GigaOM » carbon

Unlocking a $500B green industry, without government money

Jigar Shah, CEO, Carbon War Room — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:00:51 +0000

My organization, the Carbon War Room, has put together a consortium to tackle, as was reported in the New York Times this week, “one of the nation’s biggest energy problems — waste in older buildings — without new money from Washington.”

With the consortium, we’re also tackling another case of waste: developed technologies that are not being deployed. Business can halve the world’s emissions using current technology, acting within existing policy frameworks, and despite the global economic slowdown.

In fact, this emissions challenge is the largest wealth-creation opportunity on the planet. There are technologies that exist today that can solve our energy issues that could be scaled much faster. This new business consortium is an example.

The new consortium

As reported, the business consortium, led by the Ygrene Energy Fund of Santa Rosa, Calif., will unlock millions of dollars of investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies for U.S. commercial real estate.

Lockheed Martin and Barclays bank plans to invest as much as $650 million over the next few years to cut energy consumption of older buildings in Miami and Sacramento, Calif. We are confident these cities’ programs alone could stimulate $2.3 billion and more than 17,000 jobs across the two cities.

Imagine if this is carried over to Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Boston, St. Louis and every city in the U.S. There are probably a trillion dollars that can be invested, which will drive jobs now.

In this case, while we have technologies sitting on the sidelines to make our buildings more efficient, we also have legislation that is not being fully deployed.

Wasted legislation, tech

The Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) legislation enables property owners to accept a voluntary tax assessment as a means of repaying up-front financing of energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements. Twenty-six states in the United States, along with Australia and New Zealand, have enacted legislation enabling the secure and scalable financing PACE structure. PACE has yet to take off in the U.S. for homes because of uncertainties in the financing of the program from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. But the commercial side, now solidly financed, can take off.

The key motivator behind PACE is a sound one: There’s “no up-front capital cost.” No up-front capital cost was a key in unlocking the deployment of solar when, at SunEdison, I created the power purchase agreement for the solar industry. It enabled companies like Wal-Mart, Staples and Whole Foods to buy energy rather than buying a solar system. They pay for the energy used over time. It made solar make business sense.

Now, with this business consortium, we are unlocking the financing for the deployment of 20-year-old technologies like more-efficient lighting, cooling and heating and water-saving toilets.

When I tell most people about this new program, the immediate reaction is, “Well that’s a no-brainer.” But simple, obvious, powerful, business-sense solutions take brains. It then becomes a “no-brainer decision” for buyers creating $500 billion industries.

Jigar Shah is the CEO of the Carbon War Room, a nonprofit that harnesses the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change and create a post-carbon economy. By bringing project finance and growth capital together with infrastructure entrepreneurs, corporations, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), he identifies and eliminates market barriers, driving environmental improvements alongside economic growth. Shah founded SunEdison in 2003 with a new business model, the solar power services agreement business (SPSA). The SPSA uses mature technologies and required no new legislative action. The SPSA model launched solar services into a multibillion dollar industry. SunEdison now has more solar energy systems and megawatts under management than any other company.

Image courtesy of JoeInSouthernCA

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Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:01:54 +0000

The smart grid industry’s focus is now shifting to the true purpose of the smart grid movement: applications that will improve the efficiency, reliability and versatility of the electric grid. This report analyzes six key smart grid application trends that will help shape the industry landscape in the years to come: distribution automation, data analytics, demand response, carbon management, home energy management and electric vehicles. The applications that prevail in this new arena will define the smart grid experience for industrial, commercial and residential customers. Along the way, new business opportunities that arise from these applications will become available for the providers of software, systems, devices and services, and enhance customer awareness and control of energy consumption. Companies mentioned in this report include Echelon, Google, EnerNOC, ZigBee and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Beyond Carbon, and Not in Name Only

Pedro Hernandez — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:00:18 +0000

Remember Carbonetworks? This week, the carbon management firm underwent a dramatic change by ditching its name. Let’s explore a key market insight that this act of rebranding reveals.

Sustainability Reporting Software: An Overview

Thu, 06 May 2010 07:00:50 +0000

With the growing recognition that global warming demands a business response, many companies are budgeting for climate-change plans. These plans aim to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across a wide range of activities, including procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, retailing, IT, waste disposal, and regulatory compliance. In drawing up and implementing these plans, though, businesses have made an unexpected discovery: The shift to greener operations creates competitive advantages by cutting costs, preparing for regulation of carbon emissions and presenting an attractively green ethos to the market. Sustainable business, it turns out, is good business.

To help implement their plans, companies can choose from a variety of enterprise sustainability software, also known as carbon management software, delivered via a Web browser in the form of Software as a Service. These systems collect resource-consumption data distributed geographically and functionally across the enterprise including electricity metering, transportation fuel costs and emissions from manufacturing and production facilities. The objective is to bring this data into one place where it can be examined and analyzed comprehensively.

Sustainability software covers three broad areas. One category is aimed at IT and helps manage energy consumption in data centers. A second category monitors and analyzes the flow of electricity in smart-grid installations. The third helps enterprises manage resources, emissions and waste. It collects data and offers visualization tools. The most advanced systems offer sophisticated modeling capabilities, which can aid greatly in formulating and implementing strategies for reducing an enterprise’s environmental footprint.

