GigaOM » Environment

Infographic: the periodic table of smartphones

Om Malik — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:39:49 +0000

CNET has a detailed report on the mining of rare earth minerals (also called rare earth elements) and created this infographic that shows how they are being used inside the iPhone (and also other smartphones.) And that is why I thought this graphic was worth sharing — so at least we know what is being used and where. Rare earth metals are likely to be a major source of contention in coming years. China is a major supplier of these minerals. (via Randy Krum)

The Periodic Table of iPhone: Rare earth metals and how they are used inside smartphones

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Apple chooses design over recyclability. Will anyone notice?

Erica Ogg — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:52:04 +0000

Last month Apple asked that the standards group EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool), which is responsible for rating the recyclability of electronics products drop it from its rankings. The group, which is funded by the EPA, complied. It means that 39 Macs, MacBooks and monitors that were previously EPEAT certified as causing minimal environmental damage and promoting maximum recyclability, no longer have the group’s stamp of approval. In making this move, Apple is signaling that it won’t let future design decisions be governed by those seeking to uphold environmental standards.

The head of EPEAT, CEO Robert Frisbee, told the Wall Street Journal about Apple’s decision that’s sure to rile the environmentally conscious:

“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”

The “green” angle is one Apple has taken flack for over the years. Since 2007, Apple has spent time repairing its reputation with Greenpeace and other environmental groups, and has become vocal about the “green” nature of its products. And it’s still a target, most recently for its use of coal power. Now it appears to be going backward, withdrawing requests for EPEAT certification.

But will mainstream consumers, Apple’s target audience, care? I think plenty will not. To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying people shouldn’t care, I just think a lot won’t.

Apple can still claim it is thinking about the environmental impact of its products in other ways. The company is still happy to brag about how its MacBook battery lasts three times as long as competitors’ notebook batteries, as well as all the PVC and BFR it keeps out of its products and how green it has made its data centers. But do its solar- and fuel-cell powered data centers weigh heavily on whether a customer chooses to use iTunes or iCloud? Unlikely. Which is why I doubt EPEAT labels have a sizable impact on the decision for the average buyer when shopping for a new notebook.

A lot of us are already aware how difficult it is to take apart Apple products. Sites like iFixit have been vocal about how difficult it is to disassemble and self-repair the latest MacBooks, as well as the iPad and iPhone. Still, plenty continue to buy these products. The ability to take apart a MacBook and recycle the battery, for instance, and the ability to replace the battery without the need for special tools clearly go somewhat hand in hand. Apple has trained customers to expect a product that lasts a decently long amount of time, and if it’s damaged beyond repair and can’t be salvaged by the company’s own specialists, to buy a new one.

Still, Apple won’t escape completely unscathed. People with high standards for their consumer products will care about EPEAT rankings, and they’ll seek out more easily recyclable computers. Big institutions will care too. The federal government, schools, Ford and Kaiser Permanente, for example, as the WSJ points out, each have requirements to buy EPEAT-certified electronics. That’s a lot of spending power on computers for workers, and Apple computers will no longer meet those IT departments’ buying standards.

And that could hurt. But it’s also consistent with most Apple decisions: it spends a lot of money, stays out of some markets and probably loses out on some easy profits because design always comes first.

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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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LanzaTech raises $56M, targets Asia with biofuel tech

Ucilia Wang — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:31:24 +0000

Asia, with its rapidly growing number of car owners and large pollution problems, could very well be the biggest market for biofuels and green chemicals one day. Illinois-based LanzaTech, which announced Monday it has raised a $55.8 million round, is certainly finding more willing customers and partners Asia.

The Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund, formed by the Malaysian government and Burrill & Co., led the Series C funding round. Other investors included Malaysian’s national oil company, PETRONAS, and Malaysian engineering firm Dialog Group. The company has raised just over $85 million and counts Khosla Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners as investors as well.

The money will enable LanzaTech to continue developing processes for converting the carbon monoxide from waste gas from industrial operations and other sources into biofuels and chemicals. The company, founded in 2005, originally hailed from New Zealand and uses microbes and fermentation to produce products.

The startup is building demonstration projects and targeting China, which has become the largest car market and whose government has been promoting policies to promote cars that run on alternative fuels. LanzaTech is already working with two steel manufacturers – Baosteel and Capital Steel — to turn waste gas from their operations into ethanol. LanzaTech said it has installed equipment for a demonstration plant at Baosteel and plans to start production later this year. Last November, the biofuel company also announced a plan to work with a large Chinese coal producer – Yankuang Group — to produce fuels and chemicals from synthesis gas produced by Yankuang’s gasification equipment.

