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5 ways to harness info tech to fight climate change

Jonathan Koomey — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:00:16 +0000

Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Stanford University

This essay is the fourth of a series of four appearing this week on GigaOm. It draws from material in Jonathan Koomey’s latest book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which is being released by Analytics Press on February 15, 2012.

Written for entrepreneurs and investors, this book describes how to profit from tackling climate change, one of this century’s greatest challenges. The author acts as your company’s scientific advisor, summarizing the business implications of the climate problem for both new and existing ventures. Koomey helps you effectively allocate scarce time and resources to the most promising opportunities, drawing upon his more than 25 years of experience in analyzing and implementing climate solutions.

5 ways to harness info tech to fight climate change

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) speeds up our ability to collect data, manage complexity, and more rapidly learn and adapt. ICT is driving rapid innovation that continues to accelerate throughout the economy (for examples, see the recently released ebook titled The Race Against the Machine). ICT is an example of what economists call a general-purpose technology, which is one that has transformational effects on the ways companies generate value and reduce costs.

My incomplete list of new capabilities enabled by these technologies (taken mostly from my book Turning Numbers into Knowledge, which expands on most of these points) is as follows:

Near-zero marginal cost of reproduction and distribution, quicker publishing, easier sharing of data, quicker review of technical material, easier ordering and distribution, direct feedback from suppliers to consumers (and vice versa), indirect feedback from consumers to suppliers (through data collection), collaboration among users, access to information 24 hours per day, universal searching, easier and more widespread public access to technical information, dematerializing products and services, improving measurement and verification of processes, improving the speed and accuracy of analysis, and enabling more rapid institutional change.

The last five ideas bear further examination because of their direct relevance to climate-related entrepreneurial innovation.

1). Easier and more widespread public access to technical information

Interactive links between the Internet and relational database management systems help those who possess detailed technical knowledge to make it useful to a wider audience (this information is often buried in impenetrable and obscure reports). Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), for example, has for decades been the preeminent center on energy use in homes, but much of the information LBNL generated never reached the general public until the advent of the World Wide Web. LBNL’s Home Energy Saver (HES) web site was the first Internet-based home energy analysis tool; it embodies the technical expertise of dozens of LBNL scientists and has had more than 4 million users since it was created.

A user of this site has confidence that the tool accurately characterizes energy use in her home because of the expertise and credibility of those who created it. Even better, the HES has an API, so you can incorporate the technical knowledge of those who created it into your own software and avoid having to recreate all that detailed technical work yourself. Think of it as your tax dollars at work.

2). Dematerializing products and services

My flip name for this category is “replacing parts with smarts” but it’s even broader than that. It is usually possible to make products simpler in design using software and controls in the device itself, but we can also save energy and materials by avoiding the need to move physical objects and people from place to place. The three archetypal examples of this effect are telecommuting, replacement of physical compact discs with downloadable music, and video conferencing. It is not always true that moving bits instead of atoms reduces emissions, but it is often true.

3). Improving measurement and verification of processes

Because of the rapid decline in the costs of monitoring technology (driven by improvements in the costs and energy efficiency of computing and communications), our ability to understand the effects of our actions in real time is increasing at a furious pace. This means better control of processes, less waste, and better matching of energy services demanded with those supplied. The most sophisticated data center operators, for example, have sensors that measure temperature, humidity, power flows, and other key data tens or hundreds of times per second, so their control systems won’t miss anything.

4). Improving the speed and accuracy of analysis

Fortunately, the inrush of data from monitoring technologies has been accompanied by improvements in our ability to analyze and understand those data. Without new tools we’d have a hard time keeping up, which is why new data centers and industrial operations are increasingly demanding more powerful tracking software.

These developments are important because the data starting to become available on energy use will be at increasingly fine levels of geographic and temporal disaggregation. With the proliferation of “Smart Meters” that allow real-time metering of electricity use, our ability to understand electricity use in buildings will rapidly improve. In the early days of energy efficiency analysis (in the 1970s), we conducted market assessments using simple averages of costs and savings for a single refrigerator model for the US as a whole (for example). Soon we’ll be able to monitor the response of millions of households to electricity price in real time, and to disaggregate household electricity into its component parts with unparalleled accuracy. That will allow much more precise assessments of efficiency potentials and will give businesses the opportunity to target the biggest electricity users with energy-saving innovations.

