Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

As part of a LinkedIn discussion group run by the Association of Climate Change Officers, I responded to a question on green marketing that I thought would be worthwhile to copy here as well.

The question from Janet Smith: Is Green Advertising Overload Blocking Successful Value Propositions? She elaborated on her question in her blog.

And here's my response: I believe that green marketing related to product benefits which accrue directly to consumers (e.g. lower energy costs) will continue to be effective, while image-related green marketing will generally become ineffective for most companies. In fact, I think it is likely that we will get to a point where a generally good green image will be table stakes for being in the game. At that point positive differentiation will be very difficult, leaving only negative differentiation for those who stumble or don't get the basics right.

Two different news items recently led me into the same train of thought: we are all increasingly in the business of judging Goodness, and of being so judged. I purposefully capitalized Goodness here, because I mean it in the highest sense of the word. This probably sounds vague, so let me use the examples to explain.

The first item is from the NYTimes, and discusses the conundrum caused by a proposed solar plant in Nevada. While the plant will produce copious free energy, it will also require over a billion gallons of fresh water a year, or over 20% of the water supply for the valley in which it is to be cited.

This is a classic tradeoff that we're going to hear more and more about. What are we willing to give up in exchange for cleaner energy? Many types of solar power need water, as shown above. But how much water is too much? How many dead migratory birds are too many at a potential wind farm location? How much car safety should we sacrifice for better mileage? How much can the view from the shoreline be impacted by offshore wind farms before it crosses the line? There are tons of these questions, there are going to be more, and they are going to get more and more complex.

Presumably you can see why I described this as judging Goodness. We might try to reduce decisions such as these to financial terms, but its hard to put a price on scenic beauty or a single bird. And your answer may not be the same as someone else's. I'll react differently to a wind farm I can see from my deck than one that's a thousand miles away in a place I'll likely never visit. How we approach these decisions reflect our personal or group morals.

The second example isn't about tradeoffs, but about people trying to quantify the Goodness of others. You see this all of the time: green rankings of companies, ethical lists of schools, etc. For example, Sun was recently included in the Newsweek green ranking, coming in 14th out of 500. (Note: I'm not singling out the Newsweek ranking - there are dozens of examples I could have used and this just happened to be a recent, well publicized one.)

This, however, is even trickier than the task above. We're not talking about an either/or situation, we're talking about trying to capture all of the factors that make up the green-ness or ethical-ness of an organization in a single number. And to make matters worse, these the organizations being compared usually don't even do the same thing. How do you compare an airline to a consulting company? A manufacturer to a non-manufacturer? A small school in the north woods to big one in Manhattan?

But as we've seen, there's no shortage of people who feel they are up to the task. They're willing to put relative weights and scores on various sources of quantitative and qualitative data, deciding what the underlying components of "good", "green" or "ethical" should be. Sometimes we get to understand these weights and data sources, but usually we don't.

In the Newsweek case, one of the three major factors in the ranking was a "reputation survey" audit they did using unnamed CEOs and other "experts". Since Sun Microsystems is not a consumer brand and we don't advertise much, its not hard to predict that we may not score as high in that as organizations that are household names, or are use big ad budgets to tout their sustainability. Sure enough, Wal-Mart tops the list in that category followed by GE, Coke and Nike. (BTW, Wal-Mart is doing some outstanding sustainability work, but that doesn't validate the scoring methodology.)

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that Sun deserves to be scored or ranked higher. In fact, I'll go a step further and say that I have no moral grounds on which to judge the ethics or greenness of any organization, Sun included. I'm confident in telling you that we're using less fresh water and emitting less GHG than we were a year ago, but that's as far as I'm comfortable going. In short, who am I to judge?

So what's the alternative to rankings? I'm a huge proponent of measuring things and making the data public - that's what we've been trying to do at Sun through our CSR report, annual CDP response, OpenEco.org data and other avenues. I hope that companies, investors, and consumers are using that data to understand what we're up to, and are making better informed decisions.

