Green, technology and people

Okay – as promised I would share my findings on my way to a new company car. Just to emphasize this about me – I like driving. I really, really like driving. Fast is fun. There are a few things as exciting as going through a turn with your wheels almost breaking out and hearing them scream underneath you. It’s just nice.

But anyway, the old faithful Golf V GTI has to go and something has to replace it. My company, Microsoft, has a very flexible car policy that rewards you for leasing green and cheap but does not make leasing expensive and exotic impossible. This out of the belief that people should be allowed to make their own decisions but you can steer them in a certain direction rather than make them choose something. For instance, the BMW salesperson that I talked to told me that at IBM you are only allowed to lease a 116 and a 320d Efficient Dynamics. That’s it. (If someone can verify for me whether this is true, I am quite curious). I like our policy better because I can make my own choices. And since my employer also throws in a 1st class train ticket I could compensate my car choice with more train rides. The higher CO2 output of that car could then be compensated by taking the train more often. I know myself and I know I like driving too much for this to be successful in my case so I need to chose a greener model.

So far I have been looking at possible candidates and if you look at a list of cars with low CO2 output you will see the usual suspects; the Prius, a couple of hybrids from Honda, the stripped down VW Polo and Golf and a whole bunch of really small cars. And then there is one that sticks out, the BMW 320d Efficient Dynamics edition. With 109 grams per kilometer, it only has a slightly higher value than the Prius. What is special about this car is that it shows that a downsized diesel engine which has been optimized for low carbon output does not have to be a 110 bhp engine like you see in all the ‘green’ Volvos. No, the 320d carries a whopping 163 bhp which was quite an impressive number for a sports sedan not so long a go. How do they do this? Special tuning for the engine (the same as in the regular 320d but with less horsepower and optimized gears – it’s a manual), special rims and and additional improvements to the wind aerodynamics underneath the car among others. Why don’t they do all the non-engine adjustments for all their cars? I don’t know.

Last saturday I took it for a test drive and I was positively surprised. Having been in a Prius once, I was kind of fearing that this type of car would change BMW’s slogan ‘Freude am Fahren’ into ‘Freude am Schlafen”. The car was very responsive and still had a lot of power thanks to the 163 bhp. The nice thing about this car is that you can drive it in different ways. With the Prius you can only drive it in the boring way. The BMW however, you can drive this any way you want. On the short drive I managed to let the back break out in the corner and drift it a bit – in a ‘green’ car. When you drive it normally, it is a very smooth ride, the stop/start system kicks in a the light and a gear indicator makes sure you are keeping the engine at the right rev number. The point is that even though the purpose of this car, and of me as the potential buyer, is to drive efficient and produce less CO2. It is perfectly capable of doing this. It also gives you the possibility to drive it a little more on the edge, at moments when you just don’t want to ride eco(nomically). And that is great about it. It’s up to me to take an extra couple of trainrides to deal with the less than optimum performance.

The quality of the materials and so on was very good as you would expect. And like in every BMW, there is an option list that is really, really long……. Starting price is 39.995 Euro and it falls into the 20% tax category.

Conclusion? I am impressed by how BMW have made this car be so efficient and produce some really good CO2 levels while maintaining the dynamic drive experience that they are known for. (Did you notice that I used the words ‘Efficient’ and ‘Dynamic’ in this sentence without even knowing I am plugging BMW’s green slogan that way – ahh, the power of marketing).

Anyway, I like the car and it has become a serious possibility for me.

More later.

For those of you who are football fans (the original meaning of the word football) it was hard to miss. This was the week of Lionel Messi. Four goals against Arsenal in a Champions League semi-final AND scoring against archrival Real Madrid to further secure first place in the Primera Division – I think you could argue you could have worse weeks than that. This remarkable performance immediately triggered discussions amongst football commentators and journalists whether Messi had now entered the elite group of world’s best footballers ever; Pele, Maradona, Cruyff. The hype was everywhere, people claiming that he had already won and proved so much at his age, surely he must be part of this group. Others were more cautious, stating that he still had a long way to go and what made the others great was their sustained position at the top of football. No doubt Messi is a world class player but he needs to be at the helm of international football a bit longer to really judge his greatness. I saw one analyst make a comparison with Ronaldinho who also was seen as the next big thing since Maradona but who blew up and proved to be a short (but impressive) bubble. Let’s hope Messi will do better that that.

