Green Wombat

Google's green power play

Google the jolly green giant?

In a move to shake up the nascent renewable energy industry, Google announced Tuesday it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing new solar and wind technologies while investing in green tech startups.

The goal, according to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Send the fossil fuel industry to the coal bin of history by making renewable energy cheaper than coal, a main culprit in the global warming crisis.

“Assuming we can develop this, we want to deploy it as broadly as possible," said Brin during a conference call. “Which means we’ll license the technology or put it in place ourselves.” Of particular interest is spreading renewable energy technology to rapidly industrializing but coal-dependent countries like China and India.

Dubbed RE<C (as in Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal), the Google initiative will involve hiring green energy engineers and technologists for an in-house R&D program that will focus on developing breakthroughs in large-scale solar power plants. At the same time, Google's (GOOG) philanthropic arm, Google.org, will invest in green energy companies. Within a few years Google wants to be able to produce a gigawatt of clean energy -- enough to power a city the size of San Francisco -- at a price that will undercut cheap electricity from coal-fired plants.

For solar energy companies, the double-headed approach raises the prospect of both a potential brain-drain to Google and the possibility of a payday if the search giant goes on a green tech shopping spree. Page said Google routinely acquires "dozens of companies" and would apply that strategy to the renewable energy initiative where appropriate.

John O'Donnell, executive vice president of Silicon Valley solar energy startup Ausra, said he welcomes Google's bid to become a green energy player.

"I think folks who have or are developing technologies that can deliver RE<C are going to get some speedup in moving to market," he told Green Wombat. "That's good news for the sector and for the planet."

Ausra, backed by venture capital heavyweights Vinod Khosla and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, builds large-scale solar power plants and recently signed a long-term deal with California utility PG&E (PG&E). "We're at a more mainstream engineer/build stage, and don't expect hiring problems," O'Donnell added. "Google may encourage more smart folks to seek careers in clean energy."

Given that a solar power plant can cost anywhere between half a billion and a billion dollars or more, it appears Google will concentrate on perfecting solar technology rather than get into the utility business. "In terms of building power plants, hundreds of millions of dollars is really not a large sum, so I hope they spend the money in a highly leveraged way to get the most out of it," says John Woolard, CEO of solar power plant startup BrightSource Energy, which is negotiating with utilities to supply 1.5 gigawatts of solar electricity.

"We are very active in the Southwest, and would look forward to working with a group like Google on building out power plants,"  he adds.  "I never would have predicted that Google would emerge as a provocative leader in large scale solar, but I am very excited about the
visibility it brings to an area of technology that we know has real economic potential."

Google already is working with two renewable energy startups. One is eSolar, a Pasadena, Calif., developer of utility-scale solar thermal power plants whose chairman is serial tech entrepreneur Bill Gross. The other is Makani Power, a stealth Bay Area startup that is developing what it calls "high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies aimed at the most powerful wind resources." Page and Brin declined to say if Google has invested in those companies.

PG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Zerwer said RE<C is "clearly a sign of the growing awareness of and response to climate change -- and that is a positive trend, especially for those concerned about climate change, as we are. While we did not work directly with Google on this announcement, we team with them on their energy efficiency and renewable efforts."

Like other California utilities, such as Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE), PG&E is under the gun to obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020.

The move into green energy is Google's biggest departure so far from its core search and advertising business. But Page noted it is not a change of mission for Google.org, which currently is managing initiatives to promote plug-in hybrid cars.

Brin and Page took pains to stress that RE<C makes good business sense, with the potential to profit from Google's stake in green energy companies or technology the company develops. Still, acknowledged Brin, "We're not going for huge margins. We want to deploy this fast."

"This has the ability to change the world," he added.

Report: California leads green innovation

Just how green is California? Deep green. Very deep green, according to a new California Green Innovation Index compiled by Silicon Valley venture capitalist F. Noel Perry's non-profit Next 10 foundation.

That might be taken as so much environmental chest-thumping by Golden State partisans, but the report -- the product of Next 10 and public-interest consultants Collaborative Economics -- offers some persuasive statistics about the role green innovation has played in California's fortunes.

