Why are Salesforce hiding the emissions of their cloud?
The lack of transparency from Cloud computing providers is something we have discussed many times on this blog – today we thought we’d highlight an example. Salesforce dedicates a significant portion of its site to Sustainability and on “Using cloud computing to benefit our environment”. They even have nice calculators and graphs of how Green [...]
SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report demo’d
I had a Skype chat recently with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf where he gave me a demo of their new 2010 Sustainability report. With Peter’s permission, I recorded the demo for publication on YouTube. The video above is the result and the transcription is below. Some highlights Peter mentioned include: Sustainability reporting has [...]
Unfortunate EV choice won’t help SAP’s Greenhouse Gas reduction commitments
The graph above is taken from the Greenhouse Gas Footprint page of SAP’s Sustainability Report and it shows SAP’s global GHG footprint for 2010. Of particular note in this graph is that globally SAP’s 2010 carbon footprint for corporate cars is 24%. This is up from 23% in 2009 and 18% in 2008. This is [...]
Branding The Smarter City: An exercise in priorities
“Any city has to give some thought to its ambition and brand in order to set sustainability goals.” – Virginia M Rometty, IBM SVP and Group Executive. I recently attended a ground-breaking event hosted by IBM and The Prince’s Charities. 9 Days of discussions and presentations about sustainability, business, and government with a stellar attendee [...]
Friday Green Numbers round-up 04/23/2010
And here is this week’s Green numbers: Like Sept.11, volcano plane ban may hold climate clue | Reuters Plane-free skies over Europe during Iceland’s volcanic eruption may yield rare clues about how flights stoke climate change, adding to evidence from a closure of U.S. airspace after September 11, 2001, experts say tags: airplane, aviation, iceland, [...]
Grid Watch: smartgrids meet smartcomms
We have pointed to the ongoing convergence of wireless communications and smart grids before, for example in this video about Tropos Networks and in Tom’s stump pitch on sustainability and mobility, but some news from this week throws the trend into stark relief. Carbon Trust investments, the VC arm of a non-profit organisation working to [...]
Rich Lechner talks about Smart Buildings and a Smarter Urban Infrastructure
I had a great chat about Smart Buildings the other day with IBM’s VP Energy and Environment, Rich Lechner. Why are smart buildings important? Well, as Rich says, in the US buildings are responsible for about 70% of the energy consumption and for about 40% of the greenhouse gases emitted. When you combine that with [...]
Investors, the EPA and now the SEC are making pollution an increasingly unattractive option
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 [...]
Should FaceBook’s investors be worried that the site is sourcing energy for its new data center from coal?
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 [...]
This is a very opportune time to be investing in sustainability management software!
I wrote about SAP’s launch of their Sustainability Performance Management software recently. This is a space which is of massively growing importance given the increasing regulations around greenhouse gas emissions, for example. I was heartened then to hear in a recent discussion with SAS that their Sustainability Management software was launched in April 2008! For [...]
