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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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A Solar Hybrid: Crystalline Silicon and Thin Film in One Cell

Jennifer Kho — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:15:57 +0000

Who says a solar company has to choose between conventional silicon and thin-film solar cells? RoseStreet Labs Energy, a Phoenix-based private company, is combining the two in a double-layered cell that it claims can achieve “practical efficiencies” – meaning efficiencies of cells actually available on the market, not just in the lab – of 25 to 30 percent. On Monday, the company announced the world’s first (or as RoseStreet put it, the “first known”) nitride/silicon tandem solar cell, which it plans to produce in the fourth quarter of next year.

The potential efficiency might not sound breathtaking considering that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency both announced last year that they had produced cells that achieved more than 40 percent efficiency in the lab. But lab efficiencies and production efficiencies are not the same thing, and the highest efficiencies for mass-produced solar cells hover around 22 percent. SunPower Corp., which introduced 22-percent efficiency monocrystalline cells in 2007, last year announced it had produced a prototype with 23.4 percent efficiency, which it expects to launch commercially next year.

RoseStreet thinks its new hybrid cell – which “marries low-cost nitride thin film with the massive infrastructure of silicon solar cells,” as CEO Bob Forcier said in the press release – could be cheaper than crystalline silicon cells. The nitride film, the same material used in solid-state lighting and blue lasers, enables the cells to make use of more of the light spectrum, Forcier told us.

The company plans to use a fabless model, manufacturing the cells through a partner, and also plans to license some of its technology, Forcier added. RoseStreet hopes to reach costs of less than $1.50 per watt, or 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, by 2014. The company plans to target applications with space constraints, such as industrial rooftops and mobile devices.

RoseStreet will certainly have competition. Other technologies are also racing toward higher efficiencies, with six companies – Suntech Power, Sunovia Energy Technologies, IMEC, Q-Cells, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and Oerlikon – last week announcing world-record-breaking efficiencies for different types of crystalline silicon, thin film and multijunction solar cells.

And RoseStreet will have its work cut out. Many companies developing new technologies end up running into complications that result in delays. So far, at least, Forcier said he doesn’t foresee any problems with getting or processing the nitride material that it plans to use. “Nitrides are pretty pervasive in other parts of the world . . . so we see it as a scaleable technology on a worldwide basis,” he said. “We have no concerns about sourcing.”

In any case, it’s a good sign that the company expects to reach production next year. If RoseStreet really can reach such high efficiencies at a lower cost than conventional crystalline silicon, and can manufacture the cells in mass quantities, it should have no trouble finding a market.

The company has been developing higher-efficiency solar technology since at least 2004, when it licensed multiband technology from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The company has formed partnerships with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sumitomo Chemical Co., which also invested in RoseStreet.

The company already operates a 500-kW pilot line in Phoenix and last year launched a solar-cell development center in the same city. The company plans to seek more funding – technically its Series A round – in the first quarter of 2010, Forcier said.

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Report: Green Data Center Design Strategies

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:00:51 +0000

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Always Innovating Touch Book Screenshots Appear

James Kendrick — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:01:23 +0000

We’ve been following the Always Innovating Touch Book since early this year, and now the web tablet with the detachable keyboard is supposedly shipping, although we haven’t heard from anyone who’s received one yet. The folks at Always Innovating have posted some screenshots of the Touch Book in action to give a feel for the UI they’ve developed, and it looks pretty sweet. The UI changes when the keyboard is detached in order to make it a touch-friendly system. We’re expecting an evaluation unit at some point; we’ll let you know when it arrives.

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Michael Jackson Funeral Live Streams, By the Numbers

Liz Gannes — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:42:37 +0000

This post has been updated multiple times as new stats have come in.

While it may not have topped the Obama Inauguration, as some expected, viewership for Michael Jackson’s memorial service today was immense. Here are some of the initial stats.