As organizations are trying to exhibit more social responsibility, there is a necessary increase in moral judgement in business decisions. In light of this, my advice is simple. First, recognize that you're using moral in your decisions. Second, figure out what's important to you (not Newsweek or anyone else) for the specific decisions you have to make. Finally, gather your own data.

There are lots of things that are OK to outsource - your moral standards aren't one of them.

Last week I was down in DC with a group of investors and business execs, many of whom were in the green space under the banner wecanlead.org, a collaboration between Ceres and the Clean Economy Network. John Doerr was the headliner of the group, but there were CEOs of some hot company like A123 and Seventh Generation. The motivation for us all to be there was to impress upon our legislators that well-constructed, comprehensive legislation could be good for business.

(Aside: one of the dangers of these events is that the "well-constructed" part of the message is ignored or left to be defined by the audience, so the message can be interpreted as "pass anything!". My experience with business folks who are savvy about climate policy is that they are fairly particular about what "well-constructed" means. Another risk is that the press and others will try to figure out what your profit motive is, and often zero in on one part of your group, such as happened here. So whenever agree to participate in one of these missions you have to think through risks like this.)

Overall we were well received, and the trip garnered good press attention. In particular, the executive branch pulled out all of the stops, allocating time from three Department Secretaries: Sec'y Salazar (Interior), Sec'y Chu (Energy) and Sec'y Locke (Commerce). We also heard from Carol Browner, Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, and several other members of the administration.

With all of these meetings we were able to get a sense of the administration's overall mood and approach to climate change legislation. These impressions were probably slanted somewhat by the fact that the administration knew it had a favorable audience. The good news was that, overall these folks all knew their stuff. Obviously Sec'y Chu is deep into the science side of energy and Director Browner into policy, but Sec'ys Salazar and Locke both exhibited a deep knowledge and personal passion on environmental issues.

Compared to past trips to DC, the biggest change for me was a new focus on clean energy competition with China. Particularly Sec'y Locke and Director Browner emphasized China above all other reasons to get legislation done, and done soon. Personally I think this is a good change. I believe it can get more broad-based support, and will focus the discussion more on innovation. However, if China truly takes center stage as the driver for legislation, it can't help but change the focus on the individual elements of the package. In particular, is cap and trade a central mechanism in a competitive agenda as opposed to a climate change agenda? This will be interesting to watch.

Beyond the emergence of China as a motivator, there were some other notes of interest:

• The administration isn't waiting for climate legislation to get started. They discussed what they were doing with stimulus money and within the jurisdictions of their own departments. Earlier in the week the President had signed an executive order to drive the greening the federal government.
• The message on timing for climate legislation is "as soon as possible". But it was pretty clear that a climate bill is second fiddle to health care, and everyone was very careful to avoid making commitments about Copenhagen. Carol Browner was particularly careful with her words, and I was left with the sense was they're willing to let the timetable slide past December if the higher priorities aren't complete yet.
• Nuclear is back on the agenda. Sec'ys Locke and Chu both talked about an increase in US nuclear capability in a manner that assumes its a done deal. There was none of the hedging about the usual concerns, no hint of upcoming deliberation, etc. There will be more nukes.
• Public lands will be used for renewables. Similar to the discussion on nukes, Sec'y Salazar spoke with a confident certainty about opening up public lands for renewables, including solar in the southwest and wind farms on the continental shelf off of the Carolinas. Again, not even a nod to the expected concerns.

Finally, when one talks about "comprehensive climate policy", the scope of what we heard in DC and what's in the proposed legislation is certainly comprehensive in the sense that there are lots and lots of programs there. But listening to two days of discussions it is still very hard to see how the decarbonization math adds up in order to meet the goals that people are proposing. As someone commented "it's a mosaic, but there's no picture".

I remain particularly concerned about the lack of an R&D plan to support the innovation that is required to meet these goals. Lots of faith is being put into "the market" and the effects of a cap and trade system, but so far that faith eludes me.

