Excellent post by Joe Weinman about the irrational and behavioural side of cloud purchasing. Just as applicable to Cleantech irrationality.

A new study from Pike Research forecasts that LEDs will account for almost half of a $4.4 billion market for lamps in the commercial, industrial and outdoor stationary sectors by 2020.

Almost 18 percent of global electricity use goes toward lighting, and lighting in the U.S. consumes a fifth of the amount at an annual cost of more than $40 billion. With their ability to produce the same amount of light as traditional bulbs while consuming less energy and lasting far longer, LEDs represent a strong opportunity to cut expenses and reduce electricity use.

A 2009 study (PDF) by Massachusetts-based Groom Energy Research estimated that approximately 60 companies worldwide offer GHG accounting software, and more than US$46 million was invested in GHG accounting software start-ups in 2009.

According to a recent report by Colorado-based Pike Research, the global market for GHG accounting software and support services grew by nearly 84 percent from 2008 to 2009, representing a total market of US$384 million. They predict the market will achieve 40 percent compounded annual growth through 2017. Australia's S2 Intelligence reports that worldwide spending on green accounting systems will total US$595 billion through 2015, including both GHG accounting software and environmental accounting software more broadly.

Aggressive and sustained investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy would allow the U.S. to retire existing coal-fired power plants and a quarter of the its nuclear capacity by 2050.

The upfront costs would be modest — $10 billion in 2020, or $2.20 monthly for the average residential customer, but by 2040, the savings would begin reaching consumers' pocketbooks. Deploying existing high-efficient technology across every sector, such as lighting, HVAC and water heating, could cut electricity use by 15 percent from today's requirements.

All of this can occur independent of federal climate change legislation should Congress fail to pass an energy bill this year, according to Synapse Energy Economics, author of "Beyond Business as Usual: Investigating a Future without Coal and Nuclear Power in the U.S."

Renewable energy, such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, could grow to provide half of the country's electricity needs, said the report

But there’s one solution to the climate crisis that we don’t need to wait for — energy efficiency.

The opportunity is enormous: A 2009 McKinsey report estimates that by 2020, the United States could reduce its annual energy consumption by 23 percent through energy efficiency measures alone.

This would cut greenhouse gas emissions by over a gigaton — that’s a billion tons — and cumulatively save companies and consumers over a trillion dollars.

Energy efficiency is doable right now, it’s cost-effective, and it’s absolutely critical to slowing climate change. But it’s not happening fast enough. To truly take energy efficiency to scale, we need a national movement that captures the imagination of people from dorm rooms to boardrooms across the country.

As a result, in three to five years, there will be a second big enterprise IT migration from private to public infrastructures.

Don't believe everything you hear about private clouds. Just because you've finally fixed IT doesn't make you a long-term cloud computing provider. Plan accordingly.

Private clouds are better than nothing but an investment in a private cloud is an investment in a temporary fix that will only slow the path to the final destination: shared clouds. A decision to go with a private cloud is a decision to run lower utilization levels, consume more power, be less efficient environmentally, and to run higher costs.

Pictured below is Georgina Teye. She sells plastic housewares — baskets, bowls, mugs and the like — at an outdoor market in Somanya, Ghana. She'd like to install solar-powered lanterns at her shop, which is also her home, so that she can remain open later and so that her three children can study at night.

I'm loaning her $100.

I made the loan through a startup nonprofit called Energy in Common.

It’s no secret that Google has been ramping up its enterprise offerings. The company has made a strong push for the adoption of Google Apps, launching the Apps Marketplace, allowing Apps users to add other layers to their environments from companies like Socialwok and Zoho. Today, Google is taking it one step further. At Google I/O today, the search giant has announced that Google App Engine, a platform for building and hosting web applications in the cloud, will now include a Business version, catered towards enterprises. The new premium version allows customers to build their own business apps on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Google is also announcing a collaboration with VMware for deployment and development of apps on the new cloud infrastructure.

A group of investors argued heatedly about the value of open versus closed technology on a panel today at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco. Dave McClure (pictured), a partner at Founders Fund, kicked things off with a provocative statement: “Open is for losers.”

