News Blog

It already makes Office. Now, Microsoft wants a hand in controlling your office.

Like IBM, Microsoft has launched an effort to make itself a major player in the rapidly growing energy-efficiency market. The company is recruiting developers and is eyeing opportunities to produce software itself for building control systems, traffic management systems, or even the software that gets used by water quality management districts.

It's a strategy driven by opportunity and need. Climate change and rising power prices are forcing corporations and individuals to seek out ways to curb energy consumption. Besides costing more, energy is highly inefficiently used. Some studies note that about half of the electricity produced does not get used for a productive purpose. Carbon taxes, or cap-and-trade systems, are likely inevitable: all three U.S. presidential candidates support them.

On the other hand, building management and water control systems aren't exactly perched on the cutting edge. Many companies still sell closed, proprietary systems for controlling heating, lighting, etc. Two of the biggest clean-tech IPOs last year were for companies--Comverge and EnerNoc--that have devised systems for automatically curbing electricity consumption. IBM, meanwhile, is in the midst of conducting trials with utilities to control thermostats and appliances remotely.

"The whole transportation sector has huge inefficiencies that can be reduced by software," said Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, in a phone interview. When I asked him how big the need is for modern software for building management, he laughed. Years ago, he worked in commercial real estate.

"I am highly familiar with the massive opportunity for software and intelligence to optimize energy control systems," he said. "I think that buildings account for something like 37 percent of greenhouse gases around the globe. If you look at the big sectors--transportation, buildings and building management, deforestation, electrical grid, and utilities--in every one of those we are looking at how software can enable innovation."

As in other markets, Microsoft will rely heavily on third-party developers. The developers will come up with the applications, and these will run on MSFT platforms.

"We will build some applications ourselves and we will try to accelerate the entire market to address this problem," he said.

In December, it kicked off a program, called Ingenuity Point, in which developers submit applications or ideas for applications. Microsoft then gives awards each quarter to the best ideas and tries to promote the most promising in the marketplace.

One of the winners, OSIsoft, for instance, has devised business intelligence applications for tracking how much water gets lost from the reservoir until it finally hits the tap. The company is also involved in a desalination project in Australia. The country is currently wrestling with a prolonged, severe drought. Another company in France has come up with a traffic management and monitoring application: this can help delivery companies avoid clogs and thus save gas.

Stay tuned for my upcoming, related article: Microsoft's plan to make more efficient products and curb energy in its own operations.

Reading about Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize this week while juggling holiday shopping gave me a severe case of cognitive dissonance about consumption. This feeling intensified today when the viral video The Story of Stuff arrived in my e-mail inbox.

'The Story of Stuff' with Annie Leonard

The Story of Stuff illustrates the consumption chain and aims to reframe our conversation from unlimited production and consumption to sustainability and equity. The video is quite engaging, and I was impressed by its simplicity and effectiveness. No flashy graphics or sensational techniques, just simple line animation accompanying a 20-minute video lecture by sustainability expert Annie Leonard.

The story of this project is an interesting case study of viral video. Leonard has more than 20 years of experience studying factories and dumps around the world--giving her deep knowledge of sustainability issues, but not exactly a visible platform to launch a movement. Enter the video: according to Leonard's blog, The Story of Stuff has been viewed by more than 100,000 people since it was launched last week.

Cambridge, Mass.--Corporations are mishandling their data center energy consumption to the point that they risk disruptive failures of their technology infrastructure, a panel of experts said on Tuesday.

Panelists, which included speakers from the research firm the Uptime Institute, as well as AMD, Hewlett-Packard, EMC and APC, agreed that the use of electricity in data centers is a problem too few IT professionals are addressing. The panel was assembled by AMD.

"The ever-widening gap between computing performance at the server and chip level is not being matched by energy efficiency," said Bruce Taylor, chief strategist and evangelist for data center computing at the Uptime Institute. "This creates a thermal density and power consumption problem that is now a crisis."

The energy consumed by data centers is already becoming a major economic and environmental issue. Three percent of all power consumed in the United States in 2010 will be in data centers, Taylor said.

He forecast that spending on energy for data center equipment and cooling will climb from 1 to 3 percent of IT budgets to between 5 and 15 percent by 2012.

And yet, many data center operators are not aware of the associated energy costs or problems. Taylor cited statistics from a survey of 100 data center operators done last year by Aperture Research Institute, which found that almost 40 percent of respondents said they had run out of space, power, or cooling capacity without sufficient notice.

