Cool Bits

Seoul is welcoming 200 delegates from 24 countries to the Connected Urban Develoment conference hosted by Cisco this week. Companies like Cisco, Arup, Gail international, cities like Toronto, Lisbon, Amsterdam are all here showing off how they will be winners in the low carbon economy.

90% of Seoul’s emissions come from buildings and transportation sectors, says Sangbum Kim, Assistant Mayor of Seoul. Their aim is to reduce GHG emissions by 25% by 2010 against 1990 levels. They are also aiming for 15% energy efficiency by 2010 and 10% renewables by 2030. Citizens of Seoul are concerned about transport for both health and environmental reasons, so bike paths and extensions of the public transport systems are planned. In transportation alone, Seoul officials expect to have 35% reduction in GHG emissions by 2020, faster than expected.

The main thing you notice when walking around Seoul is that you can’t cross the street - you have to go underground (long steps!) and come up on the other side on main intersections (that, and the fact that your hotel room comes with a mobile phone). It is very car friendly. Will this change much due to the new policies? It will likely take a while, though it looks like they are installing 111 more crosswalks by 2011. Other policies might help a bit, ie. citizens are also given a reduction in auto taxes if they choose not to drive 1 day per week.

What’s the theory behind all this? Carlo Ratti at MIT is the brains behind SENSable cities lab at MIT. We’ve come along way since 1993 when the first browser was launched, he reminds us. We are connected (virtual) and getting more urban (physical) than ever - broadband did not cause cities to die as Gilder predicted in 1995. Are we on the way to an ‘internet of things’ where the virtual and physical are more fully merged? MIT says yes, and demonstrates this by using mobile phone data to track how citizens are reacting to events like the world cup. But what we need is ‘real time feedback’ so citizens can see movements through the city and make decisions accordingly. Can a city behave like a ‘real time’ control system? Sounds like Foucault with a digital interface. But MIT calls it citizens who are ‘actuating’.

MIT are piloting real-time well designed bus stops that give you exact times for bus arrivals (not rocket science but they make it look beautiful). In Copenhagen in December (for COP 15), they will be showing bicycle traffic and how technology can increase bicycle traffic even more. Sensors on bikes show how much you’re exposed to pollution, and show your position through facebook so you can calculate your personal footprint and track your ‘green miles’ throughout the year. Carlo claims Obama and others will be riding the bicycles during the summit! Hope they wear their helmuts.

San Francisco Environment Department Director Jared Blumenfeld launched the urban ecomap today. The main aim is to allow citizens to reduce transport, energy and waste by zip code, comparing between zip codes and between cities (it is only in SF and Amsterdam at the moment). It allows you to ’shame people’ into not using SUVs. And imagine if you could compare SF with New Delhi? We’d have a totally different view of our actions.

This is the first tool that allows you to see aggregate action on climate change in the city. Getting data is crucial to making this work, and relies on partnerships. This helped SF learn that they should focus on solar thermal rather than photovoltaics, because gas use for heating hot water was not being reduced.

Ludger Hovestadt, E-Planet Initiative, is an architect and computer scientist is to interface technologies to an everyday context. He hates the ‘threat’ message and believes the power of computing, science will lead to abundance in energy production.

But making the vision a reality has its hurdles. In a breakout session on modeling and services we get into the detail of the difficulties of gathering bottom up data. I don’t know if this type of activity will take more or less time than we think - ie 3 years or 12? In Switzerland, they already have trasnport completely connected so that people can track their routes easily. In the UK, every home will have a smart meter by 2020. So it might be less about the data and more about the interfaces with the data that allow easier decision-making.

Earth science modeler from Nasa, Steve Hipskind, has a secret: He has lots of data that is a little-known but is a publicly available resource. Satellites, high altitude unmanned aircraft plus sensors on the ground coverge to provide very high resolution data. The modeling and ecological forecasting (TOPS) work they are doing is a mashup of all this data with energy, weather and climate models using the 3rd-fastest super computer in the world to give you real time maps of environmental impacts. Info on drought impacts, agricultural productivity etc can be regionalised or localised. What you see is that - surprise surprise - water is the next big thing. Nasa can show projections of soil moisture for the California vineyards (by plot, not only by vineyard!) - god forbid our wine industry is ruined by climate change! These tools will be crucial for adaptation. I hope we can apply it to mitigation soon enough.