We haven't made a ton of noise about openeco.org in the last couple of quarters, but that was probably a mistake.

One of the most frequent questions I get as Sun's Chief Sustainability Officer is how other organizations can get started on GHG reductions. The first step is to calculate your current emissions, and to get a feel for what parts of your activities (business or otherwise) are causing those emissions. This leads to one of two follow-on questions: 1) how hard can that be? or 2) that sounds really hard - I bet I need to hire a high-priced consultant.

The combined answer is that it is not trivial, but for most organizations you don't need a consultant. The math involved is not hard, but finding the right equations and coefficients isn't easy. Also, to track and measure over time you need to keep lots of data around, which can get cumbersome.

This is why we created openeco.org. It is a free, online tool that lets organizations calculate and track their emissions over time. We needed a tool for ourselves, but found that our solution was applicable to schools, churches, companies and other organizations. It knows about different locations and sources of emissions, and follows the standard, accepted protocols for doing the GHG calculations. It also lets you set goals and track your progress against them.

As you can see above, it has a good user base, with over 700 participating organizations. Whether you're working as part of a big company, small company, town government, private residence, church, or school, openeco.org can get you on the right track quickly and (very!) cheaply.

For a quick demo and tour, check out the videos below.

Kudos to Lori Duvall, who has been the main driver behind this from the beginning, to the team at CodeMagi, who have been Java programmers extraordinaire on the project, and to the Sun Eco marketing team, who has been involved since the earliest concepts.

Under the leadership of Marcy Lynn, Sun's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports have always broken new ground. We've pushed the envelope in publishing on the web, what type of data is reported, and how data is reported. Last year we changed how stakeholders interact with that data by allowing comments. And this year we've pushed the envelope again.

Yesterday we announced the release of Sun's 2009 CSR report. With the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle, the focus this year turned to reporting on the key metrics we were tracking for our fiscal 2009. We also focused on how to cut the production cost of the report, and to continue to minimize the impact of printed copies.

So you'll see that this year's report is a fairly radical departure. The first half aims to present the data in a way that gets the key points across quickly and easily. The back half fills in the key details and boilerplate to adequately document the summary.

You'll notice a big drop in the narrative flow and commentary. This was one of the biggest changes: we stopped trying to write it as a coherent document. I believe people will find the data that they're interested in much more quickly, and will find they don't miss the color commentary, but we'll see!

Finally, I'd like to recognize the groups and folks who contributed to this (this is always dangerous - I apologize ahead of time for anyone I missed). First, in addition to Marcy, other key partners in this project were Terri Bedel, Jim Mize, and Anna Eyre from the Corp Marketing team, and the gang at Celery Designs, who've worked with us for the past few years.

Second, we got strong support from groups across the company this year, including: WE (including the JLL team), HR, EH&S, Business Conduct Office, Investor Relations, Global Communities, WWOPs, Legal, Education, Employee Volunteer and Gift Matching program, Privacy office, Product takeback team, Software team, Sustainability team, and Brand marketing. Thanks to everyone who helped out this year, it was another great team effort.

This week our book, Citizen Engineer, made it out the online bookstores and is supposed to hit the bricks-and-mortar stores next week. The book was written by myself and Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos, with tons of help from John Boutelle. Of course its also important to recognize our publisher, Greg Doench, at Prentice Hall.

The website for the book is citizenengineer.org, and there are links there for buying the book at Amazon (paper or Kindle), from the publisher, and other book sellers. PDF's of the book are also available there under a Creative Commons license.

We also plan to use the website to publish further content, publicize events related to the book, and provide forums for discussion of the book's topics (some of this is there today, and the rest will be very soon).

So why did we write this book?

After the turn of the century, Greg and I began to notice some recurring themes in our work with the engineers at Sun Microsystems and elsewhere.

