After Green Wombat blogged this week about Google’s (GOOG) reluctance to disclose its carbon footprint for competitive reasons, Sun Microsystems’ Erica Jacobs emailed to say that the Silicon Valley computer and software maker publicizes its greenhouse gas emissions on its Web site. Sun (SUNW) is still calculating its worldwide carbon footprint, but the company lists its major U.S. facilities along with their individual electricity and natural gas consumption and resulting greenhouse gas emissions. In March, for instance, the eight facilities – which are responsible for about half of Sun’s global emissions – produced 10,515 metric tons of greenhouse gases. The company, which has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent below 2002 levels by 2012, says 90 percent of its carbon footprint comes from energy usage. "We believe efforts like this start with showing all the warts so we can identify starting points, help each other improve and solve the problem," wrote Jacobs, Sun’s PR manager for Eco Responsibility. The eight facilities represent cubicle farms, data centers and manufacturing plants, according to Jacobs. She said Sun will update its emissions reports monthly and begin adding more data to allow month-to-month and year-to-year comparisons.
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Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis appeared in a redwood grove in downtown San Francisco today – the urban redwoods are planted next to the Transamerica Pyramid – to announce a first-of-its kind deal: the bank is providing 100 percent financing to the non-profit Redwood Forest Foundation to acquire 50,635 acres of redwood timberlands on Northern California’s Lost Coast. The acquisition is part of BofA’s (BAC) $20 billion green lending initiative. What makes the $65 million deal unique is that the foundation will continue to log the Usal Redwood Forest in Mendocino County, albeit on a much reduced scale and in conjunction with the restoration of the forest ecosystem. The foundation, which is buying the land from the Hawthorne Timber Company, will sell a conservation easement to ensure the forest remains intact in perpetuity and to pay down the debt it owes BofA. "We think this is an exciting new paradigm," said Redwood Forest Foundation president Art Harwood (pictured above at the podium with Lewis at left and foundation executive director Don Kemp at right). "Thanks to the flexible financing, we can delay logging operations until the forest is silviculturally and biologically ready." Logging will be limited to a maximum of three percent of the forest a year and profits from timber sales will be reinvested into the local economy, Harwood said.
This is a landmark in enviro-capitalism on several fronts. During the 1980s and 1990s bitter timber wars raged across Northern California as environmentalists fought the timber companies’ plans to log much of the remaining old-growth redwoods left in private ownership. Green activists took to the trees to block logging while their attorneys waged legal campaigns in the courts. Green Wombat spent much of the ’90s chronicling the timber wars as a newspaper reporter, and back then it would have seemed ludicrous that enviros and a timber company could reach an agreement to buy a forest while permitting continued logging – all financed by the nation’s second largest bank.
But times have changed. These days the threat to redwood forests is not so much from clear-cutting but from subdividing, said Pete Mattson, a foundation board member and chairman of the Sonoma Land Trust. Timber owners increasingly are finding it more profitable to sell off pieces of their land to developers than to log. "I’ve been anti-logging for a long time," Mattson told Green Wombat. "But now I’ve come to see that logging is critical to preserving forests and keeping wildlife corridors intact." The Usal Redwood Forest is second-growth timber land, meaning it has been logged over and probably would not be a candidate for preservation with public money. But by managing the forest for conservation and limited logging, the foundation will maintain a large redwood ecosystem while supporting local timber mills and permitting the land to regenerate.
"This transaction will stop fragmentation and allow the coastal redwoods to grow and provide carbon sequestration," said BofA’s Lewis. He emphasized that the bank will make money on the deal, though it is giving the foundation a discounted interest rate on the loan. "It’s a commercially viable rate of return," chimed in Don Kemp, the foundation’s executive director. And as Lewis noted, a growing forest absorbs CO2, generating marketable carbon credits.
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Giant utility American Electric Power said today it will buy 4.6 million carbon credits to capture methane produced by some 400,000 cows between 2010 and 2017. The Ohio-based utility – one of the U.S.’s largest producers of coal-fired electricity – did not disclose the price of the credits. Farmers in the 11 states where AEP operates will receive payments for participating in the program. AEP’s (AEP) deal with the the Environmental Credit Corp. calls for the methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to be captured in covered lagoons and burned off. That still produces carbon dioxide, of course. But if AEP really wants to neutralize the greenhouse gas emissions – and tap some naturally clean power – it could emulate California utility PG&E (PCG) by supporting the conversion of methane into biogas to generate electricity on farms or at natural gas plants.