LanzaTech also is working on similar projects in India, where it has teamed up with Indian Oil and Jindal Power and Steel to produce ethanol. In addition, it’s working with Concord Blue to turn municipal solid waste into ethanol in India, LanzaTech said.

The biofuel company added a project in the U.S. recently when it bought a biofinery plant from the ill-fated Range Fuels during a liquidation sale earlier this month. Range Fuels, also a Khosla Venture-backed company, built the plant in 2010 to produce ethanol from wood chips but closed it in 2011 after it ran into trouble with its production process and needed more money to continue. LanzaTech told Bloomberg it plans to use the Georgia plant to develop a process for converting biomass into chemicals. The company has named the Georgia plant the Freedom Pines Biorefinery.

Photo courtesy of PETRONAS

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Hacking solutions to the world’s resource problem

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:10:53 +0000

This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered together for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the entire weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy, water, food and fuel. As Sunil Paul, the founder of the event and a partner with Spring Ventures, put it in a short talk on Sunday afternoon, the idea behind the project is that “Information technology is the most powerful lever we have to address resource constraints.”

Over the weekend, the Cleanweb hackers created applications like NYC BLDGS, a web data base of the energy consumption of buildings in New York that pits the best and worst buildings against each other in friendly competition. Econofy, a web site created over the weekend that enables consumers to compare the energy consumption of appliances, won both the audience choice award and the judges’ award for best overall hack.

The first Cleanweb Hackathon was held in San Francisco in September of last year, and the New York event this weekend was a slightly more high-profile affair. Judges of the hacks included investor Fred Wilson and Rachel Sterne, New York City’s chief digital officer. United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra made an appearance as a special guest.

The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. As investors look back at the mistakes that have been made and money lost in capital-intensive investments like next-gen solar, biofuels and electric cars, some investors are taking a different route and looking to make cleantech investing look a lot more like web and mobile investing — literally. Paul’s firm Spring Ventures invests in Cleanweb companies like Solar Mosaic.

The Cleanweb is an attractive way to attack the problem of climate change and resource management for an age of 9 billion people. Information technologies are available now — compared to the science experiments in biofuels and parts of clean power — and thanks to Moore’s Law they are cheap, and will get increasingly cheaper. Now it’s time to tap into the innovation of the developer community to try to create new ways to leverage IT to solve the world’s problems.

Check out the video of the event below and Paul’s explanation of the Cleanweb at our Green:Net 2011 event:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Another changing of the guard for solar startup Nanosolar

Ucilia Wang — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:31:01 +0000

Nanosolar, which has struggled for years to fulfill its promise as the next major thin-film solar manufacturer, announced Thursday it has a new CEO, again. Eugenia Corrales, who has been the startup’s head of engineering and operations, is taking over the chief executive post effective immediately.

The transition, though the company said it’s planned, still raises questions about the company’s well-being. Nanosolar is among a group of thin-film startups that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital but have yet to become meaningful players in the solar market. Corrales replaces Geoff Tate, who arrived at the helm of Nanosolar two years ago in 2010. Before that, the company was led by its colorful founder Martin Roscheisen.

The company makes copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar panels, and it has built a reputation for making promises it can’t deliver. Part of that came from Roscheisen, who said the company began commercial production of solar panels in Dec, 2007, which meant it should have begun to steadily increase its shipments, line up more customers and expand production. But he then divulged few details that would show progress, such as its technology, factory capacities, customers or projects, and he did so for long enough to draw suspicion, then ridicule from analysts and competitors.

It turned out the company wasn’t ready for prime time. Nanosolar announced in Sept. 2009 that, for sure, it was entering mass production that time around. The company became more circumspect about its work and opened its factory in San Jose, Calif. for tours to show it was making progress.

Nanosolar has announced some big contracts, technology improvements and completion of projects by its customers since Tate took over, but the company also was trying to right itself during a time when the solar market was beset by an oversupply of panels and falling prices for solar panels. Many of the much larger solar manufacturers have closed factories, laid off a big percent of their workforce, or gone bankrupt (see our list). Whether Nanosolar can survive remains a big question.

Corrales started at Nanosolar in 2010 and the company says, “under Corrales, cumulative shipments have gone from zero to 10MW; and median panel efficiencies are now 11.5%,” the company said in a statement. Tate is “returning to retirement.”

Corrales previously worked for two other solar companies, including SolFocus. Before that, she was the VP of operations at Cisco Systems.

“Eugenia’s track record at Nanosolar and prior speaks for itself, and this planned transition will allow the company to maintain its momentum and trajectory. We are confident that under her stewardship we can grow the market for Nanosolar Utility panels and expand our global footprint,” said Erik Straser, Nanosolar board member and general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, in a statement.