"The index analyzes key economic and environmental indicators," writes Perry, "including energy consumption and efficiency, economic growth and carbon emissions, to help us better understand the role green innovation plays in achieving two goals critical to California’s future: 1) reducing the absolute level of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, and 2) increasing the state’s gross domestic product, which is the basis for our economic vitality "

The conclusion echoes one repeatedly championed by green tech proponents, from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Silicon Valley venture capitalists: environmental innovation and economic prosperity go hand in hand.

Here's some interesting data points from the report:

• "If California’s annual statewide electricity bill was the same fraction of GDP as Texas...Californians would be paying almost $25 billion more for electricity."
• California holds  44% of United States patents in solar technologies and 37% in wind.
• The Golden State has 36 percent of the U.S.'s  green tech venture capital investment.
• "California utility efficiency programs....reduced the need for 24 power plants between 1975 and 2003....The California Energy Commission estimates that building and appliance standards alone have saved residents and businesses $56 billion through 2003 and are projected to save another $23 billion by 2013."
• "More Californians recycle than vote" (More than 50 percent of Californians recycle.)
• "Per capita CO2 emissions in Texas are double those of California. Per capita emissions levels in California today are slightly lower than they were 15 years ago."
• California has about 90 percent of the market for energy-efficient dishwasher and about 50 percent of the market for energy-efficient refrigerators and washing machines

Concludes Next 10: "The growing distance between the trend lines of GDP rising and emissions dropping represent the delinking of GHG emissions from economic growth."

San Francisco oil spill is a tech disaster

The devastating San Francisco Bay oil spill brought out thousands of volunteers over the weekend eager to help clean up miles of beaches and shoreline contaminated with toxic bunker fuel and rescue hundreds of petroleum-coated birds. If ever there was a disaster area suited to exploit Internet technology to crowdsource an army of green berets and deploy them where they're needed most, it's this Twittering, Google map-mashing epicenter of Web 2.0, right?

Not quite. The masses may be wired but California authorities' disaster response was strictly 1.0, as Green Wombat discovered when he showed up at a meeting on Saturday called by the state Department of Fish and Game to brief would-be volunteers about the oil spill from the Cosco Busan. The container ship hit the Bay Bridge last Wednesday, dumping 58,000 gallons of heavy oil into the water. A couple hundred people crammed a room at the Richmond Marina in the East Bay, spilling outside into the drizzling rain. As the crowd peppered officials with questions about how they could get to work -- a few yards away a dull oily sheen streaked the harbor -- DFG representatives patiently explained that volunteers must first receive training before they can be allowed to handle wildlife or clean beaches covered in a hazardous substance.

"We have to get information from you to place you," said a representative from the DFG's Office of Spill Prevention and Response as paper forms were handed out for volunteers to fill in. They soon ran out of forms -- more than 500 people had shown up at another volunteer meeting held a few hours earlier in San Francisco. Many members of the audience, BlackBerries and Treos in hand, stared in disbelief. Paper? "I'm from Autodesk (ADSK) in Marin and we have 1,500 people that want to get to work on the cleanup," said one woman. "Can't you just put up a PDF on your site so we can download it?" Said another volunteer: Can't we just send you an e-mail?"

To be fair, state officials were overwhelmed by the response from Bay Area residents. ("An oil spill in San Francisco is so different than any other place for one reason: the people," one DFG official said at the meeting. "People here are passionate about where they live.") And by Sunday morning, the oil response unit's site had posted a Yahoo (YHOO) e-mail address (coscobusanspill@yahoo.com) so volunteers could send in their contact details. Still, if you wanted to report sightings of injured wildlife or contaminated shoreline, you had to spend a lot of time hitting redial to try to get through jammed phone lines.

The authorities' old-media disaster response strategy of relying on newspapers and television to broadcast one-way messages to a population accustomed to Internet interactivity is missing an opportunity to coordinate a faster and better targeted cleanup operation. For instance, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, residents of the coastal hamlet of Bolinas north of San Francisco were left on their own as they struggled to place a boom across the mouth of the Bolinas Lagoon to keep oil out of the environmentally sensitive Marin County estuary, home to a hundred bird species and a colony of harbor seals.