Akamai says via email it had its second-largest day ever of total traffic, after the inauguration. The CDN delivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams, with more than 2 terabits per second during the service. For the inauguration, Akamai had a peak of 7 million active simultaneous streams, again with more than 2 terabits per second traffic.

Between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. EDT today, CNN.com had 72 million global page views, 10.8 million unique visitors and 8.9 million live video streams, according to Omniture. The site had 781,000 peak concurrent live streams, according to server logs. Update: New total numbers through 5 p.m. are 81 million page views, 11.8 million unique visitors and 9.7 million live video streams. (By contrast, CNN delivered more than 25 million streams in the 12 hours surrounding the Obama inauguration, with 1.3 million concurrent live streams just before Obama’s address.)

However, people did have a lot to say about Jackson, and early reports are showing significant and possibly record-breaking levels of interaction with live video feeds. Facebook reported 300,000 users logged in through its integration with CNN.com as of 10:30 a.m. (when the service started), with 500,000 status updates total and approximately 6,000 status updates per minute at that time. For the election, the integration had produced 4,000 status updates per minute, with a peak of 8,500 statuses per minute.

UPDATE: More stats are coming in:

MSNBC.com says that visitors watched 3 million live streams of Jackson’s service and the site had more than 82 million page views and 7 million unique visitors, as of 5 p.m. EDT. Update: MSNBC now reports more than 19 million total Jackson-related video streams on the day, topping its previous record from the Inauguration. Watchers spent an average of 12.1 minutes per visit on Jackson-related video. MSNBC’s Twitter integration through Tinker.com saw more than 75,000 Jackson-related Tweets, of which it displayed a selection.

And the following was sent out to members of Official Group for Media & Analysts Following Facebook:

There were a total of about 1 million users posting approximately 800,000 status updates on Facebook related to the live online broadcasts by CNN, E! Online, ABC and MTV of the Michael Jackson memorial service. Here is a breakdown by web site:

CNN:

733,000 status updates

759,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

6,000 updates/minute at the peak

E! Online:

9,000 status updates

87,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

ABC:

48,000 status updates

97,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

MTV:

5,000 status updates

21,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

For context, there were 1.8 million Facebook status updates with the word “Obama” on Inauguration Day in the U.S. – an event that was broadly publicized for months leading up to it.

Ustream, which ran video feeds including an official one from its partner CBS News, said it had nearly 4.6 million total streams and 1.6 million total, with 12,000 messages per minute in accompanying chat rooms.

Over on oldteevee, Nielsen says: “The event was carried live from approximately 1pm ET to 4pm ET on 18 networks. The sum of average audience for those networks was 31,140,882 and had a combined household rating of 20.6.”

Transpera, which powers many mobile video offering, says mobile video views for sites with in its network that carried Jackson content network were up 88 percent above the norm.

ABC News reports nearly 6 million live Jackson memorial streams on ABCNEWS.com and on partner sites Yahoo!, Verizon, Charter, AT&T and RCN. Jackson-related content collected an additional 5 million video views on ABCNEWS.com, the ABC News channel on YouTube and the ABC News iPhone application. ABC News’ Facebook integration had nearly 100,000 Facebook members log in, with 50,000 total status updates.

MTV reports that its live stream of the memorial service ranked among its top 10 live streams ever. Unique visitors were up 28 percent versus the previous Tuesday, with time spent on the home page up 20 percent. Jackson-related video content including music video, documentaries and interviews has been seen more than 2.8 million times on MTV, MTVMusic, VH1, CMT, Logo, MTV Tr3s and mtvU since his death, up 10193 percent versus the comparable time period before his death.

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Tech Firms Establish MPG For The Internet

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:00:26 +0000

A world in which networks stream feature-length Hulu movies to laptops and virtual worlds to PCs requires a whole lot of power to run the servers, routers, desktop computers and other gear that make it all possible. The electricity used by servers alone doubled between 2000 to 2005 to about 123 billion kilowatt-hours, and if current trends continue, data-center power use is likely to increase another 76 percent by 2010, according to Jonathan Koomey, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and Stanford University. But in the face of rising power costs and increased attention on fighting climate change, network hardware makers and service providers are starting to work on curbing networks’ energy use.

