Category Archives: Going Green

Ethanol != Gasoline

I have to applaud Industry Week for an article they ran a couple of months back on how “Raising Ethanol Levels Could Hurt Consumers, Manufacturers — If Not Done Right” and shedding even more light onto why ethanol, and corn-based ethanol in particular, is not the answer. Not only are we on the verge of a Global Food Crisis, with food supplies the lowest they’ve been in at least 50, if not 100, years, but, as the article so astutely points out, raising ethanol levels in blended gasoline can be harmful to many devices, as most devices in North America were designed to run on a 10% ethanol mix, if not a 0% ethanol mix.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped at least one state (namely, Minnesota) from ignoring this fact and passing ridiculous legislation that all gasoline sold in the state be E20 (the short name for 20% by volume ethanol blended gasoline). Now, it’s true that they have a study that concluded that E20 will not harm current automotive fuel systems, which I’m not sure I believe considering many vehicles on the road were designed for E0, and that E20 apparently provides similar power and performance to E10 (and if your factor of error is large enough, I might buy that), but they’re overlooking one very important fact – cars aren’t the only piece of technology that runs on gasoline! Americans love their ride-on lawnmowers and their gasoline powered chain-saws. Many people have back-up power generators that run on gasoline … and many hobby pilots have small planes that run on gasoline. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Did the study test every single product out there that runs on gasoline? All 400 Million of them? Not even close! North America is not Brazil. Flex-Flux Vehicles (FFVs) and other Flex-Flux Engine (FFEs) technologies might be common there, where a 20% blend is perfectly fine (and doubly fine when you can make highly-efficient ethanol from abundant and easily grown sugarcane and not inefficient to produce corn-based ethanol where the corn-for-ethanol production reduces food supplies when there are still a number of countries in Africa where people are still starving on a daily basis), but they are not common, if you can even get your hands on them at all (legally), in North America.

Furthermore, small engines react differently to ethanol mixes than large engines, and often do so in ways that are dangerous. As the article deftly points out boat engines may seize up and gas may leak, the RPM increases on chainsaws as the clutch and chain are constantly engaged, and rubber and other components in small engine products grow corroded and all of this can lead to engine and product failure, and potentially, safety hazards.

So next time someone starts preaching about how ethanol is our savior, make it clear to them that it’s not the answer.

What is the answer? In the short term, it’s actually a really simple one. Stop buying energy from power plants that burn oil and petroleum products. Remember – you’re purchasers and you have the power! Over 20% of energy production in the USA is from oil and petroleum burning plants. If we replaced these plants with solar, wind, and hydro plants, that would increase the oil available for transportation needs by 150%. In the short term, we’d be swimming in it! (The Transportation sector uses roughly 40% of the 7665+ million barrels of oil consumed by the US each year.)

Utilitarian Utah

I expected that eventually a thought-leading state or province would come to their senses and proclaim 4-day work weeks, but I wasn’t expecting Utah to be the first state to go to a “4-day work-week to save energy” in the public sector. I just wish they had gone one step further and mandated 4-day work-weeks for all regular, full-time employees in the public and private sectors. That would have significantly reduced energy costs while making everyone a lot happier in the long one, once they adjusted.

Starting in August, about 17,000 of the 24,000 executive branch employees will shift to a four-day work week. Exempt will be police officers, prison guards, employees of the court, and employees of Utah’s public Universities. It’s a great start, since turning off the lights and AC in 1,000 of 3,000 government buildings will save $3M a year, plus up to 20% savings on gasoline expenses that are incurred by official vehicles. Moreover, employees of the Department of Environmental Quality alone will save more than $300,000 on commuter costs.

But I would have went two steps further. First of all, there’s no reason that University employees need to be exempt. Monday/Wednesday makes just as much sense as Tuesday/Thursday, and what student doesn’t want fewer classes? (Sure the classes are 25 minutes longer, but speaking as a former professor, having fewer classes sells!) Secondly, I would have made it mandatory across the board for regular employees of the public and private sector. Sure, many private sector business need to operate 7 days a week, if not 24/7, but why can’t regular full-time employees, who typically have office jobs, work four days instead of five? I know you need to keep the restaurant, drug store, and movie theatre open late, but your back office staff can still work four days a week, and I bet many of your employees, who are probably working odd shifts now, would prefer fewer, longer shifts and more consecutive days off. Your data center might need to be staffed 24/7, but do your accountants, procurement professionals, and janitorial staff really need to work five days a week? Think of the energy savings (and dollar savings) if the vast majority of the vast majority of buildings could be “powered down” for an extra day a week during the hottest (or coldest) hours of the day (when the most energy is expended)? Huge!

Plus, if North America went to a four-day workweek, the problems that are going to arise with only part of a state or country going to a four-day work week would be averted. If only part of the state, as in Utah’s case, goes to 4-day work weeks, then people who use child-care services are going to run into problems since most day-cares are set-up for people who work 8-hour days, and will only take children 10 hours a day, giving parents who work 8-hour days at most one hour to drop off and get to work and one hour to pick up. But if every one went to a 4-day work week, the day-cares would go to a 4-day work-week too, and then there’d be no issue with having to care for some children up to 10 hours a day, and some children up to 12 hours a day, which many daycares will not have the staff to do since more staff would be required for the same number of children.

