It looks like fuel cells are set to be the Weetabix of technology: it’ll soon be about how many you can get in your car. Obviously, you’ll have one in your car - now you can get one in your GPS too. Assuming you have either a car or a GPS. You might prefer maps and walking and be morbidly terrified of satellite communications or be half-bat and able to use echo location.
Assuming you’re none of those things, and you do want a fuel cell GPS, then you might not have to wait too much longer to sate your gadget lust: MTI MicroFuel Cells has come out with a prototype fuel cell GPS unit.
More on the device from MTI:
MTI Micro´s new Mobion powered GPS prototype provides three times as much energy as GPS devices powered by four disposable AA batteries. On a model with a large, full-colour screen, this fuel cell design generates up to 60 hours of continuous power and provides weeks instead of days of typical usage.
The new Mobion® powered GPS prototype includes a USB interface, allowing the prototype to also be used as an independent energy source for a variety of purposes, including for recharging mobile phones, digital cameras, portable media players and other handheld electronic devices. The Mobion® powered GPS prototype can be immediately recharged by refilling it with methanol.
No word on when we might see it on the market, but given it looks like standalone GPS units will be replaced by GPS functionality in mobile phones, MTI might be better off making a nice mobile fuel cell.
Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest impacts. Take the Krankies, for example, or germs.
Nokia’s latest invention - on show at the company’s design event on this week - is one of those nice baby steps of energy efficiency that warm Greenbang’s cockles far more than they deserve to be by a tiny bit of technology.
And this picture is the invention in question - a charger. Not just any charger - oh no - but one of nine prototypes the folk at Nokia re working to cut the precious energy sucked out of the wall and into the chargers when people forget to turn off the charger when they’re done topping up the mobile.
The first uses a button to charge, so leaving it plugged in means it doesn’t draw power and the user needs to hit the (green) button to set the charge in motion. The second simply charges the device for one hour before switching itself off whilst the third concept actually has a conversation with the device, where the device lets the charger know when it needs power, and when it’s all done.
That last is the ultimate objective but the team still have a way to go to make it happen. Right now the first is real and working and, I hope, will see it’s way into production before too long. Meanwhile Newman and his team are using the chargers every day, living with them and learning from them so one day we can all reap the benefits.
Could you imagine going into a supermarket, plonking your shopping down at the checkout only for the cashier to scrunch up her face, scratch her chin in contemplation, then say ‘Yeah, that’ll be 80 quid please” without ringing it up on the till? Could you? I don’t know about you, but Greenbang likes to know what she’s paying for and that she’s paying on the nose and no more.
Well, this same estimate approach to working out your electricity and gas bill will continue for the foreseeable. The government has decided to not back proposals suggested in last year’s Energy White Paper to compell energy companies to provide their customers with ’smart meters’.
Unlike your traditional display only meters, Such smart meters could provide up-to-the-minute info on how much electricity and gas you’ve burnt your way through and the size of the carbon footprint you’ve made. This info could be beamed to your laptop, mobile or straight to your brain (probably, when the technology is ready).
According to the Energy Retail Association, smart meters are what the Great British public is crying out for. It’s own YouGov poll found that 82 percent of us aren’t down with the ‘guestimate’ system of billing and would rather have smart meters to tell us what we owe.
So the government won’t introduce mandatory smart metering. Here’s what it will do though:
request electricity suppliers to provide on a voluntary basis real-time display devices to particular customer segments, but will not pursue proposals for provision of such devices when a meter is replaced or newly-installed or for provision ‘on-request’ (Section 3);
require electricity and gas suppliers to provide smart meters to all business customers above a certain usage threshold by 2013 (section 4);
to complete further economic assessment work and consultation to finalise policy position in respect of smart metering for small businesses and domestic consumers
The Energy Retail Association, rather than being a bit disappointed about the whole lack of meters, has turned its frown upside down and said this, via its chief exec Duncan Sedgwick:
It is encouraging to see that the Government has listened to the concerns of both the industry and consumer groups and tabled an amendment to the Energy Bill that has effectively opened the door for smart metering. The Government’s backing for smart meters rather than the lesser prize of electricity display devices will also be vital in keeping costs low for consumers and providing customers with what they really want: accurate billing.
