How IBM helps monitor biodiversity in the Amazon

GreenBiz | February 18, 2014

A screenshot from IBM Brazil’s Wikiflora app.

In the future, tracking the growth and development of a certain stand of açaí palm trees in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest might just as likely be done by a student as a government biologist.

That’s because a new data portal and mobile app built by IBM in its São Paulo research lab — one of 12 R&D hubs run by the company experimenting with new approaches to sustainability — will be used by a cadre of citizen scientists to help the Brazilian government monitor and track the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. It’s part of a group of projects developed by the company to give users the tools to help manage and monitor their environment via crowdsourced data.

In 2010, Brazil’s Ministry for Environment and Innovation presented his group with a 500-page catalog of all the species recorded in an area of rainforest close to the city of Manaus, according to Sergio Borger, a team lead of the São Paulo human systems division.

“Though this area was well explored, it comes up as just a big square on Google Maps,” Borger said. “That paper catalog of its biodiversity was limited to the scientists who created it.”

The government challenged IBM to think of ways it could bring the experience of the rainforest alive to younger generations — and simultaneously develop a central repository for all of its data.

But instead of conjuring up the hot and humid climate of the Amazon rainforest as inspiration, Borger was moved by a winter memory from 15 years ago: the time he and his children counted birds for the Audubon Society during its Christmas Bird Count. The oldest known citizen science project in the world, data from the 114-year-old count helps scientists monitor biodiversity and gain greater insight from population changes over time.

“I was very passionate about that,” he said. “So I felt crowdsourcing was the way to go, as one of the elements of monitoring our environment is asking our citizens about it.”

As the government’s first priority was to get the project into the schools, Borger and his team first prototyped a website-based platform they dubbed Wikiflora. It took them a year and half, and was completed in October 2011.

Wikiflora enabled students to upload their photos of a plant species, enter specific characteristics and classify it after comparing it against an existing catalog photo. Each photo contained data to describe precisely where it was taken.

A key part of the platform was its identification gaming function. Students could review their peers’ entries and rate how well they thought that student classified photos. A user’s rating would determine the weight of his or her assessments.

Over the next year, the team developed a mobile app, Wikiflora 2.0, which carried over the feature that allowed students to upload photos and rate them with their smartphones. It also gave them the capacity to track and map individual plants and trees, as well as components such as the leaves and trunk, via more photo uploads. To identify the particular plant or tree, students were asked to choose from a long list of similar-looking plants or trees that the app would present for selection.

But because the students were too impatient to scroll through the options, Borger said, his team set off a year ago to revamp Wikiflora 2.0 so the public could collect data and monitor it over time using real-time processing and data aggregation.

“We’re on our third wave of learning now,” he said.

The platform’s third iteration, Missions, uses the company’s IBM InfoSphere Streams product to process collected data coming in (from many sources at any particular moment) before it gets stored in a DB2 database. Borger estimates that it will be released later this year for both Android and iOS smartphones, but in a research capacity only.

Multiple users will be able to add to the data file of a specific plant or tree by using unique identifying characteristics, such as the diameter of a tree trunk.

“That can be done with some level of certainty,” Borger said. “At this point, the system makes an assumption [on which plant or tree the data belongs to], but we’re working to refine it even further.”

His São Paulo team is developing tools to advance the capability of real-time processing and aggregation of images so that when a user takes a photo of a certain element of a plant or tree, for example, Missions will help the user determine its species and give the user five to six options to choose from. After the user makes the final identification, the data is sent to the database.

Tracking mobile species, such as frogs and insects living close to water, tack on another dimension of complexity altogether. They will be included in the future, Borger says, as his team is determining how to handle this type of monitoring.

IBM is particularly interested in knowing if insects living close to water are present because they can serve as bioindicators.

“If they’re not there, the water may not have enough oxygen for them to live,” Borger said.

The company’s efforts to get the public to crowdsource environmental indicators through technology is not new territory for IBM.

In 2009, an engineer in its San Jose, Calif., Almaden Research Lab developed CreekWatch, an app where users help the state to monitor drought conditions by uploading photos and weighing in on water levels, flow rate and the amount of trash at each location. Borger applied what he learned from this project to the development of the Wikiflora and Missions platforms.

And IBM’s Accessible Way app allows the greater public to map accessibility barriers in urban areas, so that mobility-challenged individuals can select suitable routes well in advance of their trip.

“We look at sustainability,” Borger said, “as a way to make our environment smarter.”

View the original story here.

Screenshot of Wikiflora web app courtesy IBM Brazil

The unexpected way beer is helping a town…

TakePart | February 4, 2014

The unexpected way beer is helping a town get through a historic drought

If Cloverdale, Calif., makes it through one of the worst droughts in state history, it will be in large part due to the efforts of an unlikely source: beer.

The recent installation of an innovative water treatment system at the Bear Republic Brewing Company, along with the ongoing construction of two local wells in part paid for by the company, could go a long way toward keeping Cloverdale afloat before it’s estimated to run out of water in a few months.

“We hope to weather this drought, and with the help of this technology and the support of the city of Cloverdale we feel we have a pretty good chance,” Bear Republic owner Richard Norgrove Sr. recently told The North Bay Business Journal. The company is famous for its tasty IPA, Racer 5.

Originally designed for the U.S. military, the treatment system, named EcoVolt, will use recycled wastewater to supply about 10 percent of the 7.8 million gallons of water the brewery uses each year to produce 72,000 barrels of beer. It will also generate enough biogas to slash the facility’s electricity use by 50 percent.

Here’s the nitty-gritty of how the proprietary process works, according to the National Science Foundation:

The system sends wastewater through a bio-electrochemical reactor. As the water filters through it, special bacteria in the reactor eat the organic waste in the water, releasing electrons as a byproduct. Those electrons travel through a circuit to generate methane.

This very high quality methane is then piped out to an engine, where it’s burned with a small amount of natural gas. It then generates heat and energy.

Even before installing the EcoVolt system, for which it reportedly paid $1 million, Bear Republic was already well ahead of its competitors in terms of water conservation. The average brewery uses six gallons of water for every one gallon of beer produced, but the Cloverdale facility boasts a ratio of just three and a half to one.

In November, the brewery lent Cloverdale $466,000 to hasten the digging of two new wells, which would provide more water for the city’s residents and also enable the brewery to increase supply for a planned expansion, reports The San Francisco Chronicle.

Scheduled for completion in July, the wells will increase local water capacity by 600,000 gallons a day, a 40 percent increase over current supplies. Bear Republic currently uses up to 2,000 gallons of water a day to make beer—meaning beer will be directly responsible for city residents getting access to an additional 598,000 gallons. But since the volume of water used by the brewery is based on the city’s ability to provide, that number could change.

Last week, the need for the new wells became more acute: State officials said Cloverdale is one of 17 California cities estimated to run out of water by May without the new supply.

“The Russian River is where we get our water, and it’s just about dry,” said Cloverdale Vice Mayor Robert Cox. “There’s no rain. About the only good news on the horizon is those new wells. We’d be in really bad shape without them.”

View original story here.

IBM, SAP open big data platforms for citizen science

The Guardian US/UK | January 27, 2014

Ectatomma tuberculatum, an ant species that lives in the Amazon Rainforest

Sujeevan Ratnasingham is on a race to identify all living species on earth. With the tally anywhere between 10 million to 100 million – and one-third estimated to become extinct by the next century – it’s a Herculean task in the least.

But undiscovered species are just as likely to be found in one’s backyard as the Amazon rainforest. So it’s no surprise that in this age of crowdsourcing and citizen science, the bioinformatics expert and his colleagues at the International Barcode of Life (iBOL), a consortium of universities, natural history museums and research institutes, are asking people around the world to gather samples. Then, back in their labs, scientists can identify the species by sequencing a section of its DNA (a procedure known as barcoding).

With hundreds of millions of records to analyze – and even more data per record poised come in over the next year, iBOL decided to host its database on HANA, SAP’s enterprise platform that makes data available in a computer’s memory. The switch will allow researchers and citizen scientists to quickly analyze the huge volumes of data in the cloud.

By merging their records with other datasets such as weather, researchers can conduct predictive analyses that can reveal patterns between species and location. The results can provide clues into how outside forces – from invasive species to climate change – are affecting the environment, and suggest how to manage wild land and agricultural land more sustainably.

IBM, too, has been working on a platform to support crowdsourced citizen scientist data. Its research lab in São Paulo, Brazil, developed a portal and mobile app as a way to gain more knowledge about biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest. Users of all ages and educational backgrounds will be able to collect data points and identify species.

Sergio Borger, an IBM team lead in São Paulo, devised the crowdsourced approach when Brazil’s Ministry for Environment and Innovation approached the company in 2010. They were looking for a way to create a central repository for the rainforest data.

Borger and his team developed a platform and mobile app that allowed users to upload photos of a plant species and its components, enter its characteristics (such as color and size), compare it against a catalog photo and classify it. The classification results are juried by crowdsourced ratings.

Titled Missions, the platform will enable multiple users to collect data and monitor conditions on the same plant or tree over time through uniquely identifying characteristics such as the diameter of a tree trunk. Borger’s team is currently working through how to handle monitoring of more mobile species, such as frogs and insects.

Borger used the knowledge gained in IBM’s first experiment with gathering crowdsourced data as leverage for the new platform. Developed in partnership with California’s state water agency, the Creekwatch app enables citizens to help the government monitor drought conditions in local watersheds via uploading photos and evaluating water levels, flow rate and amount of trash present.

The company has also developed Accessible Way, an app allowing citizens to report accessibility problems in the urban environment.

The beginning of a new trend?

Could the forays by IBM and SAP signal a larger trend of IT companies opening up their platforms to crowdsourced citizen science projects?

Since the excitement and interest in big data dawned a few years ago, startup Kaggle has helped companies, organizations and researchers gain insight from their data by holding crowdsourced predictive analysis contests, while Crowdflower, another startup, has provided the service of generating the “crowd” itself. Although both Microsoft and Google have engaged in data-related conservation projects, large IT companies have mostly shied away from crowdsourced citizen science, for what could be a seemingly obvious reason, one scientist says.

“Citizen science is not the most lucrative [venture],” said Dawn Wright, academic oceanographer and chief scientist for Esri, the Redlands, California-based company behind the GIS (geographic information system) mapping platform ArcGIS.

Yet despite this disincentive, Wright says she’s seen an increased interest from industry over the past two years, despite its rise in the academic community in the past five.

Benefits to business

But while devoting resources to citizen science projects can be viewed as part of a company’s goodwill efforts, are there other business benefits to be gained?

After all, independent efforts by local groups are already underway. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Nerds for Nature has organized several ‘bioblitz’ events where volunteers document biodiversity using the iNaturalist smartphone app. They’re also working with a small biotech company and hackerspaces to perform DNA barcoding independently.

SAP says it’s not trying to sell HANA for those wanting to analyze iBOL’s biodiversity database. For these users, access will be given to the data platform at no cost.

“This is not an effort to sell our products,” said SAP’s David Jonker, head of big data marketing. “We’re passionate about using our technology for good in this world and applying it to citizen science.”

Still, Mike Gualtieri, an IT industry analyst for Forrester Research, says that there are reasons why large IT companies might be interested in making their products available for free to a non-enterprise audience.

Gualtieri says that the rise of Hadoop – an open source system enabling storage, processing and quick analysis of big data – has disrupted these companies’ core products such as databases, data analytics and data warehousing.

Although Hadoop will not necessarily replace the larger vendors’ technology, Gualtieri says they will have to work with Hadoop.

“They see a threat, so they figure they better get it out there and let people use it,” he said. “By making them available, they’re building awareness among the average user.”

As a result, Gualtieri expects to see more of these large IT companies use their platforms for more crowdsourced citizen scientist data analysis projects in the future.

Commercial applications

In five to 10 years, SAP says the public will have the ability to identify species on the spot, thanks to a DNA barcoding mobile app it’s working on with the International Barcode of Life. While the technology is being developed in part for the citizen science biodiversity project, Jonker says that the technology can be used in a commercial context.

There does appear to be a demand for it, if recent food mislabeling scandals – from horsemeat masquerading as beef, to fox meat sold as donkey meat, and mislabeled fish are any indication. Shopkeepers would be able to verify products by identifying a sample on the spot via DNA barcoding.

SAP is already in talks to commercialize the product with a few partners. In the meantime, the company will release an app enabling anyone to contribute samples to the International Barcode of Life project through uploading a photo (with location metadata) and mailing in a sample for analysis. The app is scheduled for launch in late March.

View the original story here.

Photo of Ectatomma tuberculatum, an ant species that lives in the Amazon Rainforest, by Alex Wild via Wikimedia Commons

Virtual net metering grows, expands solar’s reach

SolarEnergy | January 22, 2014

mmunity-owner solar array. Photo courtesy Clean Energy Collective

A community-owned solar array.

When the clock ticked over to the year 2014, New Hampshire officially enabled residents to receive credit on their utility bills from solar energy — without a single solar panel placed on their roof.

Sound strange? A tweak in the state’s net metering laws has made it possible for apartment dwellers, renters, and business owners to buy their own solar panels (positioned as part of a larger array and located offsite) and receive credit for the generated energy. Known as virtual net metering, or community-owned solar, participants will get a credit on their bill if they consume less than their panels produce for the month.

