Apple secretly builds out massive clean power facilities

While Google has over the years invested over a billion dollars in renewable energy projects and is a very public force-for-good in this sector, Apple has so far not made any visible moves to cleanly source the energy needs of its data centers. This is now changing. Over the last several years, Apple has built up two massive solar farms in North Caroline next to their newly build data center. Build by SunPower, these 20 MW solar farms plus their new 10 MW Bloom Energy fuel cell farm produce more energy than they consume in total.

The extent of the investment is staggering and it begins an era where large internet companies are actively playing in the energy market and changing the landscape of it in the process. Amazon is even building its own substations now and has engineers re-write old code to increase energy efficiency. At this scale, it makes sense. Very interesting moves by the big players...

How green is the internet?

At a recent Google-hosted conference, the research community discussed the question of how green the internet really is. The video shows several 5 minute rapid talks on a variety of angles to this topic.



Also, Northwestern University presented a research framework called CLEER to provide a baseline to compare cloud to non-cloud offerings. Something we could consider in the future as a case study approach.

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.

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:  

Cloud Computing and Sustainability: Beyond energy and into ethics

BSR recently wrote an article on the sustainability impacts of cloud computing beyond the usual topic of energy/carbon reduction that instead delves into energy policy, human rights, and data privacy.

It is interesting to note that in the context of cloud computing, human rights doesn't necessarily equate to labor practices, but rather data privacy and protection of data by cloud service providers. This, of course, is an area that Workday takes very seriously.

They end with this note, which challenges cloud providers to broaden the scope of what is typically considered corporate responsibility:

"As cloud computing takes hold and changes the profile of business, so too will it change notions of business ethics and corporate responsibility. There was once a time when business would argue that suppliers should take sole responsibility for following labor and environmental laws, yet today we see armies of auditors and labor relations specialists going above and beyond what is legally required. A similar transition will arise with cloud computing, and activities deemed outside the scope of corporate responsibility today -- challenging unreasonable law enforcement demands and meddling in energy policy -- will be mainstream tomorrow. Now is the time for today’s most innovative companies to define what that looks like in practice."

The green button

The White House effort to make energy usage data more transparent to end users has yielded first results. Along with other major California utility companies Pacific Gas and Electric has announced their support for the "Green Button". The initiative drives utility companies to offer energy usage data for homeowners in a standard format to download from their website at any time. Based on this format, other vendors such as Tendril or oPower can provide applications to monitor your energy usage realtime and take action directly from mobile devices at any time. This can lead to significant energy savings in a short amount of time.

If you have a smart meter installed at your home, try it out and see what unleashed data in standard formats can do. This is a great initiave by Aneesh Chopra, The United States CTO.

Renewable energy - the path of disruptive technology

All disruptive technologies have something in common. They upset the status quo and by far outpace any growth projection made based on old structural thinking.

A few examples: In 1878 Western Union declared that the telephone has no commercial use and is technologically flawed. In 1977 the CEO of DEC declared that there is no viable reason why individuals should have a computer in their home. In 1980 McKinsey projected for ATT that by the year 2000 we would have 900,000 cell phones in the US. In fact, there were 109 million of them. Now think about Apple and the iPod, iPhone and iPad. All examples of technologies that changed how entire industry sectors are viewed today.

The reason the assessment and projections of early stage technology are so wildly off is that they are done from the view point of the "currently feasible". This old thinking invariably leads to a very conservative and held-back assessment of what could be possible.

Now think about Renewable Energy. In 1977, an expert committee tasked by the German government to assess the potential of Renewables declared that more than 5% of the overall energy consumption is definitely not possible. Not now, not ever. Even in 2005, the conservative German party CDU declared that a target of 20% renewable energy production is not at all plausible. Not now, not ever. Well, in 2011, Germany reached 21% of Renewables in the total energy mix. Just like that. More over, new targets have been set for renewable electricity of 35% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Realistic scenarios for 100% Renewable Energy are now being discussed by many serious and conservative institutions (see Prof. Jacobson from Stanford, McKinsey & European Climate Foundation EFC,  Greenpeace, etc.). The best part of it: they are all economically viable and in fact cheaper than staying on the current course!

So, it seems that Renewables have the potential to truly surprise us and outpace the most optimistic scenarios issues even only a few years ago.

In 2010, the global total install base of Renewables is growing nicely (by region/technology) to a total of 1,313 GW (from 1,230 GW in 2009).



But there is a large difference between supplementing a percentage of energy with Renewables or replacing fossil and nuclear energy entirely. Old structures of harvesting dwindling energy sources, transporting and processing them and finally re-distributing them to end users in all countries will be rendered mostly useless by the very nature of Renewables. Renewables are free ("the sun ain't gonna charge us"), they are widely available in all countries (rather than rare and difficult to get at in a few countries) and are comparatively immediate in their consumability. This all poses a strong threat to the existing status quo of the energy industry and political establishment. This is quite different from most of the above mentioned disruptive technology shifts and it will be of highest importance to guard what is technologically possible and economically beneficial from the interest of a small group of incumbents. This will be the fight to watch over the next 10-20 years.

Carbon footprint of Spam

It is always amazing to me how seemingly small things create big problems once taken to web-scale. One example is spam email. McAfee conducted a global study on how much energy is spent creating, storing, viewing and filtering the annoying spam email. First of all, the numbers are staggering: Various sources estimate that 90% of all incoming email is undesired (spam). A study lists the volume of spam email in August 2010 as 200 billion per day. Yes, that is per day. Emails that need to be sent, stored, filtered, viewed and purged. That's crazy!

Per year, according to McAfee this adds up to an energy consumption of 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of fuel. What a useless waste of energy!