One of the main reasons why IT professionals don't pay attention to energy consumption is that other people in the organization get the bill. Also, data center construction and design are typically handled by a company's real estate or facilities department.

"There's only so much that can be done at the technology, the platform level, and we have to address this in a more holistic data center level," said Ken Baker, infrastructure technologist at HP.

Indeed, panelists said that there are already several technologies that can lower power consumption significantly.

Virtualization and power-management technologies are becoming more pervasive and, if exploited, are already available and installed. One financial services company has started to levy fines on company departments that don't use virtualization because of the higher energy costs, said John Tuccillo, marketing director for power supply company APC.

Other technologies are coming online but have not yet entered mainstream usage. For example, HP sells a system that will automatically dial down the cooling in a data center based on the heat generated by equipment. This is a far more efficient approach than cooling the entire room to 60 degrees--a temperature that's comfortable for people but cooler than needed for data center gear.

"Many systems within a data center are operated manually," said HP's Baker. "Customers have to get comfortable with higher degrees of automation."

Direct current power, use of outside air for cooling, and liquid cooling are areas that should be explored longer term to lower electricity use. Water cooling can reduce consumption by 5 to 10 percent, but it is 3,000 times more efficient than air, Taylor noted.

When asked whether many of these energy-saving measures pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time, panelists said that many technologies available now for no cost have yet to be implemented. A survey from AMD found that only 10 percent of users take advantage of existing processor-level power management, which could reduce consumption considerably.

Also, the layout of data centers could be improved for energy savings, which doesn't necessarily cost more.

But most customers are still not aware enough of the associated costs and potential risks to have full-scale energy efficiency programs in place, panelists said.

"You can't manage what you don't measure," said HP's Baker.

In 1899 economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen introduced the term Conspicuous Consumption to describe what he believed to be the evils of wealth accumulation in the nouveau riche upper class of the Gilded Age (Veblen was not exactly a "right wing" economist). You can best think of Conspicuous Consumption today as the notion that consumerism and "keeping up with the Joneses" drives economics.

One of my friends, Helen Priest from Meridian Energy, coined a new version of the term this week--conspicuous sustainability. She is here from New Zealand's largest (and all green) power company visiting Silicon Valley, and she's watching the torrent of activity around everything green and clean. It struck her that we are reinventing Conspicuous Consumption--keeping up with the Joneses in all things green. You have to wonder if solar panels or a LEEDs rating on a McMansion somehow doesn't miss the point.

So let's think: Al Gore's son gets arrested for doing 100 mph with marijuana in the car--in a Prius! (As I told one my friends, I didn't know they could go that fast.) Nouveau riche tech execs out here in Silicon Valley put ultraclean, and even more, ultraexpensive, solar power on their roofs. Buckingham Palace offsets the carbon footprint of the Queen's recent trip to the United States. Dell has Plant a Tree for Me Program, which I used when I bought a new Dell last month. There is an exponentially increasing number of examples of consumerism driving green.

But to be fair--conspicuous sustainability is pushing everything from the rapid growth in solar to the greening of corporate strategies like General Electric's Ecomagination, BP's Beyond Petroleum and General Motor's Live Green, Go Yellow. It's pushing hybrid electric sales, fuel cells to power our PDAs and carbon offsets--all good things for the environment.

I put the term to my friend, green business guru Joel Makower, and he quickly agreed that conspicuous sustainability is exactly the term for our age (We didn't discuss whether it was good or bad). Joel's response was, "I think the quintessential symbol for the conspicuous sustainability age would be the carbon-neutral Hummer." Or maybe Gore's carbon-neutral 10,000 (square foot) San Francisco home. He also said "And then there's Moskito, Richard Branson's privately owned Caribbean island, which he wants to be carbon neutral..."

In Veblen's mind, Conspicuous Consumption was a very bad thing, but for green tech and the environmental movement, is conspicuous sustainability a good one?

News flash: Americans have money to throw around. And we like to spend it on shiny, new gadgets.

The Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group representing electronics companies, released a study Thursday that shows the average American adult spends $1,200 on electronic gizmos each year. The result is that the average U.S. household has about 25 consumer electronics products each.

Though we're still snatching up CE mainstays like cell phones and cameras, the top growth sectors in the industry are digital video recorders, network routers, MP3 players and cable modems, according to the study. So, though it's long been predicted we'd be living in totally wired homes, the increasing popularity of DVRs and routers indicate we may finally be on our way.

The study also found that teens spend $350 a year on gadgets, roughly half of their discretionary money, and adults with teens living in the home, spend $500 more than the national average of $1,200.