New Hampshire is one of 11 entities — including California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont — where some sort of virtual net metering policy is in place. In some places, such as California, restrictions limit eligibility. California State Sen. Lois Wolk is reintroducing a bill that would enable renting residents and business owners to be eligible alongside the building owners who can currently install solar PV and implement virtual net metering at affordable housing complexes.

“It’s not as attractive to investor-owned utilities that need to deliver returns,” said Paul Spencer, CEO and founder of Clean Energy Collective in Boulder, Colo., a company that is leading the way in setting up virtual net metering programs by negotiating deals with utilities and developing the solar projects needed to generate the energy.

Spencer’s company established the first such program in the U.S. in 2010 with Holy Cross Electric, a cooperative utility near El Jebel, a town outside Aspen. To reach that milestone, Clean Energy Collective had to wrestle with a number of challenges that had never been faced before, including satisfying security laws, federal tax laws, and developing software that enables participants’ energy credits to be directly applied directly to their utility bill.

Since then, Clean Energy Collective has brokered deals for virtual net metering with 14 other utilities in six states. At least one investor-owned utility — Xcel Energy — is part of the mix.

The key, Spencer said, is to negotiate a price for the energy that both the utilities and consumers can agree upon. And the utilities also benefit from the virtual net metering programs, he added, by helping them reach their state’s mandated renewable portfolio standard.

Expansion in Massachusetts

Recently, Clean Energy Collective announced plans to construct four solar arrays (in this context, also known as community solar gardens) in Massachusetts for virtual net metering programs. The solar gardens will be built in areas served by three of the state’s largest utilities.

In Massachusetts, as in other projects, the panels are available on a first-come, first-served basis. However, residents can only purchase solar panels with the capacity of generating 100 percent of their energy consumption.

Return on Investment?

With the average cost for a panel hovering around $750, and the first year’s return between 5.5 to 10 percent payback, Spencer estimates that buyers will break even anywhere from seven to 15 years on average, after taking inflation into account.

What happens if the owner of a solar panel has to move?

If one’s new home is located the same utility service area, the owner can just notify the utility. But if he or she is moving out of the area, it will have to be transferred to someone who lives in the area.

“It’s just like a car,” Spencer said. “You own it — so you can sell it for any price you want.”

Looking to the Future

As Clean Energy Collective currently has “active conversations” in play with over 135 utilities in 38 states, Spencer feels optimistic for the future growth of virtual net metering.

But he’s also realistic.

“All 50 states might be a challenge,” he says. “Some states are not a match for solar since there’s not a lot of sun, and the power prices are low.”

View the original story here.

Photo of community-solar array courtesy Clean Energy Collective

Why Fox mentioned climate change more than…

TakePart | January 17, 2014

Broken ice on the Hudson River during the polar vortex

Why Fox mentioned climate change more than MSNBC during the polar vortex

Less than a month ago, the term “polar vortex” sounded more like the name of a Pixar film than a blast of Arctic air causing record-low temperatures. The flick would star a family of polar bears wearing red vests, I imagined. They’d stumble into a ring of gently falling snow. But the flurries would soon twist into a hard-driving blizzard, and when the family tried to escape, it would encounter all sorts of obstacles.

I wasn’t the only one with an overactive imagination during the recent cold snap. As the frigid air drove Americans into their thermal underwear and under their electric blankets, late-night talk-show hosts broadcast their own interpretations. Stephen Colbert pictured the polar vortex as a Nicolas Cage action film. Jay Leno envisioned the term splashed across Cosmo covers. And David Letterman free-associated the words “minus degrees” with Dr. Phil.

But Fox News had a different idea altogether. The channel interpreted the polar vortex–induced temperatures as evidence that global warming does not exist, according to an investigation of cable networks’ climate change coverage by Media Matters for America, a media watchdog.

Between Jan. 2 and Jan. 8—days described by The New York Times as “the worst of the polar vortex mess”—Fox News took to branding climate change as a dubious phenomenon. (Never mind that geologist James L. Powell found that only one of more than 9,000 authors of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles in the last year rejected man-made global warming, or that in September 2013 the climate arm of the United Nations proclaimed with 95 percent certainty that climate change is both real and man-made.) One story that Fox News did cover during this week was that of a ship that got trapped in large amounts of Antarctic ice—notable to broadcasters as an example of “global cooling.”

During those seven days, Fox News brought up global warming in the context of cold weather nine times, Media Matters found. The network’s relatively “frequent” mentions of climate change during that period stand out when compared with its failure to bring climate change into its news analysis during a weeklong heat wave in 2011. During July 2012, the warmest month on record in the U.S., Fox News mentioned climate change exactly once—and only “to deny it,” wrote Media Matters’ Denise Robbins.

Let’s Be Clear: Weather Is Not Climate

Whereas weather is best thought of as atmospheric conditions over a short period of time, such as days or weeks, climate is how the atmosphere behaves over long periods, such as decades or centuries.

Yet Fox News’ on-air talent repeatedly ignored this key distinction, so much so that the White House was forced to release a set-the-record-straight video featuring Obama science adviser John Holdren. In it, Holdren tells viewers not to believe that the polar vortex, a short-term weather event and not a long-term climate trend, invalidates global warming.

“The fact is that no single weather episode can either prove or disprove global climate change,” he says. “Climate is a pattern of weather that we observe geographically and over the seasons, and it’s described in terms of averages, variations, and probabilities.”

Holden adds that a “growing body of evidence” suggests the extreme cold experienced by Americans is a pattern he expects to see more frequently as global warming continues.

What About the Other Television Networks?

Media Matters’ investigation found that while MSNBC mentioned climate change in the context of the polar vortex four times, it gave airtime to only those experts who debunked the climate skeptics’ position. CNN mentioned it in the cold weather context once and presented both sides in a debate format.

What’s worse, Sunday news show coverage of global warming on Fox News and the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) totaled less than half an hour—27 minutes to be exact—for all of last year, according to a previous Media Matters investigation of climate coverage.

On a slightly more positive note, nightly news in 2013 was more generous. Climate change coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC (Fox does not have an evening news program) totaled one hour and 42 minutes, the most since 2009.

Politicians Take Note—and Action

The study’s results pushed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and eight of his peers to write a letter to ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox yesterday advocating for increased climate change coverage by the networks.

“Although it is a modest improvement over the eight minutes of coverage in 2012,” their letter read, “given the widely recognized challenge that climate change poses to the nation and the world, this is an absurdly short amount of time for a subject of such importance.”

Photo of broken Hudson River ice during the U.S. polar vortex by Anthony Quintano via Wikimedia Commons

View the original story here.

Does fake meat have legs? The case for alt-proteins

GreenBiz | November 27, 2013

Hampton Creek Foods’ Beyond Eggs is one of the new protein substitutes that has hit the national marketplace.

Recently, two American chefs were asked to cook a meal of steak and potatoes. But when they got to the supermarket, none were in sight.

Sound implausible? True, the barren aisles were staged by Food Network TV producers. And the shortage had little consequence. No beef? They cooked habanero chicken sausages instead.

Less than 40 years from now, however, food shortages could become serious. By 2050, the world’s population could reach 9 billion. Environmental pressures will put a squeeze on farmland, water and fisheries, making it harder to feed everyone using current practices, according to a June report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

This means bad news for those who count on resource-intensive protein such as beef.

Instead of cuing in the doom and gloom, however, a swell of entrepreneurs have captured the public’s attention with alternative protein offerings that appear to be more sustainable. On the menu are edible insects, plant-based imitation eggs, fake meat and “schmeat” – that is, in vitro meat as found in Mark Post’s cow stem cell hamburger.

Go ahead and giggle at the term “schmeat” — yet, as Oxford Dictionary’s runner-up word of the year, the concept has legs. Will the emerging industry have a market for mainstream growth?

Is that a cricket you’re eating? I’ll take two

Edible insects are low cost, low-carbon emitting and full of protein, vitamins, fiber, minerals and fat, according to the FAO report. Its researchers also concluded that boosting insect populations by raising them for food would provide ecological benefits such as helping with plant pollination, improving soil fertility and controlling harmful pests.

“There’s an industry that wasn’t there before three years ago,” said David Gracer, a Rhode Island resident who has been educating the public about entomophagy — human consumption of insects — since 2001.

Gracer, who started eating insects out of curiosity in 1999, has traced mention of the practice in the media and academic journals. In the last four years, he has counted 1,200 articles about entomophagy in the media and 800 technical articles about the subject — a tremendous difference over prior years.

But the public’s mindset about entomophagy, shown via the comments on articles in American media, he says, shows a lot of disgust and mockery of the practice, which is commonplace in parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

What would it take to change these mainstream attitudes and increase market viability in America? “If things get scary out there in terms of climate change and food production and food stability, and [there’s] not complete mayhem, that’s going to be something that will change the game in terms of people’s perceptions,” he said.

Nevertheless, he continued, “When I got started, there were only a few people, and now there are domestic manufacturers for insect foods. There’s a much bigger community than there was five to six years ago.”

Tiny Farms

Berkeley, Calif.-based Andrew Brentano, wife Jena and friend Dan Imrie-Situnayake decided a little over a year ago to start Tiny Farms, a business that would support individuals and entrepreneurs interested in developing a steady supply of edible insects. Their idea wasn’t too outlandish.

After all, the Bay Area already had seen the debut of edible insect food truck Don Bugito, which hit San Francisco streets in 2011. Well before that, San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences and the city zoo served samples to the adventurous. [In years past, I’ve sampled edibles at Don Bugito and the Academy of Sciences, along with chapulines (grasshoppers) in Oaxaca, Mexico].

Tiny Farm’s co-founders observed that there wasn’t enough supply to meet the needs for new businesses making insect food products, such as the Exo cricket bar funded on Kickstarter.

“It’s really tricky to get food-grade insects,” Brentano said. “That’s also an issue overseas because of import regulations and food safety issues.” In addition, most insects overseas are wild harvested and as a result likely will have accumulated metals and pesticides.

The emerging for-profit company’s core product will center around Web-based management tools to enable individuals and businesses to track their insects, receive alerts, and conduct data analysis.

“Right now, there’s not a market for our larger-scale plans,” Brentano said. “But there needs to be a feed-in. … Hopefully we’ll be growing with them so we can help with technical matters.”

In step with demand, then, Tiny Farms’ first offering will be open-source home assembly kits for bug farms. Brentano anticipates that the kits will be available in the first quarter of 2014.

Beyond Meat

Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, sought to develop a version of plant-based meat that was seamless with the real thing. He collaborated with biological engineering professor Fu-hung Hsieh and researcher Harold Huff at the University of Missouri, who had developed on a fake chicken product made from soybeans. The product got off the ground in 2012 at Beyond Meat’s Columbia, Mo. factory.

Company investors include the Obvious Corporation startup incubator and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.

Hampton Creek Foods

In 2011, Josh Tetrick founded Hampton Creek Foods in a quest for the perfect plant-based egg substitute. He was motivated to provide an alternative to eggs laid in unsafe, environmentally polluting industrial facilities (he explains in the video above).

“Since one-third of those eggs end up in food products, we focus on the products these caged chicken eggs end up in,” he said.

Heading up R&D is Johan Boot, who left his post as head of global R&D at Unilever to join Tetrick. In early research, Hampton Creek’s biochemists screened the molecular structure of more than 2,000 plants. Then, the company’s culinary director and food scientists took over. Eleven plants were “highly functional” as an egg substitute, Tetrick said, because they could aerate, emulsify and coagulate just like the real thing. The result was Beyond Eggs, a powder that can be used in place of eggs in baked goods.

Hampton Creek Foods also has developed a mayonnaise made from yellow peas. It’s available at 120 Whole Foods markets and will launch nationwide Dec. 5. Cookie dough and scrambled “egg” products are in the works.

Other large companies have shown interest in the San Francisco-based startup’s work, which counts Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and Kat Taylor’s Emerging Impact Fund among its investors. Tetrick said Hampton Creek Foods is currently collaborating with three Fortune 500 companies. Although he said he couldn’t talk much about this due to a nondisclosure agreement, there is a joint research project with General Mills.

“These companies see the prices of caged chicken eggs going up because they’re fed massive amounts of corn and soy,” he said. “They’re watching the problem, and it’s a natural way for them to save money.”

View the original story here.

Image of eggs and Beyond Eggs courtesy Hampton Creek Foods; image of cricket flour courtesy Exo

Silicon Valley dives in to support sustainable seafood

GreenBiz | November 18, 2013

Blue Sea Labs fish distribution company screenshot

Blue Sea Labs, a San Francisco-based fish distribution company, is working to shorten the traditionally long supply chain between U.S. fishermen and the end consumer.

Traditionally, the seafood industry has not benefited either end of its supply chain. While overfishing has depleted fish stocks, fishermen have given up profit margins to large processors and distributors. And thanks to mislabeling, consumers haven’t always been too sure where their fish came from.

Now, though, access to sustainable seafood has become mainstream. Large grocery chains Safeway and Whole Foods are taking cues from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch recommendations, and conscientious consumers try to buy directly from fishermen as much as possible.

But through new developments in technology and emerging opportunities for impact investors in sustainable seafood ventures, the movement has evolved and expanded beyond its original scope. Nonprofits such as the Future of Fish, for instance, are driving sustainability in seafood by supporting entrepreneurs.

And in the true style of startups, what better way to help entrepreneurs than by matching them up with investors during a two-day pitch session in Silicon Valley?

