meets, and if correctly implemented, go beyond, customer expectation and improves service delivery.

Company – by reducing costs, improving team cohesion, talent attraction and driving innovation by removing the barriers to strategy implementation.

The deployment of a sustainability strategy also ensures verification of the actions to make outcomes provable in order to meet the strictest scrutiny, so adding the greatest value. This process of verification, by default, illustrates the interdependence of functional areas, and so expose and deliver greatest resource optimisation.

Furthermore, the market place is dependant on the state of the sum of previous events and winners are often accidents of history. Therefore, to beat the market, your advantages need to be strong, robust and responsive in the face of on rushing market forces. Sustainability is poised to become the biggest economic game changer over the next twenty years.

So, ticking boxes, and playing along with the market, will expose a position, which is not as strong as it may appear. And, where as it may seem that smaller and weaker competitors as well as new market entrants are not deemed a threat; if they are taking a divergent strategy, one that embraces sustainability – verified, robust and embedded into the DNA – they will come through and be the winners tomorrow.

Because sustainability connects, and exposes, the interdependence of structure, as well as conduct and performance; the company embracing sustainability will reap the rewards of positional advantage, by conferring and living by the unique benefits delivered to them. Many companies have to keep running just to stay in the same place – sustainability is a proven method that turns running into moving forward.

Sustainability, furthermore, breaks the cycle of typical strategy setting which applies much emphasis on the status quo – metrics extrapolated from the last three or five years. Whilst, sustainability is about gathering the backward looking metrics; once turned to face forward, gives insight into cost reduction and process optimisation for the future.

And, whilst most trends emerge slowly, or very slowly, sustainability is gaining traction across the globe, as its implications are felt across entire value chains. Companies tend to react to trends, or in the case of sustainability, continue waiting for legislation. Leave it too late, and it will become almost impossible to mount a strategically effective response and will deliver no influence on shaping change to your advantage.

The cost of delay is steep, both in terms of operations as well as lost market position. Yet, for companies who have got ahead on the curve have been able to tailor strategies to the new environment – and a great deal of economic research has shown – even through the recent recession – have taken a financial lead of competitors who have or still are ignoring the shifting market place.

Furthermore, companies that routinely go out of their way to experience the world from their customers’ perspective routinely develop better strategies. Sustainability is a quality stakeholder engagement programme of continuous improvement. Once embedded into the DNA of the company, the whole team shares and aspires to the ethos; customers and suppliers become involved in the process and support the strategy. This does mean that decision makers must be taken on the journey of sustainability; create experiences which help them instinctively grasp the mis-matches that may exist between what the new strategy requires and the actions and behaviour that have brought success up to this point. By connecting the board, senior managers and employees, there is a support base for influencers to feel connected to the strategy – as such; they may even become evangelists for it.

Following on, the strategy must be translated into an action plan (see: Developing a sustainability plan, and soon to be published – Sustainable Growth through Sustainable Business)

Ultimately, when setting strategy, the three questions that need answering are:

1) Does it increase innovation?

2) Will it create value?

3) Is it material?

The answer is YES to all three – as discussed in Sustainable Growth though Sustainable Business and at: http://sustainabledevelopment.thecmgconsultancy.com

Get proof, speak to customers, speak to suppliers; but when setting strategy – make sure the insights and capabilities underlying them are real and not just the result of some carefully manipulated PowerPoint engineering.

It is easy to think success will just continue. The challenge is to watch for signs to the contrary and use those signs as the catalyst for change. Winning, like sustainability, is a journey and not a destination. It is a cycle of continual improvement, so be clear and understand where you are on your strategic journey as a business.

It is important to always be thinking about profitable growth, but you also need to be thinking about the value of risk. Sustainability strategy directly linked to company strategy underpins the very essence of strategic thinking.

Are you protecting your strongholds? Are you thinking about how your competitors are reacting? Are you thinking enough about how to create, and not just capture, value as the market matures? How much risk is there in your supply chain? How much will it cost not to develop a sustainability strategy?

Sustainability as a strategy is about optimising resource use and allocation and understanding what is working and what is not. Notwithstanding that, what does working really mean? Sustainability breaks down and modulises what is working so you can see what it actually looks like, what it means and what costs can be stripped out and processes optimised.

Sustainability is about collaboration, skills development, innovation and optimisation of the triple bottom line. Sustainability helps and guides to get specific about what you have the ability to shape, what points of influence you can begin to put in place – sustainability is invaluable.

In related post: “20 Questions To Ask Your Sustainability Reporting Manager“, Elaine focuses on the importance of critically reviewing the organization’s sustainability reporting.

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© 2011, Christopher Gleadle. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Peg Zokowski, Principal, Innovators Ink, LLC. Follow Peg on Twitter @InnovatorsInk; connect with Peg on LinkedIn

This year’s winners of the 6th Annual New Energy Symposium now headed to the Industry Growth Forum in Denver, Colorado in November, are: Rentricity, a New York water technology firm that captures and converts excess pressure in water mains into clean electric power; Versatilis, a Vermont start-up operating in the field of macroelectronics and developing an inorganic solution to address OLED technology challenges affecting lifetime, efficacy and cost; and Phase Change Energy Solutions, a North Carolina nanotechnology company leveraging bio-based phase change materials (PCMs) that dramatically reduce energy usage and lower GHG emission.

Hosted by The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s (CNSE) Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Center (E2TAC) and New Energy New York, with partner support from The New York Academy of Sciences, Clean Energy Alliance, iCLEAN and the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), this year’s New Energy Symposium featured investment presentations from 21, early-stage, clean energy companies competitively selected from around the country. “Ideally, it [NES] is meant to be a project conduit for investors looking to fund early stage clean energy companies,” said “Nicholas Querques, innovation leader, iCLEAN, College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering, in Albany, NY.

The prize for presenting companies? A trip for the top three finishers to the 2011 NREL Industry Growth Forum (IGF) in Denver, Colorado, November 9-10. Considered a successful national model, NES adopted the model four years ago working in partnership with NREL since then, the IGF is in its 16th year and provides exposure for 30 emerging energy companies to venture capital, corporate investors, strategic partners and thought leaders via panels, one-on-one meetings and organized networking opportunities. In addition to cash prizes, winning companies are provided commercialization services from NREL. Since 2003, presenting companies have collectively raised close to $4 billion in funding, according to Richard Adams, manager, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, NREL.

Focused on building and maintaining connections with the early-stage, clean energy business community, and to more efficiently identify clean energy start-ups to feed the IGF pipeline, NREL modified its approach several years ago and actively partners with state and regional competitions, such as the New Energy Symposium. Adams said, “We went from a 1:1 model to 1:many and participate annually in a number of investor competitions around the country.”

I couldn’t help but wonder, as each company pitched to 31 VC investors from across the country, if 1 of the 21 would eventually prove to be 1 of the 30-60 “billion dollar businesses” The Kauffman Foundation says is needed in order to “significantly accelerate the U.S. economic recovery.” According to its 2010 study, Inventive Billion Dollar Firms: A Faster Way to Grow?, the U.S. needs only to produce between 30-60 new billion dollar firms “to permanently increase its GDP by one percentage point” to four percent growth. But the bigger question remains, “How does the U.S. ensure the creation of those firms here in America?

One answer, the Foundation believes, is found in the creation of “entrepreneurial ecosystems.” Forums such as the New Energy Symposium and the Industry Growth Forum are certainly part of these creating and sustaining these ecosystems, feeding the innovation pipeline and building new businesses in an industry clearly capable of generating significant new job growth. The recently released Sizing the Clean Economy: A Green Jobs Assessment by Brookings Institution offers some fodder for both public and private interests to expand, strengthen and maintain an entrepreneurial ecosystem in general, and for clean energy specifically.

According to the report, the clean economy “employs some 2.7 million workers.” The “newer cleantech segments produced explosive job gains… [and]newer clean economy establishments—especially those in young energy-related segments such as wind, solar PV, and smart grid—added jobs at a torrid pace, albeit from small bases.” Albany, New York, captured the top spot with clean economy jobs accounting for 6.3 percent of all jobs in its region. In terms of its overall size Albany, New York, ranks 14th among the 100 largest metro areas.

So how do we sustain and expand this growth? Perhaps one way would be to increase the number of VC investment competitions for early stage clean energy ventures, such as NES, and narrow their focus so each is concentrated on a specific clean energy sector such as solar, wind, water, biofuels, etc. The end goal being to increase the number of clean energy firms created in each sector and potentially speeding the adoption and use of viable clean energy technologies. In short, rather than judging “apples and oranges,” in one competition, technologies within the same sector would compete. George Powch, president and CEO of Versatilis, agrees that forums such as the NES “are great, but by their nature a bit broad—waste water treatment to advanced photovoltaics is a pretty wide technology and business spectrum with different dynamics. I wonder how well such diverse ventures can be judged vis-à-vis each other.”

Related post: “Cleantech Financing Strategies in the Global Economy“, summarizes a round-table discussion about cleantech financing in the global economy held at 5th Annual Babson Energy and Environmental Conference on Entrepreneurship for a Sustainable Future.

Adams said pitch competitions such as the New Energy Symposium and Industry Growth Forum are “focused on drawing the biggest population possible to make these forums and others available to a sector that’s traditionally struggled to find investment.”

Companies presenting at this year’s NES represented all stages of development and offered a wide spectrum of technologies for potential theoretical “investment” from the VC panels. Focused on recycling, reducing or neutralizing much of the waste we create on a daily basis—companies offered solutions from reducing waste streams on site and removing metals from industrial waste water and recycling them, to simplifying solar installations, preparing residential and commercial buildings for alternative technologies and lowering energy consumption, and integrating nano carbon anodes in batteries that significantly increase lifetime and capacity.

Regulatory challenges, of course, present one of the biggest challenges to clean energy companies in general, and “a national energy policy would make a significant difference for cleantech,” according to Adams. “Government plays a significant role of providing the initial leg up and then the private sector continues from there.”

Reyad Sawafta, president and CEO of QuarTek Corporation, parent company of Phase Change Energy Solutions, agreed, “Everyone has an important role to play in preserving and sustaining a healthy ecosystem. The private sector needs to invest more on needed and creative [clean energy] innovations that provide more by using less. The government has to provide more support for creative cleantech research and promote first adoption, testing and validation of these innovations.”

Technology Transfer Coordinator for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Dr. Karina Edmonds agrees. As Coordinator, Edmonds is charged with the goal of “lowering the barriers from lab to market” for clean energy technologies. According to Edmonds, this includes establishing a better working relationship between the DOE and start-ups via the Startup America Initiative. The Initiative’s goals are threefold: 1) reducing barriers; 2) increasing access to capital; and 3) promoting mentor opportunities.

Of course, it’s no surprise that obtaining financing at each stage of development continues to be a challenge for clean energy companies and where much of their “work” is expended. Rentricity’s Chief Operating Officer, Dan Connors, said, “most cleantech investment opportunities simply do not have the scalability or “capital efficiency” that VC’s prefer and have found in other technology industries like IT or communications.”

He noted, “Government needs to provide a set of incentives, with accompanying requirements and rules, which are consistent and long-term. As the solar industry can attest, short term incentives that expire the next budget cycle are a boom/bust cycle of false starts. Additionally, the investment community, from VC’s to commercial banks, should be further incentivized to financially support companies that help the country meet its energy, environmental and economic goals.” For Rentricity, work towards obtaining project finance to support their “PPA business model” to penetrate its Tier 2 market is a continuous challenge.

“Project finance as a planned follow-up step to the pure VC investment is the missing link. For example, Rentricity’s investment needs include a blend of venture capital for equity in the company, plus an investment in Rentricity projects, which is typically a blend of debt, equity, and tax equity. Those are obviously two different types of investors,” Connors added.

In reporting its preliminary 2Q 2011 results for clean technology venture investments, San Francisco-based Cleantech Group said, “Investors continue to favor later-stage deals [with] 87 percent of all capital invested in 2Q11 in Series B or later rounds.” Cleantech Group found total investment in North America, Europe, China and India, for that period reached $1.83 billion.

Powch added that, “VCs no longer seem to [invest] in early stage [companies], leaving it to government through via grants and SBIRs, and Angel [investors]. But government has real difficulty picking winners; there lacks for true early stage technology investing that is deeper…”

Adams said the investor model is changing. “There are more strategic investors and more corporations with R&D interests and the ability to look at technology more broadly than a VC.” With respect to corporate investment, “Again, we’re seeing a trend. Companies investing are making improvements to an existing product, adding a new product line because the distribution and marketing networks are already in place, or they are using the traditional VC model of investing in a new company and eventually spinning it off. All of which reduce their investment risk.”

He also noted that a new VC is emerging. “They are dedicated to cleantech. Limited partners are set up with different return expectations. And they tend to have very large balance sheets w/ ability to support development of a new company and its deployment into a regulated environment.”

Perhaps, with the help of this new VC and companies like Phase Change Energy Solutions, Rentricity, and Versatilis, the U.S. will better its odds of creating those 30-60 new billion dollar businesses.

So You’ve Been Invited to Pitch Your Business

Everyone knows VCs invest in market opportunities and the management team. But your investment presentation is a “big piece of the overall pitch pie.” While it might seem obvious as you read through this list—and by no means a complete list—even the strongest presenters at this year’s New Energy Symposium hid or missed a few key points VCs wanted to hear. Here’s some of what you should keep up front and sharp in your presentation.