Now imagine if an Internet database of volunteers and their locations was mashed up with a Google (GOOG) map of oil-threatened areas. Would-be volunteers could go online to see where assistance was needed near them or they could be notified by e-mail or text message. Extra bodies and equipment might have helped avoid what Green Wombat found when he and his son visited the eastern shore of Bolinas Lagoon on Sunday: globs of thick purple-black oil dotting the rocks while a dozen endangered California brown pelicans floated off a nearby sandbar where seals bask during low tide. (Photo at right.)

An online map mashup or wiki page would have also helped wildlife rescuers collect old sheets and towels and other materials needed to clean oil-soaked birds as well as coordinate volunteers to provide support to cleanup crews. As it was, Green Wombat happened to hear a volunteer at the Richmond meeting mention that you could drop off sheets at the Berkeley Marina, where rescued birds were being collected. Stopping by the marina on Sunday, we found another ad hoc group of volunteers helping along the shoreline cordoned off with yellow police tape.

This is not to say creating a Web 2.0 emergency response system would be easy -- particularly when it means integrating such an operation with government agencies. But it sounds like an opportunity for some established Internet company or entrepreneur. In the meantime, Bay Area residents, environmental groups and local governments are organizing themselves online, turning to -- where else? -- Facebook to set up oil spill clearinghouses to exchange information and coordinate haz mat training sessions for volunteers.

The Apple Mac: Now Available in Green

Steve Jobs's green manifesto is bubbling about the blogosphere and much is being made over whether  (AAPL) waived the white flag under pressure from a Greenpeace campaign, which labeled the company an ecotard - as Fake Steve might put it - for its past "failure to take a green initiative."  Of much more interest to Green Wombat than the pissing match between Jobs and the enviros, or the not-so-veiled jabs he made at rivals, is how Apple has raised the bar on environmental disclosure. Ironically enough, given Jobs's obsession with keeping secrets, he detailed the amount of various toxic chemicals present in Apple's computers and iPods and disclosed future manufacturing plans to remove them. Of course, all this served to show that Apple, despite its previous opaqueness, is greener than its competitors. Still, for all the press releases issued by Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) trumpeting various environmental initiatives, few have discussed in detail such topics as the arsenic, mercury, cadmium and hexavalent chromium content of their products and specific plans to eliminate the chemicals. For instance, Jobs said Apple will begin to sell mercury-free Macs this year that use LED backlight technology for their screens and will also begin using arsenic-free glass. And he revealed that Apple phased out the use of some hazardous materials in recent years thanks to innovative design. Jobs pledged to completely end the use of others by the end of 2008. Apple has been slammed for its e-recycling polices and the fact that its flooding the planet with millions of iPods that will soon be discarded for the latest model. Jobs said the company this summer would expand its free take-back policy at U.S. Apple stores to all outlets worldwide. He also noted that Apple makes its computers with high-quality materials in demand by recyclers. "Few of our competitors do the same."

"We apologize for leaving you in the dark for this long," Jobs concluded, promising to provide updates on the company's green deeds, including an examination of its products' carbon foot print. "Apple is already a leader in innovation and engineering, and we are applying these same talents to become an environmental leader."  Coming from another company that might just be a standard-issue feel-good line. If Jobs's becomes as obsessive about the environmental design of iPods and iPhones as he does their look, feel and function, then other consumer electronics makers are about to face some real competition on the green front.

Why Apple left increasingly eco-conscious customers unenlightened about what appears to be years of work to remove toxic chemicals from its computers and gadgets remains a public relations strategy best plumbed by bloggers like David Swain at Clean PR.

Bad Apple: iPod Maker Ranks Last on GreenPeace Green List

Lenovo is the greenest consumer electronics giant while Apple (AAPL) turned brown in Greenpeace's latest ranking of companies according to their e-waste recycling policies and their use of toxic materials in their computers, mobile phones and other gadgets. The Chinese computer maker, which now own IBM's (IBM) personal computer division, won kudos from the environmental group for taking back old computers for recycling and for reporting the volume of waste it recycles as a percentage of its sales. “Given the growing mountains of e-waste in China - both imported and domestically generated – it is heartening to see a Chinese company taking the lead, and assuming responsibility at least for its own branded waste,” said Greenpeace official Iza Kruszewska in a statement. “The challenge for the industry now is to see who will actually place greener products on the market.” Greenpeace ranked Apple last for what it calls its "failure to take a green initiative." The enviro group has campaigned against Apple (see ad above) in recent years but the company has denied the group's charges that it is among the least environmentally friendly of the major consumer electronics giants. But unlike  Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Apple has not gone out of its way to portray itself as clean and green. Nokia (NOK) took the No. 2 spot on the Greenpeace list while Sony Ericsson (SNE) came in third, Dell fourth and Samsung fifth. Greenpeace highlighted Sony's efforts to remove toxic materials like phthalates and beryllium from its products.