First, an increasing number of engineers, especially those right out of school, were expressing a desire to "make a difference". Some had a hobby or activity they were already invested in outside of the office, while others were searching for something that would make them more fulfilled. Many were also bringing that sense into the office, and trying to see how they could use their job to make a difference beyond the bottom line of Sun.

Second, the world at large was asking more of engineers. Public knowledge about topics like recycling, copyright, privacy, and climate change translated into new demands on manufacturers of products and services, which, in turn, required new ways of thinking in engineering.

Generally this was good news: we have engineers who want to make a difference, and a public which has rising expectations of them. In 2006 Greg wrote the first blog post about this entitled Charting a Course from Recent Grad to “Citizen Engineer”, which launched a more focused discussion of Citizen Engineers and their role in the coming years.

However, as we began to discuss this more, it quickly became clear that engineers, including ourselves, had missed out on some important topics during our educations. In particular, engineers were being asked to make increasingly complex decisions about environmental impact and intellectual property, but had never had any formal training in either area.

So we set out to write Citizen Engineer with a couple of goals in mind. First, we wanted to promote the idea that engineers could, and should, take a more visible role in shaping our future world. Second, we wanted to fill in some of the basic knowledge gaps that we found to be widespread through the engineering community. Finally, we had a point of view about the role of engineering and how to approach these complex issues which we wanted to get across.

While we feel like the book does a great job of meeting these goals, engineers are in a rapidly changing environment. We hope to use the website, along with updates to the book, to try to move the discussion along and keep it current.

[Note: I jointly authored this with Dan Sarewitz of ASU]

The House of Representatives has passed a massive climate change bill aimed at legislating a new, climate-friendly energy supply into existence through emissions caps, technology standards, and incentives. The bill’s champions assume that, in response to an array of mandated carrots and sticks, nimble startup firms will be motivated to develop new clean-energy technologies that will ultimately revolutionize our use of energy, while investors smelling early profits will line up to fund these activities.

Unfortunately, a crucial question remains embarrassingly unasked: Who is going to buy enough of these new technologies to establish a market that's large enough to meet our carbon reduction goals? This question is particularly vexing because, in the energy sector, existing business models are deeply entrenched, huge capital investments are at stake, and new technologies often require changes in consumer behavior that inhibit adoption.

Large, reliable, early-adopter customers are essential to new markets—to bring in revenue that helps scale up operations, and to foster confidence that attracts more customers and new investments. Real-world customer feedback also promotes rapid innovation and improves the chances that new products will succeed in the market.

What would the ideal clean-energy customer look like? Imagine an organization big enough to have energy systems that mirror the real world’s, rich enough that its purchasing power could command the attention of innovators, sophisticated enough to assess and deploy the latest technologies, and disciplined enough to push those new technologies relentlessly in the direction of greater efficiency and lower cost, year after year.

Something akin to this ideal customer exists: The Department of Defense, funded annually at about $500 billion (roughly the GDP of Sweden). DoD owns a huge infrastructure, including 570,000 buildings at more than 5,000 facilities and bases (many of which are the equivalent of small cities), hundreds of thousands of vehicles and tens of thousands of aircraft, and annual energy costs of about $20 billion.

For more than 60 years, DoD has been by far the world’s most important customer for driving high-tech innovation. In aviation, telecommunications, advanced materials, semiconductors, and many other fields, the dual role of DoD as investor and major customer has stimulated rapid technological improvements, allowed scale-up of high-tech systems so they became both practical and affordable, and catalyzed the growth of the private sector so technologies could flourish in the broader marketplace. The Internet may be the DoD's crowning achievement. First conceived at DoD’s Advanced Projects Agency, this early computer network eventually created a market for equipment and service providers that soon spilled over into the private sector as the Internet, an unparalleled platform for innovation and wealth creation.