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At yesterday’s Climate Savers Computing Initiative press conference at the Googleplex, a Forbes reporter asked Google exec Urs Holzle to disclose the size of the search giant’s carbon footprint, noting that the company’s good green deeds notwithstanding, its executives still fly on private planes and so forth. (Larry Page, who had just flown in from Africa, was sitting in the front row.) Holzle, a vp for operations, rattled off a list of Google’s (GOOG) efforts to cut its greenhouse gas emissions – installing the world’s largest corporate solar array, its generous subsidies for employee purchases of hybrid cars, etc. – but declined to reveal the company’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. "Our carbon footprint is actually not that big," he said. "We have 10,000 employees. Even at this scale, we care and want to be a model citizen. But we’re not quite ready to tell you what we’re doing."
Another example of corporate hypocrisy or Google’s penchant for secrecy? Not really. Disclosing corporate carbon footprints is a tricky issue. If you’re a financial services firm or a software company, you might be quite happy to make public your greenhouse gas emissions from what is essentially office work. If you operate huge server farms around the world and are locked in cutthroat competition with the likes of Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT), such disclosures are more problematic. "Our carbon footprint is too close to information that is competitive," Google energy strategist Bill Weihl told Green Wombat during a post-press conference chat. In other words, Google worries that competitors could reverse engineer its greenhouse gas data to figure out how many servers and data centers it operates – figures that the company keeps locked in a black box. Weihl says that Google has calculated its carbon footprint and has had the numbers verified by a third party. Which third party? He said he couldn’t reveal that at this time.
The Forbes reporter put the same carbon footprint question to Intel’s Pat Gelsinger, who referred to a white paper on the company’s site. While the paper details Intel’s (INTC) many technological efforts to reduce its CO2 emissions, Green Wombat could not find a snapshot of the chip giant’s overall carbon footprint.
One thing is clear, however: Pressure for companies – especially those that portray themselves as green – to reveal their greenhouse gas emissions will only grow in the years ahead. California will require such information to be disclosed for some industries to implement its statewide cap on greenhouse gas emissions; a national registry is likely to follow at some point as part of Congressional global warming legislation. And being upfront about your carbon footprint will be key to effective green marketing. Figuring out how to do that while protecting competitive information will be the challenge.
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photo: green wombat
Gathering at a solar-powered building on the Google campus, a host of tech giants today announced a major push to improve the energy efficiency of computers – an effort they claimed could save $5.5 billion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons by 2010. (The equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road or shuttering 20 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants.) Normally fierce competitors – Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), HP and Sun Microsystems (SUNW), Microsoft (MSFT) and everyone – are cooperating on the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. (Apple, despite Steve Jobs’s recent green manifesto, was conspicuous in its absence.) "The reality today is that the average desktop computer wastes half of its energy – half the energy coming out of the wall plug is unused," said Urs Holzle, a Google vp for operations, at a press conference. By 2010, Climate Savers aims to make desktop computers 90 percent energy efficient and servers 93 percent. That would add about an average $20 to the price of a personal computer and $30 to a server. The alliance also will campaign to get power management software installed on computers to turn them off at night or lower their electricity usage when idle. "The fact that 90 percent of computers are capable of but not utilizing these power management technologies is startling," said Intel executive Pat Gelsinger. "This is not a technology problem. We can build energy efficient [power] supplies today. It’s a matter of industry choice." Holzle and Gelsinger said it is yet to be decided whether computers that meet the alliance’s standards will sport some sort of Climate Savers seal of approval like the Energy Star stickers awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Climate Savers members – which also include non-tech companies like Starbucks, green groups the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as MIT and the U.S. EPA – pledge to practice what they breach, ensuring their own operations make use of power management software and install the most efficient computers.
Ok, as important as computer energy efficiency is, it isn’t exactly the sexist green issue around – you won’t probably won’t find Darryl Hannah touting her new high efficient PC power supply. So the scribes from various daily newspapers and national magazines lured to Mountain View by the allure of the Googleplex seemed to be a bit underwhelmed by the news. But to Green Wombat, the event’s real significance – besides the obvious positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions – was the fact that once again the tech industry is out front on global warming, racing ahead of the federal government to devise a solution to ever-escalating power consumption by our digital society. Come July, the U.S. EPA will require computer power supplies to be 80 percent efficient. But the tech alliance unveiled today will begin to exceed that by next year if they keep their pledge. Contrast that commitment from computer manufacturers, chip companies and customers with the recent actions of the auto industry, which continues to fight efforts to raise energy efficiency standards of their products.