1. Don’t hide the value proposition.
2. Spell out your costs, e.g., raw materials, transportation, etc.
3. Tell them how much money you need and what you’re going to do with it if, you get it.
4. Address regulatory issues if your technology is focused on a regulated market.
5. Provide an overview of your go-to-market strategy.
6. Discuss partnerships you are pursuing or have established with corporate partners.
7. Differentiate yourself from your competition. This is not the time to be self-deprecating, though
   stating why your technology is better than your competition can be done professionally.
8. Clearly present your IP situation. Who holds the patents? What do you have? What do you need?
9. Talk about the technology’s capability and credibility, and market capability and credibility.
10. Give them a road map for getting into the field; how are you going to scale up?
11. If your licensing model fails, what’s the backup plan?
12. Last, but not least, remember you are delivering a presentation in 20 minutes or less. So, in addition to bringing your energy and passion for the technology, remember: 10-15 slides; white space is a good thing—in other words, don’t load them up with lots of text; don’t read your slides verbatim, color contrast is important; and make sure you face your panel.

Related post: “Renewables Give Us More Power Than Nuclear“, discusses the recent news that renewable energy (including hydro as well) now supplies more electricity to the US grid than does nuclear power.

Renewable Energy Focus

© 2011, Peg Zokowski. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Chris de Morsella, Green Economy Post Chris is the co-editor of The Green Executive Recruiter Directory. Follow Chris on Twitter @greeneconpost

When people think of hydropower what typically comes to mind are huge massive dams backing up large scale reservoirs behind them. While by far most existing hydropower is from large dams there are other ways to harvest the renewable energy of water flowing down rivers, such as run of th eriver systems, and that have significantly less impact on the overall river ecology than massive dams do.

Hydropower is an important energy resource, and moving water packs much more power in it than air moving at the same speed, because water is 830 times denser than air. In terms of generation contribution it is by far the single most important renewable energy resource. But big dams and the ecological havoc that they often create have caused many people to view hydropower in a very poor light. As someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest and has seen how the big dams up here along the Columbia/Snake river system have had a hugely negative impact on the river ecology of this region that once supported massive wild Salmon runs I share the concerns of environmentalists vis a vis damming rivers and in so doing disrupting the natural hydrological flows and conditions.

Which is why it is heartening to see small scale micro-hydro and run-of-the-river hydro finally getting some attention and a little bit of funding — small potatoes for sure compared to the big funding winners lining up at the federal trough, but important funding for this small but promising energy sector never the less.

One reason I support the research and development of low head small scale free river hydro is because of its low environmental impact on the river biosystems both aquatic and along the banks, wetlands and floodplains that are reached by the river. Another reason is because these systems are inherently smaller scale and distributed. Distributed generation helps the grid be more robust than it otherwise would be and is often produced closer to where power is needed as well.

The Advanced Hydropower Funding Announcement

US Department Energy Secretary Steven Chu and US Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today announced nearly $17 million in funding over the next three years for research and development projects to advance hydropower technology. Sixteen projects in 11 states were selected through a competitive grant process for their ability to contribute to the development of innovative technologies that produce hydropower more efficiently, reduce costs, and increase sustainable hydropower generation. The funding will help advance the Obama Administration’s goal of meeting 80% of our electricity needs from clean energy sources by 2035.

“By improving and deploying advanced hydropower technologies, we can maximize our use of this proven clean energy resource, create jobs, and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels,” said Secretary Chu. “Hydropower can be used to store energy to help utilities better integrate other sources of renewable energy like wind and solar into the grid, improving our energy security and diversifying our clean energy resources.”

Related post: “Remember Hydropower? Proven and Cost-Effective Clean Energy“, takes a more in depth look at the significant hydro power potential in the US.

“This administration is supporting innovative development of hydropower—one of our largest renewable energy sources—with an emphasis on reducing or eliminating environmental impacts on ecosystems,” Secretary Salazar said. “These research and development dollars will help make hydropower technology more efficient and cost-effective as we continue to promote clean energy resources and build an American renewable energy economy in an environmentally responsible manner.”

These projects will advance sustainable renewable energy generation from small (less than 30 megawatts) hydropower resources, enhance environmental performance of hydropower, test innovative, cost-effective technologies for hydropower development at low-head (less than a 30 foot drop) sites such as irrigation canals and non-powered dams, and spur deployment of pumped storage hydropower. By allowing utility operators to pump water up to a dam or impoundment during periods of low electricity demand and release water during times of peak electricity demand, pumped storage hydropower improves the reliability of electric grids and helps increase the use of variable renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power.

Hydropower is a source of renewable energy that can be relied upon for long-term, stable production of domestic electricity. The hydropower industry currently employs more than 300,000 workers in the United States, making it not only the oldest, but also the largest renewable power generation workforce in the nation.

The selections announced today focus on four approaches to advancing hydropower in the United States:

• Sustainable Small Hydropower: Nine projects awarded by DOE will receive a total of $5.8 million and one project jointly funded by DOE and DOI will receive $1.5 million to research, develop, and test low-head, small hydropower technologies that can be quickly and efficiently deployed at existing non-powered dams or constructed waterways. These projects will focus on system or component model development, as well as the real-world testing of these systems.
• Sustainable Pumped Storage Hydropower: Two projects awarded by DOE will receive a total of $6.8 million to spur deployment of advanced pumped storage hydropower in the United States. One award will conduct pre-construction, geotechnical evaluations for a pumped storage hydropower project in the early stages of development that will use advanced technology to dynamically respond to the electrical grid, enabling the integration of wind and solar energy. DOE is also supporting analyses that calculate the economic value of pumped storage hydropower.
• Environmental Mitigation Technologies for Conventional Hydropower: Three projects awarded by DOE will receive a total of $2 million to develop innovative hydropower technologies that will enhance environmental performance while increasing electricity generation, mitigating fish and habitat impacts and enhancing downstream water quality.
• Advanced Hydropower System Testing at a Bureau of Reclamation Facility: One project jointly funded by DOE and DOI will receive $746,000 to support system tests of innovative, low-head, small hydropower technologies at a non-powered site owned by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. DOE’s funding is targeted at research and development, whereas the Bureau of Reclamation’s funding is targeted at implementation. Energy cost reductions demonstrated at this site could be replicated at other Bureau of Reclamation sites.

The complete listing of funded projects is listed here.

Related Post: “Drive Energy Innovation to Grow the Clean Economy Says Brookings“, summarizes the new green jobs study by the Brookings Institute, noting that the study reports that the driving force behind the U.S. “clean economy” over the last decade has been emerging energy technologies.

© 2011, Chris de Morsella. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Steve Carl, Senior Technologist and Green IT Spokesperson for BMC Software. Read his blog, Green IT. Follow him on Twitter @stevecarl.

In my last Green IT post “Low Hanging Virtualization Fruit” I mentioned that I thought VDI would be a great way to save power and therefore reduce CO2. I thought it would be interesting to walk that intuition though some actual assumptions (similar to what I did in “Watts Up” for virtualization)

It all starts with the idea of what the average number of computers is that a single person uses professionally. I know I am way above the curve on that one, with four, but I am not that unusual for an R&D person. High average users are balanced by the mobile users that have one or two systems, and one of those is a laptop.

So, here is assumption number one. My typical person in this model will have two computers. One desktop, one laptop. The desktop will stay at their primary workplace (office or home) and the laptop will follow them around wherever they are. In today’s world it is also possible that the laptop is really a tablet computer such as a Motorola Xoom or Apple iPad.

Since this is about VDI, I am going to assume that the laptop / tablet will be one of the VDI access devices, and not be replaced, and therefore not considered for power reductions. As a power consumer, a laptop is already less than a desktop. My M4500 has a 130 watt power supply, and I have run it off a 70 watt unit. My Macbook has a 65 watt power supply, and so uses probably 50 or less.

Just the Desktop Then

The desktop in the model will have a 275 watt power supply (like my Dell 745 does..), and on average use, with a graphics cards that can drive dual monitors I will assume the data center diversity factor planning standard of .6, or 165 watts when in use.

I will also assume that the desktop has two monitors, and even go so far as to assume that they are at least LCD of some kind. My E197FP’s use 40 watts each, but they have Cold Cathode backlights. A quick look at the current model U2211H shows it using almost half that, at 22 watts. I presume most of that difference to be the LED backlight technology. So, next assumption: Half the population will have LED, half CC, or on average about 30 watts per screen. Times two, for 60 watts total. Add this to the desktop number and we have 225 watts per person per desktop. Assume older PC’s with CRT’s and this number gets much bigger very quickly.

Cross check: I found this table over at the University of Pennsylvania web site, and it quotes the 745 as using 145 watts to boot, and then using between 111 and 133 watts when active, but this is in a single monitor configuration and includes a low power monitor, so I think my 165 number is probably OK. Maybe a little high, but I’ll be extremely conservative estimate-wise in other areas so I think I’ll run with this.

This is that “while being used number”. When in standby, both the screen and the desktops use far less power (2 watts each, both panels and desktop computers, for a sleeping total of 6 watts)

How many hours a week is it using 225 watts and how many only 6 watts? I don’t know anyone that puts in only 40 hours a week, and I also don’t know many people that let their desktop system go to sleep. Their laptops? Sure. Their desktops? Hardly ever as near as I can tell. Some people still run screen savers… on LCD’s. I let the monitors go to sleep of course, but to be able to remotely access the desktops they can not be asleep. The uPenn data says that idle the desktop uses 111 watts, and that includes the Dell Ultrasharp monitor at 2 watts. Round number, lets just postulate that idle it probably uses 110 watts. And some people in the populace will let the desktop sleep, so that will bring the average down a bit. Call it 100 watts inactive then. Adjust this number whichever way needed to account for policies that enforce sleeping when inactive on a desktop. Since a fully hibernated desktop is using about 2 watts, if the majority of the PC’s are set this way, it hugely changes the assumptions.

Another thing that would influence the assumptions is the general age of the desktop. My Dell 745 is middling old at about 4 – 5 years. The older the desktops you are looking to replace, the more power they will use, the less well they will sleep when idle.

How many desktops am I after here? We have more than 6200 people here: Lets see what replacing 5000 desktops with a thin client looks like.

Thin Client

How much power does the desktop replacement thin client use? I looked at the specs of the Wyse V50LE and it appears to use 15 watts when connected to 2 monitors. A quick survey of other options makes that appear fairly typical for a dual monitor thin client, so we’ll go with that. The monitors would be the same as they were before: I’ll assume that most of the LCD’s are just moved over, that there are still two of them, and so we are using 60 watts when active and 4 when not for the screens. That is about 75 watts when active, and 6 watts when not active. The not-active wattage is a guess for the thin client,as it is not specified,so I assume that it is the same as the desktop. It is probably less, but trying to go worst case here.

Disk Space

How much stuff is on the average desktop hard drive? How big does the internal disk really need to be? I imagine that this, more than most anything, is widely variable. There are pack rats that keep everything ever written since the dawn of time, and those people that keep asking me for a copy of something I sent them last week, because they already deleted it. I try not to take it personally: They do that to everyone.

My fully patched Windows XP guest has a 10GB disk, and is full at all times. My Win7 desktop has 80GB in use. My Win7 guest (oddly) has 98GB in use. Win7 looks like it uses about 9 or 10 times what XP does. For the model I’ll assume that the virtual disk is 100GB, but that 20GB of that is not unique, so that only 80GB needs to be considered for end user space per desktop. This is probably high, but keeps me firmly on the conservative estimate side of things.

5000 times 80GB is 400 Terabytes. Wow. We have a ton of capacity at the edge of the networks.That number is probably high, and with hardware thin provisioning, virtual storage, in storage data de-dup, etc, there are all kinds of ways to reduce that footprint. Once again, to try and paint this as black as possible, what is the power for 400 TB? While we are at it, lets make this usable TB, and account for RAID and hot sparing of disks.

My sample design for this will be Dell Equalogic. A PS6500E, PS6500X, and PS6500XV. Tiered together so that hot data resides on the 15K disks of the XV, medium access data on the 10K disks of the X, and lightly referenced data on the mass storage of the E. Take 80% of each ones capacity, and rounding down, that is 105TB total, and uses about 2200 watts. 21 watts per TB, 8,400 watts for 400TB.

This is probably way high. There are all sorts of solutions inside VDI to save disk space, not even counting what modern storage can do. Virtual Bridges VERDE’s use of local disks where available for example. VMware’s Link Clones. Xen’s Provisioning Server, etc.

Nothing Is Free: A Host

Of course, the thin client works because there is a host someplace in a glass house / internal / external cloud running the actual virtual desktop. On this server there are bunches of other virtual desktops similar to the one running here. Similar, but not the same. In our experimentation with VDI, we see that that things like the memory reuse/overcommit were lower than if we were running a bunch of similar servers on the same host. On the other hand, a desktop OS does not typically use as much RAM as a server OS.

My typical desktop OS assumption will be a 2GB with a single CPU. History tells me that using dual CPU in a virtual environment only makes sense if the VM has a history of using more than one real processor a great deal of the time. If it does not, then the overhead of dispatching the second virtual processor is actually a performance decrease rather than increase.