McClure was answering a question from moderator Dick Costolo of Twitter, who noted that one of the big values celebrated in the tech community is openness, yet one of the hottest platforms, the iPhone, is completely controlled by Apple. In fact, McClure couched his answer by saying he was “channeling Steve Jobs.” He said that it’s important to have open standards as a foundation for technologies, but after that, proprietary technology motivates people to pursue “cool products and cool ideas.”

COOL video of a 330 square foot Hong Kong apartment.

In recent studies, Lux Research predicted that the green buildings market will grow from a current $144 billion to $277 billion in 2020, and the Continental Automated Buildings Association forecast significant growth in the systems market, pegged at $20 billion in 2009, over the next five years.

The Pretence of Knowledge

The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable. On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity t

reen building currently accounts for five to nine percent of the retrofit and renovation market activity by value, which equates to a $2 billion to $4 billion marketplace for major projects, according to a new report from McGraw-Hill Construction. By 2014, this share is projected to grow to 20-30 percent, making it a $10 billion to $15 billion market for major retrofit projects, according to the SmartMarket Report.

The market is expected to grow by leaps and bounds, however. Pike Research projects 250 percent growth to $19.9 billion by 2020.

About 80 percent of the current market is tied to projects in the institutional and federal sectors, spurred by the injection of nearly $11 billion in incentives, grants and lending opportunities through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

“Private commercial buildings are the next frontier,” said Research Analyst Jevan Fox. “However, private building owners still lack the proper financing structures and incentives to take advantage of this opportunity.”

In a scenario where more PACE financing becomes available, at the same time as companies face higher costs from cap-and-trade legislation, Pike Research estimates the market would balloon to $37.6 billion by 2020.

NYT writes about the lean startup.

Goodbye Career, Hello Success – Randy Komisar on giving up on careers and getting a life. AWESOME read.

A few facts on the renovation:

+ The thermal concrete mass of the old building is re-used to collect and store heat. This is just the way it was done in ancient times (see your local adobe for more information).

+ Electrical usage will be cut by over 50% – lighting only comes on when needed and a fascinating intelligent elevator system (the subject of another post) that optimizes routing keeps usage low.

+ Heating energy cut by 2/3 – triple paned windows and excellent insulation combined with a heat exchanger that allows the sun’s energy on the hot side of the building to be transferred to areas of the building that are in the shade. Not only that, but most water will be heated by solar thermal panels.

+ Water use cut by almost 75% – A full greywater system will be in place for the toilets as well as rain catchment.

+ The new building will be 100% hydro powered (by an agreement with a utility in Austria)

+ LCD readouts in the elevators will show progress of each floor on meeting

So what do top military experts say we should worry about? Here’s a top 10 list:

1. A severe energy crunch starting as soon as 2012.
2. Security problems made worse by climate change.
3. Petro-dollars being funneled to terrorist organisations.
4. Climate threats to military operations and facilities.
5. Insufficient incentives to ensure future energy security.
6. Mistaken assumptions about energy in the past.
7. The tendency to want 100 per cent certainty on energy and climate models.
8. An outdated electrical grid. The US’s ageing energy grid is “fragile,” “overtaxed” and “a threat to military capability,”
9. Energy price shocks. Since 1991, one presenter at the Johns Hopkins symposium pointed out, the consumer price index has increased by 59 per cent while energy costs have risen by 292 per cent.
10. Climate changes that are happening faster than predicted.

China may be fast establishing itself as the global leader in wind and solar energy, but to date it has made little progress in the sphere of marine energy.

Now that looks set to change after Israeli marine renewables firm SDE Energy announced that it will complete construction of a 1MW wave power plant in China by the end of the month.

The plant – which cost around $700,000 to build – is in the city of Dong Ping in Guangzhou province, and is the first installation in a proposed 10GW renewable energy project to install wave energy systems along the coastline.

The report, entitled Global Water Security – an engineering perspective, warns that a perfect storm of climate change and population growth could lead to severe water shortages in many countries that the UK is reliant on for imports.

The group calls on the government to assess the links between water, food and energy security in the UK and make water security central to national and international development policy making.

