Viewing Posts by Dave Shirley
Grab Your Green Funding
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The LDI Corporation of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, just received an award of a grant from Green Launching Pad (GLP). LDI manufactures upholstery fabric for architects and designers who are looking for green products for their facilities. According to LDI VP of Sales and Marketing, John Dame, “We have developed an energy efficient environment and environmental-friendly process that will allow us to offer a wide variety of decorative print patterns to our customers. The GLP funding will be used to help us purchase some of the required equipment to launch this new initiative.” Last year LDI experienced a 3o% growth that Dame attributes partially to a changing market place. GLP is an effort funded by federal stimulus funds through the Department if Energy and hosted by the University of New Hampshire. On GLP’s “about” page, they say that they want to be the hub of green activities and under the heading of “community” even has a button for “find a project”. This round of GLP funding was specifically targeted for manufacturing companies. This is a state effort, funded by the feds, and by targeting manufacturers, the message is that manufacturing is an important segment to New Hampshire’s economy. According to John Lynch, New Hampshire’s governor, “It only makes sense to do what we can to bolster this important sector of our economy, and that’s exactly what we are doing by working aggressively….” To LDI, it validates that the work they are doing is important, because there were 18 companies that applied for the grant. The application and review process was rigorous and LDI is one of 3 companies to received a grant Bottom-line or should I say quadruple bottom-line, is that there are grants available out there to help defray some of the costs of greening your company. Make sure that you explore all of the options, local, state, federal, as well as private funding. |
We’ve always said that, while the altruistic reasons for greening up your projects is a good thing, keeping in the spirit of people, planet, profits and projects, money is also good. We’ve also stressed the importance of keeping your ears to the ground for rebates and other incentives to green up your projects and processes. To that end, there is an organization called Greenest Data Center
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To date, about $80 million dollars have been committed to the project. This is really an unprecedented collaboration between industry, universities and a state government. One of the major drivers for the increase in datacenters, and by extension increased energy use, is the need for scientific and engineering computing. To do that properly requires a massive amount of computing power. According to the Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) website, the facility will include “33,000 square feet of computer room space optimized for high performance computing systems, a 15MW power feed, and a high efficiency cooling plant that can support up to 10MW of computing load. The on-site substation includes provisions for expansion to 30MW and the MGHPCC owns an 8.6 acre site, leaving substantial space for the addition of new floor space. The communication infrastructure includes a dark fiber loop that passes through Boston and New York City and connects to the NoX, the regional education and research network aggregation point. Boston University initially will have a pair of 10 GigE connections from its campus to its resources located in the Holyoke facility.” Some of the features will include:
This is a phenomenal undertaking and a giant leap forward to green data centers utilizing clean, renewable power, lower carbon footprint, collocation, virtualization, and all the other things that go into a comprehensive greening of IT. Hopefully, MGHPCC will be a model to emulate. |
Continuing with the theme of Green IT, a consortium of major colleges in the Boston, including Boston University (where I am have currently developed and am teaching a course in Green IT), Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, U Mass (Rich’s alma mater) along with industry partners Cisco and EMC, together with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are creating a “world-class”, green data center in Holyoke, MA, on the banks of the Connecticut River. Why there? Because, there is a large hydro plant producing clean, renewable energy! Green Information Technology
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So what are the implications; increased energy usage - costs, emissions, strains on an old power grid and capital costs, and more. It affects just about every system. IT is the key to modern business and the way we are using energy is unsustainable! Green IT is about using IT more efficiently. Here are some facts from the EPA (a favorite source for us because it is free):
So what should be the goal of Green IT?
In the future, I will be posting about of the issues involved with the information industry including life cycle assessment of equipment, or lack of. I will also look at some of the best ways to execute on Green IT including basic steps as well as some more complex efforts including its effect on people, planet and profits. |
One of the “real” green impact zones is in the world of information technology. The increase of electronic transactions (How many of you use e-banking?), the growth of Internet communications, on-line shopping, electronic medical records and global positioning systems have caused an explosion in the IT industry. Government documentation going digital, digital record retention, disaster recoveries, emergency services, national security and scientific computing also has a huge impact in the IT industry. Photovoltaic. Photo What!!