Toward the end of the event, Google co-founder Larry Page, just back from a trip to Africa, stopped by to endorse Climate Savers. "We can make great, great progress," he said. "We can also make computers better by doing this….By taking out some of the inefficiencies we can make them quieter and more reliable. The amount of power computers are using is increasing and the importance of computers in our lives is also increasing."
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photos: green wombat
California utility PG&E has given Green Wombat an exclusive look at new
technology that could provide a big boost to both the nascent
electric car market and renewable energy production. In the coming years, the utility plans to buy thousands of plug-in hybrid and electric car batteries once they’ve outlived their usefulness for transportation and install them in the basements of office towers and at electrical substations to store green energy. That will cut peak demand for expensive – and greenhouse gas-emitting – electricity. On a recent morning Green Wombat went down to a sub-basement below PG&E’s (PCG) San Francisco headquarters where the utility parks its plug-in hybrid Toyota (TM) and Mercedes fuel-cell car. Against one wall a nickel metal hydride battery salvaged from a wrecked Prius sat on a metal cart attached to an inverter that converts the battery’s DC power into AC power. The setup is hooked up to an electrical meter, a fluorescent light and a portable heater. (In the photos, the Pruis battery is on the middle shelf; the inverter is on the top left.) "The meter is spinning anti-clockwise right now," says Sven Thesen, PG&E’s supervisor for clean air transportation. "That means we energy is coming out of the building and powering the meter. PG&E is paying for this right now." A minute later the meter begins to spin in the opposite direction and the lights and heater come to life as the 1.3 kilowatt/hour Prius battery uploads electricity into the power grid.
Electric vehicle batteries generally retain 80 percent of their capacity even after they’re no longer good for powering cars. Thesen envisions a time in the near future when banks of EV batteries are charged at night with electricity produced by wind farms, which tend to generate the most electricity in the evening when power demands are the lowest. Normally, that energy is just lost because it isn’t stored. During the day when air conditioners crank up and energy demand rises, electricity can be released from the batteries to take the load off the power grid. In theory, that means PG&E won’t have to build as many planet-warming natural gas-fired power plants to meet peak demand or as an insurance policy against blackouts. It also allows the utility to do "load leveling." Cranking up a power plant to supply electricity when demand suddenly spikes is expensive. EV batteries could release electricity to the grid to smooth fill in the gaps between supply and demand. The same is true if batteries are used at electrical substations. "If we can put in $5,000 worth of batteries and avoid putting in a $50,000 transformer and upgrading the lines then everyone is a winner," says Thesen.
Electric car makers like Silcon Valley’s Tesla Motors and Norway’s Think could be some of the biggest winners. The battery is the most expensive part of the car, and PG&E’s plan would create a significant secondary market for them, especially if other utilities like Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) follow suit. A second life for electric car batteries would lower their cost as battery financing syndicates are formed to buy and sell the micro-mini power plants. That would help jump start the market for electric cars by making them more affordable. It would also spur further technological progress in battery development to exend their range and power. "Those batteries have some residual capacity and that residual capacity is actually valuable," Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard told Green Wombat last week. "At a substation you take a whole stack of three-quarter dead batteries and just run them into the ground an then chuck them into recycling." He says there would be no obstacle to re-purposing Tesla’s powerful lithium-ion batteries – which give its forthcoming Roadster super car its 200 mile range and zero-to-60-in-four seconds vroom – for such use.
The chicken-and-egg dilemma, of course, is that PG&E and other utilities will need thousands of EV batteries. Ford (F), General Motors (GM), Toyota and other automakers are not yet making plug-in hybrids. Companies like Think and Tesla, meanwhile, will be selling limited numbers of electric cars over the next couple years. Many EV batteries are expected to last five years or 100,000 miles, meaning it’ll be some time before they’re ready for recycling. Still, the creation of a secondary market for batteries could drive down costs and expand the electric car fleet sooner than anticipated. That will create another source of supply: Inevitably, drivers will crash their cars, leaving behind batteries in mint-condition that utilities can re-deploy.
"By having these out there we don’t have to import as much peak power when it’s really expensive from places that are far away," says Thesen, who himself drives Prius he had coverted to a plug in. "We move it at the cheapest most efficient time. And for PG&E that also means it’s the cleanest. So we’re going to be able to upload more clean power to the grid and it’s the cheap stuff. So it’s this wonderful synergistic win-win for everyone and it will make vehicle batteries cheaper because they will have worth. When we make an electric battery cheaper that means more people can afford it; that means we put less demand on foreign oil imports."