This hype-driven journalism reminds me of the ‘next-big-thing’ hunger that also exist in the IT/tech industry. Bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs are also always looking for the next facebook, the next twitter when even those companies still have a long way to go to see how durable and how sustainable their current success will be. In a sense, Twitter especially is like Lionel Messi. Everybody likes twitter and is convinced of it’s greatness and it’s place in our life and therefore in our economy. But we have seen many examples (like MySpace now on the decline, or Palm now being up for sale) that looked like they were on top of the world. Nothing would be able to threaten their position as the current next-big-thing. And yet they crumbled.

Our current capitalist (meaning extremely short term driven) media environment is the beast that feeds off the hypes. And with the media landscape ever expanding (this blog being an example), the feeding frenzy over new things is even getting bigger. The risk behind this is that hype takes over common sense and that certain players, companies and yes, alternative energy solutions are being bombarded to be the answer to all our troubles. This blurs our view on what needs to be done. The reality off course is much more complex than this. Especially in the field of sustainable energy. Nothing is clear yet, nobody knows which way it will go and those who claim to know are foolish on the one hand and also very needed visionaries on the other hand because they help us move in a direction – any direction. It is only history that will make the distinction between fools and visionaries. It is funny that we never look back on the success rate of our predictions of the future – my gut feeling says that of all the experts making statements about the future of technology, sustainable energy, or even football will be right in less than 1% of their predictions. Yet we keep making the, and worse, we keep believing them.

Hype-driven journalism (or even hype-driven society) is a bad thing because it will influence people and politicians to narrow their vision at a time when the broadest possible vision is needed. It is needed to look at all possible alternative solutions and make sure they get a chance to reach some level of development so we can truly let history decided which one of them proved to be the right one(s). Investors, banks and governments need to keep the pitch as broad as possible, to remain in football analogies, instead of steerning the ball into the centre funnel every time they attack.

Let’s remind ourselves to look at Leo Messi in ten years and see where he stands. Let’s hope he has given the world many more weeks like last week but let’s not rush to conclusions. Let’s allow companies like Twitter and Facebook to prove they are durable, that they can survive and grow in a changing environment. And let’s allow the different developments in alternative energy to run their course without hyping one of them out of proportion. This is how innovation happens. Competing solutions will sort themselves out but they need a playing field to do so. But in a world where the time to market seems to be measured in days rather than months or even years and where global media is following (and cheering, or booing) every step under a looking glass and where no immediate sight of delivering the answer to all our problems is pushed to the side – innovation is slowed down rather than accelerated.

I wrote in one of my earlier posts about a CO2 Compensation service. I have to admit I was quite skeptic of the idea. I know that my current lifestyle emits too much CO2 and this felt like a way to buy myself a clear conscience. It reminded me of a practice that was common in the Middle Ages in the Catholic Church – the paying of Indulgentia. The original idea was that by doing good or giving back to the community, you could ‘even out’ the impact of your sins. This quickly turned into a system that was widely taken advantage of and resulted in a blossoming mini-economy around these payments. The ability to pay for your sins was a big source of income for the Church but the side-effect was that morality was on the decline, simply because people could buy back their conscience.

I wanted to know more about the CO2 compensation service offered by the Climate Neutral group. I called them up and asked them whether what they offered was a way to buy myself a clearer conscience or whether there was more to it. They explained to me the theory behind the service, stressing the fact that we cannot yet live in a fully CO2 neutral society and that an additional investment to ‘pay’ for CO2 emissions compensation will help us get there quicker. This is off course a fully voluntary step that companies and individuals have to take and it is no surprise that the majority of their customers are companies. In a way though, this works like a Carbon Tax – something which many key thinkers believe is a better solution than a Cap and Trade program. You pay for the emissions you are responsible for.

So far so good, but I was still puzzled by the simplicity of the service. You pay a fee and voila, you are ‘climate neutral’? What actually happens with my money? The money paid is invested in ‘CO2 reducing projects’ – all certified by several standards bodies. So, that sounded like I cannot really call myself ‘climate neutral’ now can I? I mean, the service actually does not compensate for my CO2 emissions; it does not take them out of the atmosphere. What it does is that it invests in alternative energy projects, resulting in less CO2 in the future. Don’t get me wrong, that is still a good thing, but calling myself ‘climate neutral’ after I pay the fee…..hmm, that seems like a bit too much.

