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New Think: Buy the Electric Car, Lease the Battery

February 21, 2007 by Todd Woody

Think_electric_carphoto by KnutBry/TinAgent/Think Technology
Green Wombat popped into the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco this afternoon, where venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and others are confabbing about the latest trends and opportunities in green technology. Among the more intriguing companies in town was Norway’s Think. The automaker is building a two-seater electric runabout with a range of about 115 miles (185 kilometers) called the Think City. What’s cutting edge about Think is not so much its technology as its business model.  The company plans to sell its cars but lease the battery for either a monthly or by-the-mile fee. "By leasing the battery the consumer doesn’t take the risk over the unknowns of battery life," said Think president Jan-Olaf Willums. Presumably, as battery technology advances, Think drivers can swap their power plants. "Our returns come from both selling the car and the services for which the car is the platform," he added. Among those services is a package that will include on-the-road WiFi,  GPS navigation and a media player. "It Will be most IT oriented car on wheels," Willums claimed. He said Think will also offer short-term car sharing and a program to offset greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity used to power the vehicles. "We’re moving from a car concept to a mobility concept. People look more and more at the full cost of ownership."

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The company closed a $25 million round of financing earlier this month and expects to complete an additional $50 million round in a few months, which will allow it to begin selling cars in Europe by September, according to Willums. He said the company expects to start
selling the Think City in the United States in 2008. The company launched in 1990 and Ford (F) acquired the startup in 1999. After producing about 1,000 electric cars, Ford sold Think to a Kamkorp Microelectronics. That company in turn sold Think to its current owners, a group of Norwegian investors led by Willums.  So how does Think think it will succeed when automotive giants like Toyota (TM), Honda (HMC), General Motors (GM) and DaimlerChrysler (DCX) argue that the all-electric car is not ready for prime time? Think’s answer is, dare we say it, think differently.

UPDATE: See Green Wombat’s feature story on Think ("Have You Driven a Fjord Lately?" in the August issue of Business 2.0 magazine.

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Posted in green cars | 26 Comments »

Ikea Bags Plastic Bags

February 20, 2007 by Todd Woody

Ikea_store
Ikea, the purveyor of cheap chic modern furniture and housewares, said today it will stop handing out disposable plastic carry bags in the U.S. in an effort to radically reduce the tens of millions of bags its customers send to landfills every year or that end up littering the landscape. Starting March 15, shoppers who insist on plastic bags to tote their designer kitchen gadgets to their cars will be charged 5 cents per bag. Ikea will donate the proceeds from the "Bag the Plastic Bag" initiative to non-profit green group American Forests to pay for tree planting. The company will encourage customers to buy its reusable Big Blue Bag and is cutting the bag’s price to 59 cents from 99 cents. "The amount of plastic bags we use and toss is overwhelming," Ikea said in a statement. "According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. consumes over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps each year. Each year, Americans throw away some 100 billion polyethylene plastic bags, and less than 1 percent of them are recycled."  Ikea said plastic bag use at its British stores has fallen 95 percent since the Swedish company introduced the program in the U.K. Ikea spokesperson Mona Astra Liss told Green Wombat the 5 cent charge represents the cost of producing a plastic bag. "We thought this was a fair price and a good hook into making a difference as we ease customers into thinking ‘reusable’ bags," she wrote in an e-mail. Ikea hopes the program will halve the 70 million bags its customers use annually in the U.S.

The Ikea program is notable in that it’s one of the few initiatives by a distributor of plastic bags itself to discourage their use and and to pass on at least some, if a tiny, part of the environmental cost of consumers’ "paper or plastic" habit.

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Posted in enviro capitalism | 16 Comments »

Australia Bans Traditional Light Bulbs to Combat Global Warming

February 20, 2007 by Todd Woody

Cfl_bulb_earth
photo originally uploaded by grizzly
Australia today became the first nation to ban traditional light bulbs, requiring that consumers and businesses install high efficiency lighting to cut greenhouse gas emissions. A month ago a liberal Los Angeles state legislator was widely ridiculed for proposing a similar ban on incandescent bulbs in California. But in this case it’s the conservative government of Australian Prime Minister John Howard that is flipping the switch on a 125-year-old technology in a nation of 20 million people. Incandescent light bulbs will be phased out by 2010, eliminating an estimated 4 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually by 2015, according to the government. "The most effective and immediate way we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions is by using Img_1300
energy more efficiently,” said Australian Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull in a statement. "The climate change challenge is a global one. I encourage other countries to follow Australia’s lead and make the switch to more energy efficient products like compact fluorescent light bulbs.” CFLs use 70 percent less electricity than traditional bulbs and last 10 times longer. Australia’s bulb ban is good news for General Electric (GE), Philips, Honeywell (HON) and other compact fluorescent light bulb manufacturers as well as retailers that sell their products. In the United States, Wal-Mart (WMT) has pledged to sell 100 million CFLs this year.