Scaling up

Enter Fish 2.0. Although described as a competition by founder Monica Jain, it’s also a year-long development process complete with advice and mentoring from business advisors and impact investors. Eligible entrepreneurs (those focused on wild capture-based fisheries, closed-loop aquaculture or in-ocean aquaculture systems) get the chance to refine their business models through a series of four elimination rounds with advisors experienced in finance, marketing and investing.

“These entrepreneurs offer investors the opportunity to help build viable businesses that contribute to food security, ocean sustainability and thriving local communities,” said Jain, who herself possesses a hybrid marine biologist-Stanford MBA background.

The first Fish 2.0 competition took place this year. Jain started the event as a way to bridge the gap between the entrepreneurs and interested investors who just weren’t finding viable business models. Organizers aimed to create opportunities and build momentum for impact investors in the sustainable seafood industry — a sector that has yet to seal as many deals as those in sustainable agriculture.

Through offering advice and judging during the first three rounds held online (PDF), and from sitting in the audience during the finals, impact investors got a front-row opportunity to familiarize themselves with the competitors. They were also ready to invest — some up to $10 million, according to Fish 2.0.

More than 80 hopefuls entered. Judges used a scoring system that evaluated factors such as the competitors’ business models, market conditions, financial status/projections and social and environmental impact.

By April, 53 competitors made it to the second round; in June, 39 continued to the third round. In September, 10 finalists and 11 semifinalists were chosen for the final round that culminated in the two-day event Nov. 12-13 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Finalists gave a 10-minute pitch to a judging panel made up of investors and investment experts.

And the winners

First place and a prize of $40,000 went to Blue Sea Labs, a San Francisco-based distribution business shortening the supply chain via an online system connecting U.S. fishermen to consumers. As with similar online marketplace Good Eggs, producers (the fishermen in this case) know exactly what they need to fulfill their orders and can save time and money when securing their supply.

“We are really excited about the chance to grow our business and help fishermen reach more consumers,” said Blue Sea Labs founder Martin Reed. “It was great to have a room full of investors there who wanted to know more about seafood.”

Second place went to Cryoocyte, a Harvard Innovation Lab startup that is developing fish egg-freezing technology in order to preserve endangered species for aquatic biodiversity. Founder Dmitry Kozachenok believes that freezing fish eggs also would give entrepreneurs in the developing world greater access to start their own fish-hatching operations, by providing them with a year-round supply of eggs and a way to bypass the costs of breeding and transporting juvenile fish.

“We want people to have better access to healthy foods, and we want generations down the road to have the same biodiversity in the oceans that we see today,” said Kozachenok, adding that he hoped to use his company’s technology to help restore wild fisheries. Cryoocyte received a $25,000 prize.

Ho’oulu Pacific, a community-based aquaponic and distributed agriculture business, won third place. Based in Waimanalo, a Native Hawaiian community east of Honolulu, Ho’oulu Pacific hopes to give residents the tools to establish healthy food security by growing fish and vegetables in their backyards. The integrated closed-loop system directs water flow from the fish tank to the plants. Plants extract nutrients from the fish waste, and the water is purified by the plants.

The company will buy the surplus and sell it to surrounding communities. Co-founders Keith Sakuda, Ilima Ho-Lastimosa and David Walfish aim to expand the network across the Hawaiian Islands. They received $10,000 in prize money.

In the fast-pitch competition, semifinalists had just 90 seconds to make a winning impression and $2,500. SmartFish, which aims to improve fishermen’s livelihoods in developing countries through the development of local and regional markets for sustainable seafood, tied with Inland Shrimp Company for the honors. Based in the Midwest, the Inland Shrimp Company is focused on raising shrimp indoors using sustainable methods.

View the original story here.

Screenshot of Blue Sea Labs courtesy Blue Sea Labs; image of fishermen setting their nets courtesy Loki Fish Co./Blue Sea Labs

Can tech startups change the way we eat?

The Guardian US/UK | October 31, 2013

Good Eggs offers a range of produce from local producers that can be ordered online.

These days, even the most casual observers can’t go long without hearing about yet another potentially disruptive business model hoping to redefine an industry.

But when that industry is food, it’s worth paying extra attention. Food, after all, affects everyone. And as the appetite for local food grows stronger than ever, a new crop of tech startups are moving to circumvent the industrial food system in favor of small, regional producers.

Innovative? Certainly. Disruptive? Maybe.

Founders from two promising examples, Good Eggs and Freight Farms, spoke at the Net Impact conference in Silicon Valley last week.

Farm-to-doorstep food, ordered online

Good Eggs, based in California, launched earlier this year after two years of research and testing to find unfilled needs in the food system. Co-founder Rob Spiro, an ex-Google employee, hung out with farmers, spent time on their ranches and tagged along on shoppers’ food-buying trips.

“There’s more demand than there is supply for local food … it’s very rare that you find a dynamic like that,” Spiro said at the Net Impact conference. The highly perishable nature of food, he added, causes the imbalance. Good Eggs’ solution is an online farmers’ market, complete with delivery. With more than 150 profiles of regional producers to pore through, San Francisco Bay Area residents can shop for food the way one might approach online dating.

First, find the type of product you’re interested in, whether it’s seasonal fruits and vegetables, dairy products, meats and seafood, baked goods or snacks. Then, see if the accompanying description and photos appeal to you. When you find something that meets your requirements, you can arrange to pick it up at a regional location or schedule a home delivery.

Good Eggs will aggregate orders from multiple vendors; delivery costs $3.99 per order. The idea is that shoppers have a better chance of finding what they want without having to visit multiple farmers’ markets while producers will only harvest what’s been ordered for the week, reducing food waste.

Aside from the Bay Area, Good Eggs is piloting test programs in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans and plans to expand to hundreds of cities, Spiro said. He aims to take market share away from traditional grocers, including Walmart and Target, as well as from Amazon. “We would love to take them on,” he said.

But Good Eggs will have its work cut out to make sure it signs on enough producers to meet customer demand and vice versa. If it can’t meet most of shoppers’ grocery needs, they may not be willing to switch from bigger chains. The company also will need to keep a tight rein on quality control and – given the many different producers – make it easy for customers to choose between different products without being able to see, touch or smell them in advance.

In New Orleans, its fastest-growing market, the company already has signed on producers that weren’t previously selling at farmers’ markets, Spiro says. “We’ve got Vietnamese fishermen selling on the New Orleans [Good Eggs] market now that have not been hooked into the farmers’ markets or the local food scene,” he said.

Farm in a crate: year-round hydroponics

Two friends in Boston, Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, were frustrated by the inefficiencies of growing plants in rooftop greenhouses. So they designed a hydroponics farm in a shipping crate that can be installed anywhere with electricity and water hookups.

That led to the founding of Freight Farms in 2010, then the raising of nearly $31,000 via Kickstarter for the company’s first unit in 2011.

The idea is a portable farm that users can use to grow local, fresh produce year round – instead of relying on food trucked or flown in from warmer climates. “Our main goal is to allow people to create small and medium-sized food businesses that can supply fresh and local foods to any environment,” McNamara, Freight Farms’ CEO, said at the Net Impact conference.

By doing that, the company hopes to ultimately change the way food is grown and distributed on a large scale. “The food system is linear, which creates inequality, access issues, price issues and spoilage,” McNamara said. “The system is ripe for disruption – and tech is a way to do that.”

Inside Freight Farms’ 40-foot-long shipping crates, users can grow their selection of more than 3,600 plants, including leafy greens, herbs and mushrooms. The system is climate-controlled, lit by LED lights and electronically monitored. Freight farmers can view the conditions in their farms via their smartphone and customize alerts, for instance, when the temperature or humidity exceeds a certain level.

The freight farms have the potential to be installed in a range of locations, such as underutilized land at schools or recreation centers, side lots or vacant lots. And, in order to use land more efficiently, the crates can be stacked four high and eight deep.

One developer in Massachusetts plans to install freight farms on three acres of an abandoned strip mall – farming a few crates himself and renting the rest to others – instead of putting in new stores. The system is designed to be accessible to those with little farming experience, McNamara claims. Inexperienced farmers have achieved crop yields of 60%, while experts have yielded 95%, he said. And the company also networks its farms so that users can support each other and share farming strategies and techniques.

Freight Farms has received a lot of interest from regional food distributors who haven’t been able to meet the demand for fresh local produce after the local growing season ends, McNamara said. “It’s cheaper for them to buy from a freight farm versus putting another truck on the road,” he added.

One distributor in Minnesota was so happy with the basil grown by a freight farmer that he offered $1.75 more per pound than the price he was initially willing to pay, he said.

With a price tag of $60,000 per shipping crate – and a threefold increase in price if the farm is solar-powered – McNamara acknowledges that a freight farm is not affordable for everyone.

In the past few weeks, though, he says he’s been exploring the ideas of regional food distributor sponsorship for crate farms in low-income communities. The distributor would pay for the farm with stipulations that a certain percentage of the vegetables would be grown for their inventory.

Freight Farms has also been tweaking its user instructions to make them more visual and to simplify the process. The hope is that this could make the farms more accessible to a broader swath of people, including those with little education or without strong English skills.

“We want to have these changes buttoned up by the middle of next year,” McNamara said.

View the original story here.

Happiness: the next big business metric?

The Guardian US/UK | September 16, 2013

A smiling face made from nature that was found along a hiking path. Photo credit: Frerk Meyer/Creative Commons

Whether it’s words of wisdom from the Dalai Lama, guidance from an empathetic career counselor or advice from a friend, we’re often told that it’s more important to be happy than anything else.

But for the more than 1 billion people around the world fighting hunger and poverty, happiness seems fairly irrelevant – a luxury for the middle and upper classes. Does happiness matter if daily needs are not met? Certainly the primary focus should be on taking care of the basics. Happiness is a bonus.

Most, it seems, would agree. But increasingly, the answer depends upon whom you ask. In certain academic and human development circles, the stock in happiness has been rising. So much, in fact, that in the last two years, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (run by UN Millennium Development goals guru and Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs) has published the “World Happiness Report,” researchers’ attempts to measure happiness in 150 countries around the world.

That raises the question: As more thought leaders pay attention to happiness, should companies also consider happiness as one measure of their social impact?

“All businesses should care about happiness,” said Mark Williamson, founder and director of the London-based Action for Happiness Project, who joined Sachs in New York last week to release the latest report. “The happiness of a company’s people is vital to their business success.”

Companies with happier staff outperform their competitors, Williamson said, and a happier staff is sick less often, more engaged, more creative, more productive and better at working collaboratively.

Consumer-facing businesses also affect the wellbeing of their customers, production services and their supply chain, Williamson added, so responsible businesses should not be hawking products or services that they know will decrease wellbeing.

The happiness metric: more important than GDP?

Government will likely play a role in driving the happiness agenda, if it progresses. “There is now a rising worldwide demand that policy be more closely aligned with what really matters to people as they themselves characterize their wellbeing,” said Sachs, one of the report’s co-editors.

Life satisfaction – a self-evaluation of how well a person’s life is going – is the cornerstone of what the report aims to measure. According to researchers, a person’s happiness, or wellbeing, can be traced back to GDP per capita (as a measure of one’s standard of living), but also to the extent of one’s social support, freedom, generosity, healthy life expectancy and perceptions of corruption.

In recent years, Williamson said, Sachs came to believe in wellbeing’s potential as the “ultimate beyond-GDP measure.” Sachs, a senior advisor on sustainable development to Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon, is pushing to place wellbeing at the heart of the UN’s post-2015 Sustainable Development goals.

Does more happiness really mean more sustainability?

But is a goal to improve the life satisfaction of people around the world really a means to an end? How would this accelerate or enhance ongoing work to secure access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities, a sustainable food supply and a stable source of education?

“Wellbeing is really the driver that underpins all the development goals,” Williamson said. “Whether we’re aiming to alleviate poverty, ensure maternal health, support gender equality, or promote sustainability, the reason that all these things matter ultimately comes down to their impact on human wellbeing.

“If we get them right, wellbeing goes up,” he said. “If we fail to deliver on them, wellbeing goes down.”

Mental health and productivity

Mother and daughter in Bhutan. Photo credit Christopher J. Flynn/Creative Commons

But even Bhutan, the world’s most famous proponent of happiness, is starting to cast doubt on its devotion to the measure. Its society struggles with a range of social concerns including poverty, education, unemployment, gender inequality and a perceived increase of corruption – and even, perhaps, mental illness.

Yet Williamson points to both ends of the scale in this year’s World Happiness Report as examples of wellbeing’s power. The happiest countries – Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden – all have reasonably high GDP, he said, but likely rank high on happiness because people in these countries tend to have higher levels of social support and more collaborative and supportive social systems than most other developed economies.

On the other hand, countries that experienced the greatest falls in happiness over the last year – Greece and Egypt – are countries whose residents have had to contend with massive upheavals to financial and political systems that influence their quality of life. And it’s no surprise that Syria – now in the spotlight for atrocities inflicted on citizens throughout its ongoing conflict – placed among the most unhappy countries worldwide.

Another reason to include wellbeing in the UN post-2015 Sustainable Development goals, Williamson said, is that its existing goals do not include mental health, something he considers to be the among most important determinants of wellbeing. According to the report, mental illness – which counts depression and anxiety among its forms – is among the main causes of unhappiness worldwide.

Unhappiest people get happier

Perhaps some of the greatest insights into the determinants of wellbeing can be gleaned from the region with countries ranked among the least happy worldwide. All are in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region where residents battle infectious disease, poverty and corruption.