One such application may be Cisco’s planetary skin. This launched in March officially, but will take a number of years to get to the point where it is most useful. It addresses the third in the following key needs for tackling climate change:: (1) pricing carbon (2) unlocking financing for mitigation and adaptation and (3) developing the institutions around monitoring reporting and verification (MRV) infrastructures that allow 1 and 2 to be operationalised. Planetary skin is about allowing decisions to be made based on all the data Nasa collects. What will this look like in practice? In a rural area, this might be ecosystem modeling of carbon so priorities in financing can be more easily agreed. Nasa also got US stimulus funding to blanket California with sensors and create a ‘water skin’ to assess threats of drought and options for climate change mitigation.

Mayor of Toronto David Miller is passionate about connectivity and smart grid. He shows what look like the same photo in summer and winter but which is in fact two photos, one of Moscow and one of Toronto, to highlight his point that similar solutions may be posssible if we can communicate across citiies in the right way. He’s also a fan of entrepreneurship and creativity, which is what they’ll have to do if they hope to meet their ambitious emissions and waste targets.

This afternoon we’ll visit Seoul’s transportation unit, TOPIS, to see transport data in action…

ACEEE put out another great report this week in the general area of ICT and climate change, but this time focusing specifically on semiconductors:

Titled Semiconductor Technologies: The Potential to Revolutionize U.S. Energy Productivity, the new ACEEE report concludes that semiconductors already are the leading factor behind energy efficiency gains.   The report states: “Compared to the technologies available in 1976, we estimate that the entire family of semiconductor-enabled technologies generated a net savings of about 775 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity in the year 2006 alone … [H]ad we expanded the size and scope of the U.S. economy based on 1976 technologies, it appears that the U.S. would be using about 20 percent more electricity than actually consumed in 2006.  Stated differently, had we continued to rely on 1976 technologies to support the U.S. economy today, we might have had to build another 184 large electric power plants to satisfy the demand for goods and services.”

I’ve seen a number of charts that show this trend, with a line running vaguely up at less than 45 degrees across the bottom of the chart representing current energy consumption, and a line skyrocketing up at more than 45 degrees depicting the hypothetical growth of the economy had we NOT been more efficient.

The problem with this is that even though we’re clearly getting more efficient and each dollar/£/EUR spent is yeilding more economic benefit than ever before, we are still seeing GHG emissions rise. And rise uncontrollably, it would appear given the fact that we’ve not managed to curb the growth rate yet despite all manner of discussion, target setting and scary science.

We need to couple the possibility for even greater efficiency and productivity with an overall global framework that encourages absolute emissions reductions. Efficiency will be one of our cheapest “levers” for achieving this goal.

Urs Holzle has updated google’s previous post on the impact of their search today under the title “Energy and the Internet“, comparing it to other daily consumables and activities. I would love to see us be able to compare services with services (ie: search vs. going to the library), but comparing products with services is a bit like comparing apples and oranges (or newspapers and orange juice?)

See my previous comments on this topic.

The B4E summit last week featured a great line up of business leaders, NGOs and UN representatives to highlight the opportunities for business to tackle climate change. Individuals signed up to a manifesto and put their seal of approval on a global deal. It felt like most businesses are believers in the challenge and the possibility for opportunity, but there was some fatigue around the issue given that many companies are bogged down in the immediate economic problems.

The panel I chaired on Information and Communications Technologies had a great set of speakers and a good discussion:

Serge Adam, Vice President Southern EMEA, South & Central America, Tandberg
Bruno Berthon, Global Sustainability Lead, Accenture
Marc Fossier, Executive Vice President, Chief Corporate Social Responsibility Officer, Orange
Zoe McMahon, Environmental Strategy Manager, EMEA, Hewlett-Packard
Dennis Pamlin, Global Policy Advisor, WWF
Naofumi Sakamoto, Senior Researcher, Corporate Planning and Business Development, Hitachi Ltd
Bernard Spitz, Chairman, BS Conseil
Chris Tuppen, Chief Sustainability Officer, BT Group

In the final panel session which was jointly run from Washington, DC and Paris, Tanberg had the chance to show off their technologies with the most heartening speech of the 2 days from Senator John Kerry, highlighting his commitment to push the US administration to go even further than the current cuts proposed in the Waxman-Markey bill. I loved to hear Paul Sagan, President and CEO, Akamai Technologies, quoting the potential solutions from the SMART 2020 report, and championing the ‘SMART’ framework (Standards, Monitoring, Accountability, Rethink, Transform).