This is a fairly large VM: My desktop running Win7 only has 2GB, and runs fairly well most of the time. Windows XP can not even use 4GB without being 64 bit, due to some oddities in the way the memory management and other historic design issues work. I actually use my 2GB desktop as a virtual desktop when I am on the road, and it works quite well, so I think this is a good average design point for this model.

How many VDI’s per host then? A survey of the sizing data out there from various vendors is pretty widely disparate on that number. It is also clear that there are heavy users and light users (See this VMware doc and this one from Parallels), and that unlike a typical server virtualization engagement where RAM is the first virtual host bottleneck, CPU and I/O seem to be the places that the hosts get hung up for virtual desktop. Going dense on the RAM probably means spending some time optimizing the I/O subsystem to be sure that the host can handle the maximum number of virtual desktops.

Then there is the way that the VDI solutions architecture influences that variables, such as Virtual Bridges Leaf and Branch design.

Clearly how many hosts it will take is going to be my loosest part of this estimate. Still, looking at the literature, and thinking about my general observations of the current VMware data from our BCO tool, I am going to drive a stake in the ground and say that a Dell R810 with 256GB of RAM and an optimized I/O subsystem should be able to handle a mix of heavy and light users of around 200. That may be high: That may be low. I admit, its something that would need a lot of validation, and would really depend on what the VDI solution is, and how you implement it, and how many people are remote. That means we’d need about 25 hosts though, and at about 1100 watts / host. That is the nameplate, so about 660 watts steady state after booting.

Related post: “The Way of the Green Code“, proposes that software design practices need to change in order to produce software that is both greener itself and that is designed to help other systems and products become greener.

Power Costs and CO2 Emissions

How you power is generated, and where you are in the world directly impacts how the electrons are being pumped to your data center as well as how much you pay for that electron pressure. Here is some data for four locations we have data centers that I will use:

These are averages, and only useful for comparison. For example, Austin Texas is working on moving 25% of the city power to wind generated over the next few years, so a DC in Austin will have a lower CO2 footprint than a DC in, say, Dallas or Houston or Amarillo. Yes: They have things other than cows in Amarillo.

The Numbers

That should line up all the assumptions for the model. I’ll assume this is being studied over a three year period, since that is the shortest amount of time anyone would probably keep a desktop before replacing it. The reality is probably better than that, given that the average PC life-cycle has lengthened.

Power of the Desktop

Power of the Thin Client

External SAN Storage Power for VDI hosts

Here is where it all comes together: How much money in power, and how much CO2 can be saved in this model, VDI over desktop?

{Slightly updated: Found spreadsheet error on VDI hosts for MA. Fixed. Reuploaded SS}

One thing is for sure: I don’t think I’d try to roll this out to 5000 people all at once. The assumptions here are large. The design / vendor choices influence this hugely. For fun I messed around with this model seeing how more and less efficient desktops affected the bottom line, and the answer of course was “in a big way”. All my numbers are here, and I attached the OpenDoc format spreadsheet if you want to plug in your own numbers to see how your assumptions move the data around.

Finally, there are a bunch of good reasons other than being Green to use VDI. Moving your desktops inside your data center is a big one. it is much easier to back up your data assets when they are inside the glass house / internal cloud. Security is of course huge: Lost laptops are not nearly as upsetting if by losing it, all the data stayed right where it was, and nothing went missing. Being able to pick up, move from device to device, place to place, and resume where you were in your work is a nice productivity enhancer.

See related post: “Top 10 Things Data Centers Forget About PUE“, for a discussion that points out ten areas of power usage that are not being captured in PUE measurements; some of which have significant implications for PUE measurements.

© 2011, Steve Carl. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Robert Rapier, Chief Technology Officer, Merica International a renewable energy company focused on biomass. Connect with Robert on Linkedin.

In 2008, I believed all year long that Barack Obama would win the presidency. Even when Hillary Clinton was still the favorite to win the nomination, I thought Obama’s charisma would ultimately win him the Democratic nomination, and then the presidency. The night before the election I wrote that I thought he would capture more than 300 electoral votes (he got 356) and would beat McCain by more than 100 electoral vote (the margin of victory was 192 electoral votes). On the night of the election, I wrote a post congratulating him. I was happy to see him elected. But in the same post I also predicted that he would disappoint many.

There is no question that Obama inherited a mess of an economy from the previous administration. And if McCain had been elected, I would probably be writing the same story about him. I think that 100 years from now, history will look back on Obama as having broken important racial barriers. His election inspired hope around the world. But it seems that the ability to give a charismatic speech does not necessarily translate into being a good president. I believe history will judge Barack Obama as a mediocre president.

Naturally Republicans are going to view Obama negatively, but he has come under harsh criticism within his own party. Jon Stewart summed it up like this:

Stewart has elaborated that one of his biggest disappointments is that many people who were responsible for getting the country into our current financial state have been left in place to fix the problems they created: “I thought he understood the corrosiveness of the system that existed, and I thought he was going to do more to blow the system up.” New York Magazine just published a sharp critique of Obama’s policies on this very topic, namely that his “failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.” The article noted:

But while Obama has given the financial system a free pass for losing huge sums of money and requiring large taxpayer-funded bailouts, there is one system that Obama has tried to blow up. He has essentially declared war on our domestic oil companies since taking office. This is not surprising; he had campaigned on this theme as well. That was the largest beef that I had with then candidate Obama; that he was so willing to marginalize and demonize the companies that provide over 90% of the nation’s transportation fuel. It is hugely ironic that the billions in taxes paid by the oil companies helped make some of these bailouts possible (as I noted in this story) — yet the oil companies are the ones Obama has chosen to attack.

I expressed concern throughout the presidential campaign over Obama’s energy policy proposals. I felt that he was exceedingly naive, and that campaign naivety has shown up in his energy policies as president. Policies — such as his recent decision to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) — run counter to many of his other positions (e.g., reducing dependence on oil, promoting renewable energy), and increase the risk of future supply shocks. Many observers have already pointed out that oil prices are now higher than they were prior to the SPR release. As this article succinctly put it (subscription required), during a financial crisis you can print more money, but “you cannot print oil.”

As a former Democratic state representative recently said to me “I think Obama’s problem is that he is largely uninformed about energy.” It would be nice, though, if he took some time to inform himself. We know that he has an affinity for visiting renewable energy companies. I wonder if he has ever thought about visiting an oil refinery? He might learn that they make his trips on Air Force One possible.

I think the result of being uninformed is that Obama believes that if he marginalizes our domestic oil companies, that this will lift the fortunes for renewable energy. In fact, far more likely is that as our domestic oil companies are placed at a competitive disadvantage to their foreign competitors, they will curtail production and shelve marginal projects, and we will look to oil imports to fill the gap. That is why I am against policies that I believe will place our domestic oil companies at a disadvantage; this will ultimately weaken the U.S. (I am not, however, against policies that raise the price of oil across the board; those are the kinds of policies that I believe will truly incentivize renewable energy).

But as I scan the Republican field, I don’t see anyone who can beat Obama in the 2012 elections. Palin? Bachmann? No way. (I made my feelings about Palin clear here, and I thought it was a huge mistake for McCain to put her on the ticket. Blame him for unleashing her on the public). Romney? Too liberal for even large segments of his own party, particularly the far right. The Tea Party faction will support Palin or Bachmann, but some of the more moderate Republicans would likely abstain before voting for them.

See our related energy policy post: “Energy Issues Could Help Define the 2012 Republican Primary“, for a look at how energy issues may define the 2012 Republican primary.

So what does this all mean? I think Obama gets reelected in 2012, and we must endure mediocrity until at least the end of 2016. I am a firm believer that past performance is a good indicator of future performance, and thus we are unlikely to see any dramatic changes in his policies. Further, unlike his first two years when he had a Democratic majority, he now has to work with a Republican majority who will oppose him at every turn.

That also means 5 more years of naive and counterproductive energy policies. We will probably be treated to more futile releases from the SPR (I wonder when he plans on refilling it?), and a country that is weaker and more dependent on foreign oil at the end of his term.

But Osama bin Laden was eliminated on Obama’s watch. At least that’s something.

Related post: “Proof That Green Funding Means More Jobs Per Public Dollar – Green Is Good“, argues that numbers show that green stimulus investments are among the most cost-effective ways to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

© 2011, Robert Rapier. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Jim Greenberger, Executive Director, National Alliance for Advanced Technology Batteries (NAATBatt), a not-for-profit trade association of companies involved in the manufacture of large format advanced batteries for automotive and grid-connected energy storage applications. Connect with Jim on Linkedin.

A few weeks ago, I attended the National Summit on Energy Security in Washington, D.C., produced by Securing America’s Energy Future (SAFE) and the Electrification Coalition. The Summit featured a program called Oil Shock Wave, which simulated a meeting of the U.S. Cabinet following a series of events in the Middle East threatening to disrupt petroleum supplies. The simulated Cabinet members (including such former high government officials as Ari Fleischer, Stuart Eizenstat, John Negroponte and Susan Schwab) grappled in real time with unfolding events in the Middle East, their impact on the financial markets, and America’s options in responding to them.

The Oil Shock Wave program was excellent, if predictably sobering. It underlined in dramatic fashion the extreme vulnerability of the American economy to oil supply disruptions and the uncomfortable plausibility of events that would lead to such disruptions.

More importantly, the simulation demonstrated the role of crisis in government decision making. The steps necessary to reduce American dependence on imported petroleum were well known to the Cabinet members prior to the simulated crisis, just as they are well known to the readers of this column. It was interesting to see how, as the simulated crisis escalated, the short term political considerations that kept those steps from being taken fell away and let the simulated Cabinet take action.

Of course, by the time the Cabinet took action, it was already too late. The extreme economic damage of the disruptions was already unavoidable; the Cabinet’s actions simply served to lessen future vulnerability. To paraphrase one of the participants, a crisis makes choices easy but reduces the number of choices you have to make.

It is hard to identify the lessons of the Oil Shock Wave simulation. That the federal government is dysfunctionally deadlocked by short term politics and seems only to make important decisions in times of crisis is not news. Neither is the extreme vulnerability of the American economy to petroleum supply disruption. It was tempting to take a pessimistic lesson away from the program.

Related post: “Unpredictable Oil Prices are Hurting Everyone“, argues that the global economy needs a better market regulating mechanism that can help manage energy price swings so they become less damaging to the world’s economies.

But what the simulation really showed was the importance of the Big Idea. Big Ideas are fundamental changes that societies must make to survive or to thrive. Doing what is necessary to break our dangerous dependence on imported petroleum is certainly one such Big Idea.

A crisis can motivate a Big Idea. But there are other ways to motivate a Big Idea. Courage by political leaders is one. Desperation and courage are, after all, close cousins. We need to demand courage from our political leaders on the subject of energy policy. The American people will recognize courage when they see it, and they will follow. We must reassure our political leaders of that fact, if they cannot see that wisdom themselves.

The alternative to courage is a poor one, both for the country and for its leaders. An energy policy driven by crisis and desperation will be expensive and potentially catastrophic. And when the desperation comes, the American people will not forgive those who have driven them to it.

Related post: “Energy Issues Could Help Define the 2012 Republican Primary“, looks at how energy and environmental issues, and the candidate stances on them, will play a large role in the 2012 presidential election.

Biomass Power & Thermal

© 2011, James Greenberger. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Caroline Fraser, Yale Environment 360

Last year, the spectacle of 80 million people flocking to the faux greenery of FarmVille, a social networking game on Facebook, held particular irony for environmentalists who have ritually bemoaned low levels of public interest in biodiversity. Every traditional method and media has been tapped to penetrate this elephantine indifference, from documentaries to dire predictions. Rarely a week goes by without reports on crashing ecosystems or mass extinction, a blizzard of bad news inspiring little more than hand-wringing.

But in the spirit of joining rather than beating, conservationists have begun embracing the enemy, the very force that alienated people from nature in the first place: technology.

Social media have become the latest, hottest tools in natural history circles as scientists confront a populace that knows laptops better than landscapes. In the quest to give communities a grasp on complex ecological systems — particularly as they face decisions imposed by climate change — social networking promises to link scientists with the public, empowering naturalist armies to act on their behalf: monitoring species, observing behavioral patterns, and reporting the presence of invasives and changes in climate, vegetation, and populations.

Citizen science has migrated to the Web, emerging as a potent force multiplier for conservation.

Citizen science — natural history — has been the province of amateur enthusiasts for centuries, long before a young beetle-lover found himself in the Galapagos, flinging marine iguanas into the sea to see if they’d swim back. The popularity of the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, launched in 1900, brought new rigor to backyard observations, revealing the scientific potential of simultaneously gathering thousands of data points across wide geographical areas.

But with the explosion of cell phones equipped with digital cameras and global positioning systems, citizen science has migrated to the Web, emerging as a potent force-multiplier — and watchdog — for conservation. In May, Namibia’s government announced an SMS hotline for anonymous poaching tips: “Five fives for rhino.” After the Fukushima nuclear plant failure, Japanese citizens skeptical of government reassurances bought their own dosimeters to map radioactive hot spots on the Web. Likewise, during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science transformed anxiety into “civic science,” moving residents to chart the spill with digital cameras tied to kites and balloons.