Yet policymakers have, amazingly, ignored the critical role of government as a strategic customer for energy technology. DoD, with its hunger for energy, huge size, and sophisticated technical capabilities and needs, could quickly become the world’s most important consumer and catalyst for clean energy innovation—even as it vastly improves its operational efficiency and flexibility in providing for the nation’s defense. We can see the latent capacity for this role in the early adoption of solar energy cells by the military for use on satellites (in the 1950s!); in the ever-increasing demand for better batteries to support troops in remote locations; in the nation’s largest solar energy farm on Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Congress or the President should ask the Department of Defense develop a plan for committing to a path of progressively increasing efficiency and clean energy across all aspects of its operations, from tanks in the desert to the supermarkets on its bases. This plan should include a DoD commitment to purchase prescribed amounts of increasingly efficient clean energy capability in 2015-2030 time period. Such a commitment would send an immediate, strong economic signal to innovators and investors, and would decisively put the nation, and the world, on a path to a clean energy future.

Like many, I'm divided by the passage of Waxman-Markey (aka ACES) in the US House of Representatives. While its passage is a historic event, the bill has so many issues that I find myself as worried as I am excited by it. As Tom Friedman recently wrote (sorry, free registration required to see the whole article):

It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.

But he immediately turns the tables, saying "Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.". His main point is that a getting a price on carbon will result in fundamental changes in decision making, which will put us on the right path:

Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable.

At Sun, we've been a strong advocate for establishing a price for carbon, because Tom is correct that it is a basic requirement for "weaving carbon emissions into every business decision". For example, we'd like to be able to use the current cost of carbon along with scenarios of future costs to make the business case for switching our datacenter backup systems to something less carbon intensive than diesel generators. Unfortunately, Waxman-Markey doesn't provide a clear price of carbon for America's energy consumers - business or individual.

Here's why.

Most homes and businesses, including large ones like Sun, don't emit GHG in ways that require them to directly participate in the cap and trade system. When we purchase electricity the corresponding emissions will have been covered by our electric utility, and when we buy fuel and burn it in vehicles, generators, furnaces, etc, the emissions will have been covered by a party somewhere in the refining and distribution process (ACES smartly avoids forcing each of us individually to participate in the cap and trade system every time we drive somewhere or turn on a lightbulb). In both cases the emissions costs will have been passed along and will show up as increases in our electricity or fuel bill.

The challenge is to figure out what part of our bill went to paying for GHG emissions, since that's the number we need to do a standard return on investment (ROI) analysis like the one described above. Assuming we know the amount of emissions (which you can usually get today), then the number we need is the price per ton that was paid for those emissions.

The obvious answer is to use the current price of carbon in the market where utilities and oil companies trade emissions allowances. But in Waxman-Markey that "market price" may be very different from what your utility or oil company paid. In fact they will have gotten emissions allowances from many different sources, including free allowances from the government, auctioned allowances from the government, domestic offsets, cheaper foreign offsets, "banked" allowances from previous years. Note that these will all usually be cheaper (or much cheaper) than the current "market price", and are not publicly visible. I've verified with folks at utilities and who've worked directly on the bill that there is no provision to make the actual "cost of carbon" available to the consumer, and no utility I've talked to plans to voluntarily provide it.

Since the actual carbon price is lower than the publicly visible price, it makes ROI calculations especially problematic. Using the market price will overestimate the savings of going to a lower-carbon solution, but using any number lower than the market price is pretty much of a guess. This isn't exactly reassuring when you're the one who has to justify a major clean energy investment to your CEO and CFO.

Others have argued that the actual price of carbon will be reflected in the consumer prices of the respective energy options, so that decisions can be based off of that. For example, the ACES-adjusted price of coal-based electricity will go up relative to cleaner options, so people will make different decisions. There's two problems with this approach, especially in a business scenario. First, commercial clean energy commitments are almost always multi-year, and extremely so in the case of deploying solar or wind where a 20-year commitment is not uncommon. But it is obviously difficult to do a multi-year ROI analysis without even knowing what the recent carbon costs are as a baseline to project future carbon costs.

