Green Wombat

California’s Green Energy Solution: “Nega-Watts”

August 10, 2007 by Todd Woody

photo: gkjarvis
California regulators Thursday unveiled a plan to produce 1.5 gigawatts of carbon-free energy by not building three massive power plants. Instead, they will tap �nega-watts� through an energy-efficiency program that will reward the state�s big utilities for saving electricity and penalize them for missing targets set by the California Public Utilities Commission. "Energy efficiency is the best choice for meeting the energy needs of California�s citizens and its economy, while protecting the environment," wrote utilities commissioner Dian Grueneich and administrative law Judge Meg Gottstein wrote in a ruling detailing the plan. "Producing ‘nega-watts’ … of energy by using limited energy supplies more efficiently is smart business, smart for California�s ratepayers and the least-cost way to address climate change."

The emphasis on energy efficiency has kept California�s per-capita electricity usage flat over the past three decades despite an explosion in the state�s population and an economic boom that made it the world�s eighth-largest economy. Now with a state cap on greenhouse gas emissions, regulators are upping the ante on energy efficiency as a way to avoid building new carbon-emitting power plants while renewable energy sources are put in place. If the state�s energy efficiency targets are met, regulators said that California would eliminate 3.4 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2008.

In a mind-numbingly complex 212-page ruling that has kept legions of lawyers and analysts employed, regulators laid out a formula for determining how PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric�s (SRE) energy efficiency programs will count toward meeting targets. If a utility meets 85 percent of the energy efficiency goals, for instance, it will earn a 9 percent rate of return on its investment, ratcheting up to 12 percent if all the targets are met. If the Big Three utilities’ energy efficiency performance falls below 50 percent of the target, then they would be penalized a collective $238.5 million, according to the plan.

Regulators said the plan was intended to steer the utilities away from the �steel-in-the-ground� mindset that building new power plants was the best way to make money. By focusing efforts on energy efficiency, utilities could avoid financing and capital costs associated with constructing new power plants, and California consumers would save an estimated $2.7 billion between by 2008. What the plan did not do was identify specific energy efficiency measures the utilities must take to meet the targets. But in the past, programs have included everything from handing out compact fluorescent light bulbs to giving rebates to data center operators that cut electricity use by using more efficient computers. One hope is that interactive "smart meters" capable of monitoring household appliances energy use will encourage conservation by allowing utilities to vary the price of electricity according to demand.

Posted in energy efficiency | 7 Comments »

Green Sheen: Make Yahoo an Environmental Icon

August 9, 2007 by Todd Woody

photo: green wombat
Green Wombat’s in meetings today, but driving down the 101 this morning I got a glimpse of Yahoo’s 100 percent biodiesel-powered Green Guzzler employee shuttle bus in the rear view mirror before the BlackBerry buzzed with news of the purple portal’s latest green marketing campaign: a contest to design a green icon to flag enviro-related products and services on the company’s network. The winner gets $20,000 to donate to the environmental group of his or her choice. The two runners-ups’ green groups will each receive $5,000. And Yahoo (YHOO) wins a crowdsourced logo for a fraction of the price a high-concept graphics designer would charge.

Posted in corporate sustainability | 1 Comment »

Utilities to Drive Hybrid Repair Trucks

August 8, 2007 by Todd Woody

photos: green wombat
PG&E has put California’s first hybrid diesel-electric service truck on the streets as part of pilot program to cut greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants while reducing fuel bills. The nationwide effort involves 14 utilities – from PG&E (PCG) and Southern California Edison (EIX) on the West Coast to American Electric Power (AEP) in the heartland to Duke Energy (DUK) and FPL (FPL) on the East Coast. Hydro Quebec also is participating in the truck trial. This morning a 16-ton "bucket truck" silently rolled up to a plaza in front of PG&E’s San Francisco headquarters. The International truck can run up to 35 miles an hour on its electric drive train made by Eaton, according to Efrain Ornelas, PG&E senior program manager for clean air transportation. Batteries also power the bucket that lifts workers up to power lines. In a conventional bucket truck that equipment is powered by the vehicle’s diesel engine, which is left idling and spewing carbon while the repair work is being performed. "Normally when one of these trucks is working in a neighborhood it’s so loud you can’t hear yourself talk," said Ornelas as the bucket quietly lifted a technician into the air.