Other solar thin-film CIGS startups that have replaced and lost CEOs of in recent years include MiaSole, SoloPower and HelioVolt. Solyndra got a new CEO in mid-2010, and a year later it went bankrupt.

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Now live: Verizon’s smart energy home products

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:13:43 +0000

Phone company Verizon quietly launched its smart home products nationwide about three months ago, which enable customers to lock and unlock doors and windows, watch home video cameras remotely, and manage thermostats and lighting. This is the service Verizon launched in trials in New Jersey about a year ago.

Verizon discovered a few things about the service in the months it has been widely available, as well as via the months it was been available as a pilot service. First, Verizon Director of Product Development, Home Monitoring and Control Ann Shaub said Verizon’s standalone energy products haven’t been as attractive as the whole smart home package that includes cameras, door sensors, and door locks.

That’s not so surprising, as security and media management are clearly a lot more attractive to customers across the board compared to products used for reducing home energy consumption. Verizon also says it doesn’t make claims about saving energy for its home energy products, so it’s not actively marketing them as energy efficiency tools.

Verizon is currently working with Ingersoll Rand for its security products, and Aeon Labs for its thermostats and energy reader, which attaches to a circuit breaker and appliance switches. Shaub also told me Verizon is actively looking to add more smart home tools over the coming months.

Verizon says it has seen 95 percent of its smart home customers install their own devices. That could be a good sign for Nest, the smart learning thermostat startup, which is selling thermostats straight to consumers.

Verizon wouldn’t give me any information about the numbers it’s getting for its smart home tools at this point. Shaub would only say the division is here to stay, and it’s seeing significant growth.

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Apple going greener thanks to change in cable production

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:56:28 +0000

Apple’s drive to put out greener products will cost one of its suppliers some cash in the short term but will result in big environmental advantages over the long haul. Volex, which makes power and USB cables for the Mac maker’s mobile devices, will be switching to halogen-free power cables during the coming year.

The move is said to be caused at least in part by Apple’s “green push,” according to the London Evening Standard. Apple has taken measures during the past few years to lessen the environmental impact of its products. Those measures include reduced packaging as well as changes in the types and number of components used in its products. While the measures have been seen as effective by organizations like Greenpeace, Apple still faces criticism from environmental organizations in supplier countries, most notably China.

The presence of halogens in electronics is a danger, because when products are incinerated at the end of life, the burning halogen can release dioxins and furans into the atmosphere, which have been shown in studies to be increasing in presence in soil, ground water and people. Dioxins and furans are thought to be carcinogenic in large-enough concentrations, and in fact a 2003 study said that there is no known “threshold below which dioxin will not cause cancer.” Sounds like getting rid of them is a wise move.

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One Laptop Per Child project looks to off-grid clean power

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:45:38 +0000

The latest iteration of the One Laptop per Child project was unveiled at CES this week, and it’s fully focused on ways to integrate with off-grid clean power, both solar and human power. Many of the kids that could be using the laptop, which has now morphed into a simple tablet, won’t have access to grid power.

The OLPC XO-3 has an optional 4-watt solar cover (photo above) combined with a battery, so when the case is placed in the sun for 2 hours, it can provide 4 hours of computing time. There are 4 screws placed on the outside of the tablet, and along with providing a way to open the tablet to make repairs, the screws act as electrical connections with the battery.

There’s also an optional hand crank customers can buy that can charge the tablet with human power. I remember the original OLPC project was working on a hand crank, but it didn’t end up using one back then. The tablet was designed by Yves Behar’s Fuse Project. See the video below for an interesting demo and interview with the OLPC XO-3:

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India could soon move forward on smart grid projects

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:21:15 +0000

The Indian government is looking to back around eight smart grid pilot projects in the country worth close to $100 million, according to an article in The Economic Times of India (hat tip Panchabuta). India’s Power Ministry will reportedly solicit proposals from at least a dozen state utilities, then choose around eight of those plans that could cost between $9 million to $11 million each.

The Ministry is reportedly supposed to provide half of the cost of the projects, while the utilities will pay for the other half. The projects will focus on helping the utilities add in clean power — the Indian government has a plan to add 20 GW of solar by 202o — as well as reduce power outages.

For a rapidly developing nation, India has a one of the world’s most constrained grids. For cities that have grid power, there are routine rolling blackouts across the country. There’s just not enough power generation sources for the 1.2 billion population — which is one of the reasons for the country’s interest in solar.

Much of the country doesn’t have access to grid power. To meet that need, distributed solar is also a growing technology, and earlier this year, I reported on a startup called Simpa Networks that’s looking to sell micro solar panels like cellphone service.

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