The most astonishing results from environmental social networking lie in such crowdsourcing. In March, the Smithsonian put out an emergency call on Facebook for specialists to identify 5,000 freshly collected fish specimens from Guyana for export paperwork. Within 24 hours, ichthyologists around the world supplied partial or complete answers for almost 90 percent.

But most projects, from traditional websites to social networking services and apps, are premeditated: Cornell University’s Citizen Science Central acts as a clearinghouse for over 130. Many offer training in species identification and invite the public to post targeted observations: the number of gray vs. fox squirrels (Project Squirrel), the appearance of buds in spring and other seasonal plant phases (Project BudBurst), the migratory behavior of Monarch butterflies (Monarch Watch) or hummingbirds (Operation Ruby Throat). Others organize and analyze data online from “BioBlitzes,” intensive biological surveys conducted by volunteers with the guidance of specialists. Offering land managers and stakeholders spatially referenced databases on the presence or absence of protected or invasive species, these range from local exercises — a 24-hour “snapshot” of every species in Wisconsin’s Beaver Creek Reserve, for example — to large-scale, long-term initiatives like the Adirondack All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory.

Such efforts may seem modest. But Cornell professor Harry W. Greene, an old-fashioned field biologist and self-described “snake guy,” regards these observations as “absolutely at the core of all biology.” Greene points out that “for most organisms on Earth, we know almost nothing.” In years past, he often received frustrating reports of snake sightings from a public uncertain about key details — length, color, markings. Now, people send a digital image. “I write them right back,” he says, “and tell them whether the roadkill in their driveway is a Massasauga rattlesnake or a northern milk snake.” He describes the outpouring of data from citizens as “revolutionary,” not only for science but for amateurs: “When you make an observation,” he says, “you put yourself into the life of the organism. You care more.” With enough anecdotal reports and photos, meaningful statistical samples can emerge.

Related post: “CSR and Social Media“, explores the explosion of social media as a new platform for communication, stakeholder engagement and transparency.

One innovator calls social networking part of the ‘mass amateurization of everything.’

Greene and a former graduate student developed a prototype for “NatureWorm”, a social networking site designed to kindle interest in natural history on a wide scale. Investment lagged, but the niche has been filled by other opportunistic organisms, such as iNaturalist.org, an online community created by students at University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information where users can upload photos and hobnob about sightings. On a recent visit, “RussianNaturalistBrazil” had just posted an arresting image of Gongora meneziana, a fleshy, translucent red-spotted orchid found in Brazil’s Atlantic forest; Google maps pinpointed his location north of Salvador. Elsewhere on the site, a debate had broken out on the identification of a type of Indian paintbrush in California’s Wildcat Canyon.

Project Noah is a more commercial version of an environmental community, led by telecom entrepreneur Yasser Ansari, who grew up in southern California and developed a passion for poison dart frogs as a child. After studying molecular biology and bioinformatics at University of California, San Diego, Ansari collaborated on Noah (“Networked Organisms and Habitats”) with fellow students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Launched in February 2010, it is now available as an app, downloaded to over 100,000 smartphones. So far, participants have uploaded over 60,000 “spottings.” Recent caches feature everything from the inevitable white-tailed deer and common garden flowers (“rose,” “lantana”) to images of a red-eyed tree frog, an Arctic fox, a Plains zebra rolling in dirt, a griffon vulture in flight, and mating common Indian toads.

Contributors to Noah plot sightings on a worldwide map, earn patches (reminiscent of the Boy Scouts’), and join “Missions” — the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Impact — to delve deeper into scientific projects. The National Geographic Society recently provided investment for new software, reposting on Facebook Noah’s “Spotting of the Week” — including a spectacular giraffe-necked weevil from Madagascar — for its 6.6 million fans.

For all the emphasis on documentation, Ansari’s view of his social network has evolved. He sees it primarily as a motivational tool, part of the “mass amateurization of everything.” While his original vision was to collect data, he now suggests that Noah is “more effective at getting people excited. We’re trying to create a powerful gateway drug. If you use Project Noah and then move on to hard-core science, that’s a huge win. The data is secondary.”

Not necessarily. Project Squirrel, which has expanded countrywide from its origins in Chicago, is keeping watch on both its target species and human observers. “We’re correlating what people tell us about habitat to what the squirrels are telling us,” director Steve Sullivan says, predicting that the project may document the accuracy of citizen science and its role in stimulating passion for nature.

Project BudBurst, sponsored by NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, has registered nearly 12,000 volunteer observers since 2007. Participants have uploaded tens of thousands of observations on their chosen plants’ first leaf, first flower, first pollen, and other phenological phases (lilac is among the most popular), yielding datasets that have allowed scientists to extend a 50-year botanical study of Cook County, Illinois. Comparing historical data with three years of BudBurst observations has revealed that, as temperatures rise, forsythia is blooming 24 days earlier, black locust 19 days earlier, and red maple 14.

Both Squirrel and BudBurst are popular in classrooms, but lone individuals are also prolific — one Waco, Texas plant-watcher has been monitoring more than 25 species since BudBurst’s inception, including Texas red oak, Texas bluebonnet, spiderwort, and pink ladies.

Today’s social media may indeed spark a rebirth of natural history.

Perhaps the most intriguing capability of social media involves something that goes deeper than data. The University of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Game is an interactive computer simulation with the power to change minds. Beginning in 2000, it plays out over a 20-year horizon, allowing teams to take on the roles and responsibilities of oystermen, crabbers, crop and dairy farmers, real-estate developers, and policy-makers, everyone with an impact on one of the world’s most endangered watersheds. As teams make decisions based on economic and regulatory restrictions, determining how much land to cultivate or how many crabs to trap, they watch the real-time, long-term consequences of their choices playing out. Crucially, “the game is politically neutral,” says David E. Smith, professor in U. Va.’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

On Earth Day this year, teams from seven Chesapeake Bay-area universities played, each representing a major basin — York River, James River, the Eastern Shore, etc. It was a sobering experience. At the end, a College of William and Mary biology professor acknowledged that despite players’ best efforts, “the quality of the bay went down.”

The game is impressively accurate: Its recent iteration encompasses tens of thousands of data points, and IBM has selected it for the World Community Grid program, harnessing over a million volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers. Philippe Cousteau, grandson of the oceanographer, is partnering with the university to adapt it for other ecosystems, from Australia to Arizona. He foresees a day when younger students can input real data to model their backyards and lobby their parents — “Hey, mom and dad, let’s not use fertilizer on the lawn.”

Today’s social media may indeed spark a rebirth of natural history, but none have yet moved climate change or biodiversity loss forward very far forward on the political agenda. There are tremors: In 2009, 350.org, agitating for action on climate change, used social media to organize more than 5,000 events in some 180 countries, in what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” Last year, 350.org mobilized tens of thousands of people against offshore oil drilling, holding hands across 900 beaches. Avaaz, the Web-based social justice movement, has inspired more than a million to sign a petition to protect bee populations by banning neonicotinoid pesticides in the U.S. and EU.

Meanwhile, the environment waits for a software wunderkind to find the social formula that may lure a fickle public to fall in love with the real world, not a fake one.

Read our related post: “5 Green Twitter Memes You Should be Using To Get More Followers“, to find out about daily Twitter memes, and how they work to build you followers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline Fraser traveled on six continents to write Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. Her first book, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, was selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book. She has written widely about animal rights, natural history, and the environment.

© 2011, Yale Environment 360. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

Ten Innovative Ways to Use Twitter for Business

© 2011, Yale Environment 360. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Elaine Cohen, Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd. Read Elaine’s blog. Follow Elaine on Twitter. Elaine is the author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices

You are the CEO of a company that has been publishing a Sustainability Report for the past few years. On balance, you enjoy the report and find that it is a good reflection of your sustainability performance. You haven’t received any awards but you have received some positive feedback from your Board, some customers, suppliers and your own management team. After a few years on the reporting cycle, you have some questions about the costs of producing the report, the time and resources involved, the presentation of the report and the impact the report has on stakeholders. Usually, you are pretty hands-off and leave people to get on with things. However, you feel it’s time to understand the Sustainaibility Reporting process a little more closely. You have invited your Sustainability Reporting Manager (SRM) for a little chat. Well, actually, an interview. Because you want answers. Here are the 20 questions you should plan to ask your SRM. You might not want to ask ALL of them in one session!

1. How are you?
   This is as good a question as any to start an interview with. Ask genuinely and listen to the answer. You never know what might emerge that’s worth your knowing.
2. What’s new?
   Many many moons ago, I attended a Leadership Program which included a strategy session run by the inspiring Ram Charan. One of the things he talked about as a feature of great leadership, which has always stuck in my mind, was the fact that a leader is always asking questions and eager to listen to the answer. Just as a simple question such as: How are you? can be a real floodgate opener, so can the question: What’s new? be an opportunity to learn lots about what’s top-of-mind in your business and also about the person you are asking. Anyone who answers the question What’s new? with the answer: Nothing much has obviously checked out of life for a while, because in life, work and in sustainability reporting, there is always something new.
3. What aspect of our last Sustainability Report are you most proud of?
   A positive and open ended question for a gentle introduction to the subject. The SRM should be able to talk with enthusiasm about the sustainability report and in response to this question is free to select the things that personally gave her the most satisfaction. Whether these things are the same as those which are important to you, the CEO, or to the business, will give you an idea as to how well your SRM is aligned with the business and with your aspirations. The response may also enlighten you about things you may not have realized were such a big deal as you read the Sustainability Report.
4. What specific objectives were established for the Sustainability Report and how were they met?
   There are many different types of possible objectives for Sustainability Reports. These may relate to the collaborative process of developing the report, the cost, the adherence to an agreed timetable without a last minute rush, the amount of time invested, the quality of the output (which may be the report content, design or presentation) or objectives might also refer to the range of feedback received after publication of the report. Of course, we are assuming that your SRM did actually establish objectives. If not, that begs another question.

   Related post: “Sustainability – The Value of Integrated Reporting“, looks at how business sustainability is beginning to impact across the entire supply chain, as more and more global firms begin to see securing a green supply chain as a strategic priority.

5. Was the Sustainability Report prepared in accordance with an action plan and clear timetable and to what extent did performance align with these plans?
   The reporting process is no less important than the product of the process. Quality process usually means quality report. Also, the reporting process can often be an example of how of other cross-functional projects are managed in the organization. Any reporter who begins without an action plan, timetable and allocation of roles and responsibilities (usually a Steering Team for the report is preferable) is heading for a last-minute scramble, headaches and much conflict before the report is finally published. As CEO, you should be interested in embedding good process in your business, as well as delivering a good report.
6. How many work-hours of our company employees were invested in the production of our last report?
   The report budget often does not include the woman/man/hours of company employees engaged in the reporting process. It includes consulting, design, PR, marketing, printing and all other associated and easily quantifiable costs. However, doesn’t employee time also cost money? As a consultant, I log all my hours and can tell you exactly how much time (and therefore money) I have spent on anything from a major client project right down to this blog post or volunteering work. Knowing the time and cost of your reporting process is half the way to managing it more efficiently.
7. How much of our sustainability reporting budget was spent on external consultants?
   Of course, I am biased, being a sustainability reporting consultant:) but it is always worth having some external help when writing your Sustainability Report. However, you should know how much it is consuming of your total reporting budget.
8. Was the sustainability report produced in line with budget? If not, what was different?
   Sustainability reports have a talent for coming in over budget. The SRM is a business manager and must know how to manage budgets. This question is more about understanding if your SRM has it covered than understanding the gory details of what was spent where.
9. How many of our employees have read the report and how many have provided feedback?
   Aha. This is a great question. If your Sustainability Report is not reaching your employees (supported by a proactive process of dialogue) then you are probably not gaining all the potential benefits of reporting. How can employees reflect the company’s Sustainability Performance to external stakeholders if they are not familiar with the report? Your SRM should be in close collaboration with the HR function to ensure that the internal organizational processes include engagement with the Sustainability Report.
10. How many new recruits read our Sustainability Report and did this influence them in accepting a job with our company?
    Everyone likes to quote figures about how potential new recruits (including the zillions of Green MBA and Net Impact grads that join the job market each year) seek socially responsible employers. But once and for all it might make sense to check whether those who joined your company were actually influenced to do so by your sustainability performance.
11. How many Managers have used the report in discussions/presentations/meetings with external stakeholders?
    Your Managers are your sustainability ambassadors and the Sustainability Report is a key tool in their arsenal, whatever their role in the company. If they are not using your Sustainability Report, your SRM is not engaging them effectively. Your SRM should have her finger on the pulse of how your Sustainability Report is being used in the organization.
12. What insights have you gained from the last Sustainability Report that will be helpful in producing the next report?
    Every report is a learning process. How does your SRM learn from experience? How does your SRM value continous improvement? This question will enlighten you.
13. What did we choose not to report on and why not?
    Almost all reports are trade-offs. Legal, marketing, finance, HR team members almost always have something they prefer not to disclose for different reasons. In many cases, these “Secrets” may not be critical to the report’s integrity but in some cases, they might be quite telling about the organization’s challenges. As CEO, you would probably want to know what your people are fearful about disclosing and why.
14. What were your disappointments in producing your last Sustainability Report?
    Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe the report turned out exactly as your SRM envisioned. Maybe not. Understanding how your SRM measured up to her own expectations may tell you a little about the organizational issues your SRM faces in driving sustainability processes. These are the issues where a helping hand from the CEO might just be what is needed.
15. Who were your greatest allies in the company in producing the Sustainability Report?
    Yes, here is the list of people to give fat bonuses to at the end of the year:)
16. Whose support did you need but did not get?
    This sounds a bit like a whistleblowing question, but that’s OK, occasionally. I think the CEO should know who is blocking the process. If sustainability is important to you as CEO, and reporting is a key part of that, you need to have set your expectations clear. If your people are blocking progress, you might want to consider how this should affect their performance review, bonus or career development prospects. As a minimum, you might want to talk to them to find out what prevented them from being collaborative.
17. Why should we continue to produce a Sustainability Report?
    This is a fundamental question that every company should ask itself before re-embarking on the process another year around. The answer may not be the exactly the same each year and its worth taking a few minutes to articulate specific hopes for this cycle of the reporting process. NB: The response, “because we reported last year” is not really quite good enough.
18. What are your objectives for the next report and how will you measure success?
    Following on from the existential “why are we doing this” question, the obvious next thing to ask is “how will we know if we have done it well”. As a minimum, you should expect to hear quantitative targets such as adherence to budget and on-time publication, but equally, qualitative targets about the process of reporting should not be overlooked. Does your SRM intend to get feedback on the process of developing the report? Did your SRM run an effective Reporting Steering Team in which people have had the opportunity to influence? If your report is the single-handed work of your SRM and a consultant, you can bet there’s something essential missing.
19. What help do you need from me in the next reporting cycle?
    Asking the question doesn’t commit you to providing all the help requested, but it does give you an idea of the state of mind of your SRM. The SRM should be pleased to receive help and support from the CEO and I can think of hundreds of ways the CEO could support the reporting process. An SRM who responds “nothing, really” to this question is probably not doing the best possible job.
20. Fancy some ice cream?
    How can you have a conversation about Sustainability Reporting without ice cream?
21. When should we have another little chat?
    Be prepared for a non committal response

