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7 Technologies Where China Has the U.S. Beat | GreenBiz
I’ve been watching China’s ascent in cleantech for a couple of years. In that time China’s potential to leapfrog the U.S. has gone from talk to substantive examples of leadership. Even so, I’ve been surprised by the increasing frequency with which China is pushing ahead in new fronts of cleantech development.Earlier this week, the latest surprise came from energy secretary Steven Chu, who’s been talking up China’s green progress in an effort to boost Washington’s resolve on clean tech policy.
In a talk at the National Press Club, with characteristic forceful clarity (PDF of slides), Chu illuminated the growing list of sectors where China’s emerging leadership threatens U.S. players, and added leadership in supercomputing as the most recent Sino-superlative. China’s success in these technologies represents a “Sputnik Moment” for the United States, Chu said.
“When it comes to innovation, Americans don’t take a back seat to anyone — and we certainly won’t start now,” said Secretary Chu at the event. “From wind power to nuclear reactors to high-speed rail, China and other countries are moving aggressively to capture the lead. Given that challenge, and given the enormous economic opportunities in clean energy, it’s time for America to do what we do best: innovate.”
China’s ascent to the top of the list for supercomputing speed reveals a new front in this race. Last month China’s Tianhe-1A, developed by Chinese defense researchers, became the world’s fastest supercomputer, with a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second, for all the geeks in our audience, based on a standard test), substantially eclipsing the U.S. DOE’s Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at Oak Ridge national labs in Tennessee, which runs at 1.75 petaflop/s. Third place is also held by a Chinese computer.
Supercomputers may seem long way from grid-competitive solar panels, long-range electric car batteries, or other cleantech gizmos, but advanced computational simulation is the keystone of most leading-edge scientific research, including nuclear energy, nanotech and materials science, proteomics and other advanced biotech applications. Basically, any very advanced science these days needs big computing horsepower. Leadership on the fastest-computer league tables has been traded off many times, between U.S., Japanese and European computing centers. China is a relative newcomer to the race, but is clearly the new elite.
Chu highlighted several crucial technologies — mostly in the areas of power generation and transportation — where China is already outpacing U.S. efforts, adding the U.S. must innovate or risk falling far behind. The following is from the DOE:
• High Voltage Transmission. China has deployed the world’s first Ultra High Voltage AC and DC lines — including one capable of delivering 6.4 gigawatts to Shanghai from a hydroelectric plant nearly 1300 miles away in southwestern China. These lines are more efficient and carry much more power over longer distances than those in the United States.
• High-Speed Rail. In the span of six years, China has gone from importing this technology to exporting it, with the world’s fastest train and the world’s largest high-speed rail network, which will become larger than the rest of the world combined by the end of the decade. Some short distance plane routes have already been cancelled, and train travel from Beijing to Shanghai (roughly equivalent to New York to Chicago) has been cut from 11 hours to 4 hours.
• Advanced Coal Technologies. China is rapidly deploying supercritical and ultra-supercritical coal combustion plants, which have fewer emissions and are more efficient than conventional coal plants because they burn coal at much higher temperatures and pressures. Last month, Secretary Chu toured an ultra-supercritical plant in Shanghai which claims to be 45 to 48 percent efficient. The most efficient U.S. plants are about 40 percent efficient. China is also moving quickly to design and deploy technologies for Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plants as well as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
• Nuclear Power. China has more than 30 nuclear power plants under construction, more than any other country in the world, and is actively researching fourth generation nuclear power technologies.
• Alternative Energy Vehicles. China has developed a draft plan to invest $17 billion in central government funds in fuel economy, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, electric and fuel cell vehicles, with the goal of producing 5 million new energy vehicles and 15 million fuel-efficient conventional vehicles by 2020.
• Renewable Energy. China is installing wind power at a faster rate than any nation in the world, and manufactures 40 percent of the world’s solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. It is home to three of the world’s top ten wind turbine manufacturers and five of the top ten silicon-based PV manufacturers in the world.