The second problem is that the financial advantages of many clean energy options won't show up until the later years of a multi-year analysis. Initial carbon prices will not be high enough to spur a move to cleaner energy, but future carbon prices might. However, to do the financial analysis we again need a combination of recent prices plus a projection of future ones. So while using today's energy prices may work perfectly well for decisions at home, it is inadequate for the type of financial decisions that businesses need to make.

Fortunately this is easy to fix: the cap and trade participants need to make the data available. Here's three possible mechanisms:

1. Print the included price of carbon on everyone's bill (or at the pump, in the case of gas, diesel, propane, etc)
2. Same as above, but assume that this is mostly useful to businesses, so print this data for them only
3. Each utility or major emitter will publish a monthly or quarterly report of their average price of carbon for the preceding period

I believe that any of these would work for us at Sun. The last leaves more to the reader, but makes the data widely available and seems like low effort for the reporting companies. The first and third options make the information available to all US citizens and organizations that will be paying into this system. Personally this form of basic transparency seems like an important ingredient for people to build trust in this complex systems.

If the final version of ACES can establish a visible price for carbon in the US, its value to companies like Sun will rise. But as it exists right now, it does not provide a price for carbon that Sun, or any other company, can use to justify serious efforts to decarbonize our businesses. Addressing this has got to be a top priority as the bill evolves through the Senate and conference.

I've always thought that one of the most interesting and powerful aspects of the US system of government is that individual states can act as test beds for emerging areas of legislation. This is especially important to high tech, where rapid change creates new legal opportunities and issues on a regular basis. As the understanding of the new area occurs, states can enact legislation which explores the space of possible responses. At some appropriate point the federal government can then pick from the 'winners' and enact a consistent federal approach.

The problem is that this system can break down, and when it does it can be a big mess for businesses. That's the case with eWaste (i.e. the trash from end-of-life electronics), where there is a wide range of state and even local legislation springing up. Last week the WSJ documented the situation, with a good summary by Environmental Leader.

The article highlights two problems: 1) the cost of mandatory takeback and recycling, and 2) the cost of the disparate and inconsistent laws. In my case I actually think that mandatory takeback and recycling is the right answer (with appropriate details), but as I've regularly argued in DC, at some point the cost of inconsistent state and local laws far outweighs the benefits of having a mixture. And in the case of eWaste, where a reasonable and consistent regulation already exists in the EU, there's no excuse for not addressing this at a federal level today in the US.

Why is this important? The big reason is that it is a drain on innovation in this country, especially innovation driven by startups and small companies. Imagine being a small electronics company and having to deal with 50+ takeback and recycling laws and processes. We're feeling the pinch of the administrative overhead here at Sun - I can only imagine what it feels like at a smaller company.

I know that eWaste legislation isn't as appealing as GHG reductions right now, but the states aren't slowing down. So next week when I'm in DC I'm going to keep up my pitch: please pass reasonable federal eWaste legislation!

Yahoo! has been in the news with its new plans for an energy efficient datacenter in upstate NY, along with plans to discontinue purchasing carbon offsets.

First, nice to see Yahoo! join the ranks of those who find they can do more for the climate by investing in their own GHG reduction, rather than buying carbon offsets and investing in others.

Second, the article mentions that Yahoo! may patent their datacenter design. (Note: getting a patent doesn't mean you can't give it away - the question is whether they will share the work or not). If they really want to do something for the climate they will give the design away - let others do the same thing! We've published our green datacenter plans on the Internet in hopes that people will copy them and help reduce the overall load of datacenters on our energy infrastructure.

Want to have an impact? Use your expertise to teach others how to reduce theirs!

The Green Grid has cool new tools and maps for datacenter efficiency:

• Fresh air cooling map of North America (shown above)
• Water side cooling map of North America
• Free cooling calculation tool

The image above is a snapshot of the fresh air cooling map

All of them are here. Green Grid members have access to the higher res versions. Great job, Green Grid!