There’s no small irony in the Howard government seeing the light on energy conservation as a solution to global warming.

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Posted in global warming | 25 Comments »

No Nukes for California, More Solar Needed, Says State Utilities Chief

February 16, 2007 by Todd Woody

Diablo_canyon
photo originally uploaded by Ko(char *)hoo
A group of Fresno, Calif., businessmen and farmers a few months back formed a group to push for the construction of a nuclear power plant in the state’s Central Valley, in part, as a solution to global warming. On Thursday, California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey weighed in on the issue. "It’s a non-starter," said Peevey of the nuke plant proposal, during a press conference at utility PG&E (PCG) before a panel on solar energy began. Peevey, a former utility company executive, said there’s no getting around a California law that bans new nuclear power plant construction in the Golden State until a way is found to dispose of radioactive waste. "That’s not to say there is not a role for nuclear energy in climate change. But it is not going to happen in California."  Peevey acknowledged as a "Herculean challenge" a California mandate that utilities PG&E, Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) must get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2030. With PG&E executives standing beside him, he said he’d like to see the utility earn a guaranteed rate of return on capital invested in rooftop solar collectors. "I would also like to see them invest in solar thermal" power plants, Peevey added.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist and green energy guru Vinod Khosla also spoke at the press conference, calling for a carbon tax on fossil fuels to reflect their environmental costs and level the playing field with renewable energy producers.

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Posted in energy | 9 Comments »

Power Hogs: Server Farm Electricity Use Soars

February 15, 2007 by Todd Woody

Data_centerphoto originally uploaded by 77008

Want to help stop global warming? Kill your web TV. An authoritative study released today on the power consumption of servers – those high-powered computers that run the Internet, deliver millions of YouTube videos and keep the post-industrial economy humming – found that their electricity use doubled between 2000 and 2005 and could spike another 75 percent by 2010. To put it another way, in 2005 it took the equivalent of 14, 1,000-megawatt power plants to keep online the world’s data centers owned by Internet giants like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO). Server farms in the United States alone consumed enough electricity to keep five of those monster power plants running around the clock. And that was before the explosion of online video and the use of the Internet as a global telephone service. "You can imagine there be will be substantial improvements in the operation of data centers in the next five years, but you can also can imagine there will many new applications coming out leading to demand for servers we didn’t expect," study author and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey told Green Wombat. (Download his report here.) In the study funded by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) – which sells energy-efficient server chips – Koomey used server sales data supplied by market research firm IDC to estimate the computers’ worldwide power use. He found that by 2005 server farms consumed 1.2 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. The utility bill: $2.7 billion.

The X factor in the server power equation is Google. The search behemoth custom-builds most of its servers from off the shelf parts. That means its data centers don’t appear on IDC’s map.  So Koomey relied on a 2006 New York Times report that Data_center2
estimated that Google operates 450,000 servers. That would increase the number of servers worldwide by 1.7 percent. "I don’t think the Google factor is that important for this study," says Koomey. The future may be another matter, however. With its acquisition of YouTube, which serves up hundreds of millions of videos, and its pursuit of such initiatives as digitalizing university libraries, there’s no end in sight to Google’s data center building boom. (photo at right by skreuzer.)

The report is sure to intensify efforts by AMD, Sun Microsystems (SUNW) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to claim the green ground as the purveyors of energy efficient technology.

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Posted in energy | 5 Comments »

Report: Carbon Tax a Better Way to Fight Global Warming

February 14, 2007 by Todd Woody

Smokestacks_1
photo originally uploaded by uniqueview 

A former Clinton administration commerce department official today released a report arguing that a global tax on companies’ greenhouse house gas emissions is a more efficient way to combat global warming than the carbon trading markets endorsed by a host of government officials and corporations like Alcoa (AA), BP, (BP), DuPont (DD), Duke Energy (DUK) and General Electric (GE). "A carbon tax would both directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide powerful incentives for technological progress," wrote Robert  J. Shapiro, a Washington D.C. consultant, veteran think tanker and former under secretary of commerce for economic affairs. "Carbon taxes also should provide greater incentives for companies to develop new, environmentally-friendly technologies or abatement strategies than a cap-and-trade program." Shapiro’s study was released by the American Consumer Institute, a free-market oriented Washington group.

