Silicon Valley CleanTech

31 January 2010 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 1 Comments

Today's Mercury News has a great article about the growth of Clean Tech in Silicon Valley. A few things that caught my attention: an estimated 7,000 people currently employed in renewable energy and they're aiming for 25,000 new clean tech jobs; Morgan Stanley predicts that the current $USD 20 billion in smart grid revenue will rise USD$100 billion by 2030; The solar enery market is estimated to grow from a USD$30 billion global industry in 2008 to USD$81 billion by 2018; and, some nice info graphics about smart grids. Go read the whole thing, then clip and keep in your digital wallet.

NextPlays Hanoi

5 October 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 0 Comments

I've just got back from a NextPlays workshop in Hanoi. Organized and hosted by the World Bank Institute, the intent of the workshop was to introduce a tool for building understanding and engagement about sustainable development in Vietnam - you guessed it, NextPlays. It was an amazing experience, not least for being in Hanoi, an energizing city that seems to be always moving at a frenetic pace, a little like New York with scooters instead of yellow cabs.

The workshop was an impressive group of people, including the new Director of the Hanoi School of Architecture, urban planners from Hanoi; the person leading the climate change / adaptation planning in Ho Chi Min City, leaders in the environmental scientifc community, the director of community planning , two leaders of an environmental program for students.

The program kicked out with a presentation about the 2030 Master Plan for Hanoi. Still in the refinement phase, the Plan will be formally launched in 2010. It's a far-reaching plan, on par with some of the bolder plans in the developed world. It proposes the creation of satellite cities in part defined by a green corridor that creates green spaces and environmentally light activities in more than 60% of the greater Hanoi area. Because the corridor follows the two major rivers, it will help alleviate the clash between a growing population and increasing flooding. There's an outline of the plan here. And, like any Master Plan anywhere, it's being vigorously debated.

The NextPlays workshop created personas of typical people in Hanoi, and combined these with plausible economic, social and environmental change factors to develop ideas for a more sustainable city that serves its citizens. We were pleased with the results, and with the effectiveness of some of the NextPlays tools to get the group developing more robust, and more ambitious project ideas.

Apart from the workshop, the highlight of the trip had to be meeting the students from the SIFE group at the National Economics University. Though though it was only formed recently, they are working on more than five community business building projects. Their Excavatus project helped them win the national SIFE competition and they will represent Vietnam in the global finals. Good luck in November!

Incheon: Sustainable City Master Plan

3 September 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 0 Comments

Yes, we're tweeting about this too, but if we blog about it, we get to include images! (below the fold).  Foster+Partners, the team that imagined and design Masdar City, has joined forces with PHA and Mobility in Chain to win a competition for the design of the Master Plan for the Incheon Free Economic Zone in South Korea, an island near Seoul.

Incheon will be bigger than Masdar, but like Masdar the concept serves two purposes: 1) to create a quality of life for its inhabitants using sustainable construction, energy and  transport systems, and 2) to create a hub for R&D in clean tech systems and alos provide the ideal testing ground.

Foster+Partners are globally renowned, for many other amazing projects, including the Hearst Tower in New York City, (word to the wise: you can get a great subsidized lunch in the foyer food court if you know some who works there...).

The Economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Environment

2 September 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 0 Comments

There are plenty of pitfalls getting people to understand the possibilities of a sustainable future. Plenty of people understand the appeal (yes, I'm ignoring the naysayers for the moment) but still the skepticism kicks in around how you make it happen. A recent Newsweek article with Van Jones is a case in point. Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy, founder of Green for All, a green jobs NonProfit, and the Obama administration's Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (must be a small font on the business card).

In the interview excerpts, Jones is required to respond to elementary questions, including the classic canard: 'what's good for the environment can't be good for economy'.  Fortunately, Mr Jones hits knocks it out of the park:

_________

There are plenty of skeptics that say you can't save the economy and the earth at the same time. You can have investment incentives and cut taxes to spur growth and you can enact blunt carbon-cutting measures, but when you do the two simultaneously, it dilutes both efforts.

[Coughs.]

Are you OK?

I was just chocking on that false choice [Laughs]. That's clearly a false choice. That's like saying, "Who do you love more, your kids or your grandkids?" You either care about your kids so you grow the economy but do it in a way that's polluting. Or you care about your grandkids so you're going to stop polluting and stall the economy and starve your kids. False choice! You can enhance your economic performance by enhancing your environmental performance. Certainly it's true in the energy sector. The wastefulness of the way we used to do things has to be taken into account.