Another question I had was around scale and impact. What if everybody does this? Will that work? Will the calculations they made to determine the fee you need to pay based on the amount of CO2 you emit be strong enough to hold? If so – why do the governments not pick this up, charge everybody the amount and we are in climate neutral nirvana? It seems it is a bit more complicated than that. Because there are not enough sources of sustainable energy yet, having everybody buy this service will not get us in a climate neutral society. That will still be a very long process. Furthermore, the execution of the service is hindered in some way by the Kyoto protocol. Investing the money in projects within countries that are part of the Kyoto protocol will actually be taken into account when determining the reduction targets set by the protocol. The Climate Neutral Group does not want to reduce the burden of the Kyoto members because otherwise it would be building energy neutral projects that will then not have to be built by the nations themselves. So therefore, it invests in regions not covered by the protocol.

The CO2 compensation service should be seen as one part of a bigger plan. We cannot live on sustainable resources yet and if you, as a company or an individual, want to take full responsibility for your emissions now (while you are also trying hard to reduce them) – you can, through this service. The Climate Neutral Group also sees that compensation is just a part of a more layered approach, this is why whenever they work with their clients, the focus is mostly on sustainability consulting with CO2 compensation to cover the emissions impact that is left.

Will I buy the CO2 compensation service? I think I will. I am not done working on reducing my emissions but I will take responsibility for paying for my footprint that will remain and speed up the process of building facilities that product sustainable energy.

I have read a lot of books and papers on energy and climate change and I have recently read a book that really is the best one of them all. It is extremely insightful and uses a very non-biased way of comparing our energy use and the possible sustainable energy sources to cover that.

In essence, the book looks at the possibility of sustainable energy first and then the economics behind it. The answer to the first question the author raises “can we live on sustainable energy?” is : yes. But only if we invest massively in developing sustainable energy sources and he provides a very clear view on each and every one of them. He also touches on the economic aspects of actually building these sustainable energy sources and fortunately, the answer to the question whether this is affordable is also a firm yes. But we do need to start, and start big.

Mr. MacKay uses his home country, the UK, as the main target for all his calculations and insights and extends those to the rest of the world in later chapters. I believe that this book should be localized for every country because it makes every debate about switching to sustainable energy so much better. I have asked the author whether there are such plans, and if not, whether I can help in making a Dutch version of this book.

If you want to read a much better review of this book than my brief one, check out the review by @BillGates on his blog The Gates Notes.

You can buy or read the book for free here: Without Hot Air

Happy reading.

Toyota got a lot of bad press this week for announcing a major recall of their Prius model due to a malfunction in their braking system. Apparently the error is specific to the braking system in a hybrid car. Hybrids like the Prius brake differently than regular cars, they use both friction from pads pressed against drums or discs and also use the car’s electric motor to slow down. This is also needed in order to be able to regain energy from the braking motion. Is the bad press deserved or not? In some parts yes, it turns out Toyota was aware of the problem before and did not disclose this information. While the braking problem only sometimes occurs and which has the effect of suspending braking for about a second or so, this has already resulted in a couple of accidents. Toyota should have gone public with this information long before it came out now. When large companies detect such an error, especially in such a successful model, the pressure to cover it up to extend the success is very big. The truth usually always comes out though and obviously, Toyota should have treated this differently.

On the other hand, Toyota has been the carmaker that dared to set the stage for alternative powered cars in a time when this really was not yet that mainstream. They are now in their third generation hybrid models and you have to give them credit for that. It is not so much that there is a problem with the braking system. Toyota has shown innovation in moving forward with this technology and while causing a big short-term financial caveat for them and their shareholders (and not to forget, injury to some unfortunate drivers), they still could survive this ‘crisis’ (as Toyota President Akio Toyoda calls it) and come out like the company that drives green innovation and now has to deal with a minor setback. They do deserve credit for innovating and I wish that the media would give them some slack for it. After all, there is no innovation without sometimes screwing up. Personally, I don’t believe in hybrid technology. I think it is just a transitional technology but I do think it is good that they pioneered in it and that they have created a market for it.

It will be interesting to see if this incident has a longer lasting impact on the popularity of Priuses. Especially at a time when two other Japanese firms are pushing a different kind of technology. Nissan/Renault will launch a number of fully electric vehicles that will rely on an intricate replaceable battery system as built by the company Better Place, a startup of former SAP executive Shai Agassi. I was at a meeting with Mr. Agassi last year in Amsterdam where he told about how his company got started and you have to give credit to Nissan/Renault for believing in Better Place’s scheme around replaceable batteries. (Mr. Agassi also spoke at TED) A good example of a company really taking a stand for something. This will enable them to take the majority of the early electric car market or it will backfire because the replaceable battery system may be run over in time by faster loading fixed batteries. The other Japanese carmaker that is working on yet a different alternative technology is Honda, who is betting on a hydrogen powered car. It is very exciting to see these different technologies come to market and see which will prevail. It may not always work, and sometimes needs a push from a government like Better Place & Nissan/Renault in Israel, but this is the free market economy at it’s best. Let’s hope that Toyota will not suffer too much from this incident that this will slow down (no pun intented ) their work on more sustainable cars.