So if you really want to help your company save money when costs are rising across the board, use your total cost of ownership skills to do a total cost of operations if your business were to switch to a 4-day workweek and sell the concept to upper management. Then, claim the savings generated as a Procurement initiative at bonus time. (And don’t forget to count the commuter savings generated for your employees. This reduces their cost of living, which reduces the size of the raise the company has to give them to actually give them a raise during a time of inflation. Effectively implemented 4-day work-weeks are savings across the board. Go for it!)

IT : The Biggest Threat to our Energy Future

I’m normally not alarmist, and I’m usually not one to bash IT, especially since it’s the foundation of my living (no IT, no internet; no internet, no web-based software or blogs – and not much for me to do besides go back to academia and do philosawfical research), but, whereas environmental sustainability is concerned, the biggest threat to our future is not pollution from coal based factories, not the (over-exaggerated) dangers of nuclear energy, and not the continually impending shortage of oil – but computers! And I’m not talking about the bleak future painted by Arthur C. Clarke in his Space Odyssey, William Gibson in his groundbreaking Neuromancer, or any other bleak picture of the future where automated intelligence takes over the world and either tries to enslave or kill us, but the very real future where the crushing energy demands of data centers bring down the grid as their energy demands exceed what we’re able to produce.

The fact of the matter is that a single data center requires more energy to run than a small city of 40,000 people (The Greening of the CIO). And that’s just a small data center built two years ago. Today’s large ware-house size data centers (like those that would be required by companies like Google and Microsoft), which pack even more machines into the same amount of space, thanks to Moore’s law and continually decreasing hardware size, can require as much energy as a city of 100,000 to run! According to this recent article in PhysOrg.com, U.S. Data Centers cosume 45B kWh annually, and this is is expected to grow by 40% by 2010, according to another recent article in Environmental Leader. That’s over 70B kWh by 2010!

Now, it’s true that this is still a small fraction of the total energy consumption of the US, but it’s a fraction of use that is growing rapidly – and it doesn’t take into account all of the energy sucked up by computers which usually outnumber employees in an average office these days, or all of the energy sucked up by computers in the home. With over 200,000,000 computers in the US, sucking up 300-plus watts of power per hour, often around the clock (as many people don’t turn their computers off and many (backwards?) companies have policies that network computers must be left on around the clock, even when not in use, to enable network-based updates), even assuming they are only on half the time, that’s roughly another two hundred and sixty five (265) Billion kWh of energy, which is also increasing annually by a considerable percentage (as the number of computers continues to multiply like Fibonacci’s rabbits). This means that, in the US alone, IT is sucking up over 310 Billion kWh of energy annually, and that’s a very significant percentage – closing on 20% when you consider a a 1999 Green Earth Society study that found that computers consumed 13% of the entire electricity consumption of the US in 1999, and that this power consumption was expected to increase to at least 35% by 2020! (Source: Wikipedia.)

The reality is, as pointed out in a recent post by Tyler Shears on Gimmie the Scoop, every time you search Google you could power an 11-watt light bulb for an hour. But that’s nothing compared to the energy utilized every time you access YouTube (which takes up 10% of Internet bandwidth). It’s not just your computer, your ISP’s infrastructure, and the YouTube data centers that consume power to fulfill your request – but every computer and network device in between! The reality is that we’ve left the information age, and entered the energy age – an age where we need more energy every day just to function in our ultra-connected lives. (So think about that next time you think you’re doing good by accessing your Green social network every waking hour of the day!) I don’t know about you, but you should be startled by the fact that Google is using 1.8 Billion watt-hours of energy a day just for basic search queries. Believe it or not, that’s just a fraction of internet traffic!

So again, just like I pointed out in Ten Green Ideas That Work – I, it’s not your SUV that’s the problem, it’s your computer (and your internet addiction), and the fact that almost 19%, or one fifth, of power in the US is generated by the burning of petroleum products (oil) or derivatives (gas and diesel). (In comparison, natural gas accounts for over 29% and coal roughly 31%. Nuclear is about 10% and clean sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and biomass combined account for barely 11%.) So what can we do about it? I’ll address that in upcoming Green IT posts.

Greenwashing: A Brief Introduction

Since I like to talk about Green a lot (and will have some posts in the near future about Green IT and how it can save you money while saving the planet), I thought I should write a post about greenwashing. Greenwashing is a practice used by a company to mislead consumers about the environmental benefits of a product or service. A common example of greenwashing is when a company tells you a product is “certified organic” even when there is no verifiable certification. However, this is not the only common example of greenwashing (or the green sheen) that you are likely to encounter. As noted in Wikipedia, a recent study by TerraChoice called “The Six Sins of Greenwashing” surveyed 1,018 randomly selected common consumer products found that 99% of them were guilty of greenwashing. As a result, they formulated the six sins of greenwashing which were:

  • Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off
    Many “Energy-Efficient” electronics contain hazardous materials (which would likely be banned in the EU under RoHS, WEE, and / or REACH)
  • Sin of No Proof
    Many products, like shampoos, claim to be “certified organic” but the company does not have any verifiable (third party) certifications.
  • Sin of Vagueness
    Products are advertised as 100% natural even though many naturally occurring substances (like arsenic, formaldehyde, and cyanide)
  • Sin of Irrelevance
    For example, claiming products are CFC-free, even though CFCs were banned 20 years ago.
  • Sin of Fibbing
    Claiming your product is certified by an internationally recognized environmental standard like EcoLogo, Energy Star, and Green Seal.
  • Sin of Lesser of Two Evils
    For example, “organic cigarettes” or “environmentally friendly” pesticides. WTF?!?

