Solar-powered aeroplane makes runway debut

Solar-Powered Plane Makes Runway Debut

by Ariel Schwartz, 11/23/09

Biofuels are often touted as the next big thing in airplane fuel technology, but solar power shouldn’t be discounted — as was recently proven by the team behind the Solar Impulse. The solar-powered plane just took its first test down the runway, and eventually the plane is expected to take a 20 to 25 day trip around the world.

see http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/11/23/solar-powered-plane-makes-runway-debut/

 

Resource efficiency or resource intensity?

It is imperitive that the aim is to reduce the Resource Intensity of systems, not the ‘efficiency’ of individual processes

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IBM Launches Consulting Service for Sustainable Assets

ARMONK, N.Y. – 18 Nov 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has introduced a consulting service to reduce the costs and environmental impact associated with managing property, equipment and business activities.

Sustainable Asset Analytics is designed to help clients manage real estate, supplier performance, carbon data collection and analysis, asset lifecycle maintenance, and all processes and systems used to support these activities. The service can be applied to everything from buildings to information technology and other office equipment to manufacturing tools and warehouse machinery to business travel. 

Property, other assets and business activities of all types can be areas of waste and unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions. Culprits include poor planning and maintenance, inadequate energy management, the heating or cooling of unused space, and the inability to collect and analyze operational information. But by creating a comprehensive plan to manage and measure these activities and assets, clients can reduce energy and water use, lower greenhouse gas emissions and waste, and improve efficiency. ………………

Full press release at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28836.wss

 

More reasons to worry about Asia’s Clean-Tech push?

By Keith Johnson

What do you get when mix a group that passionately believes technology holds the answer to our energy future with angst about Asia’s clean-tech irruption? “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant,” a new report out today from the technophile Breakthrough Institute that makes the case that the U.S. is losing ground in a hugely important race.

Flickr So cute when they’re little

The idea that the U.S. is falling behind in Asia, and especially China, when it comes to clean tech isn’t new. It keeps Tom Friedman in business, for starters. And it keeps cropping up in congressional hearings in Washington on energy and climate legislation.

The U.S. hasn’t actually fallen too far behind yet. It’s the future that the Breakthrough Institute is worried about. Specifically, the next five years, when China, Japan, and South Korea are expected to spend about $500 billion to directly promote clean-technology development and depolyment, compared with about $170 billion in the U.S.—and that’s including energy legislation that passed the House and shoaled in the Senate…………………

…………………..At the end of the day, all the worries about the clean-tech race boil down to a much broader question: Does America’s energy and economic future depend on retooling its ailing manufacturing sector, or does the future of manufacturing depend on retooling energy policy?

Full story at http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/11/18/flying-tigers-more-reasons-to-worry-about-asias-clean-tech-push/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fenvironmentalcapital%2Ffeed+(WSJ.com%3A+Environmental+Capital+-+WSJ.com)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

 

Taiwan`s LED lighting sector needs more than quality standards

Taiwan`s LED Lighting Sector Needs More Than Standards to Glow Brighter

With the LED industrial chain in Taiwan having developed to considerable scale and sophistication, and the government working on a plan to replace traditional lamps with LED ones in four years islandwide, the time has come for Taiwan to set up quality inspection standards for LED lighting products.

Representatives from the government, LED industry and R&D institutes on the island recently gathered to flesh out the contents of a certification standard for LED lighting. One of the representatives was S.C. Wang, deputy director of Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection (BSMI) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs. He noted that LED is a new lighting technology and needs certification standards to make it a popular light source………………..

………..However, setting up certification standards for the LED lighting in Taiwan may be merely an academic exercise given that a substantial number of the makers on the island are treading water in the wake of the global downturn. “To stimulate the development of the domestic LED-lighting industry, the government should subsidize consumers as it has done for solar-energy and energy-saving products,” Yang noted……………..

Full story at http://news.cens.com/cens/html/en/news/news_inner_27876.html

 

 

Futility’s vicious circle

Perhaps more frighteningly, the decline of the Pax Americana.

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The decline of the American Empire

by Dave Cohen

[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
—Edward Gibbon, from the Decline and Fall

Perhaps you have noticed a common theme in my recent columns. Each policy proposed to solve our economic, oil or climate problems I have examined has a fatal flaw, and often more than one. New initiatives always seem dead on arrival……………………

………………………..The theme that unites our flawed responses to economic and energy problems is futility, defined as—

1. The quality of having no useful result; uselessness.
2. Lack of importance or purpose; frivolousness (unworthy of serious attention)

We can not seem to escape futility’s vicious circle.

As problems become more intractable over time, our resistance to making real changes to confront those problems, our social inertia, becomes more entrenched. Thus the solution to debt-based economic problems is more debt. The solution to liquid fuels problems is marginally more fuel efficient cars, not alternatives to driving. We study an expansion of the rail system instead of building it to provide an actual alternative to flying or driving between cities. We dream of hypothetical biofuels in the far-off future to solve an oil supply problem in the here & now.