The first step to overcoming an energy addiction is acknowledging the problem — and in the IT industry that means launching industry standards. Last week, network performance testing company Ixia (XXIA), network gear maker Juniper (JNPR) and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs launched the Energy Consumption Rating (ECR) Initiative, an open standards-based project aimed at creating energy-efficiency metrics for network and telecom devices. It’s one of the first coordinated efforts to develop such metrics and could garner the support of industry players who’ve recently begun their own energy rehab efforts.

The Initiative is welcoming network industry vendors, service providers and other standards bodies to work with it to help institute benchmark metrics for how energy-efficient (or not) network hardware is. The group is working on repeatable measurements to report energy performance in units of “watts per gigabit per second,” a sort of miles per gallon for tech gear. The measurements are some of the most detailed out there and they look at energy performance in different states, from active processing to idle states, and as Ixia’s CEO Atul Bhatnagar said in a phone call, the goal is to be able to set standards that can verify device efficiency through measurement.

Test results comparing the Energy Consumption Ratio and the weighted Energy Consumption Ratio

The ECR Initiative is still very much a work in progress; it’s more of a “call to action” than a set of instructions on what network makers should do. So far, ECR doesn’t have plans to label gear with an ECR certification to let service operators identify energy-efficient devices for purchase — Ixia’s Bhatnagar said it’s still too soon in the process. More than anything, it’s an acknowledgment that power is a significant issue for the networking and telecom industries.

Both telecom and computing gear companies, as well as service providers, have started to show signs that they’re interested in more energy-efficient networks. Earlier this year, Verizon (VZ) announced its own energy-efficiency standard for telecom gear, aimed at reducing hardware power use 20 percent, industrywide, starting in 2009. Ericsson (ERIC) partnered with a designer to develop a cellular network base station model that would use 40 percent less energy. BT says it’s incorporating energy-efficiency requirements into contracts with suppliers as it builds out next generation networks. On the server front, tech industry behemoths like Google, Yahoo, Sun and Cisco are all working on different ways to reduce data center energy use.

Why are network operators and hardware makers starting to jump on this trend? Largely because of the bottom line. For service providers, using energy-efficient network hardware can be a solid way to cut costs. Google engineers have famously reported that the cost of the power to run data centers is rivaling the cost of buying the data center gear; because the search engine giant uses so much power, it has a major data center efficiency plan underway. Telecom network operators could find similarly positive power savings with energy-efficient network equipment. For the network gear makers, energy-efficient products are a way to differentiate themselves in a largely commoditized industry.

And here’s one silver lining to the recent financial stormclouds: Energy-efficient network technologies will likely get a boost. Networking companies will be looking to cut costs even deeper than in the past, and that means cutting power use.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

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Philips and Berkeley Lab Take on Smart Energy at Home

Craig Rubens — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:33:50 +0000

While electronics maker Philips is working on getting its LEDs into homes, the company is also starting to focus on the bigger picture of energy-efficient homes. The Amsterdam-based company announced a new partnership this week with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to jointly research energy-efficiency solutions for buildings. Improving lighting efficiency using integrated smart wireless devices will be the partnership’s first objective, and consumers could see a commercial product as soon as next year, Philips says.

This is a great partnership that could help deliver the next generation smart home. Philips is one of the world’s largest producers of lighting and has been pushing hard to bring LEDs to the mass market. Meanwhile, Berkeley National Lab has been researching smart energy for homes and buildings at its Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Nothing they are proposing is that groundbreaking — there have been motion sensors to control lights for years — but this news shows that device makers like Philips are starting to “get it.” Philips is starting with lighting and building systems, but hopefully it won’t take long for them to smarten up their whole line of electronics, everything from the giant flat-screen TVs down to the Sonicare toothbrushes.