Corporations currently are not charged for the economic and environmental impacts of their greenhouse gas emissions, though those "externalities" affect everyone. Under a carbon tax, those consequences would be calculated and a tax imposed accordingly. "Since every government needs revenues, the challenge is to design taxes so they distort those relative prices as little as possible. Part of the answer is to make the base of the tax as broad as possible, so its rate can be low and most people and activities are affected equally," Shapiro wrote. "Carbon taxes generally meet this criterion, although not as well as broad income or consumption taxes. However, their economic drawback of raising the price of carbon-intensive products and operations, relative to those which are not carbon-intensive, is also their environmental purpose." Companies that do not emit greenhouse gases – such as solar and wind producers – or sell greener goods and services – would benefit. The government could use carbon tax revenue to support renewable energy technologies, cut corporate taxes or increase health spending, according to Shapiro.

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Posted in global warming | 20 Comments »

Got Biogas? Cow Power to Light Up 50,000 California Homes

February 13, 2007 by Todd Woody

California_cows_2
photo originally uploaded by troymckaskle

A California startup founded by a dairyman turned entrepreneur has signed an agreement to supply up to 3 billion cubic feet of bovine biogas – methane extracted from cow manure – to utility PG&E (PCG). That’s enough cow power – 30 to 50 megawatts – to light up about 50,000 homes and keep a small natural gas plant running for a year. The deal between Bakersfield-based BioEnergy Solutions and PG&E of San Francisco highlights the win-win-win potential of renewable energy – and how global warming laws are creating opportunities for relatively low-tech solutions by companies far outside the Silicon Valley orbit.

In this case, cow power is good for the environment, the economy and entrepreneurs like BioEnergy’s David Albers. California is home to nearly 2 million cows and more than 2,000 dairies. Unlike the coastal cows enjoying the ocean view in the photo above, most California cows live on industrial-scale dairies in the Central Valley. Those operations produce enormous quantities of manure and thus methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.  The resulting air and water pollution and other environmental impacts have resulted in stricter state regulations on dairying in recent years. Albers, who also is an attorney, has represented his fellow dairy owners in their tangles with regulators and environmentalists.

California, meanwhile, has imposed a mandate that 20 percent of electricity sold by investor-owned utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) come from renewable energy sources by 2010. That’s making cow poop look profitable as source of really natural gas. "We found the perfect storm of opportunity," Albers told Green Wombat. "It’s such a great solution on so many levels, given the air quality problems in the Central Valley and the renewable energy mandate." Albers started BioEnergy Solutions last year and began negotiating with PG&E, which had just signed a cow power deal with a company called Microgy. Like its competitor, BioEnergy Solutions will install methane digesters at dairies, where manure will be pumped into covered lagoons. As methane is released from the decomposing manure, the digester will remove the carbon dioxide and impurities before piping the gas to a PG&E plant to be burned to produce greenhouse gas-free electricity. Albers says BioEnergy will install and operate the digesters at no cost to dairy owners while giving them a share of the gas sales (he wouldn’t say how much) and any renewable energy credits that result. "Even though there’s been a lot of digester technology out there, there’s never been a situation where the dairyman can share in the profits," Albers says.

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Posted in renewable energy | 5 Comments »

HP’s Green Ink: New Packaging to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

February 12, 2007 by Todd Woody

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It’s the small things that count. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has redesigned the packaging for its ubiquitous ink and toner cartridges in a way that the printer giant claims will eliminate an estimated 37 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions this year. Or to use the cars-taken-off-the-road metric: that’s like idling 3,600 vehicles for a year. So what did HP do? It essentially shrunk the packaging and made it lighter, replacing PVC plastic with recycled plastic and paper. (Before-and-after photo above.) That will save 15 million pounds of materials, resulting in smaller packages that require fewer carbon-spewing trucks and freighters to get them to their destinations. For instance, HP says smaller LaserJet toner packages mean that 203 cartridges fit on a shipping pallet that used to hold 144. Of course, refilling spent ink cartridges rather than replacing them is another way to get rid of planet-warming packaging. HP has also redesigned the packaging for its PhotoSmart 735 digital camera, reducing the weight by 36 percent. The number of cameras per pallot has increased to 340 from 200 and pallot use has fallen 41 percent as a result, according to HP. That saves some green for shareholders: shipping costs per camera  are down 36 percent. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart (WMT) has joined efforts to rethink the box. As part of its "Sustainability 360" initiative, the retailer is working with suppliers to shrink the amount of product packaging by 5 percent by 2013.