Why is it that spies always get the cool stuff? Take James Bond. Greenbang would kill for a watch that shoots lasers, an underwater car or an exploding pen. Not to protect Queen and country though, more to show off to her mates on Friday night out.
Now, the real life Qs of the US intelligence services have plans to build a spy plane that - wait for it - can stay in the sky for five years thanks to solar power.
Managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - that’s the US Department of Defence’s R&D boffins to you - Project Vulture, as it’s known, will see the development of a plane that can carry out missions to gather information on the baddies. It’ll work just like a satellite, but will get dressed up as an airplane.
Aurora Flight Sciences will build the unmanned plane with other contractors, such as BAE, providing the electronics. Odysseus, as they’ve called it, will run on solar power during daylight and on stored solar energy during the night. Now the companies just have to work out how to keep the energy flowing while Odysseus is airborne for five years.
Aurora predicts that Odysseus could also be used for monitoring the weather and telecommunications.
Here’s Ogilvy PR’s very own Jenny Tod presenting a video diary from the Science Of Survival Museum.
Interesting footage, in a crowded, noisy and somewhat destracting room, describing this Sim City-like technology, which measures your future impact on the environment based upon the variables you enter into the system.
For example, given the choices of which car you would drive, how far you travel to work, what type of house you would live in etc etc etc…
Sean Maloney, the man tipped as Intel’s next CEO, talks to us about Intel’s green initiatives.
He’s currently executive vice president of Intel Corporation, but wouldn’t say a word about a promotion.
You can hear the podcast by clicking on this link, or it’s somewhere on iTunes.
It always strikes Greenbang as odd that it’s taken the tech sector (you know with all those innovators and clever people) this long to wake up to power saving. We ask Sean why that is…
We’ve heard a lot of people talk about green IT. We’re seeing a lot of surveys flying around, which suggest to us that no one really knows what they want to say, they just want to say something.
So we were delighted when CEO of BEA Systems (Europe) Rob Ontiveros responded to our questions on his survey, which asked 480 people in the financial services, public sector, and telecommunications sectors to tell all about sustainability.
Greenbang: What is sustainable IT? It seems like a very vague term.
Mr Ontiveros: The term ‘Sustainable’ has been very much in vogue within the last year - and this has been influenced by government adopting the term, for example, the UK Government’s Sustainable Procurement National Action Plan or the government watchdog the Sustainable Development Commission. Sustainable IT reflects the fact that this isn’t just about buying the latest technology to fix the ‘green’ problem - but it’s about the investing in a technology infrastructure that will address your organisation’s green needs now and in the future. This resonates well with BEA who’s whole ethos has been around building an enterprise architecture based on SOA to future-proof your IT.
Why is there so much emphasis on IT in the green business space? And why are so many companies (yours included) talking about this now?
IT has a significant role to play in helping an organisation to become green. By adopting technologies such as server virtualization, IT can have a direct impact on an organisations carbon footprint, it also has a knock on effect in other areas of an organisation. For example enabling employees to work from home or reducing travel requirements through video conferencing etc. Gartner quotes a 2% direct impact on C02 emissions through IT and a 98% indirect impact.
BEA are talking about this now as we’ve recently announced the delivery of BEA Virtualization 2.0 – the completion of BEA’s Java application virtualization offering.
If companies such as yours are such thought leaders, why is it only now you are talking about sustainable IT? Surely the crunch time was at least a decade ago…
You’re right - the IT industry as a whole should have been leading this drive a decade ago. Awareness and the political profile simply wasn’t there, it was the dot com boom and most organisations were driven by shareholder value. Indeed the hardware manufacturers have lead the Green drive and directives such as WEEE only come into force in 2003. The software industry has been following hot on the heels, investing in R&D around areas such as application/java virtualization. The IT industry like many other sectors (as identified in our survey) are being influenced by customers and employees to address the Green issues. As an organisation we will be increasingly asked by our customers how our solutions will reduce their carbon emissions. One of the tools we’re using at the moment is a total cost of ownership calculator that examines the implications of moving to a hypervisor-based virtualization platform (www.bea.com/virtualization)
Your research sounds much the same as many other reports. What is the most interesting thing for you? And why did you commission the research?
