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.
An artist's rendering of the company's wave system
(Credit: Orecon)Right now, wave power is in the early experimental stages, but venture capitalists are lining up to be on the ground floor.
Orecon has lined up $24 million in funding from Advent Ventures, Venrock, Wellington Partners and Northzone Ventures to build a full scale prototype of its wave power machine and, if the results are positive, move toward commercial deployment.
The U.K.-based Orecon has devised a large-scale buoy for harvesting power from waves. In a nutshell, waves striking the device create pressure in a chamber, which is used to turn a turbine and create electricity. A single device will be capable of producing up to 1.5 megawatts of power. Orecon's system in part is based around the engineering devised to build offshore oil rigs. The system will produce power for a minimum of 25 years, the company says.
That's similar to the buoy being built by Ireland's WaveBob. WaveBob has a 1/4 scale prototype in the waters off Galway now and hopes to insert a full-scale device, which will produce over one megawatt of power, in the water in the next few years.
Most wave systems produce far less power--maybe 250 kilowatts. Although smaller devices are cheaper to make, larger devices have certain advantages. For one thing, because they are large, they can survive rugged seas better. Each device also produces more power, which means fewer devices and potentially less maintenance.
Both the UK and Ireland want to build local wave industries and harvest energy from the sea. Both countries bear the brunt of strong waves that cross the Atlantic. WaveBob CEO Andrew Parish also pointed out in a recent interview that this section of the Atlantic is awash in maritime engineering know-how.
Still, wave energy, like tidal energy, remains mostly in the potential stage because of the environmental challenges and the costs. Over the next two to three years, expect to see larger prototypes and more testing. Commercially produced wave power may begin to start crossing the grid sometime between 2010 and 2015.
It is interesting to see Venrock in the deal. The firm mostly concentrates on more exotic technologies that could go commercial. Recently, it has put money into fusion and clean diesel.
Incandescent bulbs are getting it from all sides these days.
Taiwan may soon join the list of national and state governments to impose regulations that lead to the demise of traditional incandescent bulbs. Neal Hunter, CEO of LED Lighting Fixtures (LLF), says there are rumors in the lighting world that Taiwan will pass legislation that would phase out incandescents by 2011 or 2012. Sporadic reports in Taiwanese papers have come out saying that the Ministry of Economic Affairs wants to get rid of incandescents too.
Taiwan will also promote LEDs as the light source of choice for the future, he added during a presentation at the ThinkEquity ThinkGreen conference.
While Hunter said he hasn't been able to confirm the status of any bills, it makes sense. Incandescents consume quite a bit of energy. Close to 95 percent of the power gets converted into heat, rather than light. Taiwan, like other Asian nations, is struggling with ways to get consumers to cut down on electrical consumption. LEDs and compact fluorescent bulbs use considerably less energy and last longer, although they cost more.
Taiwan also plays a key role in the LED market. LEDs are chips, after all, and Taiwan remains one of the chief centers of semiconductor design and manufacturing. Supporting LEDs would be another of the country's job and export creation measures.
LLF, by the way, is a company worth keeping an eye on. It makes light fixtures based around LEDs. It has installed LED lights at McDonald's, Denny's, Starbucks, Marriott, Best Western, and Microsoft.
At $75, LED light fixtures cost more than standard light figures, but they use a lot less power. LLF just came out with a fixture that puts out the same amount of light a 65 incandescent bulb would, but it only uses 5.8 watts.
"Last year the best we could do was 11 watts," he said.
The quality of light is getting better, as well. "The current perception is a bunch of little lights shining through a fixture," he said. "The only way to make it (commercially) is so that people don't know the difference."
To take the sting out of the cost of the fixtures, utilities have begun to issue rebates to customers to encourage them to buy LED lamps. One is offering commercial building owners a little over $22 for each LED lamp they install. LLF also has LED lamps for the residential market, but the market will take a little longer to take off.
The company is also staffed and run by LED veterans. Hunter himself used to be the CEO of Cree, a large LED manufacturer.
One of my closest friends in the entire world is convinced Al Gore is full of it.
Like a lot of News.com readers who have reacted to the Nobel Prize announcement, he doesn't believe Gore deserves the award. I should add that my super-skeptical buddy--no names here or he'll come after me with a rolling pin--also dismisses the arguments seeking to prove the existence of global warming as warmed-over pseudo-science. He just doesn't believe the available evidence makes for a strong case.
Perhaps it's only circumstance that he hails from the computer industry. Then again, maybe not.
News.com attracts a fair number of folks who I like to call the "civilians,"--the non-geek crowd. But technology types still make up the heart of our audience. So it was that I've been inundated with private e-mails (in addition to the public TalkBack postings) responding to my column earlier today on "Al Gore's tech cred." Although hardly a scientific sample, most of the folks who've bothered to write in think Gore's all wet and I'm a clueless dolt for lending any credence to his argument. Maybe that doesn't represent the silent majority out there--or at least I hope not because the level of vitriol is off the charts.
I have mentioned my friend Justin Label, one of the partners at Bessemer Venture, before. Among other things he writes the Venture Again Blog. Bessemer is a highly respected old-line Silicon Valley venture capital firm. It has been an active investor in clean tech for a while, and is a backer of Miasole as well as SV Solar. I found myself on a plane recently with one his colleagues, Ted Lin. More than its investments, Lin was describing to me a new carbon friendly initiative that Bessemer itself is undertaking internally.
Its logic is simple, if it is investing in clean tech because it believes in being part of the global warming solution, not only making money, then it should practice what it preaches.
While still in its early days, it is targeting both its power and travel usage, and expects it will likely implement an internal reduction plan as well as purchasing offsets.
I asked Lin where this came from, and he said this initiative has come down from the top of the firm. It makes sense, and it is good to see the activity happening. My hat is off to the company.
Lin also pointed out that Bessemer is going to be buying offsets for its smaller portfolio companies (those under 50 people). "The goal is that when these companies grow into bigger companies and leave the nest, they will continue the tradition. We want them (our portfolio companies) to lead the next-generation of environmentally responsible enterprises."
One of the things he did ask: did I know any good offset providers? As with any venture capitalist, the company is looking for the "best of breed." So if you are interested in helping Bessemer, e-mail Lin at Ted@bvp.com.
"Without carbon capture and sequestration, we are all toast."
Jiang Lin, a scientist with the China Sustainable Energy Program with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, issued that gloomy proclamation earlier this week, and it's a fitting description of the current world situation when it comes to global warming. To make it worse, I asked Lin about how the world is responding to the challenge. Not well.
"We haven't invested in deep research or spent much money in testing out the scenarios," he said. "There are a lot of uncertainties."
Still, it's not over yet, and the University of Texas this week announced it has received a $38 million grant to study the feasibility of injecting carbon dioxide into brine-filled underground wells over a 10-year period.
The project is part of the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB), funded by the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the Department of Energy. SECARB's goal is to study carbon-dioxide injection and storage capacity of the Tuscaloosa-Woodbine geologic system that stretches from Texas to Florida. The region has the potential to store more than 200 billion tons of the gas, which the department says it equal to about 33 years of emissions.
Beginning in the fall, SECARB scientists will start to inject a million tons of carbon dioxide a year into a brine reservoir near Natchez, Mississippi. The brine is up to 10,000 feet below the surface.
In some ways, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of gaping holes. The U.S. has produced more oil than anywhere else in the world, historically speaking--250 billion gallons have been sucked out of the ground here--there is lots of empty space underground, according to Chevron's CTO Don Paul, who spoke this week at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference.
Sequestration, though, poses logistical and financial challenges, Paul said. Just to capture the carbon dioxide coming out of power plants, factories and other "stationary" carbon-dioxide emitters, it would take an infrastructure the same size as the natural gas infrastructure.
"That's a lot of pipe," Paul said. Paul also issued some interesting facts on peak oil.
Yahoo is purchasing offsets from wind turbines in India and investing in hydropower projects in Brazil, according to India news portal Sify.com.
Yahoo is planning to make up for the 250,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases it emitted last year, committing to become "carbon neutral" by the end of this year. That amount of greenhouse gases is roughly equivalent to driving 35,000 cars for a year or lighting the Las Vegas strip for two months, said Christine Page, director of climate and energy strategy at Yahoo. The company announced its plans Monday.
"We know the issue of global warming is top of mind for our consumers and employees," Page is quoted as saying.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--How much conventional oil is there left in the ground? Close to 2 trillion barrels, according to Don Paul, Chevron's chief technology officer.
The "geological endowment" of conventional oil--that is, the amount of oil in the Earth--once totaled about 3 trillion barrels, he said during a presentation at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference here. We've used about 1.1 trillion. Oil companies with current technologies can't get it all out of the ground, so maybe there is a trillion barrels left for human consumption.
Don Paul, CTO, Chevron
(Credit: Chevron)And we're consuming a lot of fuel: about 3 billion gallons a day worldwide, or roughly a half-gallon for every person on the planet. By 2012, the human race will have consumed 1.5 trillion barrels, Paul said in a hallway conversation.
Thus, peak oil--the theory that we're about to get into declining numbers on conventional oil--is probably real. However, Paul said, "I don't think it has to be the catastrophe that other people have predicted because there are other ways to make fuel."
The alternatives include shale oil and oil sands. There might be a trillion barrels of oil in shale. One problem is that producing oil from shale or oil sands generates significant amounts of carbon dioxide--but a lot of that carbon dioxide comes from producing the hydrogen needed to process the raw materials. "It is this production of hydrogen that is creating the CO2," Paul said.
Some French companies, he said, have proposed building nuclear plants in Canada near the oil sands deposits to generate steam--that is, water vapor.
Biofuels will also contribute, but biofuels are small right now. Roughly 20,000 gallons of biofuels get made a day, and that needs to be increased by 10 or 20 times, Paul said.
Electric will also come, but batteries need work. "Even the best batteries have 1/10th of the energy density of gasoline," he said. (Others, such as Nobel-winning chemist Richard Smalley, have pointed out how there's no easy alternative when it comes to energy density.)
Liquid fuel makers will also have to develop carbon capture and sequestration sites. Chevron is kicking off a large sequestration project in Australia. Sequestration is a technological challenge, but the bigger problem is financing and planning the infrastructure. These are huge construction projects after all. Just to capture the carbon dioxide coming out of power plants, factories and other "stationary" CO2 emitters, it would take an infrastructure the same size as the natural gas infrastructure.
"That's a lot of pipe," Paul said.
Expect to see sequestration projects in the U.S. Given that the U.S. has produced more oil than anywhere else in the world, historically speaking--250 billion gallons have been sucked out of the ground here--there is lots of empty space underground.
There's a lot of room between E10 and E85, says Alexander Karsner.
Karsner, the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Department of Energy, says that there needs to be a greater variety of gas-ethanol blends. E10 has only 10 percent ethanol, and in some states E10 contains only 2 percent to 3 percent ethanol, he said during a meeting with reporters at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif.
In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush called for more research into alternative fuels. A month later, he took time for a photo op with this ethanol racecar at a North Carolina biotech company.
(Credit: White House photo by Paul Morse)On the other end of the spectrum there is E85. E85, however, is sold in only one-third of 1 percent of gas stations nationwide. (E10 can fit into conventional pumps.) If forced to carry more E85, gas stations would figure out how to adjust their supply chains to handle it, but it might be easier to concoct new blends.
In Brazil, for instance, the lowest blend is E22, which contains 22 percent ethanol. E15 can be inserted, and pumped out of, conventional gas pumps in the U.S.
"Can you grow that market more with intermediate blends?" Karsner asked rhetorically. He then stated: "It is not going to be just E10 and E85."
Other notes from Karsner:
The administration is going to lay out more details on a long-term energy proposal on November 5. One idea will be "National Interest Corridors" or "clean energy superhighways." In these, large sections of the Midwest could become wind farms that supply power for distant metropolises. It will take a lot of work, particularly in making better and less expensive transmission lines. Property owners are tough, too.
"We are always fighting NIMBY (the "not in my back yard" state of mind)," he said.
He's a big supporter of geothermal, but doesn't believe it can provide 20 percent of the United States' electrical power, as some have asserted.
The DOE labs will focus a lot of energy in the future on energy storage (for instance, batteries) and solid state lighting. In the relatively near future, the department will show off a solid-state light that surpasses the efficiency of compact fluorescent lights.
For those of you who have clean-tech business plans, the DOE has loans for you too. The agency has committed to freeing up $13 billion, or half of its budget, to loans for businesses with low-carbon and carbon-free products or operations.
For someone who has a reputation for being boring and wooden, Al Gore certainly is polarizing.
News.com Poll
Supporters assert that he has been one of the principal actors in bringing awareness to global warming and prompting governments and industry to take action against greenhouse emissions. While a lot of people became familiar with his work through the recent film "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore has been writing on the issue since the '80s.
Detractors, however, say he's an opportunist who exaggerates the scientific evidence and doesn't even follow his own advice. Witness the furor over reports that his mansion in Tennessee is an energy guzzler.
On Friday, Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been assembling comprehensive scientific reports and recommendations on global warming for the U.N. The prize has also revived talk that Gore may run for president in 2008.
"He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Nobel committee, as quoted in CNN.
But what do you think? Visionary or hypocrite? Does he deserve the prize? Write a comment in the TalkBack section. A poll will be up soon.