5). Enabling more rapid institutional change

When companies first started buying computers on a large scale, economists were puzzled by the apparent lack of effect on productivity (this puzzle eventually became known as “the productivity paradox”).

This delay had historical precedent. With electric motors, for example, the real benefits of that technology didn’t arrive until production processes were modified to take full advantage of the new technology’s benefits, and the same was true for computers. Once companies reorganized themselves to capture those benefits, productivity improvements started on an upward march that continues today.

But it’s not just that ICT requires that companies reorganize themselves to take full advantage of its benefits, it also makes such reorganization easier because it improves communication, coordination, and process controls, and creates the conditions under which complementary cost-reducing innovations can more rapidly be brought to market. It is in this deep sense that ICT is a transformational technology. Institutional innovation is one of the beneficiaries of that transformational power, and it’s one of the areas where entrepreneurs can generate the most rapid and pervasive changes in the emissions intensity of the economy.

Conclusions

Information and communication technology is our ace in the hole. It speeds up data collection, helps us manage complexity, allows us to restructure our institutions more easily, and lets us rapidly learn and adapt to changing circumstances. It’s also a great place to look for emission reduction opportunities because it generally offers rapid speed to market and low startup costs.

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The importance of time for energy

Jonathan Koomey — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:00:11 +0000

This essay is the third of a series of four appearing this week on GigaOm. It draws from material in Jonathan Koomey’s latest book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which is being released by Analytics Press on February 15, 2012.

The importance of time for energy

One of the most important but overlooked issues in promoting low emissions technologies is that unless they are simply better than what they replace, it will be hard to get the broader society to adopt them widely. This means that these products need to be designed to deliver multiple benefits, and often the single most valuable added benefit they can bring is saving people’s time.

Time is money

For a long time I was an avid recycler, drove a super-efficient Honda Civic VX, and always turned the lights out when I left the room. Then I had kids, and my diligence was tested, then abandoned, in the face of the demands of parenthood. I still do the best I can, but there’s no way I can possibly do everything right and also be a good father (and the twins come first).

Fortunately, my decline in environmental virtue had a silver lining: it helped me understand what it will take to create a low-carbon society. Most folks don’t have time in their busy lives to worry about environmental issues, so we need to make it easy for them to make the right choices.

A lot of environmentalists think of pollution as a moral problem, but changing people’s morals is hard. Helping them make their lives better while also reducing pollution? That’s a much easier sell, and that’s the goal for which we need to strive.

I replaced my VX with a Toyota Prius in 2004, and that car exemplifies this lesson. Not only is it efficient, it’s a great car, with Bluetooth, voice recognition, automatic unlock for the doors, adequate acceleration, lots of legroom, and a state-of-the-art navigation system. Soon after I bought it the Prius was named the Motor Trend car of the year—I finally owned a cool car! And the best part was that it was also the most efficient car on the road.

Time is energy

Another truth that follows from basic physics is that speeding up physical processes usually requires more energy. So if you want to push a vehicle through a fluid more rapidly, the power needed goes up as the square of the velocity (as Saul Griffith points out in the Foreword to Cold Cash, Cool Climate). If you want to ship a package overnight, it will use substantially more energy than if you ship by ground. And if you travel by air instead of train, you’ll use much more fuel.

One way out of this bind is to use information technology (IT), which allows us to redefine the task to require less physical energy even though we are accomplishing that ultimate goal more efficiently and quickly. You can use IT to ship information directly (moving bits instead of atoms), in which case transmission is almost instantaneous, or you can use it to better plan your activities, so you reduce your need for physical travel. An example of the latter is the solar powered Big Belly trash compactor for outdoor applications, which not only compacts the waste five times, but also sends a text message when full, so the truck knows when to pick it up. These combined innovations reduce truck travel much more than 80 percent!

