Porsche revs up anti C-charge rant

Posh sports car maker Porsche is to fight Mayor Ken Livingstone’s plans to charge London drivers of emission-heavy cars £25 per day.

The company is so bitterly opposed to the charge, it has even launched a website and petition to fight the tax.

Here is Porsche’s argument:

“Following its launch of a judicial challenge against Mayor Ken Livingstone’s emissions related congestion charge, Porsche today released an examination of the expected CO2 savings. Using Transport for London’s own figures, the savings expected in an entire year from the emissions charge will be equal to the emissions from Heathrow between 4 minutes and at most 4 hours.

Commenting on the figures, Andy Goss, Managing Director of Porsche Cars GB, said, “Under closer examination these figures show the negligible environmental benefits of this tax. The emissions saved are a fraction of the amount of the CO2 pumped out every day at Heathrow. Calling this tax an emissions charge is a misnomer. Not only is this new charge an unfair tax on motorists and families, it is a tax that will do nothing to reduce emissions or congestion in London.”

The release of this examination comes the day after Porsche announced that it is seeking to make an application for judicial review of the proposed extension in the congestion charge, which will see the cost of driving some cars in the capital rise from £8.00 a day, or just 80p if they are residents in the congestion zone, to £25.00 a day - an increase of over 3000 per cent. Porsche is seeking a reverse of this action based on the disproportionate nature of the charge.

Porsche also announced today that it has opened a website for the legal case where families and motorists across London who will be impacted by the new tax can get more information and add their name to a petition against the charge. The website is available at www.porschejudicialreview.co.uk.”

Greenbang thinks Porsches are sweet cars, but surely with all that motoring R&D knowhow, they could come up with technology that beats the emission and engine-size problem. That would be a winner all round…

Cisco teams with smart cities for clever tech

Cisco CEO John Chambers has been banging the gong on what tech companies should do to tackle climate change this week at the Connected Urban Development conference. And because he’s a man who likes to eat he’s own dog food (who doesn’t?), Cisco has been uniting with few cities around the world to come up with some efficient tech.

The cities in question are San Francisco, Amsterdam and Seoul, who’ve Cisco says all have mayors bang up for tackling green issues and have some tasty broadband networks.

Guess what they’ve been doing with them? Oh alright, Greenbang will tell you. Here’s the deets from Cisco:

• “The Connected Bus,” is a landmark prototype that was developed by Cisco and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) to demonstrate an innovative way to make public transportation more green. The hybrid bus has a mobile hot spot that allows citizens to work while they ride; a Global Positioning System gives commuters updated status of bus routes and connections; LED displays provide information on emissions saved through public transit; and an automated system reduces the environmental impact of the bus through better maintenance. If deployed broadly throughout transit systems, the Connected Bus can significantly reduce carbon emissions in cities around the world.

• “Personal Travel Assistant (PTA),” is a pioneering service being developed by Cisco with input from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Currently being considered by the city of Seoul for pilot testing, PTA improves the transit experience within urban environments by empowering citizens to make more informed decisions on day-to-day transportation options based on schedule, financial and environmental implications. Accessible from any Web-based interface such as a mobile phone, PTA is the first service of its kind that provides green route options, integrates with other communication needs such as calendaring, and enables city agencies to predict and manage evolving citizen transportation needs more effectively.

• “Smart Work Centers,” an approach developed by Cisco and embraced by the city of Amsterdam, enables local residents to work in remote stations without having to travel into the heart of the city. The Smart Work Center concept is based on a combination of technology and services that deliver a true connected neighborhood experience: the innovative use of convergent video-voice-data technology solutions; the availability of onsite services such as child care centers, dining and banking; open public and exposition spaces; and flexible desk seating and meeting rooms.

Aluminium holds the key to hydrogen highway

Aluminium - or aluminium, if you’re American or can’t spell or both - is now the focus of scientists’ efforts as they crack on with what they’ve named the ‘hydrogen highway’.

The folks over at Purdue University say “a new aluminum-rich alloy that produces hydrogen by splitting water and is economically competitive with conventional fuels for transportation and power generation”.

The cash-conscious boffins have made up the alloy with a mere five percent of gallium, indium and tin, to generate hydrogen in a more affordable way. When the alloy is put into water, it splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which immediately reacts with the aluminum to produce aluminum oxide, also called alumina, which can be recycled back into aluminium, according to Purdue.

The folks over at Purdue explain their discoveries like this:

“I can form a one-phase melt of liquid aluminum and the gallium-indium-tin alloy by heating it. But when I cool it down, most of the gallium-indium-tin alloy is not homogeneously incorporated into the solid aluminum, but remains a separate phase of liquid,” Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process said. “The constituents separate into two phases just like ice and liquid water.”

The two-phase composition seems to be critical for the technology to work because it enables the aluminum alloy to react with water and produce hydrogen.

The researchers had earlier discovered that slow-cooling and fast-cooling the new 95/5 aluminum alloy produced drastically different versions. The fast-cooled alloy contained aluminum and the gallium-indium-tin alloy apparently as a single phase. In order for it to produce hydrogen, it had to be in contact with a puddle of the liquid gallium-indium-tin alloy.