True, but isn't it hard to convince people of that when nothing of this scale has ever been done before?

Look, every time we heard these arguments, they've been wrong. Back when we debated the first Clean Air Act, we heard that if we tried to do anything to clean the air up, it would destroy the economy. But in fact, the minute the rules were clear, U.S. business outperformed anyone in terms of driving costs down. The economy actually got better. At some point, history should matter. We always overshoot our expectation once the rules are clear and you unleash innovation.

______

We understand journalistic skepticism. Mostly it's a good thing. We also understand 'devil's advocate' questions.  We may have even employed these techniques ourselves on occasion. But it's disappointing to see the global conversation stymied by sophmoric reporting. Raise the bar please.

Business boundaries blur in age of susceptibility

21 August 2009 - Posted by Peter Salmon - 0 Comments

This article recently appeared in the New Zealand Independent. Following last week’s article by Simon Harvey on business strategies for sustainability, Peter Salmon of Moxie Design Group, looks at how companies introduce these strategies.

As we face the recession, energy source depletion, impacts of climate change and a focus on social equity, business is being forced to reassess its strategy. 

Internationally, we see sustainability becoming a driver for innovation rather than an optional add-on. This indicates a significant shift from what was formerly considered radical versus mainstream capitalism.

Pioneering businesses are forging frontiers in occupying new niches that create value in fresh and sustainable ways. As the merging of sustainability and strategy gains global validity, we need to examine what that means in the New Zealand context. 

Sustainability has been characterised by words such as reduction, cut backs, savings and minimisation. To a large extent it has been marginalised as a form of regulation rather than the potential driver to creating new opportunities. 

As a result, sustainability is being sidelined in New Zealand while offshore it’s being applied as a accelerator of innovation. 

From research at Moxie Design Group we’ve isolated seven approaches to developing a sustainability strategy. They include: 

■ Greening existing products and services. 

■ Improving and optimising operational processes. 

■ Developing new solutions around opportunities of new market demands. 

We’ve found these approaches are not mutually exclusive. One can rapidly lead to another. 

As an example, United States supermarket heavyweight Walmart views sustainability as one of its most important opportunities. For the past four years it has instigated a highly publicised drive for sustainability across the organisation. 

It has installed solar energy systems, switched its distribution fleet to run on renewable energy and introduced initiatives to close loops in its energy and waste streams. 

It is also about to introduce a traceability system on its products so customers can gauge the environmental and social impacts of purchases. 

Walmart has attracted favourable press from business observers and the green press. It has also created positive pressure on its producers to innovate along similar lines. 

Such comprehensive approaches are becoming vital. It is no longer enough to just to ‘‘green’’ existing products – whole new solutions are required to meet needs. 

Earlier this year, Peugeot launched a new product called Mu, which provides access to a range of mobility services via a pre-paid card. 

It can be topped up online, irrespective of whether the customer owns a vehicle. 

The product service system has been launched in four French cities and will be rolled out to nine others. What makes Mu remarkable is that it comes from a traditional automotive manufacturer. It signals a significant shift in the automotive industry. 

Peugeot’s managing director Jean- Marc Gales notes: ‘‘Peugeot affirms its ambition to offer total mobility to all in harmony with the current economic and environmental challenges.’’ 

With more businesses being prepared to embrace more edgy concepts, boundaries are shifting fast. 

Recently, a collection of 10 companies, including global giant Siemens, drew up blueprints for a project to harness power from the Sahara Desert to deliver extra electricity to European homes. 

The plan includes technical and financial requirements to pipe solar thermal power from the Sahara under the Mediterranean Sea to Europe and could provide 15 per cent of Europe’s electrical needs by mid-century. Generating solar-based energy from the desert regions to supply Europe’s energy demands has moved from fantasy to reality through the collaboration of previously competing business entities. 

They appreciate the mutual business benefit of a co-ordinated vision and the pooling of capacities. 

Although few organisations will work on projects of this scale, the lesson in taking the long view is as equally valid to a New Zealand SME as it is to a transnational company. 

Sustainability is about having an effective business strategy. 

It requires considering existing challenges and developing a pathway that allows you to navigate the future and make the most of new opportunities. It requires a dynamic mix of thinking which extends beyond its traditional borders. 