HP's Green Computers

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) today began selling a series of desktop business computers designed to meet strict new federal energy-efficiency standards for PCs that go into effect in July. Called Energy Star 4.0, the standards are the first update to computer energy efficiency requirements since 2000. Hewlett-Packard says its HP Compaq dc5700, dc5750 and dc7700 can be configured to use 52 percent less electricity than standard desktops, saving between $6 and $58 in power costs annually per computer. That means the computers  run cooler and need less air conditioning. Electric utility companies like PG&E (PCG), Xcel Energy (XEL) and Southern California Edison (EIX) have been pushing Dell (DELL), HP and other computer makers to improve the energy efficiency of  PC power supplies to lower the demand on the grid.

Solar Companies Team Up to Win $168 Million in U.S. Funding

photo: PowerLight

What do solar panel maker BP Solar (BP), Silicon Valley renewable energy software startup Fat Spaniel, Canadian power inverter maker Xantrex, the Palo Alto Research Center, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the Georgia Institute of Technology have in common? They're members of one of 13 solar energy "teams" that have come together to secure funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to advance solar technology innovation. The BP Solar-led team, for instance, qualified for up to $19.1 million in government grants over three years - provided Congress approves the Bush administration $168 million budget request for the program - to increase the efficiency and cut the price of solar panels to make photovoltaic power competitive with fossil fuel-fired electricity. While such corporate-government-academic collaborations are not uncommon in Europe, Asia and Australia, it's a bit of a departure in the epicenter of dog-eat-dog capitalism - particularly in a highly competitive market like renewable energy chock full of startups all hoping to be the Google of green tech.

Among the teams selected by the feds for funding: Boeing (BA), whose Spectrolab subsidiary has developed the world's most efficient solar module, is leading a research effort to make high-efficiency concentrating PV systems. The team, which could get up to $13 million, includes utility Southern California Edison (EIX), PV Powered and the California Institute of Technology. PowerLight, the Berkeley-based PV system installer now owned by SunPower (SPWR), will use its $6 million in government cash to research ways to make improve manufacturing of non-solar cell components with the help of partners like design software company Autodesk (ADSK). SunPower itself will lead a team, which scored nearly $18 million, that includes MIT to find ways to produce cheaper PV cells and systems.

Silicon Valley thin-film solar startups Miasole and Nanosolar each are heading teams to  develop high-volume manufacturing of flexible solar cells and to research technologies to incorporate them into commercial buildings, respectively. Each team qualifies for up to $20 million. Meanwhile, multinational conglomerate General Electric's (GE) team will use its $18.6 million to work on ways to speed up the adoption of solar systems through a new type of silicon cell.

The Top U.S. Green Tech Cities

originally uploaded by Simon Kapadia

When it comes to incubating clean technology which city is the greenest of them all? Austin, according to a survey by SustainLane, a San Francisco service that provides environmental management and policy information to governments and businesses. The Texas capital won for its Clean Energy Incubator, the University of Texas's research and development programs and Austin Energy, a municipal owned utility pursuing renewable sources of electricity. (It probably doesn't hurt that the city itself has declared it will go carbon neutral by 2020.)

Taking the No. 2 spot is San Jose, the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley. No surprise there, given the valley's venture capital firepower and concentration of tech companies going green, like chip equipment maker Applied Materials (AMAT)'s move into solar cell machines. And while not green tech companies themselves, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Sun Microsystems (SUN) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are pushing energy-efficiency chips and computer servers.

Green Wombat's hometown of Berkeley ranks No. 3 due to the University of California's new $500 million biofuels research center funded by BP (BP) and the presence of the  Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Berkeley also is the headquarters of solar energy company PowerLight, recently acquired by SunPower (SPWR).

