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Does “Green” Sell?

By Claus Schafhalter | November 19, 2010

Activist orga­ni­za­tion Green­peace pub­lishes peri­od­i­cally a “Guide to greener elec­tron­ics”. The guide attempts to rank top elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ers accord­ing to their “poli­cies on toxic chem­i­cals, recy­cling, and cli­mate change”. I have writ­ten about this rank­ing ear­lier, it showed Nokia as the green­est com­pany and Nin­tendo on the bot­tom of the list.

In Octo­ber 2010 Green­peace released their updated rank­ing, here are some excerpts for some com­pa­nies includ­ing their “green score” (10 is best, 0 is worst).

1. Nokia   (Score: 7.5)
2. Sony-Ericsson (6.9)
3. Philips (5.5)
4. Hewlett Packard (5.5)
5. Sam­sung (5.3)
…
16. Toshiba (4.3)
17. Microsoft (1.9)
18.Nintendo (1.8)

Look­ing at this list unsci­en­tif­i­cally I can­not see an obvi­ous con­nec­tion between sales suc­cess of a com­pany and “green­ness”. The top con­tenders do well in the mar­kets, but the low ranked com­pa­nies seem to do very well too. Microsoft is cer­tainly mak­ing lots of money, Nin­tendo is my son’s favorite. So, is it fair to say that being green is an insignif­i­cant fac­tor for over­all sales success?

I think so. Avail­abil­ity of a favorite game or abil­ity to play games with friends is impor­tant to many kids, sus­tain­abil­ity is not. Does this change with the age of the con­sumer? Appar­ently not, fea­tures and cool­ness (think Apple’s prod­uct line) seem to be more impor­tant than qual­i­ties like energy effi­ciency or sus­tain­able  prac­tices  in production.

There might be excep­tions to this obser­va­tion. Some prod­ucts sell because they are deemed to be green (think about a Prius Hybrid for a moment). Still, con­sumers might choose these prod­ucts more to make a state­ment than for its green features.

But I do have one hope: What if there is a com­pany that deliv­ers cool and fea­ture rich prod­ucts made in a very green way? Will this combo sell?

Claus Schafhal­ter, Suno­gos

Topics: News, Sustainable Technology | No Comments »

Clean Tech In California

By Claus Schafhalter | October 7, 2010

Cal­i­for­nia is in eco­nomic trou­ble. Unem­ploy­ment is above the U.S. aver­age, the bud­get deficit is mind bog­gling, and our infra­struc­ture is crum­bling.

How­ever, there is a dif­fer­ent Cal­i­for­nia. One that gen­er­ates new ideas, com­pa­nies, and addresses real global issues like global warm­ing, over reliance on fos­sil fuels and sus­tain­abil­ity in general.

The non profit group Next 10 recently released their third edi­tion of its “Cal­i­for­nia Green Inno­va­tion Index”.

This report is a must read for deci­sion maker inter­ested in California’s future. Here are some tid-bits form the report:

• Roughly $11.6 bil­lion ven­ture cap­i­tal have been invested into “Clean tech” since 2006, in the first half of 2010 California’s inno­va­tors received 40% of all ven­ture invest­ments for clean tech globally.
• Cal­i­for­nia’ s man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs shrank 9% between 1995 and 2008, how­ever green man­u­fac­tur­ing employ­ment was up 19% dur­ing the same time frame.
• California’s elec­tric­ity pro­duc­tiv­ity out­per­forms the rest of the U.S., mean­ing Cal­i­for­nia pro­duces more with com­pa­ra­ble less elec­tric­ity input.

The study con­cludes that clean tech is a dri­ver for California’s econ­omy and inno­va­tion. And I do know there are many smart minds work­ing to deliver the next great things regard­ing clean tech. Stay tuned, and to para­phrase one of our 38th Gov­er­nor’s famous movie quotes: “We’re back!”

Claus Schafhal­ter, Man­age­ment Con­sul­tant @ Suno­gos

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The 2000 Watt Society

By Claus Schafhalter | September 30, 2010

In 1998 researcher at the ETH Zurich released a vision of a soci­ety con­sum­ing only 2000 Watts around the clock (48 kWh a day). The Insti­tute for Energy and Envi­ron­men­tal Research (ifeu) released an inter­est­ing table com­par­ing today’s energy usage in Ger­many to these targets.

I did not look up actual energy con­sump­tion num­bers for the US, but it is save to say that we use much more energy per per­son in the U.S. than they use in Germany.

Now, if you look at the num­bers in detail it becomes very clear that reduc­ing energy con­sump­tion to the 2000 Watt level means sig­nif­i­cant changes to our live style. Say good bye to a sin­gle fam­ily home, a Hawaii vaca­tion, and cities built into the dessert. So, I am not so sure if a 2000 Watt soci­ety can be accomplished.

But is the 2000 Watt tar­get a rea­son­able objective?

I don’t think so. The prob­lem we have is that we con­sume the wrong form of energy. Per def­i­n­i­tion, fos­sil fuels — the main­stay of our energy con­sump­tion — are lim­ited and will be used up at a cer­tain point in time.  But let’s look at it from a dif­fer­ent perspective:

The sun (our only real source of energy) radi­ates about 1.37 kW per square meter to the outer atmos­phere of our earth. Look­ing at Ger­many, about 800 kWh reach the ground per square meter and year. If we also say that we use a solar cell with an effi­ciency of 15% the typ­i­cal Ger­man could gen­er­ate about 120 kWh per year and square meter. So, to gen­er­ate usable elec­tric energy each Ger­man would need about 440 square meter solar col­lec­tors to sat­isfy all his cur­rent energy needs (6000 Watts around the clock). That sounds a lot, but not out of reach.

