According to the EPA figures, Intel now buys 88% of its electricity from green sources, consisting of a mix of purchased power from Sterling Planet and PNM, as well as some on-site generation. Sources of power include geothermal, biomass, small hydro, solar, and wind.

Also high on the rankings was Microsoft, who came in third with 1.12 billion kWh of green power purchased per year. 46% of Microsoft’s power was green, supplied also by Sterling Planet, the EPA noted.

ICT firms that also made the list include Cisco Systems (269 million kWh, 10th place), Sprint (176 mllion kWh, 14th place), Dell (119 million kWh, 19th place), and Google (103.4 million kWh, 22th place). Another Google firm, Motorola Mobility also made the list at 25th place, while Intel’s chip rival, AMD (27th), Xerox (34th), Applied Materials (37th), made up all the IT & Telecoms firms in the top 40.

Apple Computers, who has had to endured a sustained marketing blitz from Greenpeace over allegations of relying too much on coal for its data centres, was also listed on the list. It’s Austin, Texas facility was placed in 45th place with an annual purchased of some 12.8 million kWh, which was enough to meet 100% of its electricity requirements.

What should be noted is that the above rankings is based on the absolute amount of green power purchased, and not on the percentage of green power that actually runs a company’s operations.

Out of the companies that reported 100% green power usage, Datapipe scored the highest ranking for IT & Telecoms firms with an annual green power consumption of 55.9 million kWh, followed by Nokia USA with 40 million kWh.

Ricoh Production Print Solutions, Codero, EasyStreet Online Services, Workday, XMission Internet, Green House Data, Aviat Networks, Dotster, Other World Computing, VerticalResponse, ReCellular, Avectra, DECISIVE ANALYTICS, Canvas Dreams, iCIMS, Green Geeks, GrayHair Software, Votenet Solutions, 3 TIER, Altova, Community IT Innovators, Madison Computer Works, REAL-COMP, Varsity Technologies, PC Guru, Soho Network Services, Affordable Internet Services Online, Studio eBusiness, Network Cybernetics, Supplylogix, Bates Investigations, Sandwich.Net, Invisible Gold, Island Joe Group, Vertex Technology Management, Maine.Info, and Alchemy Host, also made the 100% renewable powered list with usage figures ranging from more than 12.3 million kWh, to as little as 1000 kWh.

Interestingly, Apple’s Austin facility, which was listed as part of the Fortune 5000 list, was not included in the 100% green powered list although it is listed as getting 100% of its energy from renewable sources.

Lastly, it is worth noting that a lot of the companies in the program might not be using actual electricity generated by renewable energy, since they are not buying directly from solar or wind farms, but from resellers of renewable energy certificates.

In an online interview for a documentary film called, ‘Take Back Your Power‘, Chalk – dubbed a ‘hacking expert’ by the filmmakers – asserted a 100% certainty of catastrophic failure of the energy grid within 3 years.

“We’re in a state of crisis,” said Chalk in a press release issued by TheBigPitcher Films. “The front door is open and there is no lock to be had. There is not a power meter or device on the grid that is protected from hacking – if not already infected – with some sort of trojan horse that can cause the grid to be shut down or completely annihilated.”

“One of the most amazing things that has happened to mankind in the last 100 years is the Internet. It’s given us possibility beyond our wildest imagination. But we also know the vulnerabilities that exist inside of it. And then we have the backbone, the power grid that powers our nations. Those two are coming together. And it’s the smart meter on your home or business that’s now allowing that connectivity.”

Chalk also challenged governments, media, and technology vendors to demonstrate “one piece of digital technology that is hack-proof,” pledging to crack any system presented.

“The computer companies that are involved, the manufacturers that are involved, bring forward a technology and I will show you that it’s penetrable,” said Chalk. “I’ll do it on national TV, I’ll do it anywhere. But I can guarantee you 100% that there is nothing out there today — nothing — that can’t be penetrated.”

The filmmakers also highlighted recent examples of concern over smart grid security from security experts such as Doug Powell, manager, SMI Security, Privacy & Security, for Canadian utility BC Hydro, as well as industry insiders like former CIA Director James Woolsey.

Powell points out that smart meters represents “a new potential threat vector,” while Woolsey asserts that “the so-called ‘smart grid’ that is as vulnerable as what we’ve got now is not smart at all. It is really, really stupid.”

On top of those views, US Inspector General Gregory Friedman also warned of potential vulnerabilities, stating in an audit released in January: “Without a formal risk assessment and associated mitigation strategy, threats and weaknesses may go unidentified and expose… the system to an unacceptable level of risk.”

According to the filmmakers, the audit found that energy officials knew of these weaknesses but approved funding for projects anyway. “The initial weaknesses had not always been fully addressed, and did not include a number of security practices commonly recommended for federal government and industry systems.”

With strong criticism to the smart grid now coming from many directions, energy corporations and governments now have the challenge to explain to an increasingly unapproving public why they continue to fast-track smart grid installations, the filmmakers said.

“Citizen groups and organizations throughout the US, Canada and Europe have launched legal actions to stop the installation of smart meters. They cite issues such as cost increases, health risks, privacy concerns, grid vulnerability and the lack of democratic process,” the filmmakers said. “In Chalk’s home province of British Columbia, Citizens for Safe Technology ( www.citizensforsafetechnology.org ) and the BC Coalition to Stop Smart Meters are leading a growing challenge.”

Options for opting out of the smart metering program have been announced in markets including California, Maine, Vermont, Louisiana, Michigan, Connecticut, Quebec, the UK and the Netherlands. In the US, several regions including the counties of Santa Cruz and Marin are enforcing outright moratoriums.