Pasadena scored the No. 4 slot for hosting NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, the California Institute of Technology and a variety of Southern California alt energy companies.

The Boston area came in fifth for its concentration of renewable energy startups and big brains at MIT.

Runner-ups: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, San Diego and Houston.

Environmentalism 2.0: Widgets Fight Global Warming

Web 2.0 helped save Silicon Valley. Now will widgets help save the world? The environmental movement and its corporate allies hope so. They're tapping Web 2.0's real-time, interactive technologies in an attempt to spawn a national social network for social do-gooding in the campaign to slow global warming. The past week saw the launch of two such efforts: Beat the Heat from the Natural Resources Defense Council and 18seconds from a coalition that includes NRDC, Environmental Defense, Yahoo (YHOO) and Wal-Mart (WMT). Beat the Heat lets individuals put themselves on an interactive map of the United States, listing their global warming worries and what they're willing to do to cut greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, Jorge, a retired Army sergeant in Texas, says he'll buy energy efficicent appliances while Jenni, a 35-year-old Ohio nurse, says she'll consider purchasing a hybrid car. "NRDC is really wading into the Web 2.0 waters for the first time, but we think the opportunity the social web presents is enormous," NRDC's Kim Ranney told Green Wombat, noting that nearly 1,300 people appeared on the map in the first two-and-half days after its launch. "The social web ... lets us get the message to people directly that solutions to solving global warming exist now, and then it lets people carry that message forward and get ideas from each other."

Potentially more disruptive to the eco-political status quo are sites like 18seconds, which maps purchases of high-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs in near real-time by state and metroplitan area. The data is supplied by major retailers to AC Nielsen.

As you probably know by now, CFLs use 70 percent less electricity than standard incandescent bulbs, and are thus, potentially a big gun in the fight against global warming. Australia last week banned traditional light bulbs, and in the U.S. there's a push to replace incandescents with CFLs. (Which would be a bonanza for retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot (HD) as well as CFL makers such as General Electric (GE) ) It's a quick - takes 18 seconds, in fact - easy, and a concrete, high-impact step every citizen can take to combat a global problem that often seems beyond the influence of the average Joe or Josephine. Thus the power of a Web 2.0-powered site like 18seconds, hosted by Yahoo. It tallies the consequences of the simple act of changing a light bulb: the nearly 15 million CFLs purchases since January 1 have eliminated 6.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking 104,501 cars off the road. Better yet, to incite some good old-fashioned capitalistic competition, the site ranks states by CFL purchases per capita. Green Wombat was a bit shocked to see redder than red Texas - No. 10 in the rankings - kicking California's green butt (No. 18). In fact, in another sign that green issues do not necessarily break along the red state-blue state divide, the top 5 CFL-buying states per capita are Arkansas, Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Ultra-liberal Massachusetts, mind you, came in No. 48. As far the as the metropolitan rankings go, how did the left-leaning, Mother Earth-loving Bay Area do? As I write this looking out at the lights - incandescent apparently - of San Francisco, we're No. 103 in the per capita rankings with 396,755 bulbs bought. Silicon Valley, the green tech epicenter of green tech and home to enviro-friendly companies like Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Sun Microsytems (SUN), was No. 107 with 165,890 CFLs purchased. (The top spot went to Bellingham, Washington.) To make the campaign viral, the 18seconds includes a customizable CFL-tracking widget that people can put on their own websites and blogs to show bulb buys in their metropolitan area or state.

Now imagine other mashups that make planet-warming personal. Like combining vehicle registration records with auto emissions data and Google Maps to create a widget to show geographical concentrations of the "hottest" cars and trucks. In fact, one can even picture a pitch for a startup that makes green widgets......

Can Technology Save the Planet?

The new issue of Business 2.0 magazine - where Green Wombat is an editor - is out and the cover stories feature companies developing technologies to help solve some of the planet's most intractable environmental challenges. The wombat's colleagues at CNNMoney.com have transformed the print version into a great online package of stories, photos and video. Check out  "8 Technologies for a Green Future" and profiles of companies tackling nine of the world's most pressing problems in "Go Green, Get Rich."

Now we want to hear from you. Can technology save the planet and ensure a green future while making a buck for entrepreneuers?  Let us know what you think by giving us your comments below.