• Supercomputing. Last month, the Tianhe-1A, developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, became the world’s fastest supercomputer. While the United States — and the Department of Energy in particular — still has unrivalled expertise in the useful application of high performance computers to advance scientific research and develop technology, America must continue to improve the speed and capacity of our advanced supercomputers.
Next page: Two research areas where the U.S. still leads
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GE’s Innovation Avalanche | GreenBiz
In New York yesterday, GE announced two big steps in its Ecomagination Challenge program. The company unveiled 12 investments, totaling $55 million, as the first round of its goal to put $200 million to work in power grid technology startups over the next 18 months.
Second, GE announced five $100,000 “Innovation Awards” for still- developing technologies identified from its novel effort to crowd source innovative energy technology opportunities from the Web. This batch included two of my favorites: WinFlex, which is developing a collapsible wind turbine rotors, for easier assembly, and IceCode, which is electrifying wind turbine blades to prevent power-sapping ice build-up.
In the big money category, GE and its venture capital partners are putting up $55 million into 12 startups, established companies and one academic program. Winners get more than investment funds. They’ll also have the benefit of warp-speed product development with the help of GE’s engineering and sales troops. Plus they’ll get guidance and financial help from leading VCs, including Emerald Technology, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Rockport Capital.
For GE, the key is cultivating innovation from beyond its four walls. “What do I do? I’ve got 45,000 engineers and innovators, and 45,000 sales people. I can drive innovation at a scale these guys can’t do,” said Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO and Chairman, at the announcement.
For today’s winners, all those engineers and sales experts offer a huge leg up. “For a startup, capital is necessary, but it’s never sufficient to build innovation,” said Thomas Noonan, the CEO of JouleX, one of the winners, which is making advanced grid-monitoring technology. “The work we’re doing with GE though their energy research labs, with access to their network, testing our products, has been extraordinary for a small, early-stage company.”
As you’ll see in the list below, this first round of winners was long on smart grid plays. This is no accident. Smart grid complements GE’s own ambitions in advancing its in-house power distribution and grid management technology.
Smart grid also offers some of the best growth potentials in clean tech, too, as Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital pointed out during the announcement. While many cleantech plays are focused on the supply side of the opportunity — whether it’s converting photons to electrons, or switch grass to fuel — they’re very capital expensive to take commercial.
Conversely, Vassallo added, opportunities to reduce demand are more capital-efficient, faster to deploy, and not as dependent on subsidies because the solutions can deliver such quick savings to customers.
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The End Isn’t Near: A Better Way to Spur Action on Climate Change | GreenBiz
From Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, to emotionally wrenching visions such as this video shown at last year’s Copenhagen climate meeting, many climate change communicators opt for shock and emotional awe in their efforts to stir action. Given the scope of the fears, it’s an understandable tactic.
In fact, litanies of massive environmental disruption — often paired with images of imperiled children (here, here and here) — have become a sort of visual cliché used by even the most sophisticated messengers in this arena. Gore’s movie — despite being essentially a PowerPoint presentation on steroids — even won an Oscar. At their best, they can be educational, stirring visions meant to motivate the public.
At their worst, they do the exact opposite. Given the parlous state of climate efforts, it’s pretty obvious that these apocalyptic warnings aren’t winning over droves. I’ve seen it first hand: For every person moved to act by Gore’s work, I’ve observe others who respond with a fatalistic shrug asking, in effect, what could I possibly do about it? Still others have vaulted clear over ambivalence to outright antagonism, angered by the threat these visions suggest, and their implicit accusation of fault.
Now behavioral researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have shed some scientific light on these unintended consequences of climate communication. The new study, which will be published in the January issue of Psychological Science, suggests that dire descriptions of global warming, in isolation, can backfire, causing viewers to shut off, before considering the problem.
In their paper, “Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just World Beliefs,” [PDF] researchers Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer highlight the basic fact that fear and fatalism are poor motivators. The conclusion offers a reminder that, for all the billions being put into mitigating climate change, developing better understanding of human behavior could lead to more change at lower cost.