See full article at http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2009/06/the-decline-of-the-american-empire/

 

Resource efficient production to combat recession

Manufacturers should adopt resource efficient production to combat recession, according to EEF/Barclays report

Release date: 30/03/2009

The report Resource Efficiency; Business benefits from sustainable resource management ’ identifies and analyses the positive effects of resource efficiency in UK manufacturing and outlines major benefits and opportunities for companies. It promotes a greater understanding of sustainable manufacturing, offering a handbook of practical solutions applicable for a wide range of factory environments.

The report is the first in a series of publications being launched by EEF as part of their ‘Manufacturing Your Future’ campaign which is offering British Manufacturers advice, guidance and support to help them through the economic downturn………………..

Full story at http://www.eef.org.uk/UK/mediacentre/mediareleases/uk/2008/Resource_efficiency_report.htm

 

EEFResourceEfficiencyLocked.pdf

 

 

UK leads the knowledge transfer world

9 March 2009

Today, Unico – the UK’s leading knowledge transfer association – announces key findings of an important report recently published.  Through the work of the report,  ‘Metrics for the Evaluation of Knowledge Transfer Activities at Universities’, a new set of measurement tools is enabling universities to accurately measure the value of knowledge transfer activities (KT) for the first time.  Outcomes from the report reveal that the UK leads the world in terms of measuring the value of KT activities.

Professor David Secher, Unico Chairman said, “This report reveals that the UK is ahead of the US in addressing this difficult, but important, field of measuring the economic and social impact of knowledge transfer.  The proposed new measures may not be the last word as further work is needed but this report represents an important contribution that we are keen to share with the wider community for further development.”……………………..

The report findings illustrate that UK universities are actively involved in knowledge transfer activities and that the UK performs competitively compared with the US and Canada when measured against:

• licensing income market share
• importance of licensing income to the total research income
• number of spin-outs formed.

This project was only made possible thanks to funding, valuable input and support from:

• Department of Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS)
• Research Councils UK (RCUK)
• Scottish Funding Council
• Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)
• University of Glasgow (acting as project sponsor)

View report at http://www.unico.org.uk/uploads/Library%20House%202008%20-%20Unico%20(lowres_final).pdf

see http://www.unico.org.uk/news/article.asp?ItemID=224

also http://ren.globalwatchonline.com/epicentric_portal/site/?mode=0

 

‘Let Them Fail’, the resource intensity of mobility, and society

 The article below brings out the reality we now face, that we have to look at our problems and future holistically.

We have to think about solutions at a ’systems level’ and base our decisions on our fundamental need in a resource constained environment.

Which is, that we have to continually reduce the ‘resource intensity of society’, and in the case of the industries that provide ‘mobility’, how we mangae change to continually reduce the ‘resource intensity of that mobility’.

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 Let Them Fail

…………………Take Chrysler, for example. Since the breakup of its transatlantic marriage to Daimler, the company has lacked both the infrastructure and the ability to design new cars for today’s market. Addressing that fatal flaw will ultimately cost many more billions in taxpayer assistance than what the company requested.

Why on earth should taxpayers be responsible for stringing Chrysler along just so that it can eventually partner up with Fiat (in yet another dubious transatlantic marriage) to produce American-made copycat versions of fuel efficient cars that Europe and Asia have been churning out successfully for decades? Who benefits from that arrangement?

If Congress refuses to give them another bailout, G.M. and Chrysler will almost surely shut down nearly all of their plants and lay off tens of thousands of workers. When that happens, the taxpayer resources that would have gone to propping up these two “zombie companies” should instead be used to transition their profusion of industrial capacity from the business of producing unwanted cars to producing desperately needed solar panels, wind turbines, biomass generators and advanced batteries. ………………

Beyond the obvious imperative to jump-start these industries in order to forestall the worst effects of climate change, there’s a substantial amount of unmet demand for these products in the marketplace. Here in California, the electric utilities are likely to fall well short of their state-mandated renewable portfolio standards next year, not for lack of trying but for simple lack of supply resources…………..

by

Jim Stack, who is a resource planner at the City of Palo Alto’s municipal electric utility, where he works on renewable energy procurement in an effort to meet the City’s self-imposed RPS mandate of 30% by 2012 and 33% by 2015. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and a Master’s in public policy, both from U.C. Berkeley.

Full article at

 http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/03/let-them-fail?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-March18-2009

 

Quality, global sourcing and resource intensity

 The article below reinforces the need for a systems approach to reducing the resource intensity of an organization, particularly the risks and costs of external failure and ignoring the downside of decisions, the result of which we see all around us now.

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The hidden costs of global sourcing

 

  Devising and executing a successful global sourcing strategy may be the most complex analysis a supply chain organization undertakes. And the irony is, the more you learn about it and the deeper you get into a global sourcing strategy, often the more complex it gets. As companies continue to expand their supply bases, they learn—sometimes the hard way—about the hidden cost pitfalls that can send a global sourcing strategy right into the ditch.