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The U.S. Department of Energy has released a report analyzing the impact of proposed legislation from New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman that would require utilities to obtain 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Such a so-called renewable portfolio standard would result in a 6.7 percent decline in greenhouse gas emissions, according to the DOE’s Energy Information Administration. Though CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants would fall, utilities’ overall greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise. The study does not take into account renewable energy standards already in place in more than half states For instance, California requires that 20 percent of electricity sold by investor-owned utilities must come from renewable sources by 2010, rising to 30 percent by 2030. California will impose statewide limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and five other western states have agreed to do the same. "The implementation of any combination of these policies would be expected to have a significant impact on renewable generation markets," the report’s authors wrote. The study also found:
- Solar energy would grow to eight percent of renewable energy production, largely because of the generous marketable credits rooftop solar arrays would receive.
- Biomass energy production would triple.
- Natural gas and nuclear energy production would decline slightly.
- Electricity prices would rise .9 percent between 2005 and 2030.
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Solar energy is largely a hardware business – the stuff of solar cells, photovoltaic panels, inverters, and power-plant sized arrays. But the solar boom is also spawning a solar software market as rooftop systems become an industrial-scale supplier of electricity to corporations ranging from Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) to Estee Lauder and Wal-Mart (WMT). Call it greenware – software that lets companies that install, own or operate huge rooftop solar arrays to go online and monitor their perfomance. Green Wombat recently chatted with Chris Beekhuis, founder of Silicon Valley startup Fat Spaniel Technologies, about the growing demand for greenware and how it can boost the efficiency of solar systems and, in the Web 2.0 era, serve as interactive tool for homeowners and consumers. The San Jose company’s software monitors solar energy systems at more than 500 locations around the world. That allows the operators of solar arrays installed everywhere from the Loma Linda, California, City Hall to a Seventh Day Adventist church to a home in Ranch Mirage to go to Fat Spaniel’s site and see real-time data on how much solar power is being generated and consumed.
"It raises awareness of energy usage," says Beekhuis. "We see customers putting into context their green energy versus what they’ve been getting from the grid. Homeowners will go around and find out what’s using so much energy at particular times." In other words, if you notice your solar panels produce maximum electricity during certain hours of the day, you might start to run energy-intensive appliances during those times.
Such data is even more crucial for companies. It all comes down to power and money. Commercial rooftop arrays are multi million-dollar investments that are increasingly financed and operated by third parties – a SunEdison or MMA Renewable Ventures (MMA) – that must keep tabs on systems scattered across the country. These solar companies own the systems and sell the electricity they produce back to the rooftop host at a fixed rate, meaning that optimizing a solar array’s performance is crucial. And where marketable renewable energy credits are associated with a solar installation, such data can prove valuable in proving to regulators the project’s green energy production. "They want to be able to forecast and guarantee performance," Beekhuis says of his clients. "But it is very difficult to monitor those remote sites. We have an installer in Southern California who is approaching 100 installations. They can see a problem online and then go out and fix it. They leave a door hanger that says, "I’ve improved performance of your array.’ " For instance, online monitoring lets the installer notice if a growing tree is shading a panel, interfering with its performance.
Here’s how it works: Fat Spaniel sells a package that includes a software license, hardware and a monitoring subscription service. A device at the solar installation site keeps tabs on the system’s performance, transmitting the data over the Internet via a wireless modem.
Beekhuis sees Fat Spaniel expanding into the energy efficiency market as well. For instance, just this week Macy’s announced
a deal wth SunPower (SPWR) to install solar arrays at 26 of its
California stores in conjunction with energy efficiency upgrades to
lighting and heating and cooling systems.
"On the commercial side there’s a great value in green marketing," he says. "We’ve talked to some very large firms lately looking to reduce overall carbon footprints. This is a tangible way to monitor their efforts."
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photos: green wombat
When reporting the Big Solar story for the June issue of Business 2.0, I had the opportunity to visit solar power company Solar Systems in Melbourne, Australia, as well as one of its power plants in the Australian Outback. Founder John Lasich started the company in 1990 after spending years working on solar technology in his backyard. Lasich, 52, began tinkering with solar cells as a university student in 1975. "I had to do a project for physics," he recalls. "There was a list of really boring things to do. I happened to have read a bit about solar cells and I asked my supervisor if I could do it on that and it just so happened that he had an interest in that as well. I couldn’t wait to get these cells. I put them out in the sun and got a meter and tested them and I got milliwatts. I thought, ‘shit, as elegant as this is, this is not going to do anything.’ " So Lasich got an art student to craft a dish on his pottery wheel. "I put in the cell and bingo, it was like a hundred times the power. And I thought I’m making something here. And 10 seconds later the cell melted and fell to pieces because I cooked it. And I guess ever since then I’ve been working on the business of making cells survive and work extremely well in the environment."