So how can you identify greenwashing? A page over on Green Home Beta has some tips you can use to find the real green amongst the wannabes. They included:

  • First, remember that not everything that claims to be green or sustainable actually is.
  • Consult Greenpeace’s Greenwash Detection Kit
  • Keep your eyes on CorpWatch’s Greenwash Awards.
  • Check out the University of Oregon’s Greenwashing index.
  • Check the Unsuitablog which is updated regularly with greenwashing examples and which also contains a post on How to Spot Greenwash.
  • Finally, be suspicious of all environmental campaigns. If a company is going overboard trying to sell its green credentials, ask yourself why? What are they trying to hide? Use your instincts. If it doesn’t feel right, then it probably isn’t.

Ten Green Ideas That Work, Part II

The April 28 (2008) issue of MacLean’s had a great environmental article on “Ten Ideas That Work” that consisted of ten mini-articles that is definitely worth a read. Today we are going to cover the last five. They were:

  • Windmills Under the Sea
    Tidal Turbine Mania
    This summer, Northern Ireland will be the first country to deploy massive underwater turbines to generate electricity. Developed by Vancouver-based Clean Current Power Systems, this initial system will power 1,000 homes. A second project is being undertaken in Nova Scotia, Canada in the Bay of Fundy and will be operational next year. It will be the largest commercial-scale unit in the world.
    While the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow fast enough to power a windmill, tides are always on the move. This technology has enormous potential. For example, Clean Current estimates that the tides between Vancouver Island and the mainland is sufficient to power 500,000 homes annually! Worldwide, tidal power has the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 120 M tons annually, and this is likely a low estimate. This technology should be seriously considered by any costal, or island, state or country. While it doesn’t solve the energy problem as a whole, in some parts of the world, it can make quite a dent!
  • Orbit City Abu Dhabi
    Eco-Friendly Cities
    Last month, cranes began to dig the foundations for one of the world’s first eco-cities, which is to be situated 20 miles to the southeast of Abu Dhabi. Being built with money from the Emirati government, Masdar will be a carbon-neutral, zero-waste city of 50,000 that will encompass a university specializing in energy and sustainability issues and economic zones devoted to green industry and research. The entire city will be powered by photovoltaic cells, wind power, and biogas. Water will be conserved with vacuum toilets and high-tech treatment plants that will convert sewage into household water. And cars will be banned, as residents will be whisked about in Jetson-like driverless pods. Shaded walkways and narrow streets will be everywhere to provide cover from the hot sun.
  • One Sheet to the Wind
    Wind Dams
    Lake Lagoda, the largest lake in Europe, might soon be home to a massive wind-dam if an innovative British design firm (by the name of Chetwood Associates) has it’s way. The lake has a number of rocky gorges that act as wind funnels, and it is expected that a single 25m x 75m Kevlar sail will capture enough wind energy to produce 120 megawatts of electricity per year, enough to power 35 houses. It’s not a lot of power, but it’s cheap power, and sails can be hoisted wherever windy conditions prevail. The advantage is that, unlike conventional propellor wind-farms, it doesn’t let any wind-power escape.
  • The Power of Garbage
    Plasma Conversion Power Plants that run on Garbage
    Plasco recently threw the switch on a new energy conversion plant outside of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on a new demonstration power-generating garbage plant that is believed to be the first functioning power plant in the world that runs on zero-emissions plasma conversion. Unsorted household garbage can be fed into a chamber that contains superheated plasma gas (in excess of 8000 C). The chamber breaks garbage down into its atomic components and cools it to produce a synthetic gas that is capable of being burned in a low-emission internal combustion engines. Furthermore, most of the by-products are usable. Every ton of household waste produces 150 kg of a clean, glass-like material that can be used by construction, potable water, small amounts of sulphur (a component of fertilizer) and salt, and a little over 1 kg of non-reusable waste that has to be landfilled. In other words, landfill requirements are reduced 900%!
  • Zero Carbon Footprints in the Sand
    Carbon Neutral Resorts
    Costa-Rica is aiming to be carbon-neutral by 2021 in an attempt to be the number one vacation spot for the carbon-couting grippie (green hippy) who wants a guilt-free vacation. Already, more than 80% of its energy comes from renewable sources such as wind and water. It’s airline, that uses transitional fuel technology, buys offsets every time it flies, and it’s public transportation system is extensive. It also has a significant re-forestation initiative, which will eat the small amount of carbon it intends to produce in the future.