To compare the relative growth of Google Apps and Salesforce.com in their first few years of growth, just imagine the latter growth on steroids. Within roughly 3 1/2 years, Google Apps has amassed 25 million users and more than 2 million businesses. In contrast, it took Salesforce.com 10 years to reach 2 million users and 72,000 businesses. At the current run-rate of new businesses added, Google Apps grows its customer base by 3,000 per day, or more than half of the amount that Salesforce.com added in their most recent quarter. In case that 3,000 per day number doesn't really resonate, that is a run-rate of 1 million businesses per year. Salesforce.com's Investor Deck claims that the US business opportunity is: 6 million small businesses (with payroll), 100,000 medium sized businesses and 9,000 enterprises; it looks like the reference data comes from here). Not all of Google Apps customers are based in the US but the majority most likely are.

The iPad could ultimately be disruptive in the home energy market, because if consumers embrace it as a popular “fourth screen” in the home, it could both displace the need for separate energy gadgets, and could also give a boost the home energy management market. The home energy market is a nascent ecosystem that’s made up of: utilities that are trying get their customers to consume less energy, startups building smart energy software and energy dashboards that will manage energy data in the home and help customers consume less, large manufacturers dabbling in connected appliances, and investors looking for ways to make money.

Based on the sales and ranks of our very own Weather HD, we estimate that the Top 1,000 iPad paid applications are making about $372,000 per day, which sums up to about $136 million per year. This figure is based on there being only 500,000 iPads in the market, and is accounting only for the application sales in the United States. If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.

We believe this to be a conservative estimate. If the iPad were to enjoy a lucrative growth as the iPhone’s, which rose from 100 million downloaded applications in the first 2 months to 4 billion 19 months after, we can easily see the iPad’s App Store becoming a $1 billion per year market in 2 years.

Marriott's 30-year-old building in Bethesda attained LEED-Gold status (the second-highest designation possible in the ratings and assessment system) as an existing building as a result of a three-year renovation and retrofit project. The changes are expected to save Marriott $700,000 annually and help the company receive as much as $1.3 million tax credits.

As an island country, the UK has long understood the potential of the winds blowing along its ample coastlines and across its landscape. As of last year, wind turbines both offshore and onshore were delivering nearly 3.4 gigawatts of energy to the nation, with more capacity in the development stage. And an announcement today from the Crown Estate, which owns nearly all of Britain’s coastline, grants energy companies rights to add yet another 32 gigawatts of wind-generated electricity to the nation’s grid.

The government is calling the news the “biggest ambition in the world.”

Once completed, the wind-energy expansion is expected to provide the UK with one-fourth of its electricity needs by 2020. It could also become a £75 billion industry that supports up to 70,000 clean-energy jobs.

GE has won a $1.4 billion contract with independent power producer Caithness Energy to provide turbines and services for an 845-megawatt Oregon wind farm that would be the largest in the world.

GreenBiz.com's Heather King talks with CEO David Steiner about reinventing business models, biofuels, Barbie dolls, and why Waste Management supports a zero waste future.

Heather King: Several years ago your executive team faced a paradox — your company was in the business of collecting and disposing waste, yet your customers were asking for a zero-waste world. Tell us about your decision to "Think Green."
David Steiner, Waste Management CEO
David Steiner: Our larger industrial customers have been driving the change. They are motivated for environmental and for business reasons. Walmart was one of the first. They put out 450,000 pounds of trash a day. They are looking for innovative ways to reduce costs and recognized the potential value in their waste.

On show in Milan last week were Ecomat's Lego-esque building bricks. They're made from sustainable materials, are earthquake-proof, and suitable for both permanent and temporary structures. Do you think the fact that some of the bricks have been manufactured in United Nations blue is a subtle hint by Ecomat's Italian creators that the bricks would be suitable for refugee camps in disaster zones?

Based on the sales and ranks of our very own Weather HD, we estimate that the Top 1,000 iPad paid applications are making about $372,000 per day, which sums up to about $136 million per year. This figure is based on there being only 500,000 iPads in the market, and is accounting only for the application sales in the United States. If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.

We believe this to be a conservative estimate. If the iPad were to enjoy a lucrative growth as the iPhone’s, which rose from 100 million downloaded applications in the first 2 months to 4 billion 19 months after, we can easily see the iPad’s App Store becoming a $1 billion per year market in 2 years.