As some of the most diverse and thriving areas on the planet are deltas, estuaries or similar boundaries between natural systems, perhaps it’s time we paid attention to the boundaries of our thinking. Intersections of the radical and the commercial will be locations of rich opportunity. 

Suburban downsizing - Frugality, sustainability and social media mash up...

1 August 2009 - Posted by Peter Salmon - 0 Comments

We’re seeing a very real adaptation at the local community level. Social media, localisation and the recessions are creating some remarkable changes in community interaction. Transition towns and Suburban downsizing are becoming popular movements in changing times.

As challenging and uncertainty increase, people are turning to each other to remedy the inadequacies of current social and state systems, using enabling technology to help reconnect with their communities. And connection is key. In a recent European poll of 8,000 households in UK, France, Germany and Spain, broadband was the last thing to be dropped in hard economic times. 

Increasing connection is leading to transitional thinking and new services with different value propositions. As Tyler Cowen recently wrote in Fast Company “online you can literally create your own economy”. He goes on to argue that we consume huge amounts of unmeasured value online everyday, that social media is “becoming more fun than a trip to the store”. This he calls ‘Human capital dividend’ or the online productivity we as web consumers have in being part of the conversation, linking with communities and sharing new ideas.

As a result a new type of frugal green economy is emerging. Take for example http://www.veggietrader.com An online trading  platform in the USA where home gardeners with a surplus can trade and sell their produce within their local communities. A trademe for the home gardener that within a month had enrolled over 1,800 members.

Keep looking for more social network driven solutions like a Zip-car type platform for home deliveries and perhaps even greater peer to peer micro finance, as people build more trusted and stable financial relationships that traditional governments and banks won’t or can’t deliver.

Good New Urbanism

30 July 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 336 Comments

We like Good Magazine. Here's a cool reader competition they ran recently encouraging users to send in images that show how local streets could be improved to become more livable, that is, more human. Great before and after shots, but what gets me is how easy most of the concepts are. It doesn't take much, just a nod to the basic principles of the New Urbanism or Smart Growth movements. Anything that gets people engaged in this kind of thinking is a good thing. Of course.

Green roofs at O'Hare

27 July 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 0 Comments

Chicago is pretty good at big plans and thinking long term. After all, this year is the one hundred anniversary of Daniel Burnham's vision for the lakeshore, an ambitious bit of urban planning much of which is stil in place today. Chicago is the green roof capital of the US, with more than 2.5 million square feet of downtown green roof space. The city has been incentivizing commerical and residential building owners to develop green roofs since a pilot program in 2000 on the roof of City Hall showed that green roofs would help lessen the urban heat island effect.  Now, green roofs have spread to O'Hare, where the vast remodeling project will include a green roof on the 17,800 sq ft Building 607.

Designed by McDonough Architects - they of Cradle to Cradle fame - the building meets the US Green Building Council's LEED standards, and will feature a green roof with an average depth of six inches planted with native grasses. As the say at greenroofs.org, the roof of Building 607 will be seen by millions of travelers per year. 

Sustainability and economic opportunity

24 July 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 0 Comments

In a recent Op Ed in the Observer, English Prime Minister Gordon Brown made what we think of as the obvious connection between sustainability and economic opportunity. He said: "The global environmental sector will be worth £4.3 trillion by 2015 and sustain tens of millions of jobs. So the countries and companies that develop the technologies and services fastest will, as with the industrial revolution, reap the richest rewards."

Nothing revolutionary here, plenty of other politicians are making the same point, but every little bit helps. There remains a disconnect about the humanness of climate change / sustainability because the discourse has for so long been framed as an environmental issue. And, if it's only environmental, some people are able to think 'there's nothing I can do about it'. Sustainability is both a human problem, and a human solution. The economic frame, the weight of change that will come, is perhaps the most powerful way of making this point in a time of global recession.

More awards for Ecovative / Greensulate

21 June 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 2 Comments

It's great news that Ecovative Design is gaining more recognition while continuing to grow as a company. They've just recevied a Popular Science 2009 Invention Award that celebrates the coolness of their concept, and the quality of their products. Ecovative has developed Greensulate - an insulation product that combines waste biological material with mushroom mycelium to literally grow inert insualtion in 7-10 days. They're also working on Acorn - packaging that's made a similar way and is 100% compostable after use. Ecovative Design is a NextPlays case study; read more here, or visit their site.