The northeast United States is not usually considered a hot spot for large-scale solar power projects like the ones being developed in California and the southwest. But yesterday Pennsylvania announced it will get the largest photovoltaic solar power plant east of the Mississippi. The 3-megawatt power station will be financed and built by Germany solar company Conergy’s Epuron and SunTechnics subsidiaries. Epuron inked a 20-year power purchase agreement with utility Exelon (EXC), which operates the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear plants. The 17,000-panel PV plant will be built in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia. The size of the plant is small in contrast to some of the 500-megawatt solar thermal stations being developed for California utilities PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) - or even PV plants like the 15-megawatt facility being built by PowerLight (SPWR) in Nevada. But the Pennsylvania project indicates that the market for Big Solar is not limited to the sunbelt. it’s also a sign that Conergy, one of the world’s biggest solar companies, is serious about its recent move into the U.S.
Volkswagen joins the carbon offsetting craze, announcing today it will neutralize one year's worth of emissions for every car sold in the United States between September and January. And how will the automaker do that, you may ask? VW, in collaboration with non-profit Carbonfund.org, will plant some 250,000 trees on farmland in northern Louisiana. VW claims the "Volkswagen Forest" will soak up 372,000 tons of CO2. Planting trees, of course, produces a host of environmental benefits for the land, wildlife and people. But using forests to offset greenhouse gas emissions is controversial and for good reason. Trees absorb carbon over over the span of many years while the greenhouse gases spewed from the tailpipe of, say, a VW Touareg SUV begins to warm the planet the moment the key is put in the ignition. (A Touareg, for instance, emits more than 16,000 pounds of C02 if driven 15,000 miles a year, according to Terrapass.) If the Volkswagen Forest burns down or trees die, any offsets will be lost. And research from some scientists indicates that planting forests in North America has a negligible impact on global warming (though that's not the case in the Southern Hemisphere). Earlier this year, Land Rover (F) began offsetting C02 from its petrol-guzzling SUVs in the U.K., though it charged its customers for the service. Obviously, if automakers really want to slow global warming they could encourage customers to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars and ratchet up their investments in plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle research and production.
Three months ago, three friends decided to quit their jobs as junior engineers and as a product manager at Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) to form their own startup, Anywhere.fm. The site, which calls itself the "iTunes of the web," lets you upload your music library online so you can listen to your songs wherever you have Internet access and share your playlists with your friends.
The new online music service is entering a crowded market segment dominated by players like Last.fm and Pandora Radio, but Anywhere.fm is steadily growing a dedicated following.
Since it launched just over three weeks ago, it’s added more than
22,500 users who have uploaded more than 2.5 million songs. Last.fm,
which was acquired by CBS (CBS) for $280 million in May, only
registered 6,000 users with about 30,000 songs in its first seven
months of its launch.
Anywhere.fm co-founder Sachin Rekhi, 23, says 30 different angel
investors and VCs have shown an interest in funding their site and that
the company plans to complete its first round sometime in September. So
what makes Anywhere.fm an attractive investment?
Getting into a highly competitive market like online music is tough, so it’s key to offer something that’s not already available. Anywhere.fm lets you upload your iTunes collection (note: currently it only supports DRM-free mp3 files) so you can control what you listen to. For me, this is great because I only spend about 10 percent of my time actively discovering music. The majority of the time I just want to listen to the same five Keane songs and put it on repeat all day. Once in a while, I might switch it up and listen to a friend’s Stadium Arcadium playlist. What I don’t want is a recommendation engine delivering songs similar to Keane to build up my preference profile. I prefer to spend less time discovering and more time just listening.
Anywhere.fm also has a built-in viral effect by focusing on a low-tech approach to personalized radio streaming. Rather than discovering songs through collaborative filters or through music experts like the Hype Machine (which, by the way, is an awesome service), Anywhere.fm lets you find and share tunes through your network of friends on its Friend Radio feature. Once you join and upload your songs through the site’s iTunes uploader, your friends can start streaming your music and review what you’ve been listening to once they sign up.
Anywhere.fm is serving a particular niche to build its brand - the music listener at the office. While Rekhi and co-founder Anson Tsai, 24 were at Microsoft and Luxiou Chen, 24, at Amazon, they came across the familiar problem of many folks working at big corporations who aren’t allowed to upload mp3s onto their office machines. Like most of us in the corporate world, they learned that a lot of fun
things (ie. your music collection) that you have on your home machine
aren’t allowed to be uploaded to your office machine. You can stream your iPod or Nano at work, but then you can’t share it with your co-workers. The friend radio also lets you search for users most compatibile to your tastes. The site pays the radio fees for each play and lets you stream playlists as a radio station.