Yet at the same time, Sub-Saharan Africa – along with Latin America – is counted in this year’s report as one of two areas where happiness levels are increasing the most. The reasons? Higher levels of social support, generosity and the freedom to make key life decisions, the report said.

“Social relationships matter much more for happiness than possessions,” Williamson said. “Every organization should recognize that human wellbeing is at the heart of success and progress – and that they can play a role in contributing to this by the way they treat their people, the products and services they offer and the impact they have in the community.”

Bringing happiness to mainstream business

Some organizations, like John Lewis, have always put employee wellbeing at the heart of their business models, Williamson said. But happiness is gaining ground: companies such as Southwest Airlines, BT, Semco, Marks & Spencer, Zappos, Innocent Drinks and NixonMcInnes are increasingly taking it seriously, he added.

Happiness hasn’t yet become a top priority for sustainability-minded companies, but Williamson expects the trend to persist. And if its popularity continues to rise among nonprofits, policymakers and thought leaders, we could soon see it become a common corporate social responsibility metric as well.

Should businesses consider happiness as part of their social impact? And what can businesses do to boost happiness? Please send us your thoughts by commenting below or by tweeting #GSBhappy.

View the original story here.

Can the apparel industry pin down worker safety?

The Guardian US/UK | September 10, 2013 | Original headline: Bangladesh factory collapse: can Gap and others pin down worker safety?

Rana Plaza factory building collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh

On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed, killing more than 1,100 garment workers and injuring 2,500 more in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo credit: rijians via flickr/Creative Commons

Nearly five months after the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza building that killed more than 1,100 garment workers and injured 2,500 in Bangladesh, the reverberations continue to impact the apparel industry.

The incident – and it lessons about supply-chain vulnerabilities – has boosted efforts to improve worker and building safety.

“[Bangladesh] is an inflection point for monitoring and auditing supply chains,” said Kindley Walsh Lawlor, vice president for corporate social responsibility at Gap, speaking at the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco last week.

But companies remain divided on how best to do this in a country that’s one of the industry’s top suppliers.

Different approaches

Gap is part of an alliance of more than 15 companies – including Walmart, Kohl’s, Target and Macy’s – which has agreed to require factory inspections (and publicly release the results) in Bangladesh, develop common safety standards, provide loans to factory owners to improve safety, establish a worker hotline before the end of the year and establish “worker participation committees” selected by their peers.

The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety has set a five-year timeline for the project.

Lawlor – who has focused on fire and building safety in Bangladesh since 2010, when a factory fire near Dhaka killed more than 25 people – says Gap is bringing in professional engineers to inspect supplier factories and also is following up with remediation.

“We’re seeing the suppliers through the process and making sure they make the changes,” she said.

But Gap’s approach has been controversial. The company and its partners have been criticized by labor rights groups for not including for a requirement to allow supplier workers – mostly women earning low wages – to organize unions.

Meanwhile, more than 70 other companies have signed a different accord, which does endorse the right of workers to organize as part of an overall strategy to improve factory safety in Bangladesh. H&M, Zara, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein were among the companies to sign the accord, which requires independent factory inspections and public release of the results. Unlike Gap’s initiative, this accord is legally binding.

Taking a systemic approach

Racheal Meiers, head of BSR‘s HERproject, a factory-worker education project in Bangladesh, India, China and a half dozen other countries, said the Bangladeshi government also must play its part in fixing the health and safety problems.

HERproject works with Gap, in addition to Marks and Spencer, HP and J.Crew.

“We have to take a systemic approach for progress to be made,” she said. “If Gap has a robust fire safety standard, there aren’t many people in the country who can do those international fire safety and building safety inspections.”

But many of the factory owners in Bangladesh also have high influence in the government, she said.

“Even if factory owners do make changes – such as the two years it took to raise worker wages by between $6 to $7 a month – the impacts on workers’ lives are limited within the workplace itself,” she said. “Once the slum landlords found out that the workers got a raise, they increased the rent.”

For that reason, Meiers says, HERProject focuses on increasing the wellbeing of workers by educating the mostly female workforce on menstruation, infectious diseases, maternal health and HIV/AIDS. It teaches women how to make more nutritious food choices and how to access improved health care.

Education sessions are designed for a workplace setting and present factory owners with the business case for a healthy workforce. “The business case is important,” Lawlor said.

Boosting the business case

Aside from working with HERproject, Gap also runs a life skills education and technical training program – called Personal Advancement & Career Enhancement (P.A.C.E.) – for female garment workers.

“It’s proven these women [who participate in P.A.C.E.] have longer tenure and are being promoted more often,” Lawlor said. “They are making more money, can stay consistently in one location and factories are coming to us now. Management is starting to understand the workers aren’t replaceable.”

Michael Kobori, vice president of social and environmental sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co. – which has said it will not join the Bangladesh accord – said that getting suppliers to agree to sustainable production methods through market demand will be a motivating force for change.

“We can try to get suppliers to comply [with us] and struggle,” he said. “But they will respond to consistent business.”

Kobori shared a success story: Levi’s 501 WaterLess jeans, debuted a few years ago, cut the amount of water used in the production process by almost a third, on average, and were favorably received by consumers.

But the benefits expanded beyond conservation and sales.

“That connection [of the product] with the consumer was rewarding to suppliers,” he said. “This way worked much better – we harnessed the power of market and the consumer to drive sustainability.”

View the original story here.

Can impact investing cross from land to sea?

The Guardian US/UK | September 5, 2013 | Original headline: Can impact investing successfully cross from land to sea?

Impact investors have plunged headfirst into food and agriculture deals, but when it comes to ocean ventures, they’re just starting to learn how to swim.

Fishing pier by timparkinson via flickr/Creative Commons

Impact investing in fisheries and oceans has been slow to emerge, compared to dairy, poultry and beef ventures — in part, it seems, because these companies can seem like a safer bet. The supply is fairly predictable, and there aren’t as many middlemen cutting into producer profits.

Yet it’s possible to apply the lessons learned from food and agriculture deals toward investing in fisheries and ocean-related businesses, which could lead to larger profits for fishing communities, restored fish stocks and improved marine health.

“We see tremendous opportunity because of issues and gaps in the marketplace,” said Taryn Goodman, director of impact investing at RSF Social Finance, during an ocean investing panel Wednesday at the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco.

Know the differences

That said, investors also should realize there are differences between the ocean and agriculture sectors. Knowing those differences, panelists emphasized, can help craft a deal that meets both investors’ financial and impact requirements.

For one thing – as Goodman observed through a RSF Social Finance loan to Kuskokwim Seafoods, a Native Alaskan-run fishing company – the seafood supply chain is made up of a more concentrated monopoly of only a few companies and is disconnected from local food systems.

“The system is broken,” Goodman said. “Getting in to process fish is very difficult – you go head to head with the big guys.”

Though Kuskokwim made a deal agreeing to process everything it caught, Goodman said, “the deal went south. No money was made because you’re competing with others and not building out your supply chain.”

Seafood supply chains are filled with middlemen, explained Beau Seil, managing partner of Unitus Impact. “Fish can change hands 14 to 15 times before it gets to our plate in the US.”

Not being able to predict how much fish would be caught, Goodman said, also made it difficult to know the maximum processing capacity needed or how to get the greatest profit margin. The unpredictable length of the season, as well as Alaska-issued quotas, also threw her off.

Consumers as influencers

The public, Goodman noted, also influences how the seafood supply chain works.

“The majority of chefs, once you take the skin off, can’t identify what fish it is,” she said. “It’s lack of knowledge and awareness. It surprises me.”

Many restaurants don’t want to take a chance with smaller suppliers, who might not have what they need on any particular day, she said.

A lack of transparency creates another challenge. “Opaqueness in the space enables more poor behavior . . . you can create monopolies,” she said. “It’s like the underworld in there.”

See the original story here.

Cloud technology brings clean drinking water to India

GreenBiz | September 4, 2013 | Original headline: How cloud technology can bring clean drinking water to India

Women and children collect drinking water from tanks at an urban resettlement slum in Delhi, India. Credit: Frog Design

Imagine not having access to clean drinking water because you refused to vote for a particular politician, or didn’t pay bribes to the driver delivering your supply. Even after doing both these things, you’re still not sure just exactly when the next delivery will arrive.

This is the case in India, where access to drinking water is not universal. As India increasingly urbanizes and water becomes even more scarce, solutions that raise access will be more important in the coming decades.

That’s why the Piramal Foundation — which addresses India’s development challenges through social ventures — funded Sarvajal, a company that uses cloud technology to provide water via filtration stations and solar-powered ATMs.

UNICEF reports that water-borne diseases such as cholera, gastroenteritis and diarrhea in India are responsible for $600 million in medical bills and lost productivity per year, but it could get worse. The national government estimates that demand for clean water will rise 50 percent by 2031 if current delivery models stay the same. According to the World Bank, 220 million Indians will migrate to cities over the same 20-year period.

The problem: Steady access to clean water

In rural areas, residents often have no other choice than to capture groundwater. “The water was brackish, there were no pipes, no tankers, and filters were too expensive,” said Anand Shah, former head of the India-based Piramal Foundation, of the lack of access. “They’d sift it but would still have large amounts of kidney stones, joint pain, arthritis and gastrointestinal problems.” Plus, the reverse osmosis process to desalinate and filter out impurities was inefficient.

In urban slums, the situation can be better, but not optimal. Although tankers arrive to dispense water for free, they’re intermittent and unpredictable, Shah said. Residents invest large amounts of time pursuing the tanker, jostling to fill containers they carry home. And even if the driver has the best intentions, the country’s rough roads lead to unexpected roadblocks.

Through a monitoring device attached to each filtration unit, embedded sensors and an RFID reader, Sarvajal tracks water quality in real time. It follows user activity, how many times the water has been backwashed and rinsed, when filters need changing, how much water a station has dispensed and how many times the power went out.

Service and maintenance were costly, so a monitoring device was built in-house allowing the company to diagnose machines from one central location.

The company grew from one pilot location in 2007 to more than 200 filtration station-ATM combos in villages of at least 5,000 people each across India. One resident per village can purchase a franchise for about 30,000 Indian rupees, about $500, and sell the filtered water for a penny per liter, he said.

Users pre-pay for their water, and funds are loaded onto Sarvajal ATM cards.

Selling, really?

Shah said he realizes that selling water in a country that has offered water as a public resource could appear off the mark. But delivery via the tankers is unpredictable, and it takes families time to collect water from the tankers and filter it at home.

“We looked at every alternative out there, and even if a family buys the cheapest water filter, we’ve priced it still under what it would cost them per liter,” he said. Bottled water costs 32 cents and water pouches 14 cents per liter on the street, and creates more waste than refilling reusable containers.

According to Shah, local franchise owners can earn a good living — up to two to three times what they would make for unskilled labor. While Sarvajal still owns the water filtration equipment, it takes less than a year for the franchise owners to start returning profits, he says. Sarvajal, on the other hand, doesn’t expect to profit for another five to 10 years.

Shah says Sarvajal launched as a for-profit company in part because a non-profit would have a harder time attracting technical talent.

Scaling into urban areas – with some help

Sarvajal has secured the go-ahead from the local government in the metropolitan area around New Delhi to set up some 50 filtration station-ATM units — areas without regular access to drinking water.

Because Sarvajal mostly had operated in more rural areas, it needed help. To that end, the company hired Frog Design, a consultancy that engineers and designs products and services in energy, health care and social innovation.

Jan Chipchase, Frog’s creative director of global insights, set up a team of staffers from India. They spent over a month in Delhi interviewing and observing how residents navigated securing drinking water. The group also spoke to water providers who had opened businesses related to supplying clean water.

Savda Ghevra, a resettled slum on the edge of Delhi, was the focus of the research. Frog wanted to find out the value of clean drinking water, how a delivery system would meet residents’ needs and what might arise during the implementation of an alternative system. (The extended research was funded by the Institute of Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California-Irvine).

“A water ATM allows stored value to convert to digital credit. As the world digitizes, we wanted to find out to what extent a low literate community was willing to invest in these types of technology,” said Chipchase.

Using digital tools to store value in less developed countries is not unheard of, says Chipchase, who cited Kenya as a country where much of the population banks online.

As a result of their research – detailed in a report, “Journeys for Water” released Tuesday – Frog concluded that in the context of the current water delivery model for Savda Ghevra, the “belief that water is a right and should be free is moot. In the slum residents pay for their water in one way or another – with time and money, with their ability to move and make political choices based on their interests.”

“It’s realizing that the current practice of water tankers isn’t working from a social and practical perspective,” Chipchase said. “This project is far more about understanding politics and economics in the broader sense.”

But Frog found that despite all the advanced technology enabling a water delivery system such as Sarvajal’s to exist in a country lacking adequate infrastructure, it must give residents some ownership and control for the system to be sustainable.

Shah said his team estimates that Sarvajal needs to scale to 1,000 to 1,500 locations to break even.

Democratizing of technology

Chipchase said Sarvajal is a perfect example of how “reverse innovation” is taking place through combining “mature” technologies such as the mobile telephone system, RFID tags and sensors. “The ability to prototype is becoming mainstream. It’s not just Silicon Valley anymore.”

Shah is a CalTech and Harvard-educated Indian-American who grew up in Houston, then spent 13 years in India after college, yet most of the 120 employees at Sarvajal are Indian nationals. His team of 25 engineers developed the filtration system’s monitoring device, coined the Soochak.