It appears that the Obama administration is getting closer and closer to implementing some sort of GHG cap and trade system, since the WSJ and others are reporting that the proposed budget is counting on revenues from the sale of allowances.

You may read these articles and see numbers in the 10's or 100's of billions of dollars thrown around, and you may wonder "what is this really going to mean for me?". Let's do some math and find out.

We'll start with the impact of driving a car, which is pretty straightforward. Independent of your vehicle, driving style, etc, gasoline generates just shy of 20 pounds of CO2e per gallon. With around 2200 pounds in a metric ton, that means there's about 110 gallons per ton of CO2e. With carbon at $20 as suggested in the article, if the cost of carbon is passed straight to the consumer (more on this below), then added cost per gallon from the carbon cost is $0.18. This is an interesting number for those of us here in Massachusetts, since its close to the $0.19 increase in state gas taxes that the Governor is considering, and would put the total "tax" on gas in Mass at $0.60/gallon.

At $2.00/gallon, the $0.18 is just shy of 10% "tax". Based on this result you can see that a $40 price of carbon would be a tax of $0.36, and a $10 price at $0.09. Note again that these results hold anywhere in the US.

Next we'll look at the effect on your electricity bill. This isn't quite so simple, since the CO2e varies by location, as well as the cost of electricity. Let's look at Massachusetts as an example, and we'll use the EPA eGrid data, along with the local cost of electricity as reported by the EIA. Using the file eGRID2007V1_1_year05_SummaryTables.pdf from the eGrid site, we find that the output emission rate for GHG for the New England region is 1350 pounds per MWh, or 1.35 lbs/kWH (about average for the US). With 2200 lbs/ton, this results in about 1630 kWH/ton of CO2e. At $20/ton, this is about $0.012 per kWH.

On the price side we'll use the residential cost in Massachusetts, which is $0.177/kWH (in the top 5 highest rates nationwide, btw). With the high price of electricity and the low GHG emissions, this is only bumped up by 6.8% or so to $0.189. Again, $40/ton is twice this, and $10/ton is half this if you want to see a couple of other simple points on the curve.

As a quick comparison, at $20/ton Colorado works out to a $0.018/kWH hike on an average rate of $.099/kWH for an increase of 18%.

Now remember that all of this assumes that the price difference passed on to the consumer is exactly the price that the utilities or refiners pay for the allowances. It's hard to believe we'd pay less, and likely more. In Germany it was reported by the WSJ in 2006 that the consumer prices rose much higher than the allowance costs (full article by subscription only, unfortunately).

Today Sun took an important step forward in transparency and reporting by posting an update to our 2008 CSR Report. We've posted this mid-year update for two reasons:

1. We want to make sure we were holding ourselves accountable throughout the (reporting) year - not just during the report process at the end of the year. Over the long term we would like to move toward a reporting model where we publish timely data throughout the year rather than just once a year in a neatly packaged report. By definition, some of the data is stale by then.
2. We're trying to sharpen our internal processes around data collection and progress measurement. With some of the CSR reporting being new in the company, if you only do it once a year its easy to talk yourself into not automating the collection and reporting process. We think in the end we can report some data more often AND at lower cost.

As far as our performance to date, I think it's fair to say we are about where we expected to be at this point in our fiscal year. There is some important data missing, data we couldn't easily uncover in time to publish a relevant update (proving the point that we have some work to do). But overall, we feel good that we are on track to meet the commitments we set for ourselves, and in some cases, surpass them.

I encourage you to read about our progress and give us your feedback by using the comments feature within the report. Providing a mid-year report and accepting in-line comments are two of the innovative features that Marcy Lynn, our CSR Director has come up with to make the report more useful and impactful - let us know what you think.

The Sunday Times in London caused a big news splash a week or so ago with their coverage of Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross' comments about the GHG emissions of Google searches, which apparently turned out to not be Wissner-Gross' comments, and so on and so on.