According to PG&E, the hybrid bucket truck will slash fuel consumption up to 60 percent, saving up to $5,500 a year in diesel costs. The year-long trial will help the truck’s manufacturer tweak the vehicle’s final design. Ornelas said the electric lift can operate for about two hours on battery power, which should let PG&E customers get some sleep when trucks are dispatched in the dead of night to fix downed power lines. Meanwhile, as Green Wombat wrote earlier, New Jersey utility Public Service Electric and Gas (PEG) plans to replace a quarter of its 5,000-vehicle fleet with diesel-electric hybrids and biodiesel-powered trucks.

Posted in green cars | Leave a Comment »

A Greener iMac

August 7, 2007 by Todd Woody

Apple chief Steve Jobs unveiled the new iMac today, touting the computer’s recyclable aluminum frame and glass screen. Apple (AAPL) also won an Energy Star rating from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the iMac’s energy efficiency. The latest generation iMac appears to help fulfill the pledge Jobs made in May to make Macs more environmentally friendly. Of course, while aluminum is indeed recyclable, the process for making the metal is highly energy-intensive.

Posted in green computing | 3 Comments »

PG&E Plugs into the Green Grid

August 7, 2007 by Todd Woody

California’s PG&E has become the first utility to join the Green Grid, a consortium of tech companies working to boost energy efficiency in data centers to cut costs and fight global warming. PG&E (PCG) signs on to the effort just days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a report forecasting a dramatic rise in data center energy consumption over the next five years that would require the equivalent of 10 new power power plants to be built. However, if data center operators consolidate servers, buy energy-efficient equipment and tap alternative energy sources, they could cut annual electricity costs by $1.6 billion to $5.1 billion by 2011 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 47 million metric tons a year, according to EPA researchers. That’s the path being pursued by the Green Grid, which includes such Silicon Valley heavyweights as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel (INTC) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW), as well as Dell (DELL), IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT). (Later today Green Grid members will unveil a "technical road map" to achieve its goals.) PG&E’s participation in the effort is significant because of the incentives the utility can provide to data centers to get green. For instance, PG&E offers discounts and rebates to companies that replace old computers with more energy-efficient ones and that use virtualization software to reduce the number of electricity-sucking servers. Data center operators that upgrade their cooling systems qualify for other incentives as do companies that deploy software to put computers in sleep mode when not in use. PG&E will use the energy efficiency standards being developed by the Green Grid group as the basis for future programs. Given the growing drain on the power grid from data centers, the utility in turn will reap the rewards of lower electricity demand on its network. "PG&E has been a leader in providing incentives for data center managers to put more energy efficienct equipment into the data center," said Jon Haas, Intel’s energy efficiency programs manager, during a conference call. "We want to bring that to other regional utilities going forward."

Posted in green computing | Leave a Comment »

Biofuels Startup Taps BP Exec as CEO

August 6, 2007 by Todd Woody

Cilion, the corn ethanol startup backed by Khosla Ventures and Richard Branson’s Virgin Fuels, has turned to a veteran oil industry executive to lead the California company. Former BP (BP) group vice president Mark Noetzel was named Cilion’s new CEO and a member of its board. While at BP in London, Noetzel ran the oil company’s retail, fuels transport and wholesaling operations in Asia, Europe and the United States.

Posted in biofuels | Leave a Comment »

Federal Energy Official: Plug the Prius into the Grid

August 6, 2007 by Todd Woody

photo: CalCars

Thanks to Felix Kramer of the California Cars Initiative for tipping off Green Wombat to an enlightening exchange between a Toyota executive and a U.S. energy commissioner on the automaker’s blog. The topic: plugging a plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) version of the Prius into the power grid to supply electricity when demand peaks. Toyota (TM) corporate communications exec Irv Miller wrote a post on July 26 about the company’s move to supply plug-in versions of the Prius to the University of California, Berkeley, and UC Irvine for testing. In response, Jon Wellinghoff, a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, posted a query on Toyota’s Open Road blog about the car’s vehicle-to-grid capability, or V2G in green car geek talk, which would allow owners to be compensated for generating electricity. "Is Toyota planning on incorporating this ‘cashback’ hybrid technology into the cars they produce for testing?" asked Wellinghoff. "Studies have demonstrated that PHEV with vehicle-to-grid capability can realize annual payments from electric grid operators of between $1,000 to $3,000. These cashback payments could completely offset the high cost of this technology. What is Toyota doing in this regard?"