Coin-operated water filtration stations exist in Vietnam and Thailand. Yet Sarvajal’s pairing of cloud-based monitoring and an ATM service appears to be unique.

Capital returns should be secondary

Shah has been contacted by the Indian division of water giant Pentair and an array of venture capitalists about potential investments. But after learning more about the company’s timeline for return, he said, they lost interest. The same thing happened, he said, with larger companies interested in moving into the space themselves.

“My response to them was you’re asking the wrong question – you should be asking how long it’s going to take to solve the problem,” he said. “We’re in this to solve the problem, not for money to be made. Things like water — where innovation hasn’t happened in 50 years – these are really big opportunities to think about them freshly from a new perspective. Returning capital should be a byproduct or a secondary [outcome].”

Middle image: Women collect filtered drinking water at a solar ATM and filtration station operated by Sarvajal. Bottom image: Sarvajal’s filtration stations are operated by local villagers and are monitored for maintenance using sensor technology. All photos courtesy Frog Design

View the original story.

Dairy farmers move ahead on sustainability

GreenBiz | July 9, 2013

Farmer and cow at Foster Brothers Farms dairy in Middlebury, Vt.

Foster Brothers Farms dairy in Middlebury, Vt. Photo: Skye Chalmers for Cabot Creamery Cooperative

As a fourth-generation farmer, Bob Foster worked for decades under his father and uncles as they taught him how to run Foster Brothers Farms, his family’s 1,800-acre dairy tucked away in Middlebury, Vt.

When he was growing up, following sustainable practices was not always front and center of the industry’s business strategy.

“As a kid, it was okay to mix the bags of superphosphate in with the manure,” Foster said.

But the energy crisis of the 1970s spurred an awakening. “We had one of the last loads of fuel and we were trying to harvest crops,” he said. The situation jump-started his efforts to lower his farm’s carbon footprint through a closed loop system.

In 1982, the farm installed an onsite anaerobic digester. Since then, it has been producing electricity and compost from cow manure. So in addition to the 1.4 million gallons of milk it produces each year, Foster Brothers also sells excess electricity to the grid and compost varieties to regional farms.

But for all his efforts towards becoming a more sustainable producer, Foster was frustrated that companies looking to buy his products had a different approach towards measuring emissions and the farm’s carbon footprint.

Although many companies circulated questionnaires asking what his farm was doing to monitor its emissions and shrink its carbon footprint, Foster didn’t think they were asking the right questions. “A lot of the scorecards when you push it down to the farm gate don’t measure up,” he said.

So Foster joined efforts with Agri-Mark (a dairy co-op Foster Brothers belongs to) and over 40 other Northeastern dairy producers working alongside the Manomet Center for Conservation Science to develop the Vital Capital Index. Released in 2010, it was the U.S. dairy industry’s first effort to measure impact on a social, environmental and economic level.

Now, a national effort to standardize the way U.S. dairy producers are measured in the same three areas is almost complete.

The industry-funded organization leading the efforts, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, says that the new framework is a science-based tool for dairy producers and processors to benchmark their own progress. It enables them to report data on a variety of indicators such as their energy and water use, greenhouse gas emissions, working conditions, animal care and impacts on the local economy. Indicators were developed in collaboration with dairy producers and processors, nongovernmental organizations, academics and companies that purchase dairy products as part of their supply chain.

The framework — detailed in a document titled the Stewardship and Sustainability Guide for U.S. Dairy — is an evolution of the work the Innovation Center started in 2008. In 2009, the industry had made a voluntary commitment to reduce 25 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions from milk by 2020. So when the Vital Capital Index was released one year later, the Center was ready to build upon and expand those efforts.

The Center hopes that the framework will enable both companies and consumers to better understand dairy’s impact on the supply chain.

Kenton Holle and daughter Jennifer at family-operated Northern Lights Dairy in Mandan, N.D. Photo courtesy Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy

“It allows for standardization in communication and consistent definitions throughout the industry,” said Sandra Vijn, a sustainability metrics specialist at the Center who is leading the effort. “We want the producers and processors to tell their own sustainability story.”

The indicators are based on several performance indicators from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines that Vijn helped to develop.

Yet considering that most in the industry do not report on sustainability issues at all — and that using the Center’s framework is voluntary — how much can the effort really standardize sustainability reporting? Will it really help conscientious consumers decide which brand of milk, yogurt or cheese to buy when one farm reports progress on sustainability using the framework and another does not?

Even if both did participate, applications still appear limited. The Center emphasizes that reporting results should be used as to benchmark one’s own progress, not as a comparison tool.

Still, Foster says that if companies adopt the framework as an evaluation tool — and if the questions asked are those his peers have the data to answer — an enormous amount of time would be saved when responding to each questionnaire.

Jed Davis, director of sustainability for Agri-Mark Co-op — comprising 1,200 dairy farm families in upstate New York and New England — said that the sheer variety and ever-changing nature of questionnaires from potential customers frustrates him.

“We take all of the questionnaires at the moment and boil it down to the questions we most want to ask our farmers,” he said. “The next month we get a whole bunch more, but the next month [they’re] slightly different. More than once we have to go back — which is too much to bother them for information when they have to stop and pull it together.

“As a dairy industry, if we can help our customers ask better questions of us, we can give better answers.”

One such example of a poorly developed question, Foster and Davis agreed, was one asking about the source of the cows’ feed when not all dairies grow their own crops; sometimes, the source can change from one week’s delivery to the next.

But compared to its sister industries in agriculture such as beef, soybeans and corn — dairy appears ahead of the game. (While hackathons held recently in Silicon Valley and New York in pursuit of a more sustainable meat industry appear to be fostering a new wave of innovative ventures between farmers, hackers and entrepreneurs, they were not organized by an industry association).

What the beef industry just started doing last year — pulling together a group of stakeholders together at a sustainability “roundtable” — is what the dairy industry did in 2008 with the first of its sustainability councils, Davis said.

Earlier this year, the Center’s framework was pilot tested by a group of dairy producers and processors in different regions of the country. Testers were provided with a suite of location-specific tools (for a farm, processing plant or fleet) and handbook for guidance and support in how to report using the framework. And on July 14, the Center will wrap up a 60-day stakeholder comment period on the framework.

But plans for third-party certification are not in the immediate future. “We think that by working through a multistakeholder process, basing it on science, and getting nongovernmental organizations and customer feedback brings credibility to the process,” Vijn said.

GRI has reviewed the indicators to make sure they’re in line with its own, and the Center has been working with the Carbon Disclosure Project on processor indicators, she added.

Next, the Center will be working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a larger group of academic institutions and USDA labs to study how the industry can adapt their production methods to a changing climate. It has the support of a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It’s not a complete picture yet,” Vijn said. “Greenhouse gas and energy is one thing, but we also want to make sure we bring in other indicators over the years.”

View the original story.

How Google is changing the renewables game

GreenBiz | April 24, 2013 | Original headline: How Google is changing the renewables game for Apple, Facebook

The need to consume ever-increasing amounts of energy in their data centers — yet continue marching towards renewable energy goals — has been an ongoing challenge for Google and Apple.

Google has offset electricity needed for its centers through purchase power agreements that enable an equal amount of renewable energy to be created, yet has lamented that managing power sales and purchases on the wholesale market takes time away from its focus on building user products.

And despite Apple’s onsite generation of renewable energy, it has still had to supplement its need for renewables through buying off the grid and purchasing renewable energy certificates to offset the conventional portion, green IT experts say.

It’s a conundrum that has kept the Silicon Valley tech giants within the constraints of local utilities’ energy mix in states that don’t permit direct purchases of renewable energy.

Nowhere has this challenge been more evident than in North Carolina, an indirect access state that houses data centers for Google, Apple and Facebook as well as AT&T, Wipro and Disney. Compounding matters further is proposed legislation that would repeal the state’s renewable portfolio standard mandating that 12.5 percent of North Carolina’s energy mix come from renewable sources by 2021.

But things are looking up. Now, Google is trying to transform the local landscape in North Carolina by partnering with Duke Energy. The pair worked together to develop a mechanism which will enable companies of all sizes to directly purchase renewables through a new category dubbed “renewable energy tariffs.”

“The tariffs are creating a new class of service,” said Michael Terrell, who leads Google’s public policy efforts in energy and sustainability. “We think it will be a good framework for purchasing renewable energy,” he told GreenBiz.

Before the program can be launched, though, the new class and tariff structure needs to be approved by the North Carolina Utiltiies Commission. Duke Energy will make a regulatory filing asking for its adoption within the next three months.

Under the tariff, renewable energy will be sold at specific rates yet to be determined — higher than conventional sources, of course, but passed on only to those who choose to participate in the program.

“What we think is exciting is that it’s scaleable – it allows companies to buy large amounts of renewables … not every company can manage power on the wholesale market,” Terrell said.

Terrell said that he hopes the tariff will be in place by the end of the year.

Google’s announcement of the renewable energy tariff concept last Friday came on the same day it released plans to expand its Lenoir, N.C. data center with $600 million in investments. The possibility of accessing more renewable energy directly will come in handy for the company striving to reach a commitment it made in 2007 to become carbon neutral.

Implications for Apple, Facebook

Apple

The renewable energy tariff promises to boost Apple’s tally of renewable energy directly purchased for use at its data center in Maiden, N.C.

Despite Apple’s claim last month that its data centers are powered by 100 percent renewable energy, experts say that based on the information the company has released, it does buy conventional power off the grid in North Carolina (comprised mainly of coal and nuclear power in 2013, according to a Duke Energy report filed to the state’s utilities commission) to supplement what it cannot supply on its own from its 20 MW solar array and 10 MW fuel cell installation at the Maiden data center.

According to Brad Brech, a data center energy efficiency expert and board member of the Portland-based Green Grid, Apple fell short of its claim.

“Assuming that the facility runs the fuel cells at their rated capacity, they will be running their data center at its average operational load in 2012 on 85 percent renewable energy. On a sunny day, the facility will be running on 100 percent renewable energy for eight to 10 hours because the 20 MW solar farm is feeding the grid during that time period, increasing the percentage of the time the data center runs on renewable energy to 91.3 percent of the day,” Brech told GreenBiz. “On a rainy day, it will be 85 percent.”

Brech used Apple’s reported figure of the Maiden data center’s total consumption of 104,000 MWh in 2012 as a basis for his calculations, which he said on average requires 11.8 MW of generation capacity.

“With the current renewable energy generation and energy storage technologies, it is extremely difficult to run a facility that uses large amounts of electricity on renewable energy 24 hours per day, seven days per week,” Brech added. “Most renewable energy generation sources for electricity are intermittent and then are no economical, large scale energy storage technologies available to store electricity for release when the renewable sources are not generating.”

Gary Cook, an IT analyst for Greenpeace, also weighed in. “Apple is otherwise buying renewable energy credits to allow it to claim that all of the electricity it buys is renewable energy,” he told GreenBiz. “It’s not clear how much of Apple’s 100 percent renewable energy claim is being supported by REC purchases. … Technically speaking, if Apple used the current standard for reporting greenhouse gas emissions, Apple would have to use Duke’s grid mix.”

“Given that they expect the Maiden facility to grow and its electricity use increase it will be difficult to achieve 100 percent renewable energy use and assure the reliable operation of the facility,” Brech concluded. “The reality is that all users of renewable energy, whether they are residential or commercial, depend on grid-generated electricity for some part of the day.”

Apple did not make a spokesperson available to respond.

Facebook

The social media company runs a data center in Forest City, N.C., operates another in Prineville, Ore., is building a third in Lulea, Sweden and recently announced plans for a fourth near Des Moines, Iowa. While it has not been as aggressive as Google or Apple in the renewables market so far, it has a goal to reach 25 percent use of renewable energy at its data centers and facilities by 2015. And it’s planning to tap into renewable energy sources for its data centers in Sweden and Iowa, according to Reuters.

If Duke Energy’s regulatory filing to the North Carolina Utilities Commission to establish renewable energy tariffs is approved, Facebook will also have the opportunity to increase its use of renewables in Forest City.

Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks told GreenBiz that he didn’t know whether Facebook or Apple has expressed interest in participating in the renewable energy tariff program.

GigaOM‘s Katie Fehrenbacher reported last summer that Facebook’s head of energy efficiency and sustainability Bill Weihl expressed interest in purchasing renewable energy through an industry trade association which would “influence utilities’ grid choices through the group purchasing of clean power,” the article read.

How the renewable tariff program would work

Google and Duke Energy still have yet to hammer out much of the details of the renewable tariff program, which is a separate initiative from the state’s renewable portfolio standard.

The program will initially focus on large commercial and industrial companies as customers, according to Google.

“They have fairly predictable energy loads and it’s consistent, which makes it easy to design a rate that will meet their needs,” said Brooks, who added that Duke Energy had been discussing the tariff program with Google in detail for the last several months. General discussion about the idea began when Google first asked Duke Energy for a renewables rate during initial discussions about expanding its Lenoir data center, according to Brooks.

To start, the customer will decide if they want to offset some or all of its energy consumption, then the utility will match the customer with a project in the region that has a third party purchase agreement, Brooks said.

In addition to the utility going out and identifying renewable project sources, projects can approach the utility and come in under the tariff, he continued.

While Brooks could not project the level of demand in North Carolina for directly purchased renewables, he said he sees a potential for long-term growth of renewable energy sources.

