Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

Author: Deborah L. Cohen

With the recent spike in gas and oil prices even environmentally responsible entrepreneurs like Spencer Brown are finding new ways to cut expenses.

“I’m making products, not buying them from somebody,” said Brown, founder and owner of Huntington Beach, California-based Rent a Green Box, which manufacturers storage containers from recycled plastics for residential and commercial moving. “I need to know my flour, my butter, my eggs. If something goes up, I’ve either got to eat it or charge for it.”

Photo: Reuters/HO/Rent a Green Box

“People don’t want to pay any more for a green service,” said Brown, adding the new measures have resulted in savings of 7 percent so far this year. “I’ve got to keep my costs super low.”

FUELING EFFICIENCY
Around the country small businesses of all stripes are pushing back against high energy prices by doing more with less and inadvertently getting greener in the process. Gasoline prices above $3.00 a gallon were enough of an incentive for Indianapolis-based realtor Carole Liszak to change the way she shows houses.

“This year I’m really making a conscious effort,” said Liszak, who typically puts 15,000 miles on her car annually and has seen the cost of filling her tank rise to about $50 from $35. “I’m on the road a lot so it’s important to me.”

Liszak is now more careful to book showings in geographic progression, minimizing unnecessary trips. She also keeps better track of her mileage and has installed a device in her car that monitors driving behavior, indicating when she wastes gas from over acceleration.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded more than $280 million to small businesses in the fiscal year ended September 30, more than 10 percent of its overall funding. That’s part of a growing range of federal and state incentives designed to jumpstart moves ranging from the installation of solar panels to more energy-efficient heating-and-cooling systems. According to a recent DOE report, the U.S. Small Business Administration approved 2,800 loans for renewable energy businesses from 2006 to 2009 worth $656 million.

Even so, small businesses have lagged their corporate counterparts in adopting green practices. Only about a third of small companies have formal sustainability strategies, compared with nearly 80 percent of larger businesses, according to a recent study commissioned by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, along with its British and Canadian counterparts. The study, released in December, found that an additional 23 percent of small companies planned to formulate a strategy within the next two years.

“If it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it,” said Michael Nardi, an Indianapolis-based energy policy consultant, of the pervasive attitude by many small companies, particularly as they emerge from the recession. “It’s a real problem for small businesses to lay out money ahead to save money on energy.”

BUTTONED DOWN BUSINESS
But high gas and oil prices may serve as the catalyst. A gallon of regular gas averaged $3.56 this week, compared to $2.79 a year ago, according to the American Automobile Association. Meanwhile, crude oil was trading around $100 a barrel as uncertainty in the Middle East fueled worries about global supplies.

“Everybody is trying to cut costs wherever they can,” said Michelle Henderson, showroom manager for Chicago-based Banner Plumbing Supply Co, which has seen increasing interest by commercial customers in energy-saving equipment such as low-flow toilets and tankless water heater systems. “Businesses in this economy are really trying to button down.”

And some are benefitting directly from others’ energy misfortunes. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma-based US Fleet Tracking, which provides GPS tracking systems for commercial fleets, has seen sales double in recent months as companies seek ways to reduce fuel use, CEO Jerry Hunter said.

“Most of that is small business – overhead door companies, copier companies, oilfield service companies,” said Hunter, noting that his tracking systems can save businesses 20 to 35 percent on fuel costs. “It’s been a priceless tool for small business.”

For Spencer Brown implementing these changes is simply part of running a sustainable business.

“Green in many cases can be cheaper than traditional business practices,” he said.

A chat with Robert Cialdini
Grist Magazine’s David Roberts

When it comes to energy, policymakers are often confronted with human behavior that seems irrational, unpredictable, or unmanageable. Advocates for energy efficiency in particular are plagued by the gap between what it would make sense for people to do and what they actually do. Efforts to change people’s behavior have a record that can charitably be described as mixed.

Many of the experiments that have cast the most light on what does (and doesn’t) drive behavioral shifts around energy have been run by Dr. Robert Cialdini, until recently the Regents’ Professor of Psychology and W.P. Carey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Arizona State University (he retired in May of last year). Cialdini’s professional focus is not just on energy but on behavior more generally, and the ways behavior is influenced. His seminal 1984 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is used in business and marketing schools across the country, and his most recent book, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (co-authored with Dr. Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin), was a New York Times bestseller.

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He consults for a variety of organizations, exploring how these mechanisms can be used to produce positive results. Maybe the clean energy crowd should listen in!

Read the interview here.

Author: Preston Gralla

If truly green data centers are ever to become a reality, IT departments will have to feel some pain if they don’t reduce their energy use—and reap the benefits if they do. Today, though, too often, IT departments don’t even pay their own energy bills, as a recently released survey found. In order to green IT, that has to change.