In a lengthy reply posted less than a day later – warp speed for a multinational corporation dealing with a hot-button topic – Miller said Toyota’s priority is to produce production-ready PHEVs rather than build mini power plants. "Our expertise is in building motor vehicles. It�s not in power generation," wrote Miller. "That�s something that we would prefer to leave to those best equipped to do it." Nevertheless, he went on to discuss the challenges of V2G. Among them:

Battery performance.
Coordinating thousands of PHEVs to supply power to the grid.
Building and financing the V2G infrastructure.
Consumer’s willingness to accept lower fuel efficiency by giving up battery power to the grid.

(One hurdle not mentioned but something that Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard has raised with Green Wombat is the impact of V2G on PHEV or electric car battery life.)

"The automobile business is changing and will, we feel sure, require strategies, partnerships and alliances we might not even have thought of yet. We don�t even know, for sure, if PHEVs will come to market in the way in which we think they will," concluded Miller. "So while the potential for V2G is another intriguing aspect of hybrid technology, we must not become sidetracked so that we lose sight of the immediate goal. That goal is to produce an affordable, reliable PHEV that can be sold in large quantities, that can be serviced at any dealership, and that will meet the needs of the American motorist."

For CalCars’s Kramer, whose organization promotes plug-in hybrids, Toyota’s willingness to even publicly discuss vehicle-to-grid was more important than Miller’s laundry list of obstacles to V2G. "The company’s reservations are less significant than the fact that it is paying very serious attention to the subject," Kramer told Green Wombat in an email. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you might spot the PHEV enthusiast tooling around in his converted 100-miles-to-the-gallon plug-in Prius, as Green Wombat did just the other weekend out at Point Reyes National Seashore.

Green Wombat is also fascinated by how a high-level U.S. government energy official and a corporate executive are having a direct, and apparently minimally mediated, open discussion via blog on a matter of public policy. Toyota’s willingness to talk no doubt owes in part to the pressure exerted by groups like CalCars and the interest of utilities like PG&E (PCG) and Southern California Edison (EIX) in V2G. Google (GOOG) also has focused attention on the issue by installing a vehicle-to-grid charging stations at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View. Now the question is, will Honda (HMC), General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) join the discussion?

Posted in green cars | 7 Comments »

Report: Green Data Centers Could Save Billions, Help Planet

August 3, 2007 by Todd Woody

photo: wirenine
Time to put server-farm hogs on a diet of greens. Left unchecked, data centers could double their energy consumption over the next five years at a cost of $7.4 billion annually, according to a report issued today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By 2011, the equivalent of 10 new power plants would be needed to supply 12 gigawatts of electricity unless the energy efficiency of data centers can be improved. That’s bad news for the corporate bottom line and the environment. It’s also a hit on taxpayers’ wallets: federal government data centers alone consume about 10 percent of that electricity.

The good news, says EPA’s researchers, is that greening the data center through consolidating servers, energy-efficient equipment and tapping alternative energy sources could cut annual electricity costs by $1.6 billion to $5.1 billion by 2011 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 47 million metric tons a year.

A tech industry consortium called the Green Grid is working to ramp up data center energy efficiency as is the Climate Savers Computing Initiative led by Intel (INTC) and Google (GOOG). But the EPA report called for federal leadership to spur such measures, including working with industry to establish standardized performance standards for data centers, establishing energy efficiency standards for government contracts with data centers, and investigating whether Energy Star efficiency standards should be applied to servers and other data center equipment. State and local governments, say researchers, should consider requiring separate utility meters at large data centers while utilities could offer financial incentives for energy efficient data centers. Some utilities, like California’s PG&E (PCG), already provide such programs.

The push to make data centers more environmentally friendly is a boon to companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which has focused on energy-efficient chips, as well as data storage companies like Network Appliance (NTAP) and virtualization software makers such as VMware (EMC).

Posted in green computing | Leave a Comment »

The Feds Go Solar

August 3, 2007 by Todd Woody

photo: Blipem
How big is the opportunity to provide solar energy to the U.S. government? Consider that the federal General Services Administration alone controls more than 1,800 buildings containing 347 million square feet. Today the GSA announced it has taken a step to go green, signing a $6.9 million contract with solar systems provider SunEdison to build a 1-megawatt solar park on six acres next to the massive Denver Federal Center in Colorado. The photovoltaic arrays will meet about 10 percent of the one-square-mile complex’s peak electricity demand. It’s also a good deal for local utility Xcel Energy (XEL), which is under the gun to generate 20 percent of its electricity in Colorado from renewable sources by 2020.