The Top 10 Green Tech Trends for 2007

ThinkEquity alternative energy analyst David Edwards has released his Trends for 2007 list, and there's a couple I wanted to highlight. No. 1 is a move from bolting solar panels to roofs - effective but not aesthetically pleasing - to integrating solar cells into building materials themselves. Solar-panel maker SunPower (SPWR) president Richard Swanson recently acknowledged in a speech that customers - call them the Dwell magazine demographic - increasingly are buying solar systems based on their look. Thus SunPower's sleek black rooftop panels, shown above. As Green Wombat recently reported, thin-film startup HelioVolt will work with building material companies to incorporate its solar cells into walls, windows and roofs. A second trend Edwards identifies is the emergence of new business models to finance alternative energy systems. Probably the biggest obstacle to wide-spread adoption of solar power systems is the fact that you have to wait as long as a decade before the free energy pays back the cost of the solar panels. "It’s like buying 25 years worth of gas when you buy your car," quipped Dave Pearce, CEO of thin-film solar company Miasole, at a recent conference. One possible alternative, according to Edwards, is to have the solar panel installer retain ownership of the rooftop system and then strike a power purchase deal with the homeowner or business owner. He notes that Wal-Mart's recent request for proposals to equip its stores with rooftop solar systems - a development first reported by green blogger Joel Makeover - requires bidders to present alternative ways to finance such systems, including ownership or leasing of solar panels by the retail giant or ownership by the installer.

Other green tech trends for the New Year predicted by Edwards are:
3. A move away from using silicon in solar cells.
4. More consolidation of solar panel producers and installers, such as SunPower's 2006 purchase solar systems installer PowerLight.
5. Adoption of new ethanol technologies.
6. The emergence of a bioplastics industry as an offshoot of biofuels production.
7. Stepped up efforts by automakers to develop electric cars or hybrids that rely more on battery power than internal combustion engines.
8. More investment in the development of storage technologies to be used with renewable energy sources like solar and wind power.
9. The continued rise of China as a huge market for renewable energy.
10. The Democrat-controlled Congress will take the lead on renewable energy legislation to bolster the solar and biofuels industries.

A Solar-and-Wind-Powered Mobile Phone Service

When it comes to environmental technologies, developing countries are not only a huge potential market but are leap-frogging the post-industrial world in going green from the get-go. Take Fiji. A  local renewable energy firm, Clay Engineering, brought Vodafone (VOD) mobile phone service to an off-the-grid island in the South Pacific archipelago by installing a cellular station powered by a solar array and a wind turbine. (Photo at left) That was a more sustainable alternative to lugging a polluting diesel generator up to the peak of the 1,500-foot-high (500 meter) mountain where the cell repeater station sits. Servicing such a generator would have been costly. But the station's solar and wind array is monitored and controlled remotely via the Web and mobile phone with technology made by Silicon Valley distributed energy software company Fat Spaniel. In another sign that renewable energy software is a growth market, the Fiji project was the startup's 500th installation.
 

Verdiem: Energy-Saving Software Sales Boom as Corporate America Goes Green

This morning Green Wombat spoke to a CEO whose startup tech company's revenues have shot up from $400,000 to $4 million in two years. Verdiem isn't about Web 2.0, it doesn't do online video or mobile social networking for Generation Z. It makes software that - wait for it - manages corporate personal computer networks to lower energy usage. Sounds as sexy as, oh, selling CRM or SQL server database
software, right? But to companies looking to save money and enhance their enviro cred as global warming concerns escalate, Verdiem's software is a justifiable buy, and the 25-person Seattle startup has carved out a high-growth niche as Big Business goes green.  "The whole ethos of integrating an environmental or sustainability strategy as a corporate objective is the single biggest change we’ve seen over the past year," says Verdiem chief executive Kevin Klustner.