To read about some of the issues and challenged that crop up in sustainability reporting presented for the perspective of the author’s own personal experience, see our related post: “Lessons for Creating Your Sustainability Report: An EMC Case Study“

Environmental Daily Advisor Free eNewsletter

© 2011, Elaine_Cohen. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Silvio Marcacci, Director of Outreach and Public Relations at energyNOW!,Bloomberg Television. Follow Silvio on Twitter @Silvio_Marcacci; connect with Silvio on Linkedin.

Energy and environmental issues, and candidate stances on them, will play a large role in the 2012 presidential election. President Obama’s position on many policy issues may be well known, but for the majority of Americans, the platforms of the Republican candidates are just now coming into focus.

energyNOW! interviewed Mother Nature Network reporter Andrew Schenkel about differences in policy stances on some of the major energy and environmental issues taking shape in the Republican presidential primary.

According to Schenkel, the defining energy and environment issue for Republican candidates is whether candidates believe in climate change, but secondary issues like increasing domestic drilling and production, as well as energy subsidies looms large.

Schenkel says candidates have to be concerned with the question of support for ethanol because the first electoral contest is the Iowa Caucus in February, and the imperative to define themselves as smaller government advocates means they must also oppose subsidies.

This conflict means most of the candidates are taking an unpopular political stance, at least in Iowa, because they say they are against continuing ethanol subsidies. The two outliers, as of now, are Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who maintain support for ethanol. Most other candidates are not supporting biofuels and some, most notably Jon Huntsman, are not campaigning in Iowa for that very reason.

This opposition to ethanol does create a contradiction, however, because while most candidates oppose continuing subsidies to corn growers, at the same time support subsidies for oil and other fossil fuel companies. Schenkel says many of the candidates are avoiding having to reconcile those stances by not talking about them.

While the issue of subsidies may create headaches for the candidates, the single most important issue to Republican voters may now be climate change. In the past, the GOP championed conservation and cap-and-trade legislation, but that tide has turned since the 2009 United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen. Since then, the number of climate change skeptics has grown within the party, to the point that Schenkel doubts if a candidate who accepts climate change has any chance of winning the nomination because it is such a polarizing issue.

Of course, any time a candidate is running against an incumbent, the challenge is to draw distinctions against the Oval Office, and that trend will continue in 2012. Schenkel says Ron Paul presents the starkest contrast to President Obama because of his consistent stance of small-government solutions to energy challenges and a diminished role for the EPA. While Paul acknowledges climate change may be an issue, he does not believe it’s the government’s job to fight it.

If Paul’s positions make him the antithesis of President Obama, Mitt Romney’s may make him the most similar. Romney’s position on climate change has changed since he was governor of Massachusetts 10 years ago, when he supported cap-and-trade and helped set up the Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative. Now, he wants no part of cap-and-trade, and says Washington should have no part in energy regulation. Schenkel says this reversal holds true for many of Romney’s policy stances, in his attempt to court as many voters as possible.

To read about how the Department of Defense is forging ahead in the adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency within its many installations and for developing alternatives to fossil supplies see our related post: “The Solar Soldier Is No Fad“.

© 2011, Silvio Marcacci. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Steve Carl, Senior Technologist and Green IT Spokesperson for BMC Software. Read his blog, Green IT. Follow him on Twitter @stevecarl.

In all the news and (let us admit it) hype around virtualization, one thing about it is generally accepted as true: Virtualization saves power. If you spend less on power, you therefore also save money, and emit less CO2.

Its intuitively obvious. I wondered, based on our current technology, what does that actually look like? Is it also measurably obvious? I have been talking here about some of the false paths Intuition take one on… How much are we really saving? What is the ROI?

I want to build this out carefully, and show assumptions and factors being used so that it should be reversible into other situations and platforms. This is a bit dry, and has math and stuff, but there is a pot of gold at the other end!

First of all: What is being replaced?

The Source

The root cause of why virtualization works is that computers are fantastically underused most of the time. My Linux laptop here, that I am writing this one, has 4 processors and 8GB of RAM. To write this blog, have email up, have Firefox up, A virtual machine running MS Windows, and a few things like weather widgets and inbox monitors is using about 8% CPU on average. 58% of the memory is in use, and most of that is dedicated to the virtual machine.

If the VM was not up, I would be using far less of everything. This laptop has a 130 watt power supply. If I was replacing a my Linux PC over there (see it? The one on the left…), it has 6GB of RAM that is 20% in use (the VM is not up) and the CPU is averaging about 5%. It has a 305 watt power supply rated at 76% efficiency. The older PC’s we have in some of the R&D data centers that are acting like servers have up to 450 watt power supplies.

Figuring out how much you are using, and of what resource is always the first problem in virtualization if you have to do the ROI ahead of buying the infrastructure, which of course you do. You can not just jump up and down with money in your hand and sing about how it will save money to virtualize. They will not believe you. They might lock you up.

If you have no idea at all how much power your systems might be using, you can add up all the wattages of all the power supplies, and multiply that by .6 to get in the ballpark. I talk about this diversity factor in my “By the Numbers” post.

Here is where having a good performance and capacity planning strategy pays off: If you know how utilized these systems are, and how much power they use, you can figure all this out in the tool, or at least in a spreadsheet using data from the tool. Money people like spreadsheets.

The Target

You know what you have, now you need to decide where you want to go, both Hypervisor and hardware-wise. It matters what chipsets you use for this: For example in X86 space, the latest ones from AMD and Intel have many features that help improve the performance of the virtual machine to nearly native levels of execution. One or two generations back, and AMD was ahead in the virtualization assist department. Power 7 is better at virtualization then Power 6. T3 is better than T2 because more threads and memory slots. Etc.

For X86 we use a mix of hypervisors (KVM, Xen, VMware, Hyper-V, etc) and servers (Dell, Cisco UCS, Sun X series, etc) here because we do R&D and we support a wide range of platforms. Almost any virtualization one does will end up saving power. Your exact numbers depend only on your choices and whether you are able to convince people that fewer larger systems uses less power than more smaller ones. That the up-front acquisition costs have short or at least medium term cost recovery in them.

For ease of internal pricing and provisioning, we classify our virtual machines into several categories:

• Small: 1 VCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB of disk space
• Medium: 1 / 4 / 60
• Large: 2 / 8 / 100
• X-Large: 4 / 8 / 180

We can also do custom versions but these are the standard sizes. Each one has a different cost allocation, so R&D can look at their budget and then pick what sizes they need from there.

What is key here is knowing how many of any given size of these we can fit on a VM server.

The Target: RAM It

Most of the time, unless you are doing something obviously CPU intensive like analyzing seismic data or crunching SETI results, the key is RAM. Buy as much of it as you can, then buy some more. For this example, we’ll use the Dell R810 with 256GB of RAM.

The R810 is a nice green server. Two redundant 1100 watt power supplies. 2U rack space. Can go up to 512 GB of RAM, although that means using very expensive DIMM’s, so 256GB is a good compromise between price and density (Please future people reading this: This was state of the art in 2011. Try not to laugh at our puny memory configs. We know that you’ll have that in your Android phones soon…).

Memory is always our limiting factor. On average over our 10,000+ R&D VM’s the CPU will be at about 50% and the memory over 80% utilized. That makes it easy to figure out how many VM’s of any given size will fit on a server. For our example R810:

• Small: 124
• Medium: 62
• Large: 31
• Extra Large: 31

Knowing this, I need one other data point to figure out my first pass at watts per VM: What will the average virtual machine size be? Not everyone will buy the same size VM. Depends on what they are doing, and what OS they are running and whether there is an RDB inside there and all sorts of similarly unpredictable things.

Again, here is where that capacity planning pays off.

Our numbers of interest here are 1.4 Virtual CPU’s and 3.3 GB of RAM on average per VM. Allowing some RAM for the hypervisor, that means I can run 75 VM’s of average size on our target R810.

Taking into account the diversity factor, on average computers here consume 314 watts each (523 watts * .6 diversity factor) or a total of 23,550 watts. Even if the R810 was using all 1100 watts (which it isn’t) it is clear to see the power reductions look promising. Intuition may be right after all.

The Net of it

This is also about 5 Ethernet ports per R810 rather than 75. 4 regular Ethernet ports, plus a management port. We’ll use one to go off into a private network for the ISCSI storage, one for VC management, and 2 for general VM traffic. If you were using 24 port switches, this dropped 4 down to 2. One for public network, and one for private ISCSI traffic. A network switch only uses about 100 watts though, so that reduction is only about 400 watts down to 200. Not huge. Of course the second R810, and the third, and the forth don’t need new network switches either.

The power reductions are not dramatic, but the capital outlay is. I bring it up only to drop it from the discussion, since I am also not going to look at the floor space reductions, the DC size reductions, the fewer lights it will take inside the new smaller DC, etc.

Related post: “Is Virtualization a Valid ‘Green’ Technology for Emerging Companies?” looks at how virtualization is an emerging green technology that is suitable for small and medium sized businesses to adopt.

Storage Story

A stand alone server powers not just it’s memory and CPU with its internal power supply, but its internal disk as well. We could put disks in our example R810: Easily enough to hold 75 VM’s, but that does not scale out. A real VM deployment of any size is going to need external, sharable disks.

I need a watts per GB, and an average numbers of GB per VM to get to the next step of this story. Since we are talking about ISCSI and Dell stuff here, I’ll keep it in that range and figure out the watts per GB for Equalogic. Our standard config for that is one:

• PS6000X: Quantity 1, for faster storage, 511 watts (computed from max BTU per hour rating)
• PS6000E: Quantity 2, for less accessed data. 456 watts x 2 = 912 watts (computed from max BTU per hour rating)

Total GB in RAID 50 with hot spares: 31,200. Total Watts: 1423. Watts per GB:.046

I can now use the standard and average sizes to computer that:

• Small: 40GB: 1.84 watts
• Medium: 60GB: 2.76 watts
• Large: 100 GB: 4.6 watts
• Extra Large: 180GB: 8.3 watts
• Average VM GB allocation: 58.3 GB: 2.7 watts.

Reminder at this point: When I use averages here, these are our averages, derived from our performance data. Caution here: These VM sizes are ones we picked based off our studies of what our internal customer needed. Your sizes and mileages may vary, but the techniques for figuring our this ROI stays the same.

Keeping it cool

We are being fair to the stand alone server in the last section because its power supply had to power its storage. Seemed only right since this section will not be a happy one for the stand alone server.

HVAC

The stand alone machine would more than likely prefer we forgot about it.

A watt of power generates about 3.4 BTU of heat. 23,550 watts for the stand alone servers is 80,070 BTU that needs to be cooled back out of the room. The R810 running 75 VM’s plus storage is going to be about 1200 watts or 4,080 BTU.

So, what is a good number for how many watts of HVAC is needed per BTU to be dealt with?

It varies. A lot.

Are you doing hot and cold aisling? Are your HVAC units maintained? How new are they? Do you have any option to use outside air to cool your DC? Is free cooling an option?

One the other hand, these stand alone servers or this virtual host are sitting in the same DC, and whichever number we find will be used for both, so it stays fair even if not 100% accurate for any given situation.

Common wisdom is that data center HVAC takes an additional 50-60% of whatever the power of the power of the DC is. If the DC is using 100 KW, then the HVAC is using another 50-60KW. Let go with the lower number for this, to assume that the data center is slightly more modern, and is using more efficient HVAC. I tried to get a look at the power nameplates for our 10 and 20 ton units here, and they are hidden away against the wall, or we would have a real number to use.

50% makes for easy math though.

• 75 Standalone Servers: 23,550 watts + 11,775 HVAC watts = 35,325 watts (about 35 KW).
• 1 R810 with 75 VM’s + storage: 4,080 watts + 2040 HVAC watts = 6,120 watts (about 6 KW)

Round Numbers and the Pot of Gold

The stand alone servers are using just under six times as much power, and that directly maps to six times as much money and CO2. This does not even count that 75 servers would need three or four racks versus a 2U slot plus 12U for the shared storage. What does that look like in terms of money and CO2?

Money today. Rates vary from country to country and coast to coast. Here in the US it is ranging from 8.2 to 16 cents per kilowatt-hour for our offices. Park your DC next to a hydroelectric dam like Google did and you can probably do better.

Non-leap-years have 8760 hours in them and we’ll look at three years lifecycle (26,280 hours), so:

Note that I used the *full* rating of the virtualization servers power for this, and applied a diversity factor to the physical server, giving another slight advantage to the physical over the virtual… and still it came out this way. This is only one server, so it does not matter that much, but think about this same math applied across 10,000 real machines that later became virtual machines. Multiply the above numbers by about 133… big power reductions. Big 3 year ROI.

Also note that I used an all-Dell example here: The math applies to Cisco UCS or IBM X series or HP DL’s… You can even use the same approach for LDOMS and LPARS and IVM’s.

You just have to plug in the wattages and figure out how many VM’s of a typical size can run on a given model

Yeah: Just that. OK: Did I mention that having a capacity planning capability is key here yet?

Check out our related post: “Top 10 Things Data Centers Forget About PUE” that points out ten areas that are not being currently captured by Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metrics; some of which have significant implications for PUE measurements.

The Greening of IT

© 2011, Steve Carl. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Daniel Goleman, Yale Environment 360

On a visit to India a while back I came upon a fenced empty field that was practically buried in flimsy white throwaway plastic bags, the kind you carry your purchases home in from the store. The locals joked that this was “the garden where plastic bags grew.”

But when I returned to India last month, I was pleasantly surprised to find that now when you shop in New Delhi, no store will give you a plastic bag for your purchases. They’re illegal there, as well as in many other Indian cities and states.

That puts India well ahead of most of the world when it comes to this particular ecological issue. Most everywhere in the U.S., for instance, the throwaway plastic bag remains the ubiquitous way people haul their stuff home from the local store. But those bags never biodegrade into anything that nature can use again.

Worse, the vast majority of such single-use plastic items never get recycled, and even “degradable” plastics may not degrade all that well. On top of that, product life-cycle assessments, which are on the verge of becoming more commonly available and used in the marketplace, do not include either litter or biodegradability as factors.

The news on some once-promising plastic alternatives is not so encouraging. A recently published review in Environmental Science and Technology by a group of scientists — one at the polymer science division of the Indian Institute of Technology — finds that “degradable polyethylenes,“ used in one type of “recyclable” plastic bags, do not really disintegrate back into nature. The polyethylenes in the plastic bags studied are made by adding metals like iron and cobalt to the mix of ethylene polymers, to speed up their oxidation. But while such hybrid plastic bags once discarded do, indeed, break into fragments relatively quickly, those shreds seem to persist for a long time. No one knows just how long — the number of long-term studies is zero.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of how oil and water don’t mix can be found in the middle of the planet’s great oceans and seas in the form of litter gyres, rotating currents laden with countless bits of floating debris, mainly plastic and Styrofoam, all of which were pushed to the middle of these great bodies of water by the currents that circle them.

While the so-called Eastern Garbage Patch at the center of the Pacific has received the most media attention, every great sea now has such a gyre, a rotating ring laden with plastics. The plastic in a gyre eventually breaks down into small bits, called nurdles, which never mix with water. Marine life at the heart of a gyre, reportedly, can subsist (or perish) on a diet of many times more nurdles than krill.

Pitcairn Island, in the middle of the Pacific, offers a particularly poignant testimonial to the toxic impacts of the plastic debris whirling about at the center of our seas. Albatrosses from all over come to these islands to breed and raise their babies. Plastic bottle caps, like those atop kids’ juice containers, are plucked out of the water by albatrosses and fed to their fledglings, killing them.

Our analysis gave too little weight to the end-of-life consequences of plastic bottles.

All this has led me to rethink an OpEd I co-authored in the New York Times two years ago, with an industrial ecologist, Gregory Norris. Using the tools and metrics of his craft, we computed the eco-math over their entire life cycles to calculate whether a reusable steel water bottle was better or worse for the planet than single-use plastic water bottles. The computations on trade-offs compared their relative impacts. The steel bottle required seven times as much fossil fuel as a single plastic bottle, released 14 times more greenhouse gases, used hundreds of times more metal resources, and posed far more toxic risk to people and ecosystems.

We compared these to the “costs” of the plastic bottle in fuels, energy and emissions. This led us to determine a tipping point: If you were persistent enough to replace 500 plastic water bottles by instead refilling the steel bottle, the steel was the better choice. But now I feel our life cycle analysis gave too little weight to the end-of-life consequences of plastic bottles.

Steel is infinitely recyclable with a robust market. Most single-use plastic — like those shopping bags as well as water bottles — never gets recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tells us that only about 9 percent of plastic bags are ever recycled in the U.S. And a mere 7 percent of all plastics end up being recycled (which would allow a true “cradle-to-cradle” reuse).

“Litter is a blind spot in the LCA [life cycle assessment] world,” Gregory Norris said, when I recently raised this issue with him. “A few industrial ecologists have talked about the need to make this a standard category in LCAs — there’s no reason it couldn’t be.”

See our related post: “Sustainable Packaging on the Rise“, to read about how companies employing sustainable packaging report cost savings, improved environmental footprints, brand image and company reputation among other benefits.

Environmental groups are lobbying for laws that curtail or ban single-use plastic bags.

Norris suggests this would require a further step, specifically a working group to do some “fate modeling” of products like plastics, zeroing in on their end-of-life impacts. “If we did fate modeling for plastic bags and bottles,” Norris added, “that might mobilize the plastic industry and their B2B [business-to-business] customers to solve this problem.” Tim Grant, an industrial ecologist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia, has been raising the issue for a decade. With Karli James of the Sustainable Products division of RMIT, Grant published a demonstration of life cycle assessments on the varieties of shopping bags — paper, standard, and degradable. The LCA compared bags made with six types of degradable polymers (ranging from those made mainly from corn starch, to those with 30 percent starch from cassava plants) with bags made from materials like cotton and paper, including those made from the materials evaluated in the Environmental Science and Technology article published last month. However, the question of biodegradability was not answered by the RMIT study; the article was simply a theoretical demonstration that such a life-cycle assessment could be done.

Including plastic litter in product life cycle assessments may seem a trivial matter. But given the growing interest in making this assessment data transparent and more readily available in the consumer and business-to-business marketplace, this small step could have major impacts. In a world where transparent LCA comparisons could begin to substantially shift purchasing decisions, the inclusion of a litter metric becomes consequential.

In the meantime, nonprofits like the Plastics Pollution Coalition (PPC) are pursuing other strategies. The coalition is campaigning to inspire individuals to refuse single-use plastics and reduce their overall plastic footprint; to urge manufacturers to own the entire lifecycle of plastic products; and to persuade policy makers to formulate regulations like the legislation in Germany that makes companies responsible for their waste, which has boosted plastic recycling rates to 60 percent.

A fourth strategy: to encourage polymer scientists to develop viable bioplastics. “None of the alternatives are what they should be,” Daniella Russo, the PPC’s executive director, says. “For an alternative plastic to succeed, it should be non-toxic over its entire life cycle, fully biodegradable in all situations, and cost competitive.”

The PPC is one of many environmental groups lobbying for laws like those passed in San Jose and Palo Alto, Calif., that curtail or ban single-use plastic bags, or put a surcharge on them. That strategy makes sense. Laws like India’s have been surprisingly effective. China, the world’s largest user of plastic bags, saw the numbers of bags drop by half with a recent law requiring stores to charge for them. In Ireland, a similar law has seen use of the bags drop from an average of 330 used per person per year, to just 20.

But on my return to the U.S. from Delhi, I stopped on the way from the airport to pick up some groceries for the next day at a “green” branch of a national supermarket chain. Coming directly from the airport, I didn’t have my reusable shopping bags with me — and so ended up lugging groceries home in three single-use plastic bags.

Our related post: “Green Supply Chains Need Innovative Sustainable Packaging“, looks at the importance of sustainable packaging in achieving a sustainable supply chain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Goleman is the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. A longtime contributor to the New York Times, he also wrote the best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he examined the promise of a sustainability index and efforts by companies to make their products more sustainable.

Compliance Management in Environment, Health & Safety

© 2011, Yale Environment 360. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

© 2011, Yale Environment 360. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Christopher Gleadle, author of Sustainable Growth through Sustainable Business, and senior partner at the CMG Consultancy a sustainability performance agency. Follow Christopher on Twitter @cmgconsultancy; connect with Christopher on Linkedin; connect with him on Facebook.

Sustainability is more than just an over-used term or business practice for global organizations. It is a business practice important to all businesses of all sizes – globally.

Sustainability is the ability for companies to cut the umbilical dependency on ever increasing environmental resource demands and cut costs delivering ethical, sustainable, economic growth over the longer term. This business practice is founded on sound business sense delivering improved value to all stakeholders – the company, employees, customers and wider societal groups.

In order to be effective and deliver the desirable value generating results it is essential to report both the strategy and the policy actions, creating meaning and credibility to the outcomes. Sustainability mitigates against future risks and creates a continued license to do business. Without the passport of sustainability, companies tread the boards of high risk through the contagion of poor business practice, leading ultimately to business exclusion.

How so? In the recent Carbon Disclosure Project 2011 Carbon Disclosure Project Supply Chain report, the numbers of companies who will de-select suppliers now for not having sustainable credentials has doubled over the 2010 report. This has been further buttressed by the recently released report ‘Green Supply Chain: from awareness to action’, from the consultancy BearingPoint Ireland, which indicates: ‘two thirds of companies surveyed in Europe believe that a green supply chain is a strategic priority.’ Furthermore, over half of the respondents in the survey said they did not renew contracts with suppliers who did not respect their green charter.

Moreover, throughout the great recession of 2007 – 2010, there has been a dislocation of trust between companies and the global communities they serve. Emerging from the recession – any company wanting to repair such dislocation has used sustainability as the model to achieve best results.

Notwithstanding this disconnect, the financial crisis in the main was brought about by short-term demand on profits (UNPRI) and a lack of focus on long-term value creation. Compounding these issues further was short term and inadequate structures to monitor the environmental and social impact of the company, financial structuring and management practices.

Therefore, whether it is customers, companies want to engage, or investors through the reduction of risk, or employees to improve team cohesion, drive innovation and attract best talent from the ascendant eco-boomers; sustainability connects all the interdependent functional areas in a more holistic manner, driving down costs – delivering on-going value through the introduction of a continuous cycle of improvement.

And, the pressure being applied to the supply chain now is the result of large corporate bodies needing to realign on sustainable best practices and controlling the risk of the supply chain by removing companies demonstrating poor environmental and social practices. Furthermore, the momentum for these moves has been caused in part by the pressure being applied, from society, on the license to do business and part through the momentum of mandatory reporting. Examples of such mandatory acts are: Climate Change Act and the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme in the UK, Grenelle Act in France, Sustainability reporting law in Finland, King Code III in South Africa as well as many others across the globe.

Indeed, for global companies to survive and prosper, they need to ‘green’ their businesses to compete in an ultra competitive world, and this includes their supply chain, as exposure to a sustainably poor supplier will damage reputation and deliver the message to society, that for all the apparent sustainability efforts, ultimately there was no control.

However, sustainability is not just about mitigating risk, it is about opportunity. As stated earlier, reporting on sustainability forces actions and meets the needs of achieving cost cutting and value creation over the long term. Learning to deliver higher quality, more efficient products and services from a more efficient and optimized base of resource utilization.

Related post: “7 Ways To Get Employees To Change For The Greener“, looks at the challenge of getting employees to change their habitual behaviors in ways that help the organization achieve its sustainability goals.

So, sustainability addresses the triple bottom line of: Environmental, Social and Economic:

• Environmental – reducing emissions and bio-diversity impact
• Social – training and improved team cohesion of the human capital; further combined with societal improvement through investment in communities.
• Economic – extended competitive advantage and value, long-term economic growth through improved trust, ethics, operational optimization and innovation.

Credibility of the company takes place particularly after the publication of the first report – detailing the sustainability base line, the actions, goals and intended outcomes. Once reported, it forces the enforcement of the policy. Reporting forces the company to set robust and meaningful KPIs and forces a behavior change with the resulting environmental improvements illustrating a sustainable development reality of sagacious leadership.

In contrast, companies believing they can develop a green mirage by ticking a few boxes and communicating efforts in the vaguest terms without proof of delivery, execution and the continuous cycle of improvement will fall prey to the more sophisticated buyers who are keen in identifying ‘window dressing’. The practice of half hearted commitment will be a danger to reputation – eroding trust and competitive advantage. Notwithstanding this, poor reporting, or no reporting, will show over time, words do not equal actions and results, leaving perceptions to adjust downward, showing the underlying reality of a sustainably poor company with poor governance.