Posted in solar energy | 3 Comments »

Dean Kamen’s Stirling Solution

August 2, 2007 by Todd Woody

photos: green wombat

In a world of Stepford executives who never deviate from the corporate party line, there’s something refreshing about an entrepreneur willing to take a tumble – literally – for his latest innovation. In uber-inventor Dean Kamen’s case that meant crashing his Stirling electric hybrid scooter in front of Green Wombat and a photographer. In June, Green Wombat visited Westwind, Kamen’s estate outside Manchester, New Hampshire, to talk to the Segway inventor about his plans to install a Stirling heat engine in an electric car made by Norway’s Think. (See "Have You Driven a Fjord Lately?" in the August issue of Business 2.0.) But first, Kamen wanted to demo the scooter (photo above) to show how a virtually greenhouse gas-free Stirling engine could extend the range of an electric vehicle by trickle-charging the battery. As he zooms down the driveway, the scooter goes sideways – its weight distribution needs some tweaking – sending the inventor flying into the grass. "Say you’re in Bangladesh or anywhere in the world where people don�t have electricity," says Kamen, dusting himself off and not missing a beat. "You get home and you plug your house into it." He shows off power plugs behind the scooter’s seat. "It�s your power system, it�s your heating system, it gives everybody electricity. When you leave in the morning, you drive away with your local power plant."

Over the past decade, Kamen, who made a fortune as inventor of the insulin pump and other medical devices, has spent some $40 million developing Stirling engines. They can use virtually any fuel source to heat a sealed container containing a gas – hydrogen or helium, for instance – that expands and contracts to drive a piston and produce electricity. (The scooter uses a small can of propane as the fuel source.) "We run two villages in Bangladesh on Stirlings that run on freakin’ cow dung," says Kamen, who envisions Stirling engines powering the world’s off-the-grid villages and using the waste heat produced by the engine to purify water.

But Kamen needs to get to mass production to realize that dream and that’s where Think comes in. Kamen met Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums last year at MIT. "I took him up to New Hampshire and we spent half the night speculating about how cool the world could be if you put the right technologies in the right place at the right time," says Kamen. "I need some killer app to put this thing into production. And one way to do that would be to create the world�s first hybrid Stirling electric car." So Willums shipped a Think City to Kamen, who is now modifying the two-seater coupe to carry a Stirling engine (photo at right) powered by veggie oil, for instance. ("You could drive across the country, stopping a McDonald’s to fill up," says Kamen.) That would not only extend the Thinks range by hundreds of miles but turn the car into a mobile generator. When electricity demand peaks during the day, thousands of Thinks plugged in at office parks could feed power back to the grid so utilities like PG&E (PCG) and Edison (EIX) could avoid having to fire up planet-warming power plants. The Stirling engine would then recharge the car’s battery for the commute home. When we last spoke in July, Kamen had the autmotive version of the Stirling engine up and running. The next step is to hook it up to the City and see if it’ll work as planned. You probably won’t see a Stirling in a Toyota (TM) or Ford (F) but the device gives Think another power plant to offer its customers.

�If you have enough Thinks out there you would literally change the architecture of the grid,� says Kamen, taking Green Wombat for a drive around Westwind and past his wind turbine before parking the blue Think City near his pair of Enstrom helicopters. (He keeps the Think in a garage that also houses his 1898 steam-driven car and a 1913 Model T.) Kamen heads to the control room of his 33,000-square foot house. An Internet-enabled blue box called a Teletrol controls the home�s power systems, including a Stirling engine about the size of an air conditioner that can act as a backup generator or a mini power plant that kicks on when electricity demand soars. Kamen invented the Teletrol and his company of the same name remotely operates the heating and air-conditioning systems of buildings like the Sydney Opera House. Kamen, of course, would like to see a Teletrol in every house, acting as the interface between your Web-enabled Think and the grid (and, ideally, the Stirling engine that sits in your basement or utility room.)

"The big advantage is once we�re in production with that engine, where it will really be uniquely valuable is to the 1.6 billion people on this plant who�ve never used electricity," says Kamen. "We will become the Con Edison of every village in Asia, Africa and Central America."

Posted in alternative energy | 21 Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »