June 30th, 2009

Political gaming around the Waxman-Markey bill

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 5:48 pm

Categories: Blogroll, China, air pollution, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, environmental health, federal government, global warming, housing, law & politics, petroleum, renewable energy

Tags: Game, Bill, Dems, Regulations, Government, Harry Fuller

Nearly every energy and greentech and auto and battery and utility company in America has a stake in the proposed Waxman-Markey bill. So does every taxpayer and the future of any potential agreement with China on global warming could hang in the balance, and…the list of possible effects of the fate of this legislation is global and ginormous.

Sen. Byrd is out of the hospital but will he be there to vote? How about Sen. Ted Kennedy? The Dems are about add to “Senator” Franken but they’ll need Republican help to get past the potential Repub filibuster. Sixty votes will be needed to secure some bill or other. That means they need 60 votes. Over 40 Dems voted against the bill in its current form in the House. What are the odds?
Likely there wil be some serious give and take on the content of the bill before any Senate vote is taken.
Anti-regulation conservatives are arguing this bill will cost too much, raising energy prices. Some even claim this bill will give the feds the right to control your showering behavior. Sniff test, perhaps?
Of course, critics don’t bother to figure the costs of environmental disasters like Katrina flooding the former city of New Orleans or perhaps flooding of some place vital like Miami Beach or Hilton Head. There’s always the debate, is it cheaper to prepare for the inevitable, or wait and fix it after the unavoidable smash-up? I am a coward and will always opt for preparation. I’d rather be in a San Francisco high-rise during and earthquake than in some unregulated building in rural Turkey. When forced by regulations, American engineers can reduce many serious threats. Without regulation we might well wait until there is no Miami or Houston above the rising sea level. Then we pay lots to fix what we could have prevented.

June 30th, 2009

California not politically bankrupt

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 12:04 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, biofuel, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, green tech, law & politics, petroleum, state government

Tags: California, Harry Fuller

With more electoral votes and more voters than any other state in the U.S. California has won a big political victory in Washington. Along with more than a dozen other states like New York tagging along, California has just gotten permission to enforce its own, stricter fuel efficiency regs on autos. As the largest and richest auto market in the U.S. this move will reverberate. Not like it’s Montana and Delaware with their tiny economic clout.
As we recall, the Bush version of the EPA refused to let California have its way. The relative conservative federal courts backed up that decision. Now the Obama EPA has given California its approval. The new regs take immediate effect. It remains to be seen if the likes of GM and Chrysler will use some of the taxpayer loan money to sue to stop the move.
As you could guess, the American Petroleum Institute hates this ruling. Environmental groups applaud. The governors of New York State and California are pleased as well. The Association of International Automobile Manufacturers AIAM) seems resigned to the decision and pledges to work on improving fuel efficiency.
The California fuel efficiency standards were first enacted there in 2002 but were held in suspension because the Bush Administration refused to grant California a waiver to have standards tougher than the federal ones.
Here are the other states that intend to follow California’s auto standards: Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Also Washington D.C.

June 30th, 2009

Case study of resource use without thought of consequences

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 10:48 am

Categories: air pollution, building, conservation, environmental health, federal government, law & politics, water

Tags: Consequence, Engineering, Harry Fuller

Much of the industrialized world is dotted with no-go zones. Toxic sites. Chernobyl. Old tannery sites and battery factories in London are fenced off. They sit empty amidst Europe’s most densely crowded city. In my old home state of Missouri, Time’s Beach is abandoned by humans–too many PCBs in the soil. And in Oklahoma there’s a town so toxic nearly everybody has moved out. Lead mining for decades with little or no concern for the consequences left poluted water and soil. You might wonder if our current pollution of the atmosphere is on a similar track.

June 30th, 2009

Get ready for the Energy Star 5.0 barrage: Let the testing begin

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 3:00 am

Categories: conservation, energy, green tech

Tags: Power Management, Specification, Power Supply, KWh, Heather Clancy

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star 5.0 specification officially goes into effect on July 1, so steel yourselves for a flood of activity proclaiming support for the new standard.

Some of the products you’ll hear about, like a bunch of notebooks, desktops and monitors from Lenovo, have actually been shipping for a while, but the vendors will use the kick-off date to remind you about that. Hewlett-Packard, as an example, will claim a first in terms of support for Energy Star 5.0 by its thin clients.

It should be noted, mind you, that the third-party verification testing against these statements technically doesn’t even start until July 1. But one imagines these vendors must be fairly confident to declare themselves.

What’s different in Energy Star 5.0 vis a vis the Energy Star 4.0 specification?

First off, there were changes to the power supply design requirements. Computers using internal power supplies now must carry an 85 percent minimum efficiency at 50 percent of rated output and 82 percent minimum efficiency at 20 percent and 100 percent of rated output. External power supplies must be Energy Star-qualified in order for the entire computer to be considered. Those performance requirements are listed here.

The new specification also include new levels for typical electricity consumption (known as TEC throughout the spec). Category A desktops, for example, which covers systems that don’t have multicare processors, sets this level at 148 kilowatt hours or less. On the notebook side, the level is 40 kilowatt hours or less. Systems must come with certain power management features; on the system side, they must come with a sleep mode features that activates within 30 minutes of user interactivity, for display sleep mode, the threshhold is 15 minutes. Of course there’s oodles more, but you can consult the site link above for more details.

This blog by “green PC” manufacturer Very PC out of the United Kingdom puts the Energy Star 5.0 development into more perspective, especially for buyers that need to deal with multinational branches on behalf of their companies.

June 29th, 2009

Ready for a rise?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 3:00 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, climate change, conservation, engineering, global warming, law & politics, ocean, research, tidal, water, weather, wind

Tags: Harry Fuller

Here’s a book review at nature.com–it’s a new book on sea level rise. This book does point to the public policy debate that is needed: what to protect, where to retreat?
Of all the mainland nations on earth Netherlands has the most to lose…to rising oceans. How they meeting the threat? They ARE planning ahead. The Dutch have decided it is cheaper to begin acting now to raise levees and enhance other flood prevention measures. Waiting for the possible flooding could be far mofre expensive, they reason.
Here’s the complete Dutch Delta Commission report on preparing for global wamring sea level rise. This would cause serious twitching along coastal America: the Dutch intend to strictly enforce zoning and planning in flood-prone coastal regions. Much sand from below the sea will be used for building dikes and enhancing ocean beaches–nonw of this willbe done without prior consideration of the effects.
Sounds like the Netherlands intends to confront the future clear-eyed.

June 29th, 2009

Aerosols may not be so helpful

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:42 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, climate change, environmental health, global warming, research

Tags: Greenhouse Gas, Harry Fuller

New research indicates atmospheric aerosols are not going to be a big help in combatting greenhouse gases. Research in Norway says the aerosols are likely to counter only about 10% of the greenhouse gas effects in our atmosphere. Earlier it had been hoped aerosols could reverse up to one-third of the warming effect of CO2.

June 29th, 2009

IBM's latest campaign against paper

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 7:03 am

Categories: energy, engineering, green tech

Tags: IBM Corp., Content Management, Web Technology, Outsourcing, Vertical Industries, Healthcare, Enterprise Software, Software, It Operations, Business Operations

You’ve got to love all the statistics that high-tech companies use to express the return on investment of their green IT offering du jour. Here is a new-ish one from IBM: the average office worker uses roughly 10,000 sheets of copy paper year. (Notice that does not mention printer output, although I think this is implied.)

Indeed, Ken Bisconti, vice president of products and strategy for IBM’s enterprise content management division, says that data shows roughly 90 percent to 95 percent of corporate information is “stored” on paper. Not only is it hard to find, but it takes up a lot of space.

That’s the argument IBM is hoping will pique prospects for its new software and consulting offerings meant to reduce the amount of paper that a company uses.

Bisconti categorizes the potential savings associated with a paper reduction initiative into three different segments.

1. The costs associated with the storage of files and records.
2. The cost of actually finding something that is stored in one of these facilities.
3. The cost of saving things that no longer need to be saved, which is harder to do when you are dealing with physical assets.

IBM is so convinced that it can convince companies to cut their paper consumption that it is offering businesses a no-cost half-day workshop to help customers and potential customers understand the costs of keeping things on paper. “We find the only reasons that people don’t address this sooner tend to be internal organizational reasons,” Bisconti says.

You can grab a white paper (called “No Paper Weight”) plus a calculator at this link if you feel like exploring things on your own, but you’ll need to register for the privilege.

There are a couple of vertical markets in which the need to make information electronic is more acute, Bisconti says. The healthcare sector, as an example, not only has the need but it has government funding in the form of the economic stimulus package, which dedicates about $19 billion to electronic medical records. The public sector is also another logical place for automated electronic paper and content management processes.

Here are a couple of examples of how IBM has helped businesses and government agencies cut paper and increase productivity at the same time:

• The state of North Dakota has cut response times to citizen inquiries from days to seconds.
• Renewtek in Australia was able to achieve carbon-neutral status, which enabled it to claim a “Greenhouse Friendly” certication.
• VR Kreditwerk, a German financial services company that now processes 20,000 documents per day, cut its loan-approval process from one day to one hour.

June 28th, 2009

Solar-charged mobile phone on sale in Japan

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 4:51 pm

Categories: green tech, renewable energy, research, solar

Tags: Phone, Japan, Mobile, New Jersey, Cell Phone, Advertising & Promotion, Telecom & Utilities, Cellular Phones, Marketing, Consumer Electronics

This would be a challenge in rain-logged New Jersey: Apparently the first solar-charging mobile phone is on sale in Japan. This blog from Fast Company has some details about the device, which is from Sharp. Their take, not such a great product. I must admit, if I was beholden to solar power for my mobile over the past month in New Jersey, I wouldn’t be doing a whole lot of talking on the run. In any case, just an idea of what might be coming our way in six to nine months. Samsung and LG are also working on this design challenge.

June 28th, 2009

The little engine that can

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:35 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, cars & traffic, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, fossil fuel, green tech, renewable energy

Tags: Engine, Harry Fuller

And it’s an electrical engine that can haul you and your stuff around. Saw this nano-truck on the street today in my hometown.

It’s Zap’s Xebra.
It’s a three-wheeler.
Two in back, one
in front. List price
is $12,500.
Top speed: 40 MPH.
It’ll do 25 miles on
a full re-charge
from standard U.S. electrical socket. It uses standard lead-acid battery, not the pricier lithium-ion with longer range. It’s just ten feet long and less than five feet wide. The actual cargo bed is small compared even to the truck of a standard sized auto. This will not replace the plumber’s behemoth truck loaded with pipe and gear.

June 28th, 2009

Repubs say the Waxman-Markey bill is DOA in Senate

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:32 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, climate change, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, global warming, green tech, law & politics, petroleum, renewable energy, research, solar, tidal, water, wind

Tags: Green Technology, U.S. Senate, Obama, Harry Fuller

There was not a kind word to heard be from the Republican Party today about the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill. Obama calls the bill “bold and necessary.” The Republicans called it names. Waxman-Markey would change many aspects of federal law on energy, air pollution and global warming.
Amazingly one reader smart enough to find the ZDnet website does not understand why this issue matters here. “Why is this on ZDNet?” That was when I blogged about this bill’s rough road ahead in the Senate.
OK, allow me to belabor the obvious, well, I thought it was obvious. Green technology does not grow or die in a vaccuum. One active ingredient in the recipe for new tech is often money. And this bill has everything to do with how money flows in the energy sector, around air pollution and many aspects of technology connected with those factors.
One recent concrete example. I suspect it is not a result of my blogging but the vote results on the Waxman-Markey bill that sent the stock of a green tech company up on Friday. The company was one I recently blogged about, World Energy Solutions. Like it or not, they make the software that runs America’s only existing cap and trade system. You think that company’s fate is not directly linked to the fate of Waxman-Markey? You think their stock won;t zoom if the Senates OKs cap and trade?
Not to mention all the engineers and researchers working on solar, carbon sequestration, new generation coal plants, wind, servers, wave power, smart grid, batteries, plug-in cars…the list actually includes just about any firm that has ever appeared in any green tech blog here or elsewhere. And university and federal labs across the land. This legislation could be crucial to the failure or success of many companies, new and old, that have anything to do with energy, even if they simply buy a lot of electricity. Sorry for all that verbiage, but it sometimes amazes me to realize there are folks reading this who fail to see basic connections. Nothing, not even the legendary cheese, stands alone in a global economy. Guess that means I’m not a libertarian, huh?