The 2000 Watt tar­get would reduce the nec­es­sary area to 146 square meters. So, that would make things easier.

How­ever, once we add hydro power, wind, other renew­ables, and assume increases in energy effi­ciency of devices, homes and cars, the total shift to renew­able is not out of the ques­tion using tech­nolo­gies that are avail­able today!

So, what should the tar­get be? Reduc­ing our energy con­sump­tion or chang­ing where we get our energy from? Well, it should be both, and we should start to switch now!

Claus Schafhal­ter, Man­age­ment Con­sul­tant @ Suno­gos

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Energy And Power

By Claus Schafhalter | September 23, 2010

In an ear­lier post I was writ­ing about elec­tric cars and their bat­ter­ies. I talked to a cou­ple of peo­ple and I wit­nessed one seem­ingly wide spread con­fu­sion: What is “energy”, what is “power”, what does  “Watt” stand for and how is this dif­fer­ent to a “kilo Watt hour”.

Let me try to explain:

First, most of what I write today is based on the SI sys­tem (“Met­ric Sys­tem”), with one (con­fus­ing?) exception.

But let’s start:

Energy:

Energy is the capac­ity of a phys­i­cal sys­tem to per­form work. Energy comes in dif­fer­ent forms, i.e. mechan­i­cal energy, elec­tri­cal energy (for instance stored in a bat­tery), heat energy, and so on.

The SI unit of mea­sure for energy is 1 Joule (1J).

1 Joule is the energy expended in apply­ing a force of 1 New­ton through a dis­tance of 1 meter ( 1J = 1 Nm ).

Power:

In physics, power is the rate at which work is per­formed or energy is con­verted, i.e. energy per unit of time (second).

One Joule per sec­ond equals one Watt ( 1 J/s = 1 W)

And here is the confusion:

To describe power we often use Watt or kilo Watt (1000 W).  A  100 Watt light bulb uses power of 100 Watts (100 Joules per second).

To under­stand how much energy we use in — say, 1 hour of using the light bulb, we just add the “hour” to our power: Energy used for our light bulb in one hour is 100 Wh (Watt hours), or 0.100 kWh (kilo Watt hours). As you can see, kWh is widely used, but regret­tably not an SI unit of mea­sure, and this is where I think a lot of con­fu­sion comes from.

So, the bot­tom line: If you use power of 1 kW (10 pieces of 100 W light bulbs turned on) for an hour, you just used energy of 1kWh (kilo Watt hours).

(The cor­rect SI expres­sion would be power of 1 kW for 3,600 sec­onds equals  3,600 kJ energy used).

Does this help?

Claus Schafhal­ter, Man­age­ment Con­sul­tant @ Suno­gos

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When Disaster Hits Home

By Claus Schafhalter | September 16, 2010

On Sep­tem­ber 9 2010 a high pres­sure nat­ural gas pipe rup­tured and sent a fire­ball into the sky a few hun­dred meters away from my house in San Bruno, CA. At least 4 peo­ple died and many homes were dam­aged and destroyed. When I took my boys into the car and evac­u­ated our house I saw black smoke com­ing our way. There was also an eerie orange glow behind the smoke. This was less than 15 min­utes after the ini­tial blast, and at this moment every­one thought that an air­plane went down caus­ing the fire. It was a reminder of the risks we incur using fos­sil fuels to drive our stan­dard of living.

As I have writ­ten ear­lier I am crit­i­cal con­tin­u­ing to use fos­sil fuels as the main source of our energy. But as a per­son used  to the ben­e­fits of mod­ern soci­ety I do also know that we can­not shift our energy pro­duc­tion from fos­sil to renew­ables over night.

I am con­vinced that two things have to happen:

1. A long term shift to renew­able energy sources accom­pa­nied by a much more effi­cient use of the energy pro­duced.
2. A short term focus on safety to ensure that our cur­rent energy pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem is as save as possible.

In 2010 we had a few wake up calls  show­ing us that we need to rethink our behav­iors, processes and method­olo­gies. BP lost Bil­lions of Dol­lars when their oil well in the Gulf of Mex­ico blew up. Com­pa­ra­bly lit­tle money would have been nec­es­sary to pre­vent the acci­dent from hap­pen­ing in the first place, if the risk and its con­se­quences had been taken seriously.

Sim­i­lar things can be said about the San Bruno gas explo­sion. It becomes more and more evi­dent by the day that PG&E knew about the risk of these gas pipelines run­ning through densely  pop­u­lated res­i­den­tial areas. But short term it is cheaper to take an ele­vated risk and hope that noth­ing hap­pens. Mid and long term this is almost cer­tainly the wrong deci­sion, but if no bad inci­dent hap­pens just long enough then exec­u­tives and share­holder can cash in on short term prof­its, while their suc­ces­sors will have to strug­gle with the con­se­quences of unad­dressed risks.

The day when the dis­as­ter hit home made me think. Why is it so dif­fi­cult to change things before some­thing hap­pens? Why is it so seem­ingly easy to change things after some­thing bad hap­pened? At least four peo­ple died on that day in San Bruno. In the days and weeks after the explo­sion the Pub­lic Util­ity Com­mis­sion, State and fed­eral law mak­ers come up with pro­pos­als to enhance inspec­tions, replace old pipes, and enhance tech­nolo­gies meant to lower the risk of another blast.

What will need to hap­pen that we take the risk of burn­ing fos­sil fuels as the main source of our energy source more seri­ously? And will we be able to change before some­thing really bad happens?

Claus Schafhal­ter, Man­age­ment Con­sul­tant @ Suno­gos

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