Conclusions

Time has value and good solutions embrace that fact; otherwise they won’t become pervasive. It’s hard to value time in our personal lives, but we all know it is limited, in the near term by life’s complexity and ultimately by our finite lifespan. That’s true for businesses, too, whose biggest cost is usually payroll. That means solutions that save time AND reduce pollution will sell like gangbusters.

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7 ways to unleash game-changing greentech innovation

Jonathan Koomey — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:00:29 +0000

This essay is the second of a series of four appearing this week on GigaOm. It draws from material in Jonathan Koomey’s latest book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which is being released by Analytics Press on February 15, 2012.

7 ways to unleash game-changing greentech innovation

The key to unleashing the power of innovation in new ventures is whole systems integrated design, the modern champion of which is Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). Most engineering students are taught to focus on optimizing parts of systems, but rarely encouraged to look at the system as a whole. Unfortunately, the focus on components leads designers to (as Lovins says) “pessimize the system”.

RMI has created a set of 17 principles for doing whole systems integrated design, from which I’ve abstracted some key points below, writing specifically for those trying to start ventures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make a profit at the same time. I’ve also drawn upon the excellent book by Stasinopoulos et al. titled Whole System Design, where you can find detailed examples combined with a nicely organized set of steps for organizing the design process.

1). Create an interdisciplinary team

Your team needs a diversity of skills to truly explore almost any design space. That’s because few people have the breadth and depth of knowledge across all relevant disciplines to assess what’s possible. In addition, the process of brainstorming, if properly fostered, generates new ideas and acceptance by the team of the resulting design path (by virtue of their shared experience of brainstorming).

2). Reward the team for substantially improved designs

The goal is radical improvement, not incremental changes, and the best way to achieve this result is to pay for what you want. This sounds like a commonsense notion, but that’s often not how things are done. For example, engineers designing the heating and cooling systems in commercial buildings are usually paid as a percentage of the capital cost of the system they install, so it’s no wonder they don’t undertake whole system redesigns that would reduce capital costs. So reward the team for game-changing innovation in whatever ways your pocketbook allows.

3). Start with a clean sheet

While learning from past efforts is helpful, radically improved designs always start with a clean sheet. That’s partly because rapid technology change has opened up previously unknown opportunities, but also because old designs embody old assumptions, and those often no longer hold. I show in the book how even talented people create artificial obstacles to accomplishing big goals, and starting fresh can allow you to sidestep that tendency.

4). Rely on measured data

Baseline values for current products as well as for accomplishing the defined task need to be based on measured data, not on assumptions or rules of thumb. That’s because only measured data conveys the current reality, while rules of thumb are based on history, and because of the rapid pace of change discussed earlier in this chapter, history is becoming less and less relevant to what is possible today.

5). Go for multiple benefits

When designing a product, each component should (to the extent possible) serve multiple benefits, to minimize costs and maximize reliability. This lesson is also true for the product itself. Efficiency or low emissions by themselves won’t sell products to the vast majority of consumers, but pairing those improvements with other benefits is the best way to ensure that low-carbon innovations are widely adopted. That means that products need to reduce emissions, save money, and make people’s lives better all at the same time. That often means saving time, which turns out to be one of the most valuable scarce resources we have in our busy modern lives (see my third essay for more details).

6). Incorporate feedback into the design

That means use of smart controls to make equipment operation more effective and data collection to improve both current operations and future products. With the advent of ever more efficient computing technologies, we’ll be better able to incorporate such innovations into most future products, with corresponding increases in efficiency, reductions in emissions, and improvements in meeting human needs.

7). Accept and foster a non-linear design process

Another important feature of true integrated design is that it is anything but linear, and that’s all to the good. It’s almost impossible to anticipate everything in advance, and the process of design creates new insights that would never arise without the inevitable false starts. For example, until you actually see a working prototype you can’t really know whether it’s what you want, as the team creating the first iPhone discovered as they neared the product launch.

Conclusions

The most important lesson from the whole systems design literature is that conventional incremental design practices are both pervasive and pernicious. They leave real money on the table and slow the adoption of current technologies that could substantially reduce emissions. Don’t let this happen to you! Go for game changing innovation, and the climate (and your pocketbook) will be the better for it.

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