EDSA are an interesting company. They are 25 years old, they are privately held and they focus on power analytics. I had an opportunity to have EDSA’s CTO, Kevin Meagher, on the show so I jumped at it to find out more about their smart grid solutions for micro-grid integration.

Kevin and I had a great chat, we talked about:

• Kevin and EDSA’s definition of a Smart Grid
• The importance of micro-grids to the smart grid
• EDSA’s micro-grid management software and their target customers
• The changing face of energy generation with the likelihood of community microgrids coming together to do energy arbitrage
• Trends in energy storage systems and
• Differences in roll outs of micro-grids in varying geographies and regulations and incentives affecting them

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(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

In this, the fifth of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, I talk to the CEO of Tropos Networks, Tom Ayers. Tropos develop wireless broadband networks for Smart Grid applications and offer complete network management, as well as enhanced security features. Tropos is the only wireless broadband network provider with FIPS 140-2 certification.

Tom and I had a great chat, we talked about:

• Tom and Tropos’ definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
• Why we need Smart Grids and the efficiency gains we will achieve from them
• The security issues round wireless Smart Grids
• Tropos IP, Smart Grid standards and open protocols
• Best practice Smart Grid rollouts

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Photo credit Neubie

A perfect storm consisting of the EPA, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and investors is pressuring companies to come clean on their environmental risks and performance.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about FaceBook’s decision to use a primarily coal-burning utility to power its new data center where I asked should FaceBook’s investors be worried about the decision.

Now the SEC has started taking an interest in this area as well and recently clarified that companies’ have responsibilities [PDF] to report on:

1. the direct effects of existing and pending environmental regulation, legislation, and international treaties on the company’s business, its operations, risk factors, and in Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations
2. the indirect effects of such legislation and regulation on a company’s business, such as changes in demand for products that create or reduce greenhouse gas emissions and
3. the effect on a company’s business and operations related to the physical changes to our planet caused by climate change — such as rising seas, stronger storms, and increased drought. These changes to the environment could have a number of material effects on corporations, such as impairing the distribution and production of goods and damaging property, plant, and equipment

In announcing the clarification SEC Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar stated that the SEC will begin to be far more proactive on environmental reporting:

The Commission’s action today is a first step in an area where the Commission will begin to play a more proactive role, consistent with our mandate under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, to consider the environment in our regulatory action. The National Environmental Policy Act charged the Federal Government “to use all practicable means” to, among other things, “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.”

Noting the interest of the SEC and their clarification around companies’ environmental risk reporting requirements, investors are now becoming more vocal and are increasingly asking companies to report more information about their environmental risks and responsibilities. These investors need to look after the long term interests of their funds and the last thing they want is to have their monies disappear in some environment-related mishap like the Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill or a class action litigation.

Ceres, the non-profit network, reported recently that investors filed a record 95 climate change resolutions, a 40% increase over the 2009 proxy season! And these are serious investors. Jack Ehnes, CEO of CalSTRS for example, manages $131 billion dollars in assets. That’s billion, with a b!

As Ceres notes:

Many of the investors are part of the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), an alliance of more than 80 institutional investors with collective assets totaling more than $8 trillion.

$8 trillion! Investors with a war chest of $8 trillion wield a lot of clout.

Combine this with the fact that on Dec 29th 2009 the EPA’s Mandatory Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Rule came into effect and it states:

suppliers of fossil fuels or industrial greenhouse gases, manufacturers of vehicles and engines, and facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more per year of GHG emissions are required to submit annual reports to EPA. The gases covered by the proposed rule are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), perfluorocarbons (PFC), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and other fluorinated gases including nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and hydrofluorinated ethers (HFE).

So, the EPA is requiring the reporting of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the top 10,000 emitters in the US, the SEC now has environmental risk reporting and transparency in its sights and investors with considerable resources are looking for more details on possible environmental risks from companies they invest in. You have to think that this is not a good time to be in the pollution business!

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Brandon and I sit down at The Dog and Duck Pub to test out TabbedOut while we discuss the past week’s news about the Austin tech scene – Facebook may be opening offices in Austin, places to eat and drink during SXSE, and a few other items.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Show Notes…

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Read the complete article @ Coté's People Over Process

Today’s show is all about taking chances and is a sequel to our last episode on “change”. Risk is there but not always bad, in fact there is no bad just degrees of positive!

Talking Points

• Germany goes nuts with a recent study
• Happy Birthday Danielle
• jQuery UI
• Tiny Tips
• MacHeist
• taking chances
  • AccMan Pro

Video Replay

Links from the Chat

• Office Pods
• KapLab

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ Friday Morning Report)

Ridiculously easy group-forming matters because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs. Now that group-forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups.
- Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, pg. 54

Today Socialtext launched Socialtext 4.0. Core to this release is Collaborative Groups. Groups, and the ease in which they are formed, are not new to Socialtext, as we were the first to adapt wikis into the now common workspace construct. But the way in which this new capability is implemented tickles my inner social software geek.

Back around the time in which social software was defined and when we started enterprise social software, Seb Paquet introduced the notion of Ridiculously Easy Group-Forming.

Weblogs have a potential for group-forming like no other medium.
However I’m convinced that much of it to this day remains untapped. I’d
like to explain an idea that I have been bouncing around for a while.
It might well be a reformulation of what others have said previously. I
believe that implementing this properly would give a nice boost to the
blogosphere’s social aggregation capability.