We commissioned the research - as the majority of the other reports focused mainly on hardware issues around datacentre consolidation etc. Our research wanted to identify awareness and uptake in the relatively new market of server virtualization and in particularly Java virtualization. What was interesting was that although almost two-thirds of organizations have or are developing plans to reduce energy and emissions caused by their use of technology, they are delaying investment, partly because of cost but also because of a lack of awareness concerning the appropriate energy saving solutions. The survey uncovered that 39% of European organisations were ‘not very aware’ of a virtualization—a key enabler of the ‘green data centre’.
Anything you’d like to add?
The most interesting finding for us from our survey was that employees have the greatest impact on an organisation becoming more ‘green’. Indeed - a survey done of BEA’s own employees showed 89% agree with this finding.
It might help a bit, but there’s a lot of other stuff you can do as well.
That’s the conclusion, we reckon.
One of Greenbang’s writers wrote a piece for the Financial Times about it today. Note the hommage to the Hoff - thin-client computing needed something fun for an introduction…
“David Hasselhoff has just featured in a remake of Knight Rider , the 1980s action-car TV show.
“But to the sorrow of those old enough to remember, the 1980s have made a comeback in other ways, too: radio DJs are resuscitating music that died long ago, while students embrace shoulder pads and brick-sized mobile phones as “retro” accessories.
“Few would have thought such revolutions in fashion could make their way into the computing industry. But rising energy costs are causing companies to ask their IT experts what they can do to cut the bills. And some are suggesting moving back in time to thin-client computing.”
If popular wisdom is to be believed, bad things come in threes. So do good things: ask anyone who likes condoms, the Three Degrees and trilogies. Keeping that in mind, Greenbang is going to bring you the highlights of three reports looking into the growth of green tech.
To kick things off, a snippet from S2 Intelligence: businesses will spend $595 billion by 2010 on systems to support green accounting - you know, monitoring how much carbon they spew out in order to report it to the sort of people who like to know that sort of thing.
For mains, a tasty dish from Forrester: green IT services of the kind practiced by Accenture, Deloitte, Dell, IBM et al, will be worth $4.8 billion by 2013. Forrester reckons 6 percent were currently using a green IT service provider, 6 percent were planning to, and 18 percent were considering hiring one.
And finally, a bit of tiramisu and a coffee in the form of another green IT insight from In-Stat: with green IT all the range, LAN switches will be the next energy cutting target. And guess what? Green LANs war set to be flavour of the month, with power-over-Ethernet ports increasing tenfold by 2005.
Two observations about the European Green IT Summit today, even though we’re not even there.
Well the first is that it’s happening - and that in our opinion is a very good thing. Well, it’s a very good thing, providing that a lot of people don’t get up on stage and say: “We must act now.”
Now then - some interesting but questionable and headline-hungry PR stats came through the digital letterbox today. The report, sent by on behalf of 1E, said:
“A worrying proportion of UK IT managers are still not feeling the pressure to reduce corporate power consumption and carbon emissions, according to new research from 1E, the specialist UK based provider of PC power management software for Windows environments.
The survey, commissioned by 1E, of 100 IT managers from enterprise organisations revealed that, despite growing pressure from business leaders, internal CSR teams and government legislation, around one third of respondents still feel zero pressure to reduce power consumption.
These findings are all the more surprising given that almost 90 per cent of respondents also claim to be aware of their employer’s broader environment policy. The fact that only 23% of IT managers surveyed by 1E have direct ownership of their corporate power bills explains this trend.”
Sorry, but Greenbang doesn’t buy that. We’ve got a some of the biggest names heading down to a place to talk about just that at this summit - the debate has moved on from six months ago 1E.
How many CEOs do you know who ignore rising costs of anything - fuel, labour or entertainment. Despite the results, we think they are wrong.
One thing it’s showing is that a large number of people who read and get jiggy with Greenbang are women. That really echoes something we’ve seen in the sustainability industry - sisters are sustaining it.
But the big names at this event contradict that. Look at the European Green IT Summit’s list of speakers - is it us or there just three women on the speakers’ list?
It looks like fuel cells are set to be the Weetabix of technology: it’ll soon be about how many you can get in your car. Obviously, you’ll have one in your car - now you can get one in your GPS too. Assuming you have either a car or a GPS. You might prefer maps and walking and be morbidly terrified of satellite communications or be half-bat and able to use echo location.