Another interesting aspect is that most of the energy is consumed by end users trying to get rid of the junk mail. McAfee argues that a good spam filter can minimize this energy use and hence be a meaningful green contribution. I think this is an interesting example of using a green case study to drive additional value to the product sold. This could also be very relevant in a SaaS applications setting.

Cloud Computing is Greener

A recent study from Microsoft (with Accenture and WSP), "Cloud Computing and Sustainability" showed that companies can reduce the energy use and carbon footprint of computing by up to 90 percent by outsourcing applications.

Check out this HBR article Cloud Computing is Greener for more information.

New Dublin office measures electricity consumption in real time

As part of the new office build out, our local Dublin green team has installed electricity smart meters. The system, made by Eniscope, measures consumption in real time, collects the data from one or more meters and offers it up in powerful analytics. They also offer a service to review your consumption patterns and recommend improvements in energy efficiency. This, plus the overall consumption awareness, will lead to lower energy usage and lower cost.

We are planning to monitor this in our Dublin facilities and consider broader roll out to more facilities.

Innovate to Zero

As any green blog these days, we have to provide commentary on Bill Gates' recent talk at TED 2010.

The basic premise of the talk is that we won't stop our climate problem unless we can bring down the CO2 emission from 26 billions tons today to basically zero. Yes, zero. The factors in this are :

CO2 =

P (eople) times
S (services consumes per person) times
E (energy per service) times
C (O2 emiited per service)

One of these needs to trends towards zero for all to go down. First-grade math. People won't go down, but up. Services (aka quality of life really) should go up for all those people. Energy per services is already going down but not enough. So really, he claims, emissions per service is the one that needs to be made zero. Enter innovation. Only radical, miraculous innovation can do the trick.

Wow, sounds like we're in a bind here. Without a miracle, we're toast. BUt fear not, Bill has some potential miracles up his sleaves. He is heaviliy investing into a new form of nuclear energy called "TerraPower". Bit of a euphemism, but if ot were to work, it wuuld actually take todays radioactive trash and burn that almost cleanly at minimum risk. Sounds like a miracle? To me it does. But then again, Bill has deep pockets and a lot of pull, so we'll see in the next 20 years. He at leats points out that all other innovations and forms of energy will be critical to get us closer to zero as an energy mix and buy us time for the miracle to occur.

Take a look and judge for yourself. My overall sense was it sounded more like a VC pitch for a new form of nuclear energy than an all comprising approach to solving our climate crisis. But at least one more powerful person is now strongly in the camp of the climate savers...

PwC offers carbon footprint calculator on Facebook

Interesting mix of players: Price Waterhouse Coopers offers new carbon calculator as an app on Facebook. It has a cute Flex interface and I immediately qualified as a "Mongofoot" entering our families consumption. I think the app is somewhat oversimplified, but maybe it starts to virally spread some awareness.

Glows in the dark

Ever wondered if high voltage power lines actually have some sort of energy field around them? Well, an artist named Richard Box wanted to know more and tried it out. He installed 1301 fluorescent bulbs underneath power lines without connecting them to any energy source directly and “voila” — instant ambient energy.



The UK Guardian explains:

"A fluorescent tube glows when an electrical voltage is set up across it. The electric field set up inside the tube excites atoms of mercury gas, making them emit ultraviolet light. This invisible light strikes the phosphor coating on the glass tube, making it glow. Because powerlines are typically 400,000volts, and Earth is at an electrical potential of zero volts, pylons create electric fields between the cables they carry and the ground."

Pretty scary stuff. But even scarier is that guy's job:



Electricity sure is fun...

Workday Dublin saves CO2...

By switching to Airtricity, Workday Dublin saved 8.192kgs of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere in the month of March! And it is 10% cheaper than regular energy - way to go!!!

Leaving on PCs over night

While we do have any desktops to begin with and folks either turn off or take home their laptops, this posting still shows how wasteful energy is consumed in general.

Even more interesting than the posting itself are the comments on it below. It is still hard to grasp how many people do not understand the impact of our unsustainable life styles...

Cap and Trade - how does it work?

The new administration has outlined its plan to address the energy challenges we face. Part of it is a Cap and Trade agreement, which will reduce CO2 emissions by a whopping 80% by the year 2050. Sounds awesome to me. But how does it Cap-and-Trade system actually work? What does it mean? EDF provided a good introduction, check it out...

Get smart!

One of the much needed effort in green technology is to unify the US power grid as well as to make it smart. In recent post you have seen what the underlying issues of the grid are, but now with stimulus money flowing in, here is another view by InfoWorld on why the smart grid matters.

Wattson and Holmes

Ok, I am an eco-geek. I like things that help me understand the impact of our daily behavior, to visualize "the footprint". So I couldn't resist when I came across the slick looking Wattson.

The device has sensors that are attached directly to your main incoming electricity line and that send the usage data wireless to the Wattson device. It shows the to the second energy consumption of your entire home, indicates high or low usage by turning blue or red.



Also, it collects all that data for transfer the "Holmes", the program to track and monitor your energy data.



With a little help from my electrician I got it wired up right this Saturday and can now start teaching the kids why it matters to turn the lights off (see...Wattson is all red and angry because you left the light on!!!).

Google.org to help measure your energy consumption

Google has announced to develop a PowerMeter which tracks your energy consumption and helps you understand which appliances cause what drain. Very cool.

Why the smart grid matters so much

If we want to increase the percentage of renewable energy in the US power mix in any meaningful way, we first need to dramatically overhaul the US power grid and turn it into a "smart grid". I found this fantastic article that outlines the problematic and challenge at hand in very easy words.

A must read for anyone who wants to understand the path to a cleaner energy future.