Aron Cramer, CEO of B4E had the last word on the panel on the second day by saying “scale it” - meaning the solutions of course.

———– Manifesto from the summit…

The Green Imperative
from the B4E Summit, Paris, 22-23 April 2009

The global economic downturn has exposed the extent to which markets and societies are increasingly interconnected and interdependent. We, the participants of the B4E Summit 2009, recognize that the economic, environmental and social challenges and risks we face demand a new level of leadership and cooperation. We are confident that by exercising such leadership, restoring trust and by working together we have the opportunity to put our global economy, our markets and lifestyles, our livelihoods and security, and, ultimately, our planet on a sustainable path. We emphasize the following:

• Agreement on a new global climate regime is urgent, offering all countries the opportunity to unlock the potential for sustainable, green innovation and job creation that exist as we head towards the low-carbon society. We call on Governments to complete a comprehensive and successful COP-15.
• We call on Governments to promote global integration, based on fundamental principles of non- discrimination in trade and investment, so that we can more efficiently disseminate clean
technologies globally.
• We call on Governments to provide appropriate regulatory and incentive structures to encourage more sustainable consumption and production, and send the right market signals for business to act.
• Now is the time to remove uncertainties, enable green investments to flow, and build scalable public- private partnerships that can leapfrog in terms of technological innovation.
• Capturing the global crisis requires recovery plans that provide for drastically expanded investment in clean technologies and sustainable infrastructure systems, building the Green Economy with transformative improvements that avoid lock-in in high carbon and resource inefficient systems.
• For business, we need increased transparency, a stronger ethical orientation and an expanded risk paradigm that includes not only traditional business and financial factors, but also relevant extra-financial issues in the environmental, social and governance realms.
• We need new due diligence requirements that strike a fair balance between the needs of shareholders and other stakeholders, including future generations.
• We need to shift from a product to a services perspective, applying life cycle approaches that support cradle-to-cradle strategies in business along all value chains and using ecosystem services sustainably.
• We need to shift from the tyranny of “short-termism” to a longer-term orientation of value creation, as embodied in the UN Global Compact.
• We need broad-based use of sustainable procurement and criteria that are both green and decent in the management of our supply chains.
• We need reporting and accountability systems which combine internationally recognized financial and sustainability standards to mainstream forward-looking approaches.
• We recognize the importance of promoting small business development and social entrepreneurship in the making of truly sustainable enterprises.
• We underscore the importance of revamping business education and training in order to properly nurture and develop the leaders and managers of tomorrow.

We offer our energy and commitment to work with Government and society, to jointly take leadership, ownership and accountability for our contribution as responsible citizens, consumers and leaders. This implies our engagement from local to global level, including cooperation with UNEP and others in the UN facilitated process on sustainable consumption and production leading to a 2012 World Summit.

We, the participants of the B4E Summit 2009, underline the need for business to take its part - along with Government, the research community and other societal partners - in creating a more sustainable world and drive the way towards the sustainable, green and responsible enterprise. We call on all stakeholders to work together in order to achieve these aims.

We need a ’smart’ grid if we hope to get the kind of solutions in electric vehicles that we’ve seen hyped over the last month or so.

Maybe it’s just where I’m living (London) but the explosion of Electric Vehicle news might be a flash in the pan or might be a harbinger for things to come.

The first chance people may have to participate en masse in the energy system may not be as producers but as storers of energy. That’s right, the holy grail of energy production - STORAGE. In the form of lots of batteries in electrified vehicles.

Let’s work backwards over the past month or so:

* April 16: Labour’s £5,000 sweetener to launch electric car revolution
* April 9: Boris Johnson announces that London will be green EV capital of the world: Mayor unveils plan to make London into ‘electric car capitol of Europe‘
* April 8: Gordon Brown lays out vision of green revolution with charging stations for EVs as a key component: Brown’s ‘electric dream’ for Britain
* April 3: Ireland goes electric with Renault-Nissan Alliance
* April 1: China vies to be World’s electric vehicle leader
* March 26: Rocky Mountain Institute launches Project Get Ready aiming to make the first 1 million EV rollout go smoothly

What is behind all this? In the Boris and Brown cases, political jockeying, certainly.

But there is also a classic innovation cluster effect happening now.