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Is the US Losing the Leading Role in Smart Grid? | GreenBiz
When the World Economic Forum and Accenture launched their latest look at global progress of smart grid technology, the authors selected Tianjian, China, for the debut.
It wasn’t until nearly two months later that the analysis, “Accelerating Successful Smart Grid Pilots (pdf),” was formally unveiled in the U.S. — at a meeting of industry leaders today in Atlanta hosted by General Electric Energy.
The China debut caught my eye. Is it a signal that U.S. leadership in smart grid is giving way? There’s been much worry that the U.S. is losing its edge in clean technologies born here. It’s already happened with solar photo voltaic technology, which is dominated by China. Other sectors — such as e-car, battery and wind technology — are re-centering there, too.
In the smart grid space, the U.S. is a natural leader, given our huge energy appetites and how similar the smart grid is to the Internet.
“As the largest per capita consumers of energy in the world, the United States has both the opportunity and the responsibility to be at the forefront of this revolution,” said Bob Gilligan, GE Energy’s vice president of digital energy, in a statement as part of the WEF event.
Yet as its China debut suggests, the report makes clear that whatever head start the U.S. may have had, it’s being challenged by ambitious programs elsewhere. The report maps out the surprising scope of international efforts. For instance, while Washington committed $4.5 billion into smart grid as part of the stimulus, Beijing committed some $7.3 billion.
The question isn’t so simple as U.S. versus China, of course. China’s key focus isn’t to develop exports, at least not yet. Rather, it’s racing to build out its national grid to keep pace with rapid urbanization and economic growth. And it’s not alone. Newly wealthy India and Brazil, together with Kenya, according to the WEF’s report, are plowing funding into smart grid work to build infrastructure fast, as well.
That said, and unlike China, some other economies are more explicitly focused on developing smart grid technologies for export, the WEF found. These include South Korea, Japan and Singapore. Their plans dovetail nicely with domestic efforts to cultivate green technology industries and lower national energy use.
In Europe, billions are flowing into the sector as part of strong national commitment to build out renewables, roll out e-cars and lower the carbon intensity of the power grid.
To be sure, the sky isn’t falling. According to the WEF’s survey, the U.S. is tied with Europe as leaders in these technologies. Plus in fast-emerging markets like China and India, much of the money being poured into grid technologies is simply to deliver basic services, rather than cutting edge digital systems.
U.S. efforts are gaining speed too. While U.S. public funding in smart grid projects trails that of some other regions, private investment — led by utility spending — is slated to hit $7 billion this year, the WEF estimates. As much as South Korean and Singaporean players may hope to export smart grid gizmos to the U.S., big tech juggernauts here such as GE and IBM are already hustling to sell U.S. expertise into those and other markets too.
This context is worth remembering as the U.S. smart grid rollout goes through some early growing pains. We’ve already seen some barriers to early projects and anxiety is on the rise over the vulnerability of the smart grid to cyber-risks. These problems aren’t unique to the U.S., of course, and by fixing them, the U.S. smart grid could yet set standards and define the technologies, others will emulate.
A video of the discussion on the report by the WEF and Accenture can be seen here. The Q&A following the presentation is worth catching, given the caliber of attendees — including Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers — and the thoughtful the discussion of the challenges facing the U.S. rollout.
The full WEF “Accelerating Successful Smart Grid Pilots” is available at www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_EN_SmartGrids_Pilots_Report_2010.pdf
The executive summary is available atwww3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_EN_SmartGrids_Pilots_ExecutiveSummary_2010.pdf
Image CC licensed by Flickr users Vince Alongi and Marc_Smith.
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Check out the original article at http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/11/10/could-us-lose-leading-role-smart-grid
BSR 2010: What Will it Take to Feed the Future? | GreenBiz
Food production sits at the intersection of some of the most fraught concerns in the landscape of sustainability. Combining life-or-death issues of nutrition, with pressing concerns about the environment together with questions over the role of big industrial players in agricultural, food production sparks passions in boardrooms and dining rooms alike.