Lasich’s rudimentary dish had concentrated the sun’s rays on the solar cell, boosting its output. After university, he joined a solar company that went broke when oil prices fell in the early 1980s. Lasich then went to work in the petrochemical industry for the next 10 years. But he continued to perfect his concentrator dish technology. He pulls out a faded Polaroid of his younger, long-haired self working on a homemade solar dish in his backyard in the 1980s. In 1990 he took the plunge and founded Solar Systems to build concentrator photovoltaic dishes. Solar Systems headquarters off a lane in a Melbourne suburb is something of a solar museum, with various generations of the company’s technology sitting on shelves and scattered about Lasich’s office. That solar dish that he and his wife built in their backyard more than a decade and a half ago sits outside the company’s clean room and is still used to test solar receivers.
Solar Systems has built three small-scale power plants in remote Aboriginal communities in Australia’s Northern Territory. The Hermannsburg plant (photos above) features eight giant dishes that focus the sun on receivers containing solar cells. Electricity is produced instantly with virtually no moving parts, other than the dishes that track the sun throughout the day. Seven of the dishes feature solar cells from SunPower. The eighth dish, however, sports new high-efficiency multijunction cells developed by Boeing’s Spectrolab subsidiary and Solar Systems. Inside the control room, a flat-screen monitor shows a more than 50 percent improvement in efficiency for that dish.
Back in Melbourne, Lasich holds up a cube of midnight-blue glass. It’s a Spectrolab solar module that is the heart of Solar Systems’s next big project: a 154-megawatt heliostat concentrator solar power station to be built in southeast Australia. Last year the company won $95 million in Australian government funding toward the plant. Instead of using expensive and technologically complex solar dishes, Solar Systems will deploy fields of relatively cheap sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats that will focus the sun on towers that hold receivers containing the world’s most efficient solar cells. And when even more efficient cells are developed, Solar Systems can just swap out the old ones. The company plans to produce 20,000 heliostats on a robotic assembly line. "They’ll be rolled out over about a three-year period," Lasich says. "So we have a proving up period of about three and a half years to demonstrate this format and then the process is to just repeat that."
Lasich expects the plant to produce electricity for about 10 cents a kilowatt hour, which would make it nearly competitive with coal, especially if greenhouse gas emission limits are imposed. "It’s not a number we picked because it sounds good. We did a thousand-line costing of the thing," he says. "The beautiful thing about a concentrator system is that the module puts out 1,500 times more power than a normal solar panel," he says. "What it means is the rest of the system – 95 percent of it is glass, steel and concrete, really common stuff. So the manufacturing and building techniques are stock standard."
"We’re in this for the triple bottom line, if you like," he adds. "We’re trying to make money for our shareholders and we’re trying to be socially responsible while we do it, and of course we’re trying to improve the environment while we’re at it."
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photo: Ian David Blüm
California, Connecticut and Vermont are the most energy-efficient states in the U.S., according to a new report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The Washington, D.C.-based non-profit analyzed federal energy data and surveyed state policies to rank states based on, among other things, their spending on energy efficiency programs, appliance and equipment energy efficiency standards, building codes, and tax incentives for energy efficiency. The 74-page report was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The top 10 most energy efficient states in 2006:
- California, Connecticut and Vermont (tie)
- Massachusetts
- Oregon
- Washington
- New York
- New Jersey
- Rhode Island, Minnesota (tie)
The 10 least energy efficient states:
- North Dakota
- Wyoming
- Mississippi
- South Dakota
- Alabama
- Missouri
- Arkansas
- Oklahoma
- Tennessee
- Alaska
"The top 10 states are generally characterized by having limited in-state supplies of conventional fossil energy resources," the report’s authors wrote. "They have long understood that they cannot rely on conventional resources for security of supply or other reasons. By contrast, the lower-scoring states have been typically endowed with abundant amounts of traditional energy resources that have been historically inexpensive."
The green states’ investments in energy efficiency have paid off, according to the report, in job creation, lower air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, less expensive energy bills and a more sustainable growth in energy demand.
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