1 - The enabling technologies ’smart grid’ interest, from Accenture to Zigbee, on new collaborations and services.

2 - EVs are the storage for intermittent sources of energy (renewables like wind and solar) that wouldn’t be possible without the smart grid

3 - Financing: smart grid is included in the US stimulus package, and globally focused ‘green’ stimulus is increasingly the focus.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will utilities get in the game and deliver EVs themselves (as in Ireland), in partnership with OEMs? Or will EV service companies sit in the middle managing the EV’s interaction with the distribution utility (ie: Better Place which owns the battery and service plan for mileage like your mobile phone, which aims to deploy EVs at an ambitious rate, starting in Israel, Denmark, Hawaii to name a few.)

Let’s remind ourselves why this hype has a long way to go before EVs are standard. There are over 600 million cars on the road in the world today, and the IMF as reported in the Economist suggests this number will grow to 2.9 billion in 2050. Boris Johnson is aiming for 100,000 cars in London in 6 years (2015). Even if 10 other mayors aim for the same, for a total of 1 million cars by 2015, at this rate we’d be waiting 600 years to replace today’s demand (not to mention the demand for vehicles in 2609!)

In any case, we really can’t afford 2.9 billion cars using today’s technology. Already, emissions from road transport are growing fastest among end user sectors and by some estimates are 4.66 Gt Co2e of emissions today (WRI). (We must stabilise emissions at 2 tonnes per person in 2050, which is about 20 Gt globally.)

The prize (for mass solutions to climate change) is still up for grabs… and the smart grid is clearly key to this opportunity.

The last paragraph of the leaked G20 draft communique mentions the challenge of climate change. Interesting given that the amount of money from the stimulus in the US that is being given to the Department of Energy made news in the Economist, as “Energiser Money.”

It is widely recognised (see HSBC report) that the Economic stimulus packages globally are giving vastly different emphasis to ‘green’ issues. But most countries are recognising the link between sustainability and economic recovery.

This is particularly apparent in the US energy budget, which is 18% higher than 2008, and that $7.8 bn budget is more than doubled by the $8 bn earmarked in the stimulus package. But in spite of the extra cash, the aim to cut emissions by 80% by 2050 is unprecedented, and Steven Chu and others in charge of delivering a massive shift in energy production have their work cut out for them.

Where does smart grid fit into all this? In the US, up to $30 billion will go into energy efficiency, including smart grids, and advanced battery technology. An Apollo Jobs Report states that for an investment of $2 billion over 10 years in smart grid, GDP gain would be $200 billion and create 441,473 jobs. In other words, every $1 bn of investment creates 200,000+ jobs, which far outpaces investment in road construction or green buildings, according to the report. Not to say we shouldn’t invest in those as well!

Smart grid is as much about energy efficiency as it is about new generation (see Wired article), which makes it crucial for short term emissions reductions and long term targets. I would advocate smart grid for those reasons, rather than putting all my eggs in the ‘new technologies’ basket, as entrepreneurs like Vinod Khosla are doing when they call for new technologies, rather than policies to limit energy consumption.

The G20 has to demonstrate it is ’sorting out’ the economy, but it can’t be done at the expense of green investment.

Julius Genachowski is Obama’s new chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (Read NPR story). Public Knowledge says that Genachowski understands that his job isn’t just about TV and cell phones because he drafted Obama’s innovation plan. It would seem from the inauguration and his own campaign that Obama understands that connectivity underpins the next wave of software and hardware infrastructure that will benefit the world beyond geeky techies, from opening up the process of policy to improving education to a smart grid. Time will tell…

Read more about Obama’s technology and innovation plan.

… will they have anything to say? It is unlikely that we’ll ever think of our appliances as talkative, but basic sensors and communications on the energy system is likely to allow balancing of load from a host of distributed generation and storage units, such as solar panels and plug in electric vehicles.

This was the topic of yesterday’s TCG webinar on ‘Grid 2.0′. The speakers were:

• Laura Schewel from the Rocky Mountain Institute, with an overview of their recent ‘Smart Garage’ charrette, where architects, engineers and designers discussed the barriers to achieving their 2025 vision for urban infrastructure.
• Steven Hauser, VP Strategy at Gridpoint and formerly of Gridwise discussed the smart grid definition and vision, and the Gridpoint platform, which allows you to manage and control energy consumption through software dashboards.
• Sven Thesen, Strategic Operations, Better Place, discussed their innovative approach and progress toward widespread vehicle electrification, and where and when to get a Better Place vehicle

What’s clear is that electric motors in vehicles are possible today - either battery operated or plug-in - and that they are more efficient than the internal combustion engine. New infrastructure needs to be developed that will integrate the demand from buildings with those from newly-electrified transport. There is also investment in smart grid and electric vehicles in the US which will mean they plan to race ahead along with European, Chinese and Indian players.