But the story got our team thinking about the carbon impact of common internet activities, and wondering about the impact of each email, YouTube, iTune, SMS text, and tweet that flies across the net. We all have day jobs, so we couldn't estimate all of them, but we had some good internal data on email so Mark Monroe led the team in an analysis of the emissions of the internet's original (warning: bad pun coming) "killer app".

We broke the email process up into 4 parts: composition, processing, and storage. This made the analysis easier and highlighted some big differences in where the carbon loads are. The other big area to look at would be transport (the energy used by switches in the network to move the bits around). That's the one area we didn't have good data, but the time involved in transit in the network is so small that we believe it is much lower than the storage or processing costs. (anyone have any data?)

For processing, we looked at the energy consumed by one of our large enterprise email systems. This system serves over 12,000 employees, processing 12.6 million emails per week. For all that work, we ended up estimating the energy per email processed at about 0.13 watt-hours, which in the US would average about 0.08 grams of COe2.

Storage was next. The same server farm has over 330 million emails stored, with an average size of 76KB and and average age of 18 month on disk. That's roughly 27,000 emails per employee, stored mostly on redundant, highly available spinning disks within the complex. When all was included, storing the average email used up another 0.36 watt-hours, or about 0.23 grams of CO2e. With storage we're now up to 0.31 grams of CO2e.

On to composition. Looking at a random sample of about 62,000 emails, we found the median number of new characters typed into an email was around 300. If the average English word is 6 characters, and the average typing speed while composing is around 19 words per minute, our typical user is spending 2.6 minutes in front of a laptop, desktop, or thin client to compose each message. We estimated the average power draw for these 3 types of devices at our company is about 66 W, so the 2.6 min of composition time would consume about 2.9 watt-hours of energy, producing 1.8 grams of CO2e (obviously it would be less if you only used thin clients, more if you only used workstation-class PCs).

Note that that's six times the amount of energy and carbon produced in the processing and storage steps. But it highlights the fact that the back end email systems are pretty efficient. It's the time sitting in front of the console that chews up the big energy. As an example, the 25 minutes it takes to compose this blog entry on my 32 watt laptop results in 8 grams of CO2e. The same pattern probably holds for Google searches, where the 0.2 seconds the search spends inside Google's data center is nothing compared to the minute or two you spend reading it on your screen and clicking through to several references.

Add up the emissions to compose, process and store a message for 18 months and it totals 2.19 grams CO2e. To put this in perspective, humans emit 0.5 grams of CO2e per minutes by through breathing, so a 2.6 minute email is 1.3 grams of CO2e from breathing. Doesn't seem like much until you consider the total volume of email is estimated at 97 billion messages per day, which turns our little puffs of CO2e into 212,000 metric Tons of CO2e per day.

If the amount of spam keeps rising, maybe this will be our "killer app"!

I wasn't surprised the article in the WSJ over the holidays which was pretty hard on Dell for its "carbon neutral" claim. There's certainly plenty of room for skepticism. There's no formal definition of "carbon neutral", and in the case of a company like Dell (or Sun or others) there's large parts of the environmental impact that fall outside the formal company boundary (e.g. supply chain, product energy usage by customers). Furthermore, as the article points out, the questions of "additionality" and whether the offset dollars are really changing behavior are not clear cut (and probably never will be, imho). Putting this all together, the skepticism wasn't a surprise.

Here's a couple of other thoughts related to the article:

• I know a number of the folks working on sustainability at Dell, and I know they've got some really good programs underway there. Personally I feel like their carbon neutrality claims have actually detracted from the communicating the good work they're doing.
• At Sun, our position has not changed. We are not attempting to be carbon neutral, nor are we dealing in offsets or RECs. We are continuing to make major investments to lower our environmental impact, both direct as well as in our supply chain and products. We have achieved over 20% reduction since 2002, and have projects underway to take that down much further.
• Remember, Dell spent a bunch of money to be able to claim to be carbon neutral. How much more headway could they have made in their other programs if they'd applied that same money?