At BSR 2010, the tensions pulling at these issues surfaced in a standing-room-only session titled “Feeding the Future: What will it Take.”
World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay, who ran his family’s farm early in his life, laid out the challenge facing the world’s food production systems. Today, just 30 percent of arable land remains unfarmed. Yet over the last 10 years, that share of farmed land has grown by bout 0.6 percent per year. If this pace continues steadily, by 2050, all but 6 percent of untouched arable land will be put to use, meaning rain forests and other pristine environments will be imperiled.
“Suddenly there will be no biodiversity left. We will eat the planet. We have to figure out how to do more with less,” said Clay. To get there from here, without eating the planet, Clay estimates we’ll have to do about twice as much with every input — whether plants, or phosphorus, or water, or land.
Clay pointed out that water is another huge constraint. Today humans use half the fresh water supply on the planet, and of that, about 70 percent goes for farming. Put another way, he explained that it takes about 1 liter of water to produce each calorie of food we eat. So a person’s daily water consumption isn’t really the few liters they drink directly, but the 2,500 or 3,000 liters they eat each day.
Driving the food consumption is rising wealth. By 2050, Clay predicts, the world will have some 9 billion people, with 2.9 times more income on average than today. And in many of the largest, less developed countries, income could grow by 5 times per capita.
By practically any measure, wealth translates into healthier populations. But as newly wealthy populations boost their meat intake, the impact on food systems will be stressful, and enormous. A richer world will eat more protein, which demands much more energy, water and farming resources to grow. “We’re seeing it with pork in China and eggs in India,” said Clay.
To feed this richer, more populous world, Clay emphasized that no single strategy can do the trick, so we should be pursuing many at once. Reducing waste is among the best near term steps, he points out, given that one of every three food calories is wasted worldwide.
By simply eliminating wasted food, said Clay, “we could produce half as much additional new food we expect to need under the business as usual plan.” Sounds easy? But it runs against deeply ingrained practices in restaurants — where portion sizes are often too big — and shoppers’ love affair with fresh food. Transporting fresh food not only wastes about half the food, but uses more energy.
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BSR 2010: The Push to Merge Financial and Sustainability Reporting | GreenBiz
For all the attention flowing into greener corporate practices, there’s scant agreement about how best to document these efforts. Standalone sustainability reports have become de rigueur for most multinationals, pressure is growing to integrate environmental and sustainability practices into a single annual report.
The push for such so-called “integrated reporting” was the topic of a meeting at the BSR 2010 conference, When CSR and Financial Reporting Meet: Integrated Reporting, where “AK”Adam Kanzer, managing director and general counsel of Domini Social Investments, emphasized that the issue is likely to end up on the “to do” lists for many boards of directors and investment relations offices as the SEC moves towards setting rules about treating the “materiality” of sustainability issues to earnings and reporting.
In advance of SEC rulemaking, Kanzer points out many companies are headed in the same direction for strategic reasons. Over 90% of CEOs, when polled, report that sustainability is critical to future success. “If it’s material to business, then it’s inadequate not to include it in the annual report,” Kanzer said. “The ultimate question is: why do separate reports?”
As yet, just a handful of companies — mostly European, such as Astra Zeneca — are producing integrated reports, and there is scant consensus on how to prepare such reports. And while guidelines remain hazy, Kanzer said, lawyers in investment relations offices are always likely to opt out until rules are set.
“The SEC definition of materiality is based on what a reasonable investor would need to make an investment or voting decision,” said Kanzer. “Take that broad interpretation, then put it in hands of corporate counsel, and you end up with boilerplate disclosure, something not very useful to investors.”
Investors should therefore be pressing for integrated reporting ahead of the rules, Kanzer argues. Mainstream financial analysts are more likely to integrate these issues into their recommendations when sustainability factors are presented along side conventional financial metrics in an same annual report. Left to an external report, Kanzer concedes, sustainability issues are more likely to be ignored.