“We’ve seen renewable energy projects bloom in the state over the last few years, and we’ve seen a great interest in solar energy companies, wind and even biomass and other forms of methane gas projects too. Solar in particular has really boomed in the past few years, and we’ve seen costs come down for those technologies,” Brooks said.

Terrell said that Google has been speaking to other utilities about the renewable energy tariff proposal. According to Brooks, the idea to offer renewable energy rates to various customer classes is fairly new but not entirely unique. Dominion Virginia Power, he said, provides a similar offering.

“It’s [an idea] that utilities are exploring in different ways,” he said.

View the original story.

Carbon standard aims to benefit women worldwide

GreenBiz | April 18, 2013 | Original headline: How a new carbon standard seeks to benefit women worldwide

Using a biodigester means that women (here, in Laos) can use biogas as fuel for cooking and prevent their exposure to pollutant-emitting cookstoves. Photo: SNV

Women are the majority of the world’s farmers, yet carbon mitigation projects in agriculture and forestry are rarely designed in ways that benefit their economic and social status.

So says Jeannette Gurung, a Bangkok-based women’s development advocate whose group WOCAN (Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management) is trying to change that through the Women’s Carbon Standard. According to Gurung, no such standard currently exists for carbon projects or any other type of project that specifically addresses women.

“By and large, gender issues are not considered important to most climate change mitigation projects,” Gurung said at the standard’s launch on Wednesday in San Francisco. “There are a number of projects out there — for example, improved cookstoves — [developed] without even a thought about how to improve women’s [status]. We wanted to see if we could use the carbon markets to benefit them.”

The Women’s Carbon Standard aims to boost project benefits in income, health, food security, education, leadership and increased discretionary time. It requires that a portion of the profits from carbon offset sales be channeled back to the women’s community where the offset is based.

But despite its name, it’s really a social standard designed to measure outcomes benefiting women who participate in carbon mitigation projects.

“We call it ‘carbon’ because we feel like there’s a market around carbon,” Gurung said,“but it can be used on all sorts of activities.”

The mitigation project must exhibit certain indicators in income, health, food security, education, leadership and increased discretionary time before it can achieve third-party verification. For example, has the project increased access to education and improved air quality? What about water quality? Has it increased community funds under women’s control?

Christiana Figueres, the head and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), expressed support. “This approach to set up a carbon standard that measures in six different categories the very concrete impact that mitigation projects can have is a very good way of making sure that those projects are really making a difference in the quality of life for women,” Figueres said at the launch event.

To illustrate how the standard would apply to improve women’s lives, Gurung said that the choice to install a biodigester to provide energy for a gas cookstove makes a big difference. Just the one decision to use a biodigester, she said, will result in a number of improved outcomes for women’s well-being alone – not just reduce carbon emissions.

By stirring the contents of the biodigester a few times a day, gas is released up a pipeline to a kitchen stove.

“There’s no more smoke, there’s no more walking to the forest,” she said. “It relieves all those women from the drudgery of the fuel wood collection – something we see all over most of Africa and most of South Asia … The dependence on fuel wood for women means long work hours for women and health problems – respiratory problems and eye problems for those who have to work in smoky kitchens.”

And less kitchen time means more free time for women to pursue education, community leadership or entrepreneurial activities. In some cases, men have started cooking once the household has access to biogas, according to Gurung — an action representing a shift in traditional gender roles.

Figueres spoke about the need for women to be involved in the design and building of cookstoves used to replace open fire. When her daughter worked on a Clean Development Mechanism project in Guatemala, Figueres said, her daughter discovered that the first thing that needed to be done was “to get the women to be the builders of the stoves, and teach them how to maintain the stoves.” If the stoves didn’t work, she said, the stoves would be placed outside and open fire would return.

“If these women are given the entrepreneurial training to figure out how to build as a business, then now we have a very different type of leadership,” Figueres added.

The Women’s Carbon Standard was field tested in Western Kenya at an agroforestry project funded by SIDA, Sweden’s international development agency. WOCAN is also getting ready to launch three pilot projects using the standard in Laos (an improved cookstoves project), Cambodia (biodigester) and Vietnam (waste treatment) funded by the Asian Development Bank.

Gurung started developing the standard two years ago as a way to address the funding gaps she observed throughout her three decades of international development work with organizations such as the United Nations Development Program, CARE and the Peace Corps.

Gurung immersed herself in learning everything she could about the carbon market. She emerged determined that it could serve as an alternative system to provide social benefits and revenue to women around the world.

“After decades of attempts in influencing how those international aid allocations were made, it was high time to look for alternative ways to attend to the needs of those women,” she said.

Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have expressed interest in using the Women’s Carbon Standard, according to Gurung.

“The IMF told me all of the investors that they deal with are calling for green investments, and if we can give them green plus women, we don’t have a single investor who won’t jump on that,” Gurung said.

Business has also expressed interest in using the standard.

“We’ve had interest in companies we can’t name — a company who flies your documents around the world and is offsetting your carbon,” she said. “We’ve also heard indications of interest from pension funds who use corporate social responsibility guidelines to make guidelines about who they buy their offsets from.”

WOCAN has not determined which company will provide third-party verification services, but Gurung reported that she has already met with energy and sustainability company DNV KEMA in regards to this task.

View the original story.

Lessons for business in the age of climate change

Bill McKibben marching with crowd at climate rally in Washington, D.C., Feb. 12, 2013

Bill McKibben (center right) marching at Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 12, 2013. Photo: 350.org

GreenBiz | April 1, 2013

Perhaps one of the most well-known climate activists of our times, environmental writer Bill McKibben is on a mission to slow down the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth. Alongside his colleagues at the nongovernmental organization 350.org, McKibben has spearheaded a campaign calling upon communities, governments and universities all around the world to take action by divesting from fossil fuel companies.

Last summer, McKibben laid out his case for divestment in Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, an article he wrote for Rolling Stone. The piece stated that while the United Nations’ Copenhagen Accord climate agreement recognizes that the earth’s temperature should not rise by no more than an amount just under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), global temperature has already risen about 0.8 degrees Celsius — and that many scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen believe that a rise of two degrees is too much. McKibben closes his case by highlighting research by the Carbon Tracker Initiative which reports that burning the total amount of coal, oil and gas reserves currently held by fossil fuel companies would release five times the amount of carbon needed to stay under the two-degree threshold.

McKibben is also reaching out to business. Later this month, he’ll speak to the health care industry at the CleanMed conference in Boston (April 24-26) about what it can do to fight climate change.

GreenBiz Interim Managing Editor Kristine A. Wong recently spoke with McKibben about lessons for business in the age of climate change.

Kristine Wong: There’s only so much government has been able to do to address climate change, and business is a clear part of the answer. What are some of the top things that business needs to do to move this process forward?

Bill McKibben: Well, I think that there’s a lot of things that individual businesses can be doing in their own business, and we’re seeing a lot of that start to happen already. Apple announced that their entire server farm is running off of solar energy. People are making good transitions in their operations in a lot of cases.

But just in the same way that we always say to people ‘It’s important to change your lightbulbs, but it’s more important to change the structures of your energy system,’ the most important thing that businesses can be doing is to join in a real concerted political effort to cause change – not letting the fossil fuel industry win through letting its vehicles like the Chamber of Commerce dominate the discussion. You need to bring pressure on [the Chamber of Commerce].

There may be no more important player in Washington – I haven’t seen the latest numbers, but in the 2010 election cycle they spent more than the Republican and Democratic National Committee parties combined. And they’re stone cold climate obstructionists. They filed a brief with the EPA saying something like don’t worry about climate change – if it ever happens, humans will adapt their physiology in order to cope. They’ve been way, way, way outside the mainstream on this issue, carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, and the rest of the of the business community has let them get away with it.

Wong: Why do you think that is?

McKibben: Because it’s not their main business to be focused on that. If you run a furniture company, your main thing that you spend all day thinking about is making and selling furniture. You don’t have a lot of bandwidth left to think about climate change – or at least you haven’t had a lot of it — and the only people who have that bandwidth left is the fossil fuel industry because they understand that doing anything for climate change is a mortal threat for their industry. They’ve been there day in and day out.

It’s starting to change because renewable energy groups and things are beginning to acquire some power, but lobbying power belongs to people who’ve made money already. It represents the accumulated money and power of the last 50 years, not the next 50 years. Fifty years from now, I have no doubt that the wind industry lobby will be powerful, and perhaps obnoxious. Maybe it will be stepping on the neck of the tidal power industry, or whatever else is coming next.

But for the moment, we need everybody who’s at all concerned about climate change — the biggest problem facing the world — to make it their business. This, at this point, is everybody’s business. And it better be fast because the economic consequences of not doing anything about it are staggering, quite aside from the moral human consequences.

Wong: There’s a lot of Fortune 1000 companies that have the money to do something — and they have sustainability departments. What’s the best way for them to be engaging with governments and the grassroots?

McKibben: Companies are deeply politically involved all the time. If they’re a member of the Chamber of Commerce, then they’ve joined the movement to do nothing for climate change. So maybe a good first step would be quitting. But internally within their businesses, it’s very easy to do figure out how to do things like setting an internal carbon price and quickly make fossil fuel reduction a priority. And these things are starting to happen at your better-managed companies now. And they’re important and good, but they’re also not a substitute for political engagement.

Wong: What companies do you think are doing a good job in this area, and who needs to improve?

McKibben: I don’t track individual companies. But I know there have been some interesting focused efforts at some of the chemical companies – DuPont, I think, has done an interesting job of energy use reduction. Sometimes, one’s a little sad that the same handful of companies are being held up again and again – Interface, for example — because it sort of implies others aren’t moving as fast as one might want.

Wong: What are some strategies to get businesses to change — whether it’s from within or from the outside?

McKibben: Consumers and others are increasingly putting pressure on businesses and trying to hold them accountable. In extreme cases of the fossil fuel industry, we’re now having a huge divestment movement break out across the entire country. It’s at over 300 college campuses now, and it’s moving to cities and religious denominations and things like that. People are cutting their ties with this industry.

But it doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones needing to change. Consumers are paying attention as well as activists and citizens. Climate change by far is the biggest problem that human beings have ever faced. So what companies do and don’t do will be long remembered.

Wong: Are there particular influencers that you think might have a snowball effect? For example, a company that can have an effect on its peers and unlock change?

McKibben: Yes. There’s companies that are starting to do — we all know what companies people really pay attention to as examples of good management and innovation and things.

In the tech sector, it’s Apple and Google. And both of them have done some progressive things in energy. And I believe that Apple anyway has severed its relations with the Chamber of Commerce, and I believe Microsoft, at least, has stepped down from its board. And there are sector leaders in almost every place that it would be good to see doing this.

One of the things that makes it more difficult is that there’s a constant ongoing desire too among many environmentalists and activists, including myself, to see a somewhat more decentralized, spread out and diverse business sector than we have at the moment. There’s a great interest for environmental reasons to have people moving towards more localized business opportunities too. So companies that figure out how to get in front of that trend and help it instead of hinder it, I think, will also be useful.

Wong: I know you’re fighting the Keystone XL pipeline right now. What are the next steps for you and 350.org?

McKibben: We’ll see what kind of decision comes down [on the pipeline] and whether our effort needs to be going to jail in Nebraska — we’ll find out. That’s a big and important paddle.

What we’re doing at 350.org is trying to take it all around the world. We’re convening a huge summit of 500 young people from pretty much every country on earth. We have about 5,000 applications we’re weeding through at the moment. It will be in Istanbul in June, and the purpose is to produce as many fired up and confident organizers to take this divestment campaign and spread it everywhere. We have to put the fossil fuel industry on the run, and fast.

Wong: What are some of the critiques and praises about how climate change has been covered by the media?

McKibben: The media has not done itself any great credit in the fight over climate change. It’s treated it as a ‘He said, she said’ thing. And in the case of Keystone, it hasn’t even done a very good job getting down what’s actually the facts of the situation. There has been a ton of lazy reporting. That’s starting to change because it’s becoming so obvious to everyone in this country that the climate is changing fast, so I think there are a lot of reporters starting to play catch up now.

I do think there are a few examples of people who have done strong powerful work on climate reporting over the years and have helped a lot. Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker would be a good example.

Wong: Later this month, you’ll be speaking at the CleanMED conference focused on sustainability in health care. You’re talking to an industry that has already made a lot of progress in greening their industry. What’s the message you’ll be bringing them?

McKibben: Since many parts of that industry come from the nonprofit sector, I’ll be bringing people up to date on this work we’re doing on endowments and portfolios around divestment from fossil fuel companies. In general, I’ll be reminding them that the rest of the business community needs to really sharpen their game on dealing with climate because they’ve tended to leave it as an issue to the fossil fuel industry, whose great desire is to have nothing happen at any time.

Mobile app turns city residents into agents of change

GreenBiz | March 27, 2013 | Original headline: How a civic app is turning city residents into agents of change

Civic improvement requests resolved via PublicStuff mobile app. Credit: PublicStuff

Would you turn in the girl next door for watering her lawn too much?

That’s exactly what has been happening in Plano, Texas ever since the city started using a mobile app and digital communications system. Residents can report problems in real-time ranging from environmental health hazards to water leaks, potholes, trash and broken street lights.

When the city’s water supply was under siege due to invasive zebra mussels and a simultaneous drought, the City of Plano restricted residents to watering their yards once a week, then once every other week. But with limited staff, there was no way the city could absorb the costs of monitoring and enforcement around the clock. Drive-bys noting whether lawn color was closer to brown than green wouldn’t cut it either.