Posted in green packaging | 1 Comment »

Australian Solar Tower Company Has Eyes on Texas

February 9, 2007 by Todd Woody

Enviromission_solar_towerWith the future cloudy for its plan to build a 1,600-foot-high, 50-megawatt solar tower power plant in southeast Australia, EnviroMission (EVOMY.PK) announced this week that it is studying the feasibility of sites near El Paso, Texas. The Melbourne, Australia-based startup says it is also is using weather stations from utility Arizona Public Service, a subsidiary of Pinnacle West (PNW), to assess potential solar tower sites northwest of Phoenix. Another site assessment is being conducted on Native American land that covers part of Arizona, California and Nevada. EnviroMission is working with the Fort Mojave tribe’s utility, Aha Macav Power Service. The developments come as the viability of the Australian solar tower remains unclear. The project is planned for 24,000 acres of sun-drenched land EnviroMission owns on the edge of the Outback on the New South Wales-Victoria border. However, EnviroMission lost out on a $A75 million ($US57 million) Australian federal government grant to Solar Systems, a competing Melbourne solar power company. Solar Systems intends to build a 154-megawatt solar power station in the same area. (See "Tower of Power," the Business 2.0 magazine story I wrote on the EnviroMission for details on the Aussie solar tower.)

In other solar power station news this week, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission approved construction of an 8-megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant. The plant will be built by SunEdison, which will sell the electricity to utility Xcel Energy (XEL).

Posted in solar energy | 6 Comments »

Green Companies, Brown Buildings

February 8, 2007 by Todd Woody

Sf_transamerica_buildingnorth_beach_1
photo originally uploaded by p3p510

Pop quiz: What’s one of the biggest sources of global warming in the United States? Just look around. Chances are you’re reading this from inside a hermetically sealed, continuously heated and air-conditioned, well-lit commercial office building. Such structures, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, are responsible for nearly 20 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. So this week the EPA singled out for praise those energy efficient buildings that qualify for its Energy Star rating – also found on washing machines, dishwashers and other household appliances. Energy Star buildings in 2006 saved $600 million in power costs and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 11 billion pounds – the equivalent of taking 900,000 cars off the road, the agency said. Such buildings use, on average, 35 percent less energy than conventional commercial offices.

That piqued Green Wombat’s curiosity. What about the headquarters of the 10 big corporations and four environmental groups that have formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership to press for immediate mandatory greenhouse gas emissions caps and the establishment of a national carbon trading market? Absent from the EPA green building list are the headquarters of US-CAP members Alcoa (AA), BP (BP), Caterpillar (CAT), DuPont (DD), General Electric (GE), Lehman Brothers (LEH), Duke Energy (DUK), FPL (FPL), and PNM Resources (PNM), as well as the HQs for Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and World Resources Institute. (Click here to download Energy Star building list.)

The only US-CAP member to score an Energy Star rating was California utility PG&E (PCG) for its San Francisco building, which the EPA says uses half the energy of your standard-issue tower. (BP, however, announced in January that an expansion and retrofit of its U.S. headquarters in Maryland will adhere to green building practices, deploying energy efficient heating and lighting systems.) San Francisco, in fact, is chockablock with green skyscrapers, though Green Wombat’s home at One California Street didn’t make the list. Nor did the New York City headquarters of the wombat’s corporate parent, Time Warner (TWX). It should be noted that Salesforce.com (CRM), which Green Wombat took to task recently for its less-than-green marketing practices, is housed in a renovated historic San Francisco building that won an Energy Star rating.

One caveat: It is possible the Climate Action Partnership companies and green groups – or their landlords – simply did not submit an application for the Energy Star rating. Still, more than 3,200 did apply and make the grade. California has the most Energy Star buildings – 779 – with Texas in second place with 367 and North Carolina taking third with 306.

Posted in green buildings | 6 Comments »

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