Kanzer, who has served on an SEC advisory committee on sustainability reporting standards, explained that determining what is “material” to earnings is still more art than science, which complicates the decision about how to report such issues.
For instance, Kanzer recounted, Costco recently changed its seafood purchasing practices in response to pressure from Greenpeace and other NGOs. “If Bluefin tuna goes extinct, neither Costco nor its competitors will sell it anymore,” so they’ll be equally affected, plus sales reduction will be undetectable to the company’s bottom line, Kanzer explained. “So it’s hard to make a case that the decision is material to Costco’s financial reporting. But it is clearly material to our evaluation or the company as an investor.”
Photo CC-licensed by featheredtar.
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BSR 2010: Conflict Mineral Supply Headed Toward a Crisis? | GreenBiz
The use of “conflict minerals,” already a simmering issue at BSR 2009, shot up the agenda of the manufacturers attending this year’s meeting which are reliant on electronics.
Under a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule, a key deadline to file information on corporations’ sources of these materials is approaching fast. And while industry is working with NGOs, governments and local miners to set up the necessary tracking rules, time may be too short to complete the work.
If not, supplies of these materials could be disrupted and the fragile war-torn economy of the African region where mining of these minerals is taking place could be grievously damaged, said Karen Hayes, director of corporate community engagement for the Africa region at Pact, a nonprofit trying to develop tracking processes for the material. Hayes participated in a panel at BSR 2010 entitled “Responsible Sourcing and Conflict Minerals.”
Corporations are already at work trying to meet the SEC standard, which requires companies to identify and publicize sources of key minerals. Formal reporting of this information is due in 2012, still more than a year away. But in April 2011 the new SEC standard calls for companies to produce a timeline describing plans to comply.
That’s just six months from now, very tight timing for large manufacturers who typically sign supply agreements years in advance. Corporations ranging from GE to Honda and Intel are already wrestling with vagaries of the new rule, and assessing the potential impact on their supply chains if supplies of these key minerals are disrupted. “Companies have an incredibly short timeline,” Hayes said.
The minerals in question are gold and the “three Ts” — tin, tungsten and tantalum — all widely used in electronics and mined in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Embroiled in a decades-old civil war that has caused five million deaths and even more displaced persons, DRC is the largest producer of the three Ts, and a major gold producer. Army factions exploit countless small-scale mining operations — “taxing” material sales, as well as shipments — to fund war efforts
Alternative supplies of these minerals exist. There’s growing concern that by disrupting their export from the DRC, however, the SEC rules could have unintended tragic consequences by effectively embargoing all mineral exports from the region.
Hayes reported that “artisanal mining” jobs, while hard labor, were a critical source of income, as well as the DRC’s largest sector. Among the possible effects of ending formal exports: thousands of workers displaced, destabilization of the economy and formal government, in parallel with a strengthening of rebel forces.
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BSR 2010: Maersk Slows Down to Go Greener | GreenBiz
150diggsdiggNearly two years after oil’s record pricing run-up, many consumers and businesses have at least softened some of the dramatic changes that $5 per gallon gasoline induced. SUV sales will never be what they were, of course, but big vehicles still rule U.S. roads. And shippers like FedEx and UPS have backed up fuel surcharges, which were tacked onto some shipments.
On the high seas, though, Maersk Line has stuck with the cost-cutting steps it instituted during the energy price spike. At the time, Maersk, the world’s largest operator of container vessels, broke with industry practice and proposed to its shipping clients that by slowing down its ships, Maersk could cut fuel use and lower shipping costs.
While 1,000-foot-long freighters may not have the same zip as a FedEx jet, the container industry has been subject to the same pressure to go “faster, faster, faster” in recent decades, so the move was a gamble, explained Jacob A. Sterling, head of climate and environment sustainability at Maersk Lines, at a BSR 2010 panel yesterday titled Extending Sustainability into the Transportation Sector.
