Workday offsets 100% electricity consumption for 2012

As in prior years, Workday is proud to announce that we have fulfilled our commitment for 2012 to offset 100% of the electricity use in our office buildings and data centers across the world. We have completed a data collection process and calculated an estimated electricity consumption of 14,100,000 kWhs for the calendar year. This is more than double the amount we consumed for 2011 and nicely reflects the fantastic growth we have as a company. We have purchased Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) from our partner Renewable Choice Energy which is equivalent in impact to taking 1,400 cars of the road for the year or planting about 64,000 mature trees. We also have committed to buying RECs for 2013 representing our increased electricity usage.

A heartfelt “Thank You” goes from the Green Team to everyone in Executive Management, Infrastructure, Facilities, IT and Finance who helped in the data collection and REC purchase process. 

Sustainability is truly valued at Workday!

The impact of airtravel

To date, only about 5% of the world's population has ever flown. However, the IPCC estimates that 3.5% of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions stem from aviation. Taking a long distance flight, say from Munich to San Francisco, is about the worst climate offense one can commit in a day. Air planes are per person not much more efficient than cars. If you consider the distance being about 5870 miles one way, a round trip can be equivalent to your annual car mileage!

But given that our lives at times require air travel, it is important to mitigate its impact. There are many sites selling carbon offsets, but they all vary in precision of climate maths, efficiency of administration and quality of investment projects. It is very important that the money gathered by selling offsets is invested in meaningful, timely and verifiable projects. The currently best option to offset flight emissions is atmosfair. Their focus on the airline industry makes them a good partner for environmentally acceptable air travel.

Some of the things that make atmosfair stand out are:

• Over 90% of all investments go into CDM Gold Standard project (the highest available standard for climate protection projects).
• High efficiency of administration with 92% of all funds going into projects.
• Detailed emission calculation specific to air travel, including non-CO2 impacts.
• Research on efficiency of airlines, published in a detailed airline index.
• Engaging with corporation to optimize and offset business travel.

atmosfair is "more costly" than what carbon calculators of other sites quote to fully offset a flight. However, this is due to more accurate calculations and higher quality projects. As they state on their site, 'because contributions to atmosfair are voluntary, [...] passengers should be fully informed about the ecological effects of flying as they are currently understood by the scientific community.' It becomes our choice then.

Next time we fly, we can consider our personal climate budget. Given the climate community's stated goal of limiting the average rise in Earth’s temperature by 2050 to 2°C above the pre-industrial level, we have a global budget of about 750 billion tonnes of CO₂ until the year 2050. Given a world population of 8.2 billion people, this means that each person on Earth has a yearly budget of roughly 2.3 tonnes of CO₂. We can do our own maths on how many flights that allows us to support this important goal. Let's do our part!

Greenpeace pranks Amazon to be green

Greenpeace has begun to look into the clean energy reality of some of the largest IT companies with their "Clean the Cloud" initiative and recently published a clean cloud report. To improve their carbon footprint, they also successfully applied pressure to Facebook with their "No more coal" campaign and authored this amusing video. Facebook has since responded with a new commitment to clean energy and located their most recent data center in Sweden.

In the last week Greenpeace has also pranked Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is running a tremendous amount of hardware in the cloud. Some estimates say it is up to 500,000 servers.  But what are these servers powered by? In order to start the conversation Greenpeace put up a "green AWS" website falsely claiming clean powered services. The background is an interesting comparison: The big players have different levels of transparency, commitment and actual reality of renewable energy.

While Workday is nowhere near the size of the big players in terms of server count, it is good to know that we have a 100% clean power commitment through the purchase of RECs. While Greenpeace cites numerous more directly impactful options, our current use of colocation providers and the comparatively smaller number of servers makes RECs for now the best available option to mitigate emissions.

Tesla S wins Car of the Year award - for true innovation!

Elon Musk and Tesla have done it - they built an all-electric car that wins hands down in all evaluation categories - the Model S. And to prove it, they were awarded the Car of the Year award by Motor Trend. Their chief editor shares his thoughts on why Tesla could become the next Apple and why this is a turning point in history in recent interview.

This car is truly fascinating. Our very own Ken Morris is proud owner of by now 3 electric vehicles, including his brand new Model S:

Now, this is not only beautiful, fast and all-electric powered, it is also smart. A quick look at the insides of this vehicle as taken on a factory tour show this:

The chassis pretty much ends at your knee. Battery packs close to the ground, four wheels, an electric motor - done. No combustion engine, gearbox, cooler. No maintenance intensive pieces, clean, simple.

No wonder the existing cart manufacturers are either fighting this disruptive innovation tooth and nail or are at least blocking it where they can to slow it down. The larger part of their entire value creation is threatened! No more age-old intellectual property required.

Every so often a truly disruptive company comes along. Workday is leading us into the Cloud Computing age of Enterprise Applications, Apple has shown this by offering us a digital lifestyle that has changed our world completely. Tesla might just do that for our eMobility by showing us the future today.

Needless to say, I signed up on the pre-order list and am now counting the days until my Model S is being built. Several other Workday folks are already ahead of me though...

(all photos courtesy of Ken Morris)

Cheap oil and climate future

While the environmental debate has not been a prominent topic in the all dominating US election coverage, the last few weeks have been packed full of truly confusing news items. 

On the one hand, IEA has published their World Energy Outlook 2012 (see also 12 page executive summary) showing that we can achieve energy savings equivalent to nearly a fifth of global demand in 2010 and that Renewables become the world’s second-largest source of power generation by 2015 and close in on coal as the primary source by 2035.

That sounds like environmentally good news to me - at first. Another truly astonishing result is that the US will become the worlds largest oil producer by 2020 and become nearly self-sufficient around 2035. Given peak oil, how is this possible? It is possible by tapping into "unconventional gas and oil". Fun stuff like tar sands and specifically shale oil by use of fracking. While the oil industry celebrates this as a new dawn of the fossil fuel era, we ought to question the environmental impact of the techniques used for extracting unconventional oil and gas as well as the effect of burning it. The IEA report states clearly no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal. This however seems highly doubtful given the current excitement over cheap oil.

To warn us all, the World Bank has released their climate change report "Turn Down The Heat" which outlines the devastating consequences of staying on the current trajectory. 

It is up to us to politically demand a different path for the next generations than what is outlined in the numerous scientific reports of the recent years. To renew our understanding of our climate reality, I encourage you to spend a few minutes watching some relevant information:  

UCLA study: Employees at green companies are significantly more productive

(Yet another) new study correlating "green business" practices with productivity. This one is from UCLA, and it further dispels the myth that environmental strategies hurts economic performance.

Published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, the study found that companies that voluntarily adopt "green" practices have employees that are up to sixteen percent more productive than the average employee.

From the UCLA Newsroom:

“The researchers determined each company's productivity by taking a logarithm of its value added (revenue minus costs), divided by the number of employees, which produced the average value of production per employee. They discovered a difference of one standard deviation, which corresponded to 16 percent higher-than-average labor productivity, in firms that voluntarily adopted environmental standards. “

This is great news for companies that have environmental strategies in place and a call for organizations to adopt formal practices to help boost their bottom line.

Reinventing fire

Watch Amory Lovins give an information-packed talk on how we can go from the current gridlock mess to a bright future of energy independency. In in the meantime savings trillions of dollar and providing lots of entrepreneurial opportunities.



A must see! Then go visit Rocky Mountain Institute's "Reinventing Fire" site to learn more about this can be done in this graphic.