Verdiem began selling its Surveyor software in 2004 to school districts and other public institutions and non-profts that need to keep costs under control. "But we saw very little interest on the corporate side," Klustner says. "We save energy on a PC network. The IT guys are the ones that manage the network and they don’t pay the energy bill." But with more and more Fortune 500 companies appointing VPs for sustainability and environmental policy, demand for Verdiem's software has grown, according to Klustner. He says corporate clients - currently about 15 percent of Verdiem's customer base -  include Quad/Graphics, the big Wisconsin printing company, and several Wall Street firms he said did not want to be identified at this time. Verdiem sells seat licenses to the software and charges a yearly maintenance fee, which includes updates and an annual energy audit. That gives customers hard data on how much money they're saving by lowering electricty usage - a figure that can be translated into how many fewer tons of greenhouse gases they're emitting. Verdiem has also cut deals with 25 utilities that will rebate part of the seat license if companies can show they've lowered electricity use.

Coal is Still King: $1 Billion in Tax Credits for "Clean Coal" Companies

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced $1 billion in tax credits for nine companies developing gasification and other so-called clean coal technologies. The winners include Duke Energy (DUK) and the Southern Company (SO), two giant utilities in the southeast United States that have been targeted by environmentalists over pollution from their coal-burning power stations. Gasification breaks down coal and transforms it into a gas that can be burned with lower emissions of sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide, greenhouse gases that form smog and acid rain and contribute to global warming. Gasification plants operate more efficiently than standard coal-fired power stations and thus have lower carbon dioxide emissions. The technology, of course, does nothing to ameliorate the high environmental costs and greenhouse emissions that result from coal mining itself.

Using "Smart Agents" to Save Energy, Fight Global Warming

“Smart agents” have infiltrated Australia’s renewable energy research center. The smart agents are wireless motes the size of a Treo that adorn office walls while other versions are attached to refrigerators, a wind turbine and solar panel arrays. The agents communicate among themselves, analyzing data and adjusting the center’s power systems and air conditioning. For instance, when the smart agent that controls the facility’s solar arrays learns from the weather report that maximum photovoltaic power will be produced around 2 in the afternoon, it will notify the agent that controls the center’s air conditioning. “That agent may say, `I’ll wait until 2 p.m. to turn on the air conditioning when we have renewable energy coming online,' ” said Glenn Platt, the smart agent project leader for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, when the Green Wombat visited the CSIRO Energy Centre this week. Other agents monitor individual offices, observing that one person may prefer warmer temperatures than others. The mote (like the one pitctured at right) will adjust the thermostat for that office, saving on air conditioning costs. 

CSIRO has been trialing the technology with utilities who are interested in installing smart agents in individual homes to control heating, air conditioning and appliances. Each home would be plugged into a neighborhood smart grid, with every house exchanging information with the others about power useage. Managing peak demand is a challenge for utilities – when it’s a scorcher, everyone turns on their air conditioning at the same time – so the agents learn which residents can tolerate higher temperatures and who is at home when. That allows the power company, through the agents, to turn off the air conditioning in a handful of houses for 15 minutes at a time to manage peak demand rather than implement rolling blackouts that take entire neighborhoods off the grid. As the share of electricity generated by solar and wind power grows, Platt expects demand for smart agents to rise as homes, businesses and utilities will need to manage increasingly complex systems to ensure that the cheapest and greenest energy is used a the right times.

A Plug-In Prius that Powers Your House

PG&E, one of the United States' largest and greenest utilities, is working on technology that would allow plug-in hybrid cars to feed electricity to the power grid during peak demand, Green Wombat has learned. That would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by letting the utility to switch to Prius power when demand spikes rather than being forced to buy "dirty energy" from  coal-fired power plants.  In effect, a plug-in hybrid becomes a back-up generator. "Your car will be able to keep your home powered during a blackout," Roland Risser, PG&E's director of customer energy efficiency, told Green Wombat last night at a dinner put on by the utility, Sun Microsystems and eBay to promote their environmental programs.

Microsoft: Saving the Planet with Software

Microsoft (MSFT) is working on an "environmental dashboard" to let companies monitor their energy and water use, waste management and other activities. "Global warming is a reality, it’s a top-of-mind issue for business decision makers, and it is not going away," wrote Microsoft exec James Utzschneider on a company discussion forum. "Companies will need systems to track and mitigate the impact they have on the environment." Utzschneider is the general manager for marketing for Microsoft Dynamics, which makes software to manage corporate finances, manufacturing, purchasing and planning, among other things. The environmental dashboard will collect relevant data from those activities and give executives a snapshot of their green bottom line so they can pinpoint ways to improve efficiency and minimize the impact on the environment.