Additionally, the EU over a number of years has consistently emphasized sustainable development to build trust between businesses and society to improve competitiveness. Following this lead, managers from companies in the vanguard of sustainability use their reports as tools to build better and more effective networks and communications across stakeholder groups. The reports become effective business tools as they deliver against market demand and expectation for transparency and make the companies more accessible. In response, the report providing companies gain a reputation for responsible corporate behavior.

What we see here is the evolution of sustainability creating an evolving and improving cycle of competitive advantage as sustainability has been shown to retain and attract best employees as, experience has shown, highly qualified eco-boomers come to the work market from university, they are choosing whom to work for with more consideration as to the values of the employer, making sustainability a major factor in decision-making. Business is going to have to adapt to the changing requirements and needs of the workforce and its ability to attract best talent as people revise their goals, priorities and expectations as they look to make efficiencies in how and where to live and work – as, commuting is less attractive with the associated impacts of time, cost and emissions being factored. Moreover, with best talent there is a natural progression toward evolving products and services reducing customer impact and building further the bonds of trust and legitimacy to operate, delivering long term value creation and, moving away from the corrosive past economic and business models.

Whilst market forces are driving the reporting agenda, this has been in part lead by regulation, and it would be naive to think the regulation imperatives are going to melt away. On the contrary, they are on a sharp curve to engage all businesses quickly – each nation needing to meet challenging and agreed emission reduction targets. The quickest way to meet these targets is through operational excellence – reducing energy, water and waste whilst benefiting communities in reducing poverty and poor health. To decouple economic growth from current emissions growth curves is not a difficult concept, just one that needs embracing. The winners are embracing sustainability now and inoculating their businesses from investment and market exclusion. The losers will be the ones who just don’t get it.

Furthermore, pervasive market and Governmental demands on sustainable development ensures the metrics needed to create meaningful and robust reports are being elevated to the same rigor as financial reporting. This in its self is leading to, and causing, new requirements for company law and accountancy rules. With reports being used as business tools, it is further leading towards managerial creativity around new ways of building brand and reputation to meet with the new customer and other stakeholder demands and expectations.

These market forced actions underpinned in 2010 by the establishment of the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC). The objective: to establish a global reporting framework for ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) information in a clear, concise, consistent and comparable manner. “Integrated Reporting demonstrates the linkages between an organization strategy, governance and financial performance and the social, environmental and economic context within which it operates. By reinforcing these connections, Integrated Reporting can help business to take more sustainable decisions and enable investors and other stakeholders to understand how an organization is really performing.” IIRC.

For example: Ernst and Young recently issued a report indicating an increase in the number of shareholder resolutions focused on sustainability. The report: ‘Shareholders Press Boards on Social, Environmental Risks’ claims shareholders are paying closer attention to environmental and social matters as they bear closely upon the risk companies are exposed and therefore ultimately on financial performance of these companies. In short: shareholder resolutions that garnered at least 30% support (30% being seen as critical mass) on social and environmental issues rose from just 2.6% in 2005 to 26.8% in 2010.

Naturally, this momentum is also found in the investment market place where ESG issues are gaining critical importance in determining investment funds – understanding fully the risks to future income, trust and reputation. It has been shown; intermediaries in capital markets are increasingly integrating ESG data into valuation models. And, evidence suggests that sell-side analysts generate more positive recommendations for firms that score high in ESG credentials. (See Sustainable Growth through Sustainable Business – Christopher Gleadle).

In conclusion, sustainability is not restricted to companies valued through stock markets. Their supply chains are part of that valuation, and so all companies are involved. Society is demanding a repair of the dislocation of trust. And this is a wonderful opportunity for business, the environment and society to benefit.

Sustainability and its reporting will increase the transparency of the company, highlighting the issues and the impacts towards governance and structure. It acts as a catalyst for positive change to internal management practices and creates incentives to better manage relationships with employees, investors, customers, suppliers, regulators and society.

Whilst sustainability highlights risks, it also by default spotlights the opportunities – to increase efficiency, reduce energy, water and waste through operational optimization; within the boundaries of the company as well as the supply chain – whilst also exposing any human rights violations.

Sustainability inoculates a business from market exclusion as customers have already shown to be turning their backs on socially and environmentally irresponsible companies.

Sustainability is about building long-term relationships and long-term economic growth, for the company engaged in sustainable behavior and the eco-system in which the company is embedded.

See our related post: “How to Set Sustainability Goals: The Do’s and Don’ts, to read about some examples of successful sustainability goals and examples of goals that fall short of the mark.“

Copyright © Christopher Gleadle 2011

EHS Today

© 2011, Christopher Gleadle. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Tyler Caine, Project Manager and Sustainability Adviser at Lubrano Ciavarra Architects. Tyler is the author of the blog Intercon, a forum for critique and discussion of sustainability. Follow him on Twitter @InterconGreen. Connect with Tyler on LinkedIn.

For the first time in a while, our portfolio of renewable power sources has surpassed power production from nuclear generation. According to the latest Monthly Energy Review from the Energy Information Administration, the most sustainable forms of energy now produce more for us than the most hazardous, largely due to rises in wind, solar and hydro production.

In the first quarter, renewable energy clocked in a total of 11.73% of our total power production at 2.245 quads (quadrillion BTUs) or 5.65% more than nuclear power. From the same period last year, solar power generation was up 104.8 percent, wind generation increased 40.3 percent, and hydro expanded by 28.7 percent. Power generated from biomass decreased by 4.8 percent. By comparison, natural gas generation increased by 1.8 percent, nuclear by 0.4 percent, and coal-fired electrical generation declined by 5.7 percent.

*It is important to note that this represents total power production for the country, not only the generation of electricity, which leads to why the number for coal looks low and oil looks high. While renewables produced 12.7% of our electricity in the same period, nuclear power accounted for 22.1% of our electrical needs, meaning that there is a large portion of renewables that are producing energy (notably heat) but not electrons. Coal still reigns supreme with 47.9% of grid fodder. Oil actually produces a very small amount of our electricity (3.9%) which is good given that it is the second dirtiest form of power generation we have.

There are likely just as many people saying “How is this possible?” as “Well it’s about time,” but in either case the milestone is an important one for attributing credence to the growth of the renewable sector and the wealth of unused potential. The events of Japan’s nuclear disaster is just one more nail in the coffin of the world’s most expensive type of energy to construct, making it unlikely that nuclear power will be clawing its way back anytime soon.

Related post: “The Catastrophic Downside Risk of Nuclear, Oil, Gas, and Coal“, argues that these highly centralized fossil energy systems have catastrophic risk factors that have not traditionally been accounted for in cost/benefit analysis.

Some have pointed to the topic of renewable strength as misleading, saying that although “renewable” sources include a group of technologies such as wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and hydroelectric, they do not contribute equally and it can attribute an image of strength to parts of the marketplace that are still providing negligible amounts of energy for us. This is not untrue. Biomass was the all star, marking a resurgence to provide 48 of all renewable production. Hydro followed with 35.31 percent. Over three quarters of all “renewable” power comes from two sources that are not heralded as the cutting edge technologies that are forecast to reshape the face of the grid. Meanwhile, solar power gives the country less than one percent of its total power needs. Renewable production increased 36% from the same period in 2009, which is admirable but far from enough. If these technologies are to provide significant portions of our power, we need them to not just increase, but multiply from current levels.

That being said, I am optimistic of what the next 12-24 months will hold for advances in renewable energy production. While solar may be the ugly duckling right now, DOE loans are coming through for a new breed of solar installations, much larger than what typically exists now. Solar arrays of 100-150 MW provide only a fraction of their standard coal counterparts, but newer fields of 500+ MW start to offset meaningful amounts of energy from fossil fuels. National Solar Power is planning 400 MW of solar capacity while First Solar received DOB backing for three California projects of 230 MW, 250 MW and 550 MW. Together the four projects total roughly $6 billion of investment.

In related post: “Nine Reasons Why Solar Power Costs a Lot Less Than People Commonly Believe“, argues that more focus should be given to the many important benefits that result from increasing the use of distributed solar power, and lists nine of these measurable costable benefits.

Wind has similar prospects on the drawing board. The world’s largest land-based wind farm, Shepard’s Flat, is currently under construction in Oregon, boasting 338 GE wind turbines for a capacity of 845 MW with operation slated for the end of 2012. This next generation of clean energy projects could signal that investors and grid managers are done dipping their toes in the water and are more prepared to take the plunge. Passing nuclear was a nice stepping stone, but catching up to oil is next.

Image Credit: sustainabilityninja.com

© 2011, Tyler Caine. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

by Jim Greenberger, Executive Director, National Alliance for Advanced Technology Batteries (NAATBatt), a not-for-profit trade association of companies involved in the manufacture of large format advanced batteries for automotive and grid-connected energy storage applications. Connect with Jim on Linkedin.

The past several months have seen an explosion of interest in grid-connected energy storage. Driven in part by the realization that the advanced automotive battery market will be slower to develop than many hoped, and by recent white papers on the economics of grid-connected energy storage by EPRI, Southern California Edison and Sandia National Laboratory, investment bankers, stock analysts and large industrial companies crowded into the Energy Storage Association’s recent meeting in San Jose to try to figure out what is going on.

The enthusiasm for grid-connected energy storage is well-founded. The inability to store electric energy on the grid is, in many respects, the technological limitation that defined the design of our national power grid in the early 20th Century and that continues to account for its basic architecture today. The ability to generate electricity, to store it economically in large quantities, and to use it at a later time, would be the most disruptive technology to emerge on the power grid in the past 100 years.

That said, the technological ability to store electricity has been around for a while (in fact, it pre-dates the construction of our national power grid by several millennia). The reason that electricity is not stored in large quantities on the U.S. electricity grid today (other than 21.5 gigawatts of pumped storage hydropower) is because it is still generally less expensive to generate an electron than to store it. It is a safe bet that the day that calculation changes, the world will beat a path to the grid-connected energy storage door.

To read more on fifteen existing and up and potential grid scale energy storage technologies see our related post: “Fifteen Grid Scale Energy Storage Solutions to Watch“.

So the economic case for investing in new energy storage technologies is clear. The company that can bring to market a technology that stores electricity cheaper than a public utility or other customer can generate or acquire it will do very well.

But what is the case for government investment (either directly or through tax credits) in grid-connected energy storage technology? Why can’t the government leave development of grid-connected energy storage to the private sector alone?

The case for government investment in storage turns on three arguments: First, that storage will help integrate variable renewably generated electricity onto the grid; second, that deploying certain types of energy storage technology on the grid will help battery makers achieve economies of scale, bring down the cost of electric vehicles and reduce petroleum imports; and, third, that distributed storage will help stabilize the grid and facilitate the fast charging of electric vehicles.

The first argument, which focuses on renewables integration, in the most tenuous. Most new forms of renewable energy (i.e., wind and solar) are variable and need to be balanced by other sources of electricity. Today, most of the stand by capacity used to balance variable renewables is provided by natural gas peaker plants. So, in effect, the first argument is that the government should invest in storage technology so that the country can burn less natural gas and, therefore, reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

An argument for investing in storage in order to reduce natural gas consumption, however, is a weak argument. While there would be some emissions benefit to reducing natural gas consumption, there are far more cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than by reducing the use of natural gas, a form of energy that even President Obama classifies as “clean” and that apparently exists in greater domestic abundance than was generally understood just a few years ago.

A better case for government investment in storage technology is the second argument: that grid-connected storage can bring down the cost of electric vehicles. The electrification of motor vehicles is a critical part of any strategy to reduce U.S. petroleum imports. Yet the high cost of large format lithium-ion batteries remains the principal barrier to widespread adoption of electric vehicles. The inability of advanced battery manufacturers to take advantage of economies of scale is a big part of the cost problem. Today, PHEV and EV sales in the United States run at the rate of only a few hundred units per month. This creates a death cycle of advanced battery pricing, with battery production volumes being too low meaningfully to lower unit battery prices, and PHEV and EV prices remaining too high to generate larger battery production volumes.

Government investment in grid-connected energy storage can help break this pricing death cycle. If battery makers can use the same plants and processes to manufacture large quantities of batteries for the grid-connected market as for the automotive market, the prices of PHEV’s and EV’s can be significantly reduced, as battery suppliers will be able to amortize high plant costs over a larger number of units. Economy of scale is an important factor in the capital-intensive advanced battery industry. In the early part of the last decade, the price of lithium-ion batteries in consumer electronics fell significantly, in large part due to volume increases in that market. Expecting a similar volume-driven price drop in large format lithium-ion batteries would not be unreasonable.

Third and finally, the important role that grid-connected energy storage could play in stabilizing and protecting electricity distribution systems is often not fully appreciated. The vulnerability of the U.S. electricity grid to malicious attack and natural disaster is an issue of growing concern in the defense community. Promoting the development of microgrids within larger, centralized distribution systems would help address this concern. Energy storage technology deployed at the distribution level is an essential component of microgrid systems. The case for government investment in grid-connected energy storage as part of an effort to secure the power grid is compelling, as securing the grid against attack is a proper and necessary role of government. [See: "Distributed Energy Generation, a Green Economy Paradigm"]

Locating storage at the distribution level would also facilitate fast charging technologies for electric vehicles. Deploying fast charging stations will in turn make EV’s and PHEV’s more attractive to consumers and lower petroleum imports. Fast charging stations must discharge large amounts of electricity very quickly into EV’s and PHEV’s. Local energy storage is a critical component of most such systems.