To encourage and convert early users to its site, the Anywhere.fm cofounders developed an interface that felt familiar to iTunes (APPL), Windows Media Player and Zune Player. It’s most similar to iTunes, which uploads all your playlists and has seven feature buttons at the bottom of the screen. (Tsai was a former intern at Apple.) Anywhere.fm claims they’re not a complete ripoff of iTunes and are not afraid of competing with Apple since it gets revenue from its hardware sales. "We wanted there to be no learning curve associated with our player," Chen says. "All of our graphics, from the visualizers to the title bar to the playlist icons, are lovingly crafted in-house."
Currently, Anywhere.fm has partnered with iLike’s Garageband.com to stream free indie music. While it hopes to incorporate an integrated music store, it’s eyeing a potentially more lucrative route - capturing a piece of the $20 bilion radio advertising industry. It’s currently in talks with TargetSpot, a streaming radio ad startup. Backed by CBS Radio, Oddcast and Union Square Partners, TargetSpot is expected to roll out its service to 230 online radio stations nationwide by next week.
More states are expected to join the Western Climate Initiative - a consortium of six U.S. states and two Canadian provinces developing a regional carbon trading market - in the coming months, officials said today on a conference call. The WCI includes Arizona, British Columbia, California, Manitoba, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington. New members may come from the U.S., Mexican and Canadian states and provinces currently associated with the group as observers: Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Sonora, and Wyoming. WCI officials said they were also open to the participation of Native American tribes, given that a number of power plants operate on tribal lands in the southwest U.S. Five states founded the WCI in February to adopt a regional greenhouse gas reduction target and a carbon trading market to achieve the goal.
Last week the group announced a regional target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. (Individual states and provinces have set their own targets. Utah, for instance, won’t set a target until next year while California law requires the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.) The WCI also said that by August 2008 it will have designed a regional carbon trading market to allow those companies that reduce their emissions below the limit to sell credits to those that do not. WCI members on Wednesday’s conference call said the group has yet to decide whether the initial carbon allowances would be auctioned off or distributed. But WCI reps said mandatory corporate reporting of greenhouse gas emissions would likely be required.
The design of the so-called cap-and-trade system is being closely watched by the utility industry, judging by the representatives from companies like PG&E (PCG) and Southern California Edison (EIX) who joined the conference call held to provide an update on the WCI’s work.
Green Wombat takes public transport to work, uses compact fluorescent light bulbs in the Berkeley burrow, and dries the washing on a clothesline. But when it comes to air
travel, the wombat is a carbon criminal. The conundrum of being an
environmental journalist for a national magazine with a global outlook
is that the more I write about green technology the more I fly. So
far this year, Green Wombat has logged more than 70,000 air miles, which
according to some carbon calculators means I’m personally responsible for about 30,000 pounds of CO2 emissions from my frequent flying. In contrast, the average Californian’s carbon footprint from all activities is 26,301 pounds, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Of course, that plane is going to take off for London or Sydney whether you or I are on it or not, and barring the emergence of a slow travel movement, the number of flights is expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades.
So when I recently booked a flight on Virgin Blue - Richard Branson’s Australian airline - I guiltily pressed the green “Offset Flight Here” button and paid $2.41 to, as Virgin puts it, “fly carbon neutral” on my 900-mile trip. With U.S. carriers like Continental (CAL) and Delta (DAL) planning similar programs to allow fliers to pay a small fee to be invested in projects to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, Virgin Blue offers a look at one approach to airline offsetting.
Carbon offsetting is controversial, slammed by some as a “papal indulgence” that allows consumers to ease their conscience for a pittance without actually changing their behavior. For their part, corporations get to look green without directly reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. (The “A Better Environment at the Push of a Button” on the Virgin Blue home page doesn’t exactly dispel that notion.) Carbon offsetting services are proliferating but remain largely unregulated as do the offset projects themselves, which range from investments in renewable energy to flaring methane gas in landfills to preserving forests. Defenders say carbon offsetting provides needed financial support to worthwhile projects that have a direct impact on global warming as well as raise consciousness about global warming.