“That was a very exciting finding because it showed that the alloy would react with water at room temperature to produce hydrogen until all of the aluminum was used up,” Woodall said.
The engineers were surprised to learn late last year, however, that slow-cooling formed a two-phase solid alloy, meaning solid pieces of the 95/5 aluminum alloy react with water to produce hydrogen, eliminating the need for the liquid gallium-indium-tin alloy.

Tech must introduce bit miles

Greenbang likes analysts. They’re clever folk and, like silk worms, if you leave them alone for long enough, they come up with some really cool stuff. Just like Greenmonk, who’ve come up with the idea of “bit miles”.

Like food miles, bit miles would assign a ecological, social and economic footprint to IT, in order to get people to think about the environmental costs to their technology. Says Greenmonk, on its eponymous blog:

Bit miles thinking isn’t confined to IT. Any industry that involves needless transport of information that could be digitised should perhaps be subject to the dread Carbon Added Tax. We ship bits in all kinds of industries. Think of the music industry, so long addicted to the inventory of little plastic discs, black for most of the 20th century, iridescent for the end of the period. When Wired editor Chris Anderson first started looking at Long Tail businesses he didn’t have green thinking in mind. But by assiduously researching and laying out the economics of abundance through digitisation in his ground breaking book he could indirectly have done green lobbies a huge favour. A key Long Tail insight is that abundance doesn’t necessarily mean waste. When the inventory is digital it can be infinite.

Greenmonk goes so far as to call for the complete death of paper in the office, to be replaced by online wikis.

The more Greenbang thinks about the idea of bit miles, the more she likes it. Anything to stop vendors sending meaningless screeds of material and indigestible CDs gets Greenbang’s thumbs up.

Philips goes for €1 billion eco-innovations

Greenbang has been spending some quality time with Philips’ latest CSR report. The dirty great tome reveals that the Netherlands’ second best export after Edam plans to double the money it’s ploughing into “green innovations” to €1 billion over the next five years.

And why announce one green target when you can have three? Here’s the others: to generate 30 percent of its revenue from green products and to increase energy efficiency by 25 percent, both by 2012.

It’s already making progress towards its 30 percent target: it’s on 20 percent at the moment, up from 15 percent in 2006.

It’s showing more greenery than ever in three business units: sales of green products are up 35 percent in healthcare, 91 percent in consumer lifestyle and 17 percent in lighting.

Here’s a couple of ideas from the company on what they’ve been up to:

The Philips MRI scanner Achieva 3.0T X-series for instance shows a reduction of the environmental impact of the product by 32% compared to previous models. A new market introduction that has also proven its green credentials is the Philips IntelliVue MMS X2 Patient Monitor that consumes 52% less energy during use.[...]

the Cineos Soundbar with Ambisound, which uses 50% less energy than its closest competitor, and the energy efficient LCD TV range of which some models use 36% less energy than closest competitors.

Philips Green Products offer a significant environmental improvement in one or more of the Philips Green Focal Areas: energy efficiency, packaging, hazardous substances, weight, recycling and disposal, and lifetime reliability, compared to similar products on the market.

Carbon offsetters give code thumbs-up

After good old Mr (Hilary) Benn gave out Defra’s voluntary code of conduct for carbon offsetters this week, offsetters are now keen to give Mr Benn a warm round of applause.

Eight voluntary carbon offset companies - The CarbonNeutral Company, Carbon Clear, ClimateCare, Climate Friendly, co2balance, NativeEnergy, targetneutral and Terrapass - have announced they’re welcoming the code.

Here’s what they say:

The beyond-compliance carbon market, which kick-started carbon trading
in the mid-nineties, is global, cross-sectoral and growing extremely
fast. The industry has professionalised over the last 5 years, and has
seen in the launch of new quality standards for VERs [Verified Emissions Reductions] including the Gold Standard (GS VER) and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), with registries for the VCS and GS in development along with a planned project database linking the two.

We firmly believe that there is increased interest from people and
business in acting beyond compliance, i.e. reducing emissions because
they want to not because they have to. This is the carbon market
coming of age, and we look forward to working with the UK Government
to keep them informed participants in the global development of this
innovative and fast-paced emergent market is one that is already
generating important investments and innovative solutions towards
tackling climate change.

Article: Sustainability in ICT

Providing direction for a sustainable ICT future

By Graham Palmer, Chair of the Intellect Energy and Environment Group and UK and Ireland Country Manager for Intel Corporation

In a world beset with overconsumption, environmental degradation, global warming, growing resource scarcity, and social change, humanity is facing its greatest challenge ever. Doing more with less is vitally important if we are to responsibly manage our finite resources and continue to grow our economies.

With environmental challenges facing all of us, now is the time for governments, business, industry, environmental organisations, and individuals to join together in solutions to create a sustainable world for this generation and those that follow.