To be continued.

Scanning a number of newspapers around the world and listening to politicians shows a grim picture. Yes, the mistakes that have been made by the IPCC are serious ones and should be looked into. But the way that certain media and politicians are dealing with this is really typical. From a newspaper perspective I can kind of understand it, they need to sell papers and draw people to their website in order to survive and any kind of half-crisis will do to jump on and exploit. The fact that media have become so detached from a regular user-based income has resulted in this behaviour of scandal-hunting. Minor things are blown out of proportion on an ever further gliding scale of sensibility, all just to make that one-off buy of the newspaper at the stand or that one online view which enables them to sell adds and, let’s be realistic, keep journalists employed. Too bad these journalists are then ‘forced’ to drive this cheap journalistic approach.

Politicians is another story; it is amazing to watch how some parties (notable example the liberal party in the Netherlands) are racing to be in the headlines with examples of ‘strong measures’. One of them is proposing to postpone the work on the new water defences in the Netherlands until the IPCC reports have undergone serious investigation. This cannot be serious……The current minister for Environmental Affairs in the Netherlands, Mrs. Cramer, has stated she wants to have a full investigation into the workings of the IPCC.

How refreshingly different has been the reaction of her British colleague, Mr. Ed Milliband, who has stated that mistakes are part of science and that these little errors do nothing to change the broader picture; man is responsible for the large concentration of greenhouse gasses which will cause global warming. He further stated that the ‘science’ behind all these sceptics that are now standing on the barricades, wanting the IPCC to be removed all together, be looked at with the same rigor as these mistakes by the IPCC.

Every scientists will tell you there are mistakes in their work. It’s just how science works. Mistakes will be looked in and improved, resulting in better science.

Long story short – these mistakes don’t change the bigger picture. Let’s all go back to work and start doing something against climate change, rather than debating these errors as if this has changed the whole world and we can emit CO2 like in the good old days.

I live in an apartment building. I have a balcony, build in a corridor between my building and the next. It is extremely windy on my balcony. Naturally, that made me think about what it would take to put an ‘Urban’ Wind Turbine on my balcony. Would it be worth it? Can I even do it or are there rules preventing me from doing so, because it may interfere with the view of my neighbours?

Those of you who have seen “The Age of Stupid” will remember the endless struggle one of the people in the movie faced, trying to build a wind park in one of the most windy sites of the UK. At the end of the movie, the anti-wind movement won because of the argument it would do too much damage to the view… When one of the leaders of the anti-wind movement was asked whether she thought a switch to more renewable energy was needed, she said: “Off course that is needed, but it cannot ruin our view”.

There are smaller wind turbines on the market available that you could build. Maybe a balcony is still not the best location but if you had a home with a garden, it would work. Take a look at this product from Home Energy, the Energy Ball V100. It even comes with a battery so you would not have to worry about connecting your turbine to the grid which is still very difficult in most places. There are plenty of suppliers on the market today – visit http://www.urbanwind.net/wineur.html for a good (although a little dated) overview. The problem lies more in the permits needed to place an Urban Wind Turbine (UWT). In the Netherlands, the government does not believe in UWT’s as a good strategy on the way to a sustainable energy infrastructure. Because of this, there is no special regulation for placing an UWT, which means it will take a very long time before you get a permit (if you get one).

At this moment in time, it is far from clear which sustainable energy sources will be key in truly enabling a sustainable society. Take cars for instance, hybrid technology will probably be a transitional technology, and the technology (or technologies) that will truly enable CO2-free cars is unknown. Will it be hydrogen or electric cars? We don’t know and that is why we should support the development of both technologies. That is why I do not understand why governments don’t allow for a more flexible approach around UWT’s. There are numerous suppliers on the market who believe this can be an additional source of realizing a sustainable city – let’s give them a chance and make it easier for consumers or housing corporations to purchase them.

And if buying one is too expensive, you can always experiment to build one yourself

Who has experience with UWT’s?