A recently released report from Brocade about Green IT is eye-opening. The report surveyed more than 1,000 senior IT decision makers in North America, Western Europe, the Nordic region, Turkey, and Dubai. It found that in 50% of all enterprises surveyed, facilities management paid the electricity bill. In only 23% of enterprises does the IT department foot the bill. In 22% of the cases IT and facilities share the costs, and in 5% of companies, a different department pays.

It’s this simple: If IT doesn’t pay the electric bill, the data center won’t get greened. The survey backs that up. It found that only 51% of IT departments surveyed have a system in place for measuring how much power hardware uses. That’s no surprise, given that IT departments are only responsible for paying for all or part of the electric bill in 45% of companies.

If IT departments paid their own electric bills, you’d see electric monitoring systems being put into place quickly. If they had to deal with rate hikes, you’d see electric use go down. And if they were allowed to keep a sizable portion of their savings on electricity, and apply that to other IT projects, you’d see massive power savings in the data center.

We’re at the point where greening IT may be more about corporate organization than actual technology. The first step it to make IT departments feel the pain when electric bills go up—and get the benefits when electricity use goes down.

Author: Ari Rabinovitch

Founder of 3GSolar Jonathan Goldstein (L) demonstrates the electric output of a dye-based solar panel in Jerusalem in this picture taken July 1, 2009. Photo: Ronen Zvulun

JERUSALEM - It may take a little bit of color to create cheaper solar energy.

Israeli start-up 3GSolar says it has developed the world’s first commercial-size solar energy system that uses colored dyes to turn sunlight into electricity.

The technology emerged from a relatively new field in solar energy that uses simple organic dyes instead of rare or costly materials, like silicon, which scare many consumers away from solar power.

Energy companies have been struggling for years to make dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC) large enough to be used in commercial-size systems. Such next generation cells could be used in cutting-edge applications, like windows that turn passing sun rays into electricity.

Japanese electronics conglomerate Sony Corp said last year it had developed dye-sensitized cells with an energy conversion efficiency of 10 percent, a level seen necessary for commercial use, but that its technology was still in the research and development stage.

A 1.5 square meter (16 square foot) prototype, boasting red panels, stands on the rooftop of the 3GSolar’s Jerusalem laboratories. The company’s founder, Jonathan Goldstein, says it is by far the largest in the world.

It transforms just seven percent of the sunlight it absorbs into electricity, but he said that its efficiency would increase steadily in the coming years.

Scaling up the size of solar panels has been hampered by problems of metal corrosion in their grids. 3GSolar would not disclose the exact process it used to overcome the obstacle.

“These cells, each individual one of 225 square centimeters (34 square inches), we believe are the largest of this type in the world and give a record-breaking current,” Goldstein said.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are also known as Graetzel cells, after Michael Graetzel, a professor at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who discovered them about 20 years ago.

He found that sunlight excites the dye and creates and electronic charge without the need for pricey semiconductors, similar to the way a plant uses chlorophyll to turn sunlight into energy through photosynthesis.

Graetzel told Reuters the dye-based technology has been gaining momentum in the renewable energy market.

He said there were key advantages over other systems.

These included lower costs, its ability to create electricity in cloudy areas or in non-peak sunlight, and the smaller amount of energy needed to manufacture the panels, which leaves a smaller carbon footprint.

Other companies, including Australia’s Dyesol and Japan’s Sharp Corp, have been racing to “scale up” dye solar cells to a commercial size, Graetzel said.

“3GSolar came up with a solution. They report to have a collector that doesn’t corrode,” Graetzel said. He added that the company has shown promising results from durability tests on their panels carried out over 1,500 hours at 85 degrees Celsius.

“They are not the only company working with DSC, but they have deliberately pushed their particular current collector technology first,” he said.

CANDLE-LIT VILLAGES
Ken Zweibel, director of George Washington University’s Solar Institute, said dye cells should be pursued but they remain among the “low efficiency” group of solar cells.

“They are inching their way up in efficiency, and they appear to have some headroom,” Zweibel said. He added that the different color options and range of applications may make dye cells more attractive. But he emphasized the importance of durability: “Can they warrantee 25 years outdoors as their competitors do?”

3GSolar says its first system—with two solar panels, a charge controller and a battery—will hit the market in two years. It will target the off-grid market in developing countries, where many villages still depend on candlelight.

The Brussels-based Alliance for Rural Electrification estimated the off-grid market at $1.5 billion.

3GSolar said its system will have a lifespan of about seven years and have an output of 110 watts, enough to power many types of refrigerators.

It will cost $400, less than similar silicon-based systems, when produced locally. That translates into 30 cents per kWh, which is still much higher than fossil fuels.

The company expects the price will come down as the lifespan increases and production costs drop.

(Editing by Anthony Barker)