Virgin Blue’s program is notable on a couple of counts. First, the airline had its emissions audited so it could calculate the carbon footprint of its flights. Second, Virgin Blue only invests in greenhouse gas abatement projects certified by the Australian and New Zealand governments. In Australia, most of those are gas-flaring operations that burn off methane - a potent greenhouse gas - from landfills. Other approved projects include forest preservation and energy efficiency programs. (Notably absent are renewable energy projects - some 86 percent of Australia’s electricity is generated from coal-fired power plants.) In New Zealand - which, unlike Australia and the United States - has implemented the Kyoto Accord - many of the approved projects involve renewable energy production.
Lastly, Virgin makes the carbon offset option a prominent part of its online reservations system and offers extensive details about what the program does and does not do. With typical Aussie bluntness, one question in the FAQ reads, “If I offset my flight, this doesn’t really address the fact that emissions are still being released into the atmosphere from the aircraft I am flying on. Surely your campaign is just a cosmetic approach to a much larger problem?”
These airline offset programs will likely have little impact on the growing problem of jet greenhouse gas emissions - it’ll take technological breakthroughs like those being pursued by Boeing (BA) and Virgin Fuels to do that. But given that U.S. fliers already pay a 9/11 fee on airline tickets, a mandatory carbon tax on air travel would go a long way to supporting such efforts.
San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dean Takahashi recently took a measure of his household's carbon footprint, and the veteran gamer discovered the greenest gaming console by far is the Nintendo Wii. Attaching a device that measures electricity use to various gadgets around his Silicon Valley home, Takahashi found that the Wii consumed just 17 watts. Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox 360, on the other hand, is a veritable power hog, sucking down 194 watts, rivaling Takahashi's 42-inch plasma TV. The Sony (SNE) PlayStation 3 wasn't much better, guzzling 171 watts by Takahashi's measure. Nintendo scored a huge hit with the Wii's relatively simple graphics and family-friendly games that require players to put down the Cheetos and get off the couch. By eschewing traditional testosterone shoot-to-kill gaming that requires ever more powerful chips to render movie-quality scenes, the Wii is also doing a decent job playing the carbon game.
photo: green wombat California is looking to tap green energy projects in bordering states to meet its ambitious renewable energy targets. The California Public Utilities Commission last week approved a $6 million study to consider the feasibility of building new transmission lines to transmit green electricity from solar power stations and wind farms that could be built in isolated areas of the state as well as in Nevada and Arizona. The move is good news for solar entrepreneurs hoping to develop power plants in the sunny triangle of Arizona, California and Nevada.
The region boosts some of the best solar resource in the country but faces the conundrum that renewable energy-rich areas often are far off the grid. By locating such projects across the California border, developers can avoid the state’s intensive regulatory process while reaping the benefits of selling it green power. California utilities are under the gun to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2030. Adding to the pressure, regulators earlier this year barred utilities from signing long-term contracts with out-of-state coal-fired power plants, which provide about 20 percent of California’s electricity.
"Many renewable resource areas are located far from the grid and load centers and often require extensive and expensive transmission upgrades," the commission stated.
The CPUC is a member of California Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative, a consortium of state energy agencies. "Meeting California’s renewable policy goals will require rapid development of renewable resource areas throughout the state and possibly in adjoining states," states the group. "It will also require the construction of new transmission infrastructure to deliver energy from those renewable resource areas to the electric grid."
Southern California Edison (EIX) lead the study, which is backed by the state’s other big utilities, PG&E (PCG) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE). Also on board are renewable energy companies like BrightSource Energy and Solel, both of which are set to build large-scale solar power plants for PG&E.
Advertisers want their ads to be in a place where as many people as possible will see them. Call it the Super Bowl syndrome: A marketer’s wet dream is to have as many eyeballs on their product at once as possible. On the internet, that means the big, highly-trafficked sites get the first pick and…
The online ad market is heating up, according to analyst firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson; online advertising should overtake newspaper advertising by 2011, at which point the market will be worth about $62 billion each year. That means something different for every industry sector. One that stands to benefit is analyst groups, represented by big firms…
The upcoming August 13th issue of Newsweek has been much publicized already, with a cover story about how companies like Exxon Mobil (XOM) funded the scientific denial of global warming, sponsoring studies that obfuscated the issue for years. The accusation sounds familiar, at least in part because another industry has been going through the painful…