With all of the variable costs associated with global sourcing, it’s best to develop a range in which the current sourcing decision still makes economic sense. John Brockwell of J.P. Morgan Trade Services says using a range of costs will help determine when a particular cost is approaching a less-than-sensible level.

 

For example, a global sourcing decision may be based on a given freight cost model, but with freight rates becoming more volatile, using a range will help decide how much is too much when it comes to freight cost increases. From there, it will be easier to justify moving to a supplier in another market.

 

With that in mind, Purchasing recently tapped the expertise of several global sourcing experts in various sectors of the supply chain for their thoughts on what hidden cost factors could creep up and undo the savings a global sourcing plan seeks to achieve…………………..

………………Quality breakdowns

It’s no secret that global sourcing in many cases means balancing a planned cost savings with a possible risk of less reliable product quality. Unreliable quality levels in a product or the timeliness of the production from overseas factories may impact profitability as well. On a broad scale, a product recall is very expensive.

But more likely, the cost impact of varying quality will be more subtly buried in your supply chain. For example, Goodrich’s Ostrosky points out that when selecting a contract manufacturer for a small or low-cost product, there may be a temptation to use a lower-quality contract manufacturer to improve the profit margin on the product. But if the contract manufacturer’s quality affects delivery of the part or increases the number of failures, it could wind up costing more than originally forecasted and wipe out the global sourcing ROI……………………..

Traditional Model (based on industrial products example)
Labor savings	20–25%
Depreciation	5–10%
Materials and components	10–15%
Economic development incentives	0–5%
Savings on manufacturing cost (subtotal)	50%
Logistics, inventory costs	-10–15%
Ongoing management costs	-5–10%
Taxes and duties	-0–5%
Net cost savings	25%
Procurement Strategy Council Model (factoring in the impact of hidden costs not considered in the traditional model)
Cost savings in traditional model	25%
Business partner non-participation (buyers opting out before contract is set)	-8%
Business partner noncompliance (buyers not using contracts in place)	-6%
Savings (subtotal)	11%
Resource-intensive sourcing activities	-4–5%
Reputation risk exposure and mitigation	-1–2%
Actual savings realized	4–6%

As this model from the Procurement Strategy Council shows, hidden costs such as non-compliance, internal resource costs and costs of mitigating reputation risk—including working conditions, foreign corrupt practices, and data security issues—can shave off significant savings on a global sourcing contract. 

Full article at http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA6642345.html?industryid=48372

see also

http://www.oaklandconsulting.com/
 

 

Freebates and the resource intensity of mobility

 This article from the RMI in 2004 is prescient and its tenets are now being applied successfully in Germany.

We need to create a system of Freebates, based on the difference in the CO2 emissions of the vehicle scrapped and the replacement vehicle and its remaining useful life.

There has been time for manufacturers of highly polluting vehicles to recognise that theirs has not been a viable business model for many years and so can only expect minimal government support.

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September 19, 2004 – Vol.9 No.26

NO OIL SOLUTION.

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has published a plan for the U.S to rid itself of oil. Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs and Security is good, and it’s free (for a download copy.)

Oil Endgame, funded by the Pentagon, is a roadmap that the U.S. could follow that would save more oil by 2015 than it now gets from the Persian Gulf. Further, by 2025, the U.S. would use less oil than in 1970, by 2040 import no oil and by 2050 eliminate oil from the nation’s energy menu.

Endgame authors envision a mostly market-driven effort, with only some government assistance and law-making to get the program rolling. Once underway, profits and business opportunities, should keep the momentum………………………… 

……………How the Government could help start the process:

— Create revenue neutral incentives; freebates that would encourage the purchase of highly efficient vehicles. Combine a fee for the ownership of an inefficient vehicle with a rebate for the purchase of a super-efficient one.

— Create a scrap-and-replace program for low income people to bring money saving transportation to the poorest. New transportation opportunities would allow access to job opportunities now not accessible.

— Create loan guarantees for the auto industries that allow them to switch over to new fabrication techniques for high-tech composite materials.

— Let the Pentagon add its expertise in developing the new technologies. The Pentagon, as the largest single purchaser of fossil fuels in the world (all those aircraft, ships and wheeled vehicles), stands to benefit greatly from energy efficiency and independence.

For this market-based, profit-based approach to energy freedom to work it needs leadership not just money. The vehicle industry would need to be convinced that this has to be done. Consumers need to be convinced that they will not lose any of the safety or utility or choice of vehicles they now have if they convert to more efficient vehicles. But the first step will be to convince politicians of the importance of this issue – energy freedom, energy independence – for the future of the nation.

The 329-page report, executive summary and technical backup papers can be downloaded at http://www.oilendgame.org/ . A paperback version can also be purchased at the site.

From http://www.green-energy-news.com/arch/nrgs2004/20040196.html

See also

http://move.rmi.org/

http://www.triplepundit.com/