Laura gave us a rundown of what she thinks consumers and businesses can do to accelerate electrification of vehicles, and pointed to ways to get involved in the US - particularly through Project Get Ready.

• Buy a plug-in in 2010/2011 (or get a conversion today).
• Create employee discounts/education for buying plug-ins.
• Buy plug-ins for your corporate fleet.
• Install a charge-station at your office, network in with local pilot/demo programs.
• Train staff to service the Smart Garage world (cars, IT and grid)
• Developers/Builders: make 240v conduit to parking spaces a requirement for all new buildings. Size electrical system appropriately. Network with rooftop Solar.
• Participate in your local Project Get Ready team.
• Figure out a way to finance batteries so that initial costs are not so high.
• Figure out a way to legally allow citizens to make down-payments on plug-ins in advance.
• Provide software/hardware solutions to multi-point charging, Smart Charging, and billing (but look out for Gridpoint and Better Place)

Is Apple the Kindle killer? This is the question at the heart of the Economist article “An iTunes Moment” which suggests that more people have downloaded ebook apps on their iphones than have bought the new Kindle that came out in February.

Leaving aside the assertion that no one reads anymore (clearly they must), the question is important because every device that is made has an environmental footprint in its manufacture, use and disposal (or reuse) and our predictions of the footprint of ICT devices was not based on a proliferation of new gadgets (which we couldn’t predict), but on the business as usual growth of existing kit - mobile phones, laptops, networks etc.

If we took photos, talked on the phone, texted, emailed, listened to music and read books all on different devices, the footprint of ICT would grow faster than anyone in the industry would like. But fostering innovation in susbtitutes for high carbon activities is also an imperative; ah, the convergence conundrum.

Some convergence will take place under business as usual, but I would like to see convergence as a first priority, and allow consumers more choice in the features they want on their multi-use devices.

(…But I am dying to try the Kindle!)

Are you sick of hearing about it yet? Well, I just thought I’d log my thoughts briefly today and add to them in the future.

In total, 40% of the economic stimulus package or more will be going to tax cuts. Not exactly an investment in our future, but I’m sure people will appreciate that exta $8 per week to get a few more coffees or packets of crisps (or should I say chips!)

However, there is about $30 billion that could potentially go toward energy efficiency, smart grid and advanced battery technology. Tax incentives provide other possible $20 billion for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Where this money goes is likely to be controversial in implementation phase, however, as pointed out in this Economist article.

While £50 billion is a lot, it’s nothing compared to the £12 bn that China already invested in renewables back in 2007, or what I heard on NPR from Representative Peter DeFazio is a $600 bn Chinese investment in transportation infrastructure in the next 3 years.

But individual measure add up. Take for example, buildings. “Taking everything together, the bill provides $15 billion that could be applied to building retrofits – creating a tremendous opportunity for fresh approaches.  The next challenge, therefore, is implementation,” says Reid Detchon from the Energy Future Coalition. Here is his rundown of the investments related to building retrofit:

$3.1 billion for State Energy Programs for building retrofits
$3.2 billion for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program,
$5 billion for low-income weatherization assistance
$1.32 billion to invest in energy efficiency projects and to repair and modernize Department of Defense facilities;
$100 million for energy conservation and alternative energy projects for the Navy and Marines;
$120 million for the Defense-wide Energy Conservation Investment Program;
$400 million to invest in energy efficiency projects and to improve, repair and modernize military medical facilities;
$100 million for discretionary grants to public transit agencies for capital investments that will assist in reducing the energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions of their public transit agencies;
$4 billion to assist public housing authorities in rehabilitating and retrofitting public housing units, including increasing the energy efficiency of units and making critical safety repairs;
$510 million to rehabilitate and improve energy efficiency in housing units maintained by Native American housing programs; and
$250 million to support a program to upgrade HUD-sponsored low-income housing to increase energy efficiency, including new insulation, windows, and furnaces.