Basically the goal is to push the threshold for group creation to an unprecedented low. I think Reed’s Law should be refined to state:

The value of a group-forming network increases exponentially with the number of people in the network, and in inverse proportion to the effort required to start a group.

4.0 makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to form a group, assemble needed tools and set the right privacy. Groups and their activity streams are discoverable. However, if I was to further amend Reed’s Law, it would include “…and manage the noise it generates.”

Take groups on Twitter. The strength of hashtags is easy group-forming and discovery. The weakness is noise in and around the hashtag. Lists are relatively hard to form and discover, but I bet that will improve. Lists have relatively less noise unless you subscribe to them, and are more noisy as people-centric constructs.

Twitter doesn’t have Groups, but when you have a large scale enterprise microblogging deployment, you decidedly need them. Groups need to be public, private or hidden. Simple affordances let you have people-centric groups (e.g. a workgroup) or topical (e.g. innovation). But the real strength is filtering microblogging and activity streams. And if you miss something in real time, be able to leverage rankings and search that delivers results in context.

Thanks for letting me get my social software geek on.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Socialtext, Groups and the Context of the Social Web (readwriteweb.com)
• Socialtext helps enterprise users manage Twitter-like stream (infoworld.com)
• Socialtext adds tools to manage its Twitter-like stream (computerworld.com)

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(Cross-posted @ Ross Mayfield's Weblog)

This is the third of my Smart Grid Heavy Hitters’ interviews, and in it I talked to the CTO of Silver Springs Networks, Raj Vaswani.

It was a great interview – in it we talked about:

• Raj’s definition and the benefits of a Smart Grid
• The fact that, to-date Smart Grids are quite notional
• How long it will be before home energy portals, vehicle to grid, and similar technologies will emerge and
• The differences between Europe and the US in terms of Smart Grid rollouts

I wanted to go on for longer but unfortunately we ran out of time!

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Photo credit: The Sierra Club

Should FaceBook’s investors be worried that the site is sourcing energy for its new data center from primarily coal-fired power?

FaceBook is fourth largest web property (by unique visitor count) and well on its way to becoming third. It is valued in excess of $10 billion and its investors include Russian investment company DST, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital and Microsoft.

FaceBook announced last month that it would be locating its first data center in Prinville Oregon. The data center looks to be all singing and dancing on the efficiency front and is expected to have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.15. So far so good.

However, it soon emerged that FaceBook are purchasing the electricity for their data center from Pacific Power, a utility owned by PacifiCorp, a utility whose primary power-generation fuel is coal!

Sourcing power from a company whose generation comes principally from coal is a very risky business and if there is anything that investors shy away from, it is risk!

Why is it risky?

Coal has significant negative environmental effects from its mining through to its burning to generate electricity contaminating waterways, destroying ecosystems, generation of hundreds of millions of tons of waste products, including fly ash, bottom ash, flue gas desulfurisation sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals and emitting massive amounts of radiation.

And let’s not forget that coal burning is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO₂ in the air [PDF].

The US EPA recently ruled that:

current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases–carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆)–in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Note the wording “the public health and welfare of current and future generations”

Who knows what legislation the EPA will pass in the coming months and years to control CO₂ emissions from coal-fired power plants in the coming months and years – and the knock on effects this will have on costs.

Now think back to the litigation associated with asbestos - the longest and most expensive tort in US history. Then note that climate change litigation is gaining ground daily, the decision to go with coal as a primary power source starts to look decidedly shaky.

Then GreenPeace decided to wade in with a campaign and FaceBook page to shame FaceBook into reversing this decision. Not good for the compay image at all.

Finally, when you factor in the recent revolts by investors in Shell and BP to decisions likely to land the companies in hot water down the road for pollution, the investors in FaceBook should be asking some serious questions right about now.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Do risk and compliance have a part to play in reducing pollution? EQ² certainly thinks so.

Steve Burt, the founder and CEO of EQ², is a former economist having worked at senior levels with Dun & Bradstreet and British Petroleum. His approach, which he calls Granular Resource Economics (GRE), enables companies to quickly see at a glance the entire spectrum of their emissions down to parts per million.

Why is this important?

Well, consider one of the verticals Steve is looking at – the aviation industry (see EQ²’s excellent Sustainable Flying Report – PDF) . As Steve says, a single flight taking off from an airport, in pollution terms, is not a significant event. But when an airport handles hundreds of flights per day. What is the accumulated pollution from all the flights, incoming and outgoing, it has ever handled? Now project this forward for all the flights it is going to handle…

When you think of pollution from planes, you typically think in terms of CO2. EQ² go well beyond that though and in the case of aviation, for example, you will also see the numbers for SOx, NOx, and other constituents emitted from jet fuel such as mercury, selenium, arsenic, particulates, etc. When you start to run those numbers for even moderately sized airports, the results can be quite sobering. For airports located near water this could be especially troubling.

And it is not just airports – all organisations need to find out what their liabilities are with respect to their accumulated emissions. A recent report for the UN has found that the world’s top firms caused US$2.2 trillion of environmental damage in 2008 alone. This is obviously unsustainable and is merely a preface to more restrictive pollution controls being enacted which:

is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage

Imagine for a sec if communities in the vicinity of Drax or Kingsnorth coal-fired power plants in the UK decided to sue for the environmental damage wrought on them by these power plants. The kind of information EQ² can provide would be invaluable in helping these facilities reduce their emissions and minimise the increasing risks associated with being a polluter.

With that in mind, how many firms can afford to remain ignorant of the full spectrum of their emissions?