“We’ve always known a minor reduction in speed could deliver energy savings,” said Sterling. A 20 percent reduction in speed can cut fuel use and CO2 emissions by up to 40 percent, the ship operator found. “But for decades, the price of fuel has been so low, shipping costs didn’t factor into companies analysis. The speed from factory to market mattered much more, so we kept pushing to go faster.”
Today, the practice known as slow-steaming has been adopted by many shipping lines, but isn’t the rule on every run. “On a given route — from Asia to Europe, for instance — we’ll run the ships from Hong Kong to Rotterdam at normal speed, or a little slower, because of the high value of the electronics and manufactured goods onboard justifies the expenditure.” But on the return trip, when the ship sails loaded with scrap metal and paper waste headed for Chinese recyclers, slow-steaming makes more sense. “The goods are worth less, and they’re not as time sensitive,” said Sterling. Over 18 months, the shift has cut company CO2 emissions by 7 percent. Maersk has committed to reducing its CO2 footprint by 25 percent by 2020.
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Why Planning for the Worst is Best in Coping With Climate Risks | GreenBiz
“It’s not a question of if a major hurricane will strike the New York area, but when,” former National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield once told a congressional committee.
Megan Linkin, an atmospheric perils specialist for Swiss Reinsurance America Corp. in Armonk, NY, reminded me of this ominous projection in a recent conversation, following her presentation at Climate Week NYºC 2010.
Linkin who, as a perils specialist at SwissRe, sports one of the most ominous professional titles I’ve come across, has a PhD in in atmospheric and oceanic science. As part of a broader project involving the New York Academy of Science and in partnership with the city government and a host of regional academic experts, Linkin has recently spent time focusing on the financial perspectives of how climate change could affect America’s largest city. Since climate change is expected to intensify the impact of extreme weather events on the city, a major part of her focus is to assess what the cost of major storms could be to New York City.
In the wake of New Orleans’ hurricane Katrina disaster, or the leveling of scores of cities in Pakistan due to flooding this past summer, it’s not as hard to imagine catastrophic weather events in the Big Apple. Indeed, as we spoke, not far from my Brooklyn apartment, workers were cleaning up the tree fall from the third tornado event in the city’s five boroughs in the past few years, unprecedented in recent history. This summer, New York has endured 39 days with temperatures over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the most in recorded history.
Of course, it’s a mistake to associate near-term weather events with long-term shifts in the climate, but extreme weather does steer collective thinking in that direction. And climate change is predicted to significantly alter the area’s environment.
According to a forecast by Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research, the city will see average temperatures rise by as much as 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2050s, and more further out. Sea levels are anticipated to rise by up to a foot by the 2050, and more than twice that if Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt quickly. These predictions for average changes bely the destructive potential of outlier events, when heat waves, rainfall, storm surges, or strong winds reach peak power.
New York is uniquely vulnerable in many respects. It is, of course, the most populous conurbation in the United States, with huge swaths of dense building stock merely a few feet above sea level — not just in Manhattan, but also in the city’s most populous boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens as well as Staten Island.
Adding to this list of vulnerabilities are unique sets of infrastructure – subways, tunnels, and bridges – which if damaged or destroyed would wreak long-lasting economic havoc by impairing movement of people and goods between the boroughs. And like Amsterdam, LaGuardia Airport is below sea level and requires constant pumping to keep it dry. JFK Airport is at roughly sea level, facing the Atlantic, so it would likely be at least temporarily knocked out by a major storm.
According to estimates compiled by Linkin, the total value of privately insured coastal properties is $2.4 trillion, including city coastal areas and Long Island, but excluding nearby but similarly vulnerable coastal areas in New Jersey. The city of Hoboken — which has a emerged as a sort of Mini-Me to Wall Street with a clump of office towers housing back office duties for Wall Street’s biggest players — sits directly across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan and would be equally imperiled from a severe storm surge.
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