The most compelling case for government investment in grid-connected energy storage, therefore, centers on two relatively narrow concerns: vehicle electrification and grid vulnerability. Current government initiatives to promote storage, however, lack any such focus. DOE funding of storage technologies and recent Congressional proposals to encourage storage investments seem simply to focus on storage with a capital “S”, without any regard to how that storage will be used or what precise benefit it promises to the American public. Energy storage, it seems, has become an end in itself rather than a means to other, more important ends.

The government badly needs to set a strategy for grid-connected energy storage. In a time of constricting budgets, it is critical that the few dollars available to develop this important technology are spent where they are most needed and where they will produce the greatest return for U.S. taxpayers. Grid-connected storage is a promising technology, which has the potential to address some of our nation’s greatest energy challenges. It would be a shame if the limited government funding for it simply becomes another give-away for a wide range of commercial interests.

Read about a proposal to produce and store hydrogen energy at wind farms to smooth out variability: “Storing Wind Energy as Hydrogen“.

Featured Resource: Renewable Energy Focus -- Renewable Energy Focus is a FREE leading international magazine providing authoritative coverage of what's hot in renewable energy. Every issue of Renewable Energy Focus USA provides news and insight into new technologies and applications. Coverage includes: •Bioenergy •Energy efficiency •Energy infrastructure •Energy storage (including fuel cells) •Geothermal •Green building •Other marine energy •Photovoltaics •Policy investments and markets •Solar electricity •Solar heating and cooling •Wave and tidal energy •Wind power. Renewable Energy Focus keeps you and your organization completely up-to-date with the industry as a whole as well as with the individual renewable energy markets. SUBSCRIBE FREE >>.

© 2011, James Greenberger. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

This is the follow up to my previous post The Ultimate Green Twitter Hashtag List: Build Your Online Green Twitter Following – 150+Green Hashtags.  This post  introduces you to daily Twitter memes, explains how they work to build you followers, provides you with an overview of how they were started, and provides strategies for getting the most from green Twitter memes.  The post also includes a list of the of most prominent green twitter memes and additional list of other related memes.

by Tracey de Morsella, Green Economy Post. Tracey is the co-editor of The Green Executive Recruiter Directory. Follow Tracey on Twitter @greeneconpost

What are Twitter Memes?

Like hashtags, green twitter memes categorize tweets, which makes them more findable in a sea of 55 million tweets posted each day on Twitter.  [See The Ultimate Green Twitter Hashtag List: Build Your Online Green Twitter Following - 150+Green Hashtags]  Green Twitter memes enable the online green community to zero in on specific topics that they are interested in, and find others with similar interests. This, ultimately will get you more followers. Green Twitter memes take hashtags to the next level. Twitter memes are a way of extending the impact of #hashtags by making it a weekly event.  The first and most popular twitter meme is #FollowFriday.  The most popular green twitter meme is #EcoMonday.

How FollowFriday and EcoMonday Got Their Start

Back in March 2009, #FollowFriday was started by Micah Baldwin. Mykl Roventine suggested adding the hashtag # to #FollowFriday, and with the help of a few friends to promote it, there were almost two #followfriday tweets per second at its peak on that on that first #FollowFriday. These days many people used the shortened #FF hashtag to save precious character space.

A few weeks later, in April, several green memes spouted up. Brian Wallace of NowSourcing Skyped his network about #HealthyHumpday follow meme for health-relatedTweeps, Around the same time, on April 24th, Shea Gunther, a blogger at Mother Nature Network posted 10 Green Twitterers You Should Follow. One the same day Max Gladwell, sent the original #EcoMonday Tweet.  It was a flop, with very few people taking note, but Shea Gunther did. The following Monday, he posted the great green Twitter follow parade, which promoted #EcoMonday.  It listed more green people to follow, and encouraged site visitors to leave their recommendations in the comments section. #EcoMonday was a hit.  In its second and third weeks, #EcoMonday became a top trending topic on Twitter.

Micah Baldwin put it so succinctly, “FollowFriday is a strong example of a crowdsourced recommendation engine, which will always provide better results than an automated one.” For those following issues like sustainability, cleantech, green building, climate change and other green topics on Twitter, green Twitter memes can provide even better results.

How To Use Twitter Memes

The common practice for a typical #FollowFriday or #EcoMonday tweet is to pack as many of your favorite followers into 140 characters as possible. While this strategy is great for pinging people in your network to let them know you’re thinking of them, as well as finding many like minded Tweeps, sometimes your message can get lost in the noise.  However, you can do something about that.

Four Strategies  Strategies That Can Be Used To Increase The Effectiveness  of Twitter Memes As Crowdsourced Recommending Engines

These strategies will show your followers and the tweeps that you are recommending that you care about quality relationship building.  So, when you tweet, they will pay attention.

1. Dedicate an entire tweet to recommend one Tweep, and include information on why that person is someone that people should follow.  Format: #followfriday #ff @username Why you should follow them – (their niche/group). See example:

2. Recommend a group of Tweeps to follow who are knowledgeable about a specific subject like green building, solar, power, sustainability, etc. See example:

3. Use the memes to point out great blog posts. See example:

4. Consider asking who to follow in a specific specialty to engage your followers and initiate conversation.

 List of Green Twitter Memes

Monday Green Memes
#EcoMonday – #EcoMonday seeks to unite and network the green community.

Tuesday Green Memes
#TurtleTuesday – #TurtleTuesday is dedicated to tweets on all things turtles

Wednesday Green Memes
#HealthyHumpday – Created by @goodhealth, #healthyhumpday is like #followfriday for health-related Twitter accounts and links.
#WaterWednesday – A twitter meme for Tweets on water quality and water conservation
#WildLifeWednesday- On Wednesdays around the world celebrate and support wildlife.  This is done at events, on TV, in publications, and in blog posts.  It is also a follow meme on Twitter.

List  of Related Non-Green Twitter Memes

Monday Memes
#MeowMonday – A special day on Twitter for catloving tweeps.
#MM  – Mondays are the days dedicated to recommending marketing tweeps to follow

Tuesday Memes
#FollowTuesday – Follow Friday for Tuesdays
#TeacherTuesday – A day set aside for teachers to discuss all things education
#TechTuesday – #Techtuesday is a day on twitter dedicated to technology discussions.
#TumblTtuesday  – #tumblrtuesdayas a way to promote your Tumblr friends (re-posting within Tumblr is also recommended).
#TwitterTuesday - A day where businesses offer specials on Twitter

Wednesday Memes
#FollowWednesday – #followfriday for Wednesdays.
#WisdomWed – Created by Mashable Associate Editor @BenParr, #WisdomWed helps spread knowledge across Twitter by sharing a piece of useful advice with followers on Wednesdays
#Women2Follow – Every Wednesday, recommend women to follow on Twitter. Started by @WomenWhoTech.
#WonderfulWednesday – Best wishes for the middle of the week.
#WoofWednesday – A special day for dog loving Twitter friends.

Thursday Memes
#FollowtThursday – #followfriday for Thursdays
#RTThursday – Thursday is set aside to thank your retweeters in style.
#ThankfulThursday – Started by @gracesmith and @themethursday, #thankfulthursday is a day on twitter set aside for telling others what you’re thankful for
#ThemeThursday - Recommend links on a certain topic  that changes from week to week

Friday Memes

#GoodNewsFriday – Good news comes on Friday.
#FollowFriday – #followfriday is the original Twitter daily meme. You can read more about #followfriday here.
#FQF - Friday Quote Fest, hashtag is for sharing quotes

Saturday Memes
#Caturday – Another day on Twitter dedicated to cats and catlovers.
#WkendThx – Created by @MichDdot, #wkendthx is a follow up to #followfriday, or if you missed thanking your tweeps on Friday.

If we have missed a meme, please add it below.  Additionally, please share your ideas on how to get the most from these Twitter memes.  In a few weeks we will follow up with a post on Green Twitter Chats.

For more strategies on maximizing the use of Twitter as a marketing or personal branding tool check out the following free downloads:

Follow @greeneconpost

Ten Innovative Ways to Use Twitter for Business

© 2011, Tracey de Morsella. All rights reserved. Do not republish.

By David Anthony and Ken Brown

Wind turbines capture the energy contained in wind. The turbine rotates a shaft which powers an electric generator. The electricity that flows from the generator can go to the wind farm’s grid connection to be consumed immediately or go to storage. We have previously discussed the advantages of storage. Let’s look at storage using hydrogen.

Water electrolysis produces hydrogen. As the electricity flows through the water in an electrolysis unit, oxygen and hydrogen are evolved as gases at separate electrodes. In a 100% efficient unit, it takes about 39 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity to create 1 kilogram (kg) of hydrogen. In the real world, electrolysis units are about 80% efficient at best. With an 80% efficient unit, it takes about 50 kWh of electricity to create 1 kg of hydrogen. The hydrogen is piped to a hydrogen storage unit. To avoid the high cost of compressing hydrogen or of cooling and liquefying hydrogen, a good alternative is to store the gas in a metal hydride slurry. Safe Hydrogen uses magnesium as the metal and mineral oil as the liquefying agent. With the use of small particles and a suitable dispersant, the particles will stay in suspension almost indefinitely. Using a hydriding reactor, hydrogen is absorbed by the Magnesium Slurry with suitable pressure and temperature that ensures rapid reaction. The Magnesium Hydride Slurry that is created in this reactor then can be stored in large quantities at ambient conditions. The hydriding reaction to create the magnesium hydride slurry creates heat. This heat is about 30% of the heating value of the hydrogen gas. About 10 percentage points of this heat, or one-third of the heat, can be used to perform useful work such as generating more electricity. The rest of the heat can be used for space heating or to produce hot water. Thus the hydriding step in the process can be from 110-130% efficient.

There are a number of options for the stored slurry. One, the hydrogen can be recovered on site and the hydrogen can be used to power a gas turbine-generator. The wind farm owner has the option of selling into the real time and day ahead electric market at a time and price of his choosing. Since wind blows more at night than during the day on average, and since consumers use more electricity during the day than at night, the wholesale price at night is often $0.02 per kWh or less. It was reported in Business Week in September 2009 that year to date in the Texas Grid, the wholesale price of electricity was zero or below for 11% of the time. During those times, the generation facilities on line were paying to put power on the grid. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) controls the wholesale price of electricity in the real time and day ahead markets to balance generation and load. Why would generators pay to put power on the grid? Large base-load coal and nuclear plants do not want to vary their loads. Cycling the plants leads to premature wear and high costs. Wind farms get a $0.022 production federal tax credit. Until the price passes down through a negative $0.022, wind farms still receive revenue if the turbines generate power.

Another option is to use the hydrogen slurry to “firm” the wind power. Wind does not blow consistently from hour to hour, day to day, week to week, or season to season. The ISO that supervises the grid cannot count on the full power of the wind farm’s output. Typically, only 15% of a wind farm’s output can be counted on as reliable capacity—likely to be available in any given time period. This means that for a 500MW wind farm, only 75MW is counted as generating capacity by the ISO. Often, to “firm” the wind farms output, a natural gas fired plant needs to be constructed—partially negating the carbon free output of the wind farm.

To read about the first comprehensive update to Unites States wind potential estimates in 17 years see our related post: “New State-by-State Wind Power Data Helps Build a Green Grid“.

With storage, the picture can be different. Below is an example of a 500MW wind farm delivering 150MW dispatchable power 100% of the time by using storage and gas turbines(GT) powered by hydrogen. In this example, the ISO can count on 30% of the wind farm’s output.

The beige portion of the power generated is stored, the blue portion is delivered by the wind turbines to the grid, and the red portion comes from gas turbines powered by hydrogen. The horizontal axis represents a probability of power going to the grid from the wind or gas turbine. About 45% of the time in the year, 100% of the 150MW will come from wind with the excess going to storage. About 40% of the time, power comes from both the wind and gas turbines. About 15% of the time, all of the power comes from the gas turbine. In any give hour or day, power may flow in any of these ways.

Advantages:

1. Dispatchable power can demand a higher price.
2. The grid connection can have smaller capacity—it no longer has be sized for maximum wind farm output.
3. Firming natural gas fired plants do not need to be built.
4. The gas turbines can provide the regulation that natural gas fired turbines now provide.
5. The wind turbines can spin 100% of the time the wind blows (excluding the time when the weather is too violent to operate).

To read a related viewpoint see our related post: “Why Wind Intermittency Is Not a Big Deal, which attempts to quantify the actual cost of intermittency in order to make the point that it is not the problem some paint it out to be.”

About the Authors

by David Anthony, Managing Partner, 21Ventures David blogs at http://davidanthonyvc.com/ ~ Connect with David on Linkedin.

Ken Brown is CEO of Safe Hydrogen, LLC, a developer of safe, transportable hydrogen. http://www.safehydrogen.com

Renewable Energy Focus

© 2011, David Anthony. All rights reserved. Do not republish.