Enter the mobile app and communications system the city purchased from New York City-based startup PublicStuff. Suddenly, residents who downloaded the FixIt Plano app (for free) could stop grumbling to their friends about their neighbor’s behavior — and gleefully send a hall-of-shame photo (which included the date and time the photo was snapped) documenting the excess water consumption directly to Plano City Hall instead. The location of the incident could also be mapped as well, provided the phone’s location tracking was on. And once the “report” was in the system, anyone could track its progress through receiving push notifications from city staff.

“When we enabled people to report watering violations, the use of our PublicStuff website and app really skyrocketed,” Melissa Peachey, the electronics communication manager for Plano, told GreenBiz.

Residents got so snap-happy, in fact, that in the first 19 days after FixIt Plano set up a category for water violations, 71 reports were filed.

“Being able to tag a picture to it makes it a valuable tool … The technology puts the reporting capability in their hands and they can make that report as they see [the issue],” Peachey said.

Though the watering restrictions have since been relaxed (residents are now allowed to water twice a week), the FixIt Plano app remains a convenient way for residents and city staff to keep an eye out for violations.

To date, the city has closed nearly 3,900 resident reports on the app since it debuted in 2011. Analyzing the data as a whole, Peachey says, enables Plano to make data-driven decisions for the benefit of citizens and city budgets. One such decision that might be made based on FixIt Plano data is where the city will spray for mosquitoes as a means of controlling potential West Nile Virus carriers. The city will map the locations of dead birds reported by residents and look out for areas of high concentration. A pop-up message informing that a dead bird was spotted, along with instructions on how to dispose of one in a safe manner, will be sent out to residents after the original report was filed, according to Peachey.

National push to use technology and open data for city problem-solving

Plano is just one of many cities using mobile technology to do a better job of tracking problems with the help of residents. These innovators are using open data collected by and from the local population to better plan emergency responses, city services and manage everyday occurrences such as traffic jams.

While about 200 cities (including Philadelphia, one of the pioneers of using open data and civic hackers for public good) have purchased the PublicStuff software and app that are customizable with widgets of their choice, others have signed up with competitors SeeClickFix and Citysourced to give residents access to city hall by reporting via their mobile devices.

In an update of PublicStuff’s mobile app released last week, non-English speaking residents can send in requests in their native language, and their message will be automatically translated into English for the city workers — and vice versa.

How’s it working so far? “We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback,” PublicStuff co-founder and CEO Lily Liu told GreenBiz. “We want to be sensitive to different words used in local languages and let people know that there are some sorts of modifications to the text. Obviously that will affect someone’s response and we’re building in a mechanism for that,” she said. PublicStuff also wants to make sure that its system recognizes colloquial words like “graffiti,” Liu added.

Increased communication between city staff and residents — along with increasing civic engagement — are not the only benefits for the multitudes of cash-strapped cities that have been forced to cut back on city services and staff in recent years. According to Liu, cities using her company’s products have been able to free up much-needed staff time from taking reports over the phone. Users can also pay their municipal bills and parking tickets on PublicStuff.

The service can also facilitate quick communication of crucial information during emergencies when power lines might be down, Liu said.

“Before Hurricane Sandy, cities sent out information on how to prepare, and during the hurricane residents sent in notes on the system rather than bogging down 911 lines, so critical resources weren’t tied up,” she said.

Liu, who was recognized in December by Forbes as a “30 Under 30” social entrepreneur, co-founded PublicStuff with Vincent Polidoro (now the company’s Chief Technology Officer) in 2010. The initial beta version of PublicStuff was released at the end of that year, and it was tested in a few cities in early 2011. The company is backed by FirstMark Capital venture capital firm and the Knight Enterprise Fund.

A former staffer for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Liu was inspired to develop the product after noticing that there was a gap in services for government agencies that wanted a better way to communicate with the public. None of the vendors, products or price points were accessible for cities, she said.

The cost for cities to install the PublicStuff software and use an app depends on the population size — anywhere between $1,000 for small cities and “more than $20,000” for large cities, according to Liu.

Plano did not say whether it has saved money from using PublicStuff, though Adrian Hummel, the electronic media specialist for the city who works on the back end of the system daily, observed that many of the reports sent in are closed within 24 hours.

“Some remain longer,” he said. “Obviously a pothole or street repair will take longer than [picking up] a dead animal.”

Why Kimberly-Clark is banking on bamboo

GreenBiz | November 9, 2012

When Kimberly-Clark announced its plan to source 50 percent of its wood fiber to alternative sources by 2025 — more than the amount that’s in three billion rolls of toilet paper — the company wasn’t quite sure how it would make that happen.

It’s a tall order, even for the one of the world’s top suppliers of facial tissue, toilet paper and paper towels.

“We don’t know how we’re going to get there yet,” Brenda Nelson, a director of business planning and sustainability for the company’s family care division, told GreenBiz. “It’s not like there was a lot of precision around number and years,” she said of the pledge made in June.

So why would Kimberly-Clark, best known for its Kleenex, Huggies and Scott brand products, commit to an actual deadline? After all, Walmart famously announced goals to become 100 percent supplied by renewable energy and create zero waste — yet failed to disclose a timeline.

Like the advice given to Benjamin, the young man searching for a future in the 1967 film “The Graduate,” the answer lies in one word.

Kimberly-Clark is banking on bamboo.

“We did enough research on the fibers and potential barriers to know that it’s achievable,” Nelson said. “2025 was a date we put out there to hold ourselves accountable to make it happen.”

Mitigating risk

In 2011, Kimberly-Clark used 3.53 million metric tons of fiber to manufacture its products, according to company figures. Less than one-third of that amount – 1.05 million metric tons — came from recycled sources, the company reported.

Eighty percent of Kimberly-Clark’s product line contains wood fiber. Its primary sources are from the U.S., Brazil and Canada. In a 2011 report, the company describes itself as “highly reliant” on the material.

In the last few years, Kimberly-Clark has been hunting for a commercially viable alternative to wood fiber. In 2009, the company adopted a procurement policy requiring 40 percent of its fiber to be sourced either from FSC-certified or recycled sources by 2011. The move brought an end to a five-year campaign by Greenpeace pressuring the company to cut its ties with suppliers hawking non FSC-certified wood. The policy also banned the use of any fiber from endangered species.

But the motivation for the search extends beyond environmental reasons, Nelson says. It’s also an effort to insulate the company from a fiber market marked by volatile prices and a dwindling supply.

“We’ve taken a long look at what are the outlook and trends in virgin and recycled fiber supply,” she says. “There’s increasing pressures and demand on land that’s available. We know that where there’s constraints in terms of resources, we’ll someday have business impacts associated with them.”

To build the business case for alternative fibers, Nelson’s team examined a whole range of characteristics for several materials including bamboo and wheat straw, a product left over from wheat farming. They looked at fiber characteristics, biomass available, processing requirements and whether the infrastructure needed for processing was available. The group also identified barriers to commercializing the materials, along with broader trends that could affect the supply.

After a year of initial R&D tests, bamboo appears to have become the focus in the company’s alternative fiber strategy. Kimberly Clark is also evaluating other candidates, Nelson said, but declined to disclose more information.

With its ability to grow four times faster than trees — and without fertilizer, pesticides or a lot of water — the towering plant from Asia is a favorite for companies specializing in sustainable goods. As a result, the bamboo goods market has grown into a robust industry within the past ten years.

According to Susanne Lucas, executive director of the World Bamboo Organization, an industry association, the annual global bamboo market is currently estimated at $7 billion a year. In 2017, it’s expected to more than double to $17 billion, she says, due to increasing commercial applications such as combustion, pyrolysis, fibers, metabolites, water purification and phyto-remediation.

For Kimberly-Clark, bamboo’s ability to grow in the southeastern U.S. as well as be processed locally at wood pulping plants is significant, as the company won’t need to invest in new infrastructure, Nelson said.

Of course, Kimberly-Clark isn’t the first company to take steps toward sourcing sustainable bamboo. Cape Cod, Mass.-based Bum Boosa, which makes bamboo toilet paper and baby wipes, sources its bamboo from an FSC-certified supplier in China, according to owner Sonja Sheasley. Sheasley says she turned to a Chinese source since they accept smaller orders.

But for companies as large as Kimberly-Clark, volume is a problem.

Because bamboo only flowers once every 60 to 100 years, there hasn’t been enough of a supply to keep up with the demand. Bamboo forests around the world have been overharvested to meet consumer demand. In fact, half of all bamboo species are at risk of extinction due to forest destruction, according to a report issued by the United Nations.

Upturning sourcing on its end

But Kimberly-Clark’s development deal with Booshoot, a tiny biotech upstart located north of Seattle in Mt. Vernon, Wash., has the potential to upturn bamboo sourcing on its end — for the better.

Over the course of 12 years, Booshoot developed a now-patented method using non-genetically modified tissue culture to grow large volumes of bamboo fast enough for it to be sourced at commercial scale.

“We shattered that scientific bottleneck … it’s really a complicated cloning process,” said biologist Jackie Heinricher, Booshoot’s founder.

Booshoot’s technology created the solution Kimberly-Clark was looking for: A way to develop a recycled fiber source that could deliver the high volume it needed in a sustainable and economical way.

The deal

Under its development deal, Booshoot is providing Kimberly-Clark with tens of thousands of bamboo starts for its R&D projects.

The goal: to bring bamboo into the company’s fiber fold.

Kimberly-Clark is testing the plants to see if they can grow efficiently, and whether the fiber will hold up to standards expected by consumers, such as strength and softness.

Though not exclusive, the focus is on the Moso species, a giant that grows up to 100 feet tall, produces more fiber than wood and captures four times more carbon than most trees. Because of its fast growth, less land is needed to grow bamboo fiber when compared to the same amount of wood fiber. It can be harvested in less than a decade.

If the material passes the tests, Kimberly-Clark will become the largest grower and processor of bamboo in the U.S.

Nelson said her company is also investigating how to process bamboo “with a lighter footprint, less complex processing and a higher yield” than the predominant method currently used, which includes carbon disulfide, sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide among its inputs. Bamboo goods company Bum Boosa employs a processor that uses water, steam and friction to pulp the cellulose, Sheasley said.

Kimberly-Clark’s trials are being conducted with the potential of using bamboo in products across all types of its tissue products, Nelson said.

Working with a team of external consultants and advisors, the company is also conducting a lifecycle analysis for its products that might be manufactured with bamboo.

“It’s challenging – especially in this case to do a LCA on something theoretical,” Nelson said. “We can’t say for sure when the work will be done. But if it shows a negative impact on the total lifecycle, that would cause us to pause.”

One of the issues that the team is investigating is whether bamboo could have an invasive effect on local ecosystems — something that’s commonly associated with the plant.

The ripple effect

“It’s a really bold move,” said Richard Brooks, a Greenpeace forest campaigner in Toronto, Canada, who led the successful campaign against Kimberly-Clark that ended in 2009.

Brooks predicts Kimberly-Clark’s alternative fiber goal will send ripples throughout fiber supply chains.

“We’ve seen it before,” he said. “You can be sure there are other Fortune 500 companies looking into alternative fibers.”

“It’s actually hard for companies to be the first to make the first move,” Brooks said. “We’re seeing Kimberly-Clark make the move, get early adopter status and benefits — and other companies quickly follow them.”

It’s not clear yet whether Procter & Gamble and Georgia Pacific — Kimberly-Clark’s largest competitors in the market — will follow suit.

In the months following Kimberly-Clark’s announcement, Brooks reports that an increasing number of companies around the world who source fiber — and their pulp suppliers — are asking Greenpeace for guidance about alternatives.

“The conversations we’re having with these companies are more sophisticated,” he says. “They’re seriously exploring how to start purchasing these types of pulp.”

Brooks, who thinks the 50 percent reduction goal by 2025 is “realistic,” gives credit to Kimberly-Clark. “It’s the first time we’ve seen a large announcement that puts a number out there and puts research dollars behind it,” he said.

Still, he cautions that there are some actions that the company needs to take as part of its effort to source alternative fiber at commercial scale.

“There is no third party certification system for alternative fibers. Right now, Kimberly-Clark needs to come together with other companies and define some minimum criteria before certification is set up,” he said, referring to social, labor and environmental standards.

He also emphasizes that any potential use of post-agricultural wheat straw must be weighed in consideration with the global food supply.

Clark has been working with Kimberly-Clark along with a group of other external advisors on developing a socially and environmentally responsible alternative fiber supply chain.

“We know that we can’t do this alone,” Nelson said. “Getting the right partnerships in place, identifying the stakeholders and who to have conversations with — it’s all important to be successful.”

“It really is the next step of where the pulp and paper sector and companies need to go,” Brooks said. “We simply don’t have enough forests to be able to supply the growing demands of consumers.”

Photo of bamboo in test tubes courtesy of Booshoot

View the original story.

One grower’s $17 million quest for a greener tomato

GreenBiz | August 30, 2012

More than 15 years ago, Casey Houweling ventured from his native Canada to start raising his tomatoes in the Southern California sunshine. From Romas to grape tomatoes and tomatoes on the vine, Houweling’s Tomatoes grows a wide range of GMO-free varieties at its outpost in Camarillo, Calif. in addition to its original facility in British Columbia, Canada.