This could prove to be both competition and a strong new partner for the startups developing energy efficiency devices for the home. The Dutch electronics giant has been buying up LED companies — perhaps smart energy startups are next.

If you found this post interesting you might also be interested in Earth2Tech’s first Briefing, The Smart Energy Home.

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Climate Change = More Heat Waves = More Blackouts

Craig Rubens — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:18:48 +0000

Coming soon to a city near you — more power outages! As temperatures soar across the nation, a report published today in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology details research from scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which estimates that electricity demand could outstrip supply by as much as 17 percent on the hottest days in the coming decades. Co-author Norman Miller said in a statement: “Climate warming across the western U.S. could further strain the electricity grid, making brownouts or even rolling blackouts more frequent.” Cue ominous music.

What’s most discouraging about the report is that it doesn’t offer any solutions other than the stock “energy conservation and emissions reductions.” Yawn. Of course those would alleviate many of the problems of global warming, but this report addresses the specific problem of peak power demand. And there are several clean technologies that specifically address peak demand as well.

One of the biggest advantage of solar energy is that it’s a peak power producer. The day is hottest when the sun is beating down hard. Peak solar energy production, either from rooftop photovoltaics or desert-located solar thermal plants, could overlap with peak demand. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is currently pushing rooftop solar which could obviate new, natural gas power plants.

Demand response, a grid management service offered by the likes of EnerNOC, coordinates large energy users and can alleviate peak demand by getting clients to click systems off when demand is high. The clients enjoy discounts on their energy for participating, while the utility gains extra capacity in the form of “negawatts,” and EnerNOC takes a nice cut.

Air conditioning is by far the biggest offender in these heat wave-induced energy spikes. Greener ventilation design can drastically reduce the need to cool a building. Of the presidential hopefuls, Barack Obama has made a building efficiency a part of his energy planby proposing that all new government buildings must be carbon neutral by 2030. He also wants to improve the energy efficiency of existing government buildings by 25 percent.

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Pencil Turns Firefox into a Drawing Tool

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Just when I think I’ve seen everything that you can do in Firefox, along comes an add-on like Pencil (Firefox 3 required). By coupling the Gecko drawing engine with the ability to display, save, and load an external canvas, together with a palette of shapes, Pencil installs an entire drawing application into your Firefox browser.

If you’ve worked with Visio or OmniGraffle, you’ll have the general idea: drag shapes to the canvas, move and resize them with the mouse, set their properties. There are basic shapes and a variety of UI widgets available. Pencil supports undo and redo, scaling, rotating, setting the z-order, adding external text and graphics, and so on. If nothing else, this means that you now have a tool for quickly prototyping new UI ideas wherever you have a browser handy.

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Could Climate Change Lead to Computing Change?

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:43:07 +0000

I wrote about an effort us use millions of specialized embedded processors to build an energy-efficient (relatively) supercomputer that could run at speeds of up to 200 petaflops over at Earth2Tech. The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has signed a partnership with chip maker Tensilica to research building such a computer, but after chatting with Chris Rowan, Tensilica’s CEO, I wonder if more specialized computing tasks in the data center might be farmed out to highly customizable — but lower-powered — chips.

Rowen doesn’t think the data center is at the point yet where power consumption costs outweigh the benefits of using a cheaper x86 processor, but said that day might come, especially for very specific uses such as accessing web databases. In the meantime, he’s focusing on getting customized embedded cores in applications that rely on speed, such as routing. Cisco uses Tensilica cores in its recently launched QuantumFlow Processor, primarily as a way to boost speeds. As the web gets faster, general-purpose x86 chips have to work harder and hotter, so a return to specialized, low-power processors may be in the cards.

Computing hardware and services tend to run in cycles, and right now, I think the hardware and networks put in place in the late 90s, which allowed Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications to flourish, are hitting their limit. The IP and IT networks are in the early stages of stepping up to challenge of delivering the next generation of services, but unlike the last cycle, power consumption will join speed as an essential feature for the underlying silicon.

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