This third category is the subject of this report. While the green IT and smart-grid categories are relatively mature, the enterprise market is still taking shape. Moreover, this area has potential to become the largest by far. While the traditional market for sustainability software consists of Fortune 500 companies, smaller operations are beginning to recognize the benefits. Sustainability software will become attractive to businesses of all sizes and sectors as industries develop standards for tracking, evaluating, and reporting greenhouse gas emissions and as government regulations spur trade in carbon credits and environmental labeling of consumer products.

This report surveys the history of enterprise sustainability software systems, their capabilities, and how they’re being used in a variety of industries. It also offers recommendations for companies interested in using these tools.

Study: ‘Cyber Monday’ 50 Times Greener Than ‘Black Friday’

Dave Norem — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:00:30 +0000

In this research study, MindClick SGM sought to compare the relative greenhouse gas emissions of online and in-store holiday shopping during the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend. We modeled the environmental impact of purchasing consumer goods either online or through a trip to a retail outlet for an in-store purchase using anEconomic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) model approach . The environmental impact, as indicated by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, was then weighed by the relative dollar amounts spent during the traditional ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ purchasing windows. In summary, we find that the impact of an in-store purchase represents an increase of more than 15 times that of an online purchase; the overall impact of Black Friday is more than 50 times that of Cyber Monday.

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AMEE and AlertMe: Measuring a Home Worker's Carbon Footprint

Imran Ali — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:00:04 +0000

The United Nations’ historic Climate Change Conference, the COP15, hosted in Copenhagen (read more coverage over on our sister site, Earth2Tech) — has seen the usual political controversies, notably leaked emails from the UK Met Office.

I suspect what the world’s citizens are looking for isn’t righteousness or posturing, but leadership and pragmatism. What can we do as individuals to adjust our lifestyles? Though it’s debatable whether our energy literacy and awareness should be oriented around carbon or power usage, carbon seems to be the current consensus.

As web workers, we perhaps work under the assumption that our commute-free lifestyles are relatively low-carbon. However, it’s sensible to actually quantify and monitor the impact that home workers really are having on the environment. Fortunately, services are beginning to emerge that help home workers to measure and track their carbon footprints.

Time Magazine recently ranked the personal carbon footprint as one of 2009′s best inventions. AMEE — a leading carbon tracking startup — just last launched a new offering that claims to make measuring and reporting on a home worker’s carbon footprint much more straightforward.

Learn more about home energy management with this report from GigaOM Pro for just $79.

AMEE is currently currently targeted at companies with remote workers, and is only providing its tracking and measurement engine to users of AlertMe‘s smart metering solutions. Here’s how it works:

Workers will need to install an AlertMe Energy kit (around $114) into their home that monitors and reports their home’s energy use.
The AlertMe kit sends data to AMEE to calculate a carbon footprint.
Aggregated data from all remote workers is structured to fit a company’s reporting requirements, with appropriate formats and visualizations. Data can be viewed live, by location, as an aggregate and in compliance with external reporting frameworks.

Though the service is currently designed to help employers track and report their home worker’s usage there seems little reason not to offer the same solutions to independent web workers. More significantly, when smarter appliances can individually report how we use heating, cooling, computing and other equipment, web workers will have a better range of data with which to make lifestyle decisions and to play their part in managing climate change.

Are you employing personal carbon strategy or using tracking/measurement services?

Photo credit: stock.xchng user safegear

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When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:50:37 +0000

Upstream bandwidth use is on the rise, with some vendors reporting a 24 percent increase in traffic from 2007 to 2008. But does that increase mean more people are contributing content to the web, or that the few who do contribute use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth? While ISPs are addressing the latter scenario with restrictions and caps, I’m inclined to believe this is a widespread movement of people putting their lives online. That means ISPs are going to have to start pushing the limits on upstream speeds and capacity — or see customers change service providers (if they can). So, which carriers can keep adding upstream bandwidth to serve consumer demand? And what services will help drive that demand?

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Why SAP’s Carbon Software Buy Matters

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:00:47 +0000

This week, SAP took a surprisingly early step into the nascent carbon management market: it purchased the young (and relatively unknown in the broader software industry business) carbon management startup Clear Standards. The move is a game-changer for big software firms that have been eying the carbon management market, for startups that have been working on competitive products, and for industries outside of cleantech that have been unsure whether or not to bank on the price of carbon.

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Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?

Michael Wolf — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:00:42 +0000

Reading Om’s piece on Pogoplug this week, I started to think about how local network storage and cloud storage are becoming indistinguishable to the end user. While it’s not technically cloud storage, Pogoplug allows you to placeshift by accessing your locally stored content through the cloud, making anywhere access to content much simpler.

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China Blocks All of YouTube

Chris Albrecht — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:12:05 +0000

China implemented a site-wide block of YouTube today, for reasons still unknown. The country has blocked portions of YouTube before as part of its censorship programs, but blocking the entire site is something new.

Wired’s Epicenter blog lists some recent events that could have triggered China’s censorship officials’ massive blockade, including footage of Chinese soldiers beating Tibetans, or videos released by the U.S. Navy of Chinese ships attempting to interfere with a sonar array cable being dragged behind the USNS Impeccable.

Regardless, Chinese citizens currently can’t watch videos on YouTube, and while parent company Google is working to restore access, it doesn’t know what its next steps will be.

The Chinese government exerts strict control over content and has denied the required licenses to different Chinese video-sharing sites in the past. During a recent visit to our offices, Youku CEO Victor Koo said that officials in charge of censoring content had been more permissive as of late.

Last year, all of YouTube went down after technical error occurred when Pakistan attempted to block access to a particular video clip to the site.

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