It’s a massive operation. Each year, rows and rows of plants inside the company’s glass-enclosed greenhouses produce over 108 million pounds. Growing the tomatoes hydroponically — without the use of soil — enables Houweling to use less water, yield more on less land and save money. He has also outfitted his greenhouses with solar panels, reuses water and recycles or composts the majority of the company’s waste.

Over the last three years, Houweling has aimed to boost productivity even more — and reduce his environmental impact further — by making a major investment.

He recently unveiled the fruits of that investment: a new 125-acre greenhouse powered by two high-efficient, two-stage turbocharged gas-powered GE Jenbacher J624 engines. The combined heat and power (CHP) system can produce 8.7 megawatts of electrical power — enough to run about 8,800 homes — and goes beyond capturing and reusing heat, as traditional cogeneration systems do.

It also captures CO2 which can then be pumped in to the greenhouse as a fertilizer, as well as water that can be used in facility operations.

As the first commercial CHP greenhouse in the U.S., it’s arguably poised to become the most efficient in the country, and is expected to increase tomato production by 20 percent.

The system makes use of excess low grade heat and water released during production which would normally be wasted, according to GE spokesperson Scott Nolen. And since all of its power output won’t be needed 24 hours a day, Houweling plans to sell the excess power back to the grid.

“From a common sense perspective it seemed like a no-brainer,” Houweling said, reflecting back to his mindset when he first took on the project financed by lease and equity from company profits.

Yet by the time the greenhouse is ready for use, he’ll have spent a total of $17 million — with no idea what his financial return will be.

Certain risk, uncertain reward

Common sense?

As a self-proclaimed risk-taker, Houweling thinks so.

“If we waited for certainty for every decision we make in our facility, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” he said.

“We take a lot more risk than other companies and this has been the biggest risk,” he added, acknowledging that Houweling’s size (with $150 million in annual revenue) lowers the level of risk in comparison to its smaller counterparts.

Houweling said he experienced a defining moment in 2008 after expanding on the final 40 acres needed to build the last in a series of greenhouses at his Camarillo facility.

“I looked at it and said ‘I want it to be completely energy neutral,’” he said. For once, he realized, he wanted to build something that didn’t create any pollution.

How it works

The system’s heat output is stored in up to one million gallons of water that are then available to warm the greenhouses on demand. On top of that, the nitrogen oxide (NOx) produced by the system’s exhaust gas is converted into CO2 and water.

The CO2 is then vented into the greenhouse as fertilizer, while the water — estimated to be about 9,500 gallons a day — will be used in the greenhouse.

According to David Bell, a spokesperson for Houweling’s Tomatoes, most of the NOx — a known air pollutant — is eliminated during the NOx conversion to water and CO2.

“Although a portion of the CO2 will be absorbed by the tomatoes, it is not expected that the tomatoes would absorb the air toxics from the cogeneration units,” Bell said.

In contrast to the 5 parts per million by volume (ppmv) emitted by the new CHP system, greenhouses at Houweling’s Tomatoes that are heated by boilers are permitted to emit up to 40 ppmv NOx, he said.

Improvements aside, Houweling said getting the system online has presented many challenges, namely because he is the first to operate a U.S. facility using the Jenbacher J624. The other Jenbacher J624 engines operated as part of a CHP system are installed in greenhouses across the world.

Houweling reports spending $10 million in equipment and $7 million in infrastructure costs. That includes getting the facility ready for permitting and establishing interconnecting power between the greenhouse to the grid managed by Southern California Edison, the regional electric utility.

The biggest challenge was getting the green light to sell power back to the grid.

While the application to interconnect power and the facility permits have been approved, Houweling said the system has been delayed from going online due to the lack of a full-capacity power purchase agreement from California’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator.

Though the facility is equipped to generate 8.7 MW — with an additional 4.4 MW in capacity anticipated to come online in the future — it’s currently allowed to sell just 2 MW.

In Houweling’s opinion, the hurdles stem from “the way the American electrical power distribution is set up — having a big centralized power generating station and distributing power to where the demand is,” he said. “What we’re doing is producing the power where the demand is.

“There’s hundreds of documents you have to sign and read through — just to sell your electricity to the grid,” he said. “You can’t estimate the time or cost it takes to build it.”

What delays could cost

As a result, Houweling expects he won’t be able to take the system online until Jan. 1, 2013 — four months later than he initially planned.

And he still isn’t even completely sure he’ll be able to fire up the facility in early 2013. “We could be sitting idle for another year after this –- costing us $15,000 a day,” he said.

Houweling says if he knew three years ago what he knows now, he’s not sure if he would do it again.

Still, interested parties did make the trek out West to see the Jenbacher J624 in action. “There were people from the East Coast here mostly from utilities, someone from Alaska that was interested in doing something, and other industry people,” he said.

But based on what Houweling’s Tomatoes, GE and California government agencies learned from the experience, Houweling said, companies interested in investing in the equipment and getting it online in the U.S. will have others to draw upon for advice.

If not for all the logistical and bureaucratic hurdles, Houweling is convinced many more growers in the U.S. would be adopting the system.

But the path to getting a CHP system up and running might be less bumpy in the future, thanks to a directive issued just this morning from the White House. The Executive Order aims to increase the amount of CHP-generated industrial power in the U.S. by 40 GW by the end of 2020. Assistance will take the form of technical guidance, financial incentives and assistance to states.

California is perhaps one of the best-positioned to receive that help. The state is working towards a goal of boosting the amount of power produced by CHP facilities by 6500 MW — also by 2020.

And while it’s definitely “uncharted territory” in Canada, Houweling says — GE operates one Jenbacher J624 in Ontario and it’s primarily a standby facility — since the government manages and owns the electrical distribution, he expects fewer hurdles to overcome than in the U.S.

Lessons learned

Companies interested in installing the technology should “be prepared at how difficult this is going to be,” Houweling said. “Go into it knowing you can’t set the timeline and you don’t know the cost.”

Houweling acknowledges that these two factors make it difficult to finance such a project.

In addition to GE, Houweling recommends Western Energy Systems, GE’s distributor and installer for the cogeneration technology that works alongside its Jenbacher J264 engines, as a resource throughout the process.

“I would use them on lean on them and be much more diligent to be very sure that you have all questions answered,” he said. “Give a lot of time,” he added.

Companies should allow 15-18 months to go through the process before the equipment arrives on site, Houweling said.

While Houweling’s Tomatoes is the only company in the U.S. that is using the Jenbacher J624 as part of a commercial operation, GE’s Nolen is optimistic.

“This is an early gate launch of the project,” he said. “ We’re really hopeful. Market research people want to see it work in the U.S. first, as they’re risk averse.”

In the meantime, Nolen says that GE is working on an even more efficient engine as a followup to the Jenbacher J624, which at 46 percent efficiency runs as the highest in its class. “We’re pushing to get to 50 percent,” he said. “But this doesn’t happen overnight.”

Photo of Casey Houweling in company greenhouse courtesy of Houweling’s Tomatoes

View the original story.

Inside the military’s billion-plus push for renewables

Story by Kristine A. Wong
This piece was originally published on GreenBiz on Aug. 22, 2012 with a headline of “Inside the military’s multibillion-dollar push for renewables”

As the largest consumer of energy in the world, the Department of Defense has a long way to go before becoming a sustainable operation.

But a recent push to purchase 3 gigawatts (GW) of locally generated renewable energy is opening up billions of dollars in market opportunities — and it’s not just energy companies that stand to benefit. Companies that can finance these deals also stand to carve out a substantial piece of this pie.

The military’s goal?

To become more energy independent.

“By diversifying our installation energy sources to include sustainable, reliable energy, we improve our ability to fulfill our mission during energy interruptions and to better manage price volatility,” said Katherine Hammack, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Army for installations, energy & environment.

Plans are underway for the Army, Navy and Air Force to each deploy 1 GW of renewable energy on U.S. bases by 2025, an effort announced in April. The 3 GW goal is tied to a 2007 DOD initiative to source 25 percent of its energy from renewables by 2025.

It’s one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history, according to the White House.

Three gigawatts are equivalent to the amount needed to power 750,000 homes, said Hammack.

The military will purchase the power generated through privately owned solar, wind, geothermal or biomass facilities under power purchase agreements.

Companies can build their facilities on military bases or on some of the 16 million acres of military land recently opened for renewable energy development. They will be expected to own and maintain the facilities, as well as arrange private sector financing for its construction and operation.

One aim of the effort is to develop energy security on U.S. military bases, according to DOD spokeswoman Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan.

“Together with smart microgrid and storage technologies, renewable and other forms of on-site energy will allow a military base to maintain its critical operations ‘off-grid’ for weeks or months if necessary,” said Morgan.

Noteworthy opportunities for experienced developers, investors
Billions of dollars in federal funds will be available to the private sector in contracts for the purchase of renewable energy.

“This is an end-of-the-game market creator for renewable energy and cleantech,” said Taite McDonald, a senior advisor at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) in Washington, D.C. who advises energy and clean technology companies interested in working with government.

Opportunities are materializing. Earlier this month, the Army took an important step forward in laying the foundation to fulfill its commitment of deploying 1 GW of renewable energy. The Army Corps of Engineers released a call for companies to bid for up to $7 billion of contracts to purchase energy from renewable facilities that will be installed on military land.
The contracts –- in the form of power purchase agreements, or contracts that define the terms between buyers and sellers of electricity – could be in place for as long as 30 years. More likely, though, they’ll be 23 to 25 years in length, according to McDonald.

The number of contractors is dependent on the capabilities and qualifications of the bids the Army receives, said Hammack. It’s also dependent on the type of energy that’s supplied and the size of those projects. One gigawatt can be generated through 10 very large projects, 100 medium-sized projects or 500 small projects, according to Hammack.

The Navy is now soliciting feedback regarding what type of projects industry may want to build on its bases such as the Naval Air Weapons Station in China Lake, Calif. It’s planning to continue the process with other bases in the future, according to McDonald.

As for the Air Force, McDonald predicts it will likely start to release more opportunities for building renewable projects with enhanced-use leases in the coming months. The first step in the process to develop such an opportunity is now underway at the Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico.

In the future, more requests for proposals focused on purchase power agreements are likely to become available, McDonald said.

Getting qualified under the Army’s $7 billion opportunity

Those qualified to be renewable energy contractors for the Army have demonstrated the ability to finance, design, build, operate, own and maintain their own energy facilities, Hammack said.

“If your company qualifies under this opportunity, you can go after up to $7 billion in contracts –- we call it a hunting license,” said McDonald.

Throughout the last year –- as a service to help educate and prepare companies for this contract opportunity –- McDonald and colleagues have acted as advisors-for-hire with several renewable energy companies, developers and investors interested in getting their “hunting licenses.”

A significant number of developers, small businesses and defense contractors have been preparing for this announcement for some time, McDonald said.

She estimates that while Army Energy Initiative Task Force officials have met with about 150 entities, only 50 will qualify as prime contractors for hunting licenses. The Army Corps of Engineers will evaluate all applicants.

According to McDonald, those best positioned to qualify are experienced renewable energy project developers and operators — not those who are selling technology in the developing stage. Most of the opportunities will be for purchase power agreements for solar, she added.

“Unless you are a very large and reputable developer that has just recently begun to learn about this opportunity, you probably want to join other teams instead of submitting a proposal to be a prime contractor,” she said.

But small businesses shouldn’t fear being edged out of competition by their larger counterparts. Projects that are slated to produce less than four megawatts of energy will be reserved for small businesses first. Those that fall in the 4-12 MW capacity range may be reserved for small businesses as well, depending on the project size, complexity and level of financing required. Projects over 12 MW in capacity are open for unrestricted competition.

And there are still opportunities available for investors who can bring capital to the table as well as finance commercial projects.

“That’s where we’re seeing the most gaps,” McDonald said.

The Army will likely announce the firms that are qualified for its $7 billion in contracts during the first quarter of 2013, she predicted.

Three to six months after determining which companies are qualified, the Army will issue its first task orders, Hammack said. Task orders detail contracts available for bidding, including the energy capacity of the project and the type of technology to be used.

“At least 100 megawatts in task orders will be issued a year,” Hammack said.

Hammack said the task orders are currently being determined by the Army Energy Initiative Task Force through environmental analyses of more than 180 military installations. After evaluating the natural resources available at each site, the task force will match it with the technology best suited for the site and calculate the amount of energy that can be generated onsite.

Companies whose technology is not ready to scale at a commercial level need not despair. There are a number of demonstration opportunities with the military services and with the Office of the Secretary of Defense that will become available next year, McDonald said.

Photo of wind turbines courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

kristine wong | MULTIMEDIA + VIDEO JOURNALIST

reporting on energy, environment, food, green tech, culture, health

Author Archives: kw

How IBM helps monitor biodiversity in the Amazon

The unexpected way beer is helping a town…

IBM, SAP open big data platforms for citizen science

Virtual net metering grows, expands solar’s reach

Why Fox mentioned climate change more than…

Does fake meat have legs? The case for alt-proteins

Silicon Valley dives in to support sustainable seafood

Can tech startups change the way we eat?

Happiness: the next big business metric?

Can the apparel industry pin down worker safety?

Can impact investing cross from land to sea?

Cloud technology brings clean drinking water to India

Dairy farmers move ahead on sustainability

How Google is changing the renewables game

Carbon standard aims to benefit women worldwide

Lessons for business in the age of climate change

Mobile app turns city residents into agents of change

Why Kimberly-Clark is banking on bamboo

One grower’s $17 million quest for a greener tomato

Inside the military’s billion-plus push for renewables