As a fast-paced industry itself, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a role to play in tackling these global challenges head on and we must take communal responsibility for their resolution. The need to adopt a holistic approach is required, to encompass everything from development and production to policy and recycling. It is for this reason that the Energy and Environment Group was formed within Intellect, to provide leadership and drive innovation throughout the ICT industry.

Fortunately, the ICT sector is accustomed to moving rapidly. This makes our industry well poised to swiftly contribute to the development of a wide range of solutions to reducing global warming and improving energy efficiency, as well as empowering sustainable economic growth, productivity and job creation.

The UK Intellect Energy and Environment Group recently published a report to drive ICT contribution to sustainability. It highlights four principle areas of development, namely:

1. To understand where we are today through effective measuring and monitoring and further research into the impact of ICT on climate change
2. The need for a reduced carbon footprint created by the global and UK ICT industry. This includes adopting changes at the global, corporate and product level, for example optimising companies’ supply chains
3. Continued innovation in the development of technology solutions to improve energy efficiency
4. The need to educate consumers on behavioural changes that could benefit climate change through better ICT use

Corporate responsibility begins at home

The place to start tackling these problems is close to home.

The members of the Energy and Environment Group are organisations concerned with the impact that ICT has on climate change. As a group we are committed to driving the efforts of individual organisations to reduce carbon footprint and promote innovation in more energy efficient ICT, and make it a national and industry-wide movement.

My own organisation, Intel has a publicly stated goal to reduce its energy consumption by more than 30 percent by 2010 while driving innovation in our products to deliver increasing performance and reduced energy consumption to all our customers. As such, last year we announced a number of initiatives including the formation of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative in conjunction with WWF and Google, to help promote these changes. Other members of the group have similarly stated goals, but more importantly we all realise that doing these things alone is not enough. We must allow others to take advantage of our experiences, provide advice on the improvements we have found and work together to drive the creation of new innovations more rapidly.

From words to action

Of course one report is not going to change the way the industry behaves but it does provide a statement of intent. We need to turn these four areas of development into concerted action, and we have already begun, working with Warwick University to further research in the area. It is incumbent on all of us to take action, however, now is the time to work together, as a community.

UK carbon cuts - is 80 percent coming?

Here’s a quicky from the government: reviewing the UK CO2’s by 60 percent by 2050 could soon become mandatory under the Climate Change Bill, according to environment secretary Hilary Benn.

Review? Could? Do these words indicate an attempt to wriggle out of this carbon cut nonsense? Apparently not. The review will look at whether to up it to 80 percent. That’s a lot of cut.

Here’s what our Hilary said:

“The Climate Change Bill is groundbreaking legislation, and will provide the foundations for building a low carbon Britain. We need it to be as strong as possible.

“The scientific evidence has moved rapidly, and as part of a new global climate deal, developed countries may have to cut their emissions by as much as 80 per cent by 2050. That’s why we announced a review of the UK target last year.
“This review will now be a statutory duty, and I’ve asked the Committee to provide their advice on both the 2050 target and on the first three carbon budgets by 1 December this year.”

Solar plane - round the world with no fuel

What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done? Parachuted out of a plane, maybe? Mooned in crowded pub? Shut your eyes while you’re driving at 80mph? Tell your partner you didn’t like the dinner they just spent hours slaving over? Pah. Wuss. Try becoming an adventurer and flying around the world in a plane with no fuel.

Which is just what adventurer Bertrand Piccard (surely adventurer is the coolest job title in the world) is planning to do.

The International Air Transport Association has become a partner of Solar Impulse, a solar plane venture which is going to circumvent the globe with in an aircraft producing no emissions and using none of the normal carbon spewing diesel required. The twosome are all about cooperation now, apparently, and IATA will help Solar Impulse in its round the world mission by getting air clearance for the journey.

The first flights for the solar-powered plane will happen next year and by 2011, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, CEO of Solar Impulse, will do the flight around the world.

Greenbang officially thinks this is the coolest thing ever. Roll on 2011.

Pythagoras Solar hooks $10 million

Pythagoras Solar has found itself on the receiving end of a $10 million series A funding injection led by Israel Cleantech Ventures, alongside PitangoVenture Captial and Evergreen Venture Partners.

Greenbang would like to bring you more details on what Pythagoras is up to but the company is all about secrecy right now and a note on their website says: “The company expects to disclose more about its products and technologies by early 2009.”

However, Greenbang can tell you that the fund will be used to pay for “R&D and global commericalisation” of its products. Well that clears that up then.

Here’s for info from Pythagoras Solar to be getting on with:

Pythagoras Solar is focused on dramatically changing the economics of photovoltaic technology through innovation that changes some of the basic technical principles behind the discipline. To accomplish its goals, the company is working to combine software models, optic design, semiconductor processes, materials science, and mass manufacturing techniques to build highly durable, cost effective solar energy products.

Greenbang tracks the explosion of the environmental industry, reporting on news of green innovation and thought leadership.

We blog on this rather than the environmental problems of the world because we are interested in the answers to climate change.