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Google is one of those companies that we considered “Top of Their Game” in our book. It seems, from the article, that some were speculating that Google was “losing its appetite for clean power” because it had decided to stop its initiative “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal.” But I suppose it wasn’t that Google is not interested in clean energy, it is just that that initiative had run its course. Google says that it is investing $94 million into four photovoltaic projects that Recurrent Energy is building in the Sacramento area. So what are these projects? To paraphrase a line from Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” The Sacramento Municipal Utility District has agreed to a 20 year deal to purchase 88 MW of solar power from Recurrent Energy. Recurrent Energy develops solar energy projects and generates clean electricity to utilities and large energy buyers. They are the primary solar development company for Sharp Corporation, and are a Sharp subsidiary. For this particular project, there are four sites south and south east of Sacramento where these solar arrays will be built. The first of the projects are scheduled to come on line in 2012. So Google is not abandoning their search for cleaner energy, just exploring all options. But one thing that stands out in my mind is that fossil fuels will not be going away anytime soon. I applaud the efforts of the clean energy industry and their backers to explore alternate clean energy sources. I’m no fortune teller, but my tea leaves say that for the foreseeable future, energy will be provided by a combination of electricity (nuclear, solar, wind, fossil fuel plants, including wood and waste product fueled plants), natural gas, coal and oil. The key will be to increase our usage of clean energy produced (including nuclear while finding the solutions to the safety issues surrounding nuclear plants), and decrease our dependency on oil and natural gas while making those sources cleaner. We must work to decrease our dependency on the least clean energy sources, because I can’t see us totally eliminating their use. |
Well, that’s an interesting word, and I like interesting words. It means, according to Encarta, literally “generating current of voltage when illuminated.” It is further defined as “able to generate a current or voltage when exposed to visible light, or other electromagnetic radiation.” So while I have seen the word before, I never actually paid much attention to it. I’m sure it was the box for my solar garden lights. It is really a great word foto-vol-tay-ik. I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it if it wasn’t for a recent article I was reading about Google. 'Tis the Season
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And then there is that Christmas tree with all the lights and ornaments. When the lights went bad, they were thrown away, but the ornaments, now that was a different story. A lot of them are handed down from generation to generation to be unboxed and hung on the tree from year to year, reuse! At one time the trees were collected and used to fuel a huge bonfire to signal the end of the holiday season and to warm us while we watched. One of the best uses of discarded Christmas trees we’ve seen is that they are collected and ground up for mulch to be used in the spring on minicipal lands or made available to citizens for their gardens. Christmas trees are certainly a renewable, recyclable resource, just ask the Virginia Christmas Tree Growers Association http://www.virginiachristmastrees.org/facts.asp. There are now alternatives to the traditional non-recyclable wrapping paper. Have a contest to see who can come up with the most sustainable wrap. It is amazing what people will come up with, especially if there is an incentive involved, like some homemade cookies for the winner. If you do buy paper, make sure it has the Sustainable Forest Initiative symbol. And, then do what my mother used to do, carefully unwrap the present to preserve the paper for another gift. Reuse again. Have another contest to see who can come up with the cleverest idea for ribbons and bows or other packaging decorations. Gift bags are also to be considered as they can be used again and again. Food as a package decoration is great, as long as it isn’t something perishable. Candy makes great decorations, especially the Christmas candies like candy canes and ribbons, very colorful. I have a friend who sends a very simple Christmas card, but he hand ties a fishing fly that is included. Each year is a different fly. A hand tied fishing fly would be a great decoration for a simple package (just watch the hook). There are a lot more things to green up your holiday season. Just look on the Internet; LED lights for the tree to reduce energy usage, solar lights for the outside (a disappointment for Clark Griswold) to reduce energy usage to 0, and more. Not only is it fun to create ways to be more sustainable, but the results could drastically reduce that holiday waste. Now, if I could just do something about my holiday waist-line to keep myself more sustainable. |
For some of us, the holiday season, by nature (excuse the pun), is about green. Not Kermit green, but evergreens and “mistletoe and holly” to quote a Christmas Carol. But it could go either way, sustainable or not, and if it goes not, it goes in a big way. Americans toss out an extra 25 million tons of trash over the holidays, largely due to packaging. I remember when I was young and it was all about the present count. Each present was gaily wrapped by one of Santa’s elves and mysteriously appeared in the on Christmas morning under the tree. The tree miraculously appeared with ornaments and lights just in time when my question of “Has Santa come?” was answered in the affirmative, usually in the wee hours of Christmas morning. Funny I never heard the sleigh. By the time all the presents were unwrapped; there was an enormous pile of colored paper. What to do with it? Usually, it went into gigantic black plastic “contractor’s” bags to be placed on the curb with all of our neighbors black plastic bags. I’ll bet some of that wrapping is still in a landfill somewhere. After all, there is virtually no degradation taking place in a landfill. Besides, the waste in landfills, the remnants of the wrapping paper can be a fire hazard. People almost burn their houses down by throwing too much of the paper in their fireplaces. Have you ever seen how that stuff burns?