“Unless we wake up and realize what we’re doing, there is 100% certainty of total catastrophic failure of the entire power infrastructure within 3 years,” said Chalk. “This could actually be worse than a nuclear war, because it would happen everywhere. How governments and utilities are blindly merging the power grid with the Internet, and effectively without any protection, is insanity at its finest.”

The full video interview with David Chalk can be seen on www.thepowerfilm.org . The feature film documentary ‘Take Back Your Power’, which critically examines the smart grid program, will be released online this spring.

According to the market researchers, utilities have so far ignored public cellular networks for their smart grid initiatives, but that is about to change. A confluence of factors is leading a major shift in how utilities view public cellular options as they roll out smart grid infrastructure projects, Pike said.

“Carriers and integrators have awakened to the unique opportunity of the smart grid. It is no longer just another general vertical market application,” says vice president Bob Gohn. “With new pricing and service offerings specifically tailored for the large number of endpoints but relatively low aggregate data volume typical of grid applications, public cellular is becoming a real competitor to private utility-owned networks. The end result is a significant and growing monthly stream of revenue to the carrier, without taxing the carrier’s network resources.”

According to Pike Research, global annual service revenue from public cellular network nodes in smart grid applications will surpass $1 billion by 2020, representing a 27% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2011 to 2020. A cumulative total of 73 million cellular M2M communication nodes will be shipped for use in smart grid applications during the period from 2011 through 2020, the cleantech market intelligence firm finds.

A major factor for the surge is the European Union’s much-publicised 20-20-20 mandate, which aims to reduce EU GHG emission by at least 20% below 1990 levels, deploy 20% of renewable energy for the EU, and a 20% reduction in energy use.

Europe is the leading region for public cellular node unit shipments and revenue through the remainder of the decade, Pike said. Europe will also likely lead the market in annual service revenue, due largely to the sheer volume of aggregate data being sent by the region’s smart meters, as well as the smaller (yet steadily growing) number of nodes being used for applications such as distribution automation and substation automation.

“We’ve reached a point in our engineering projects where we’re facing new challenges related to our solar receiver design,” Google wrote in its blog. “At this point, other institutions seem better positioned than Google to take this work to the next level.”

However, all is not loss. True to its originally philosophy of trying to stimulate the renewable energy market, Google will make all that it has learned through the Initiative, namely research into technologies for solar power towers – a system that focuses a field of mirrors on a solar receiver on top of tower, which then captures that heat and turns it into electricity, available to the rest of the industry.

Here’s a video of the Heliostat project

<iframe width=”450″ height=”259″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/C_oRDBda73U” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here’s what Google has learned and is sharing in its own words:

• Smarter controls: In the past, the focus has been on making strong heliostat structures. We learned that using lower cost materials and smarter software controls can generate better performance at a lower cost. This ends up lowering the overall cost of the concentrating solar power system.
• The Brayton engine: Concentrating solar power plants traditionally use significant quantities of water for cooling. This poses a challenge to scaling these technologies, especially in the desert. Our research shows that using a “Brayton engine” — a jet engine that uses solar energy to heat air and does not require spray cooling with water — significantly reduces water use and may reduce operating costs as well.
• A systems approach: We took a system level approach to designing concentrating solar systems. By focusing on the cost and quality of the system as a whole, we tried to make cutbacks on some components, while compensating elsewhere to maintain performance. We believe this approach could reduce the cost of electricity generated by concentrating solar systems, rather than attempting to optimize each individual component, which can drive up overall costs.

Basically, home owners will be able to put up a solar power system costing up to US$30,000, at little or no upfront cost. Google will retain ownership of the solar power system, and will charge the homeowner a monthly fee, which the project say will be less or equalled to what they are paying today to their utility.

The business model is not only based on the monthly return, but also includes state and federal government subsidies for renewable energy production.

The project probably makes a lot of sense for high-priced energy regions, such as California, but the economics will be challenge for regions with lower energy costs, and less government subsidies.

According to Google, it recorded a total of 1,457,982 metric tons of CO2 equivalent for the year 2010. This includes 11,126 metric tons of CO2e for direct emissions (Scope 1) from cars, company shuttles, onsite fuel consumption at its offices, 1,226,350 metric tons of CO2e of emissions from purchased electricity (Scope 2), and 207,065 metric tons of CO2e from other indirect emissions (Scope 3) such as business travel, commuting, manufacturing its servers, building its data centres, and consumption by leased premises. The overall figure also includes 13,441 metric tons of CO2e from a new category – Biogenic emissions, from landfill gas combustions.

Overall, that equals about 1.46 kg of CO2e per user (employee) on an annual basis, Google said. Google adds that without its energy efficiency measures at its data centres, its footprint would have been “about twice as big.”

In addition to the overview of its carbon footprint, Google also gave further details of the energy profile and performance of specific areas of operations.

For example, it says that its data centres now use only 50% of the energy of most other data centres. This, Google says, saves it “millions of dollars in energy costs and cuts our impact on the environment.”

And the savings don’t stop there because Google also buys carbon offsets, in addition to buying and generating renewable energy (30% of Google’s energy in the year 2010 are from renewable sources), so any amount of energy saved, and carbon avoided, also means it needs to buy less carbon offsets to achieve its carbon neutral status.

Another interesting figure from Google is what percentage of global electricity its data centres consume. Based on a study by Standford consulting professor Jonathan Koomey, who estimates the global data centre energy consumption at between 1.1% to 1.5% of the global electricity consumption, Google says that its figures equal only about 1% of the Koomey figure. So 1% of 1.3% (as the average of the Koomey estimate) puts Google’s data centre electricity consumption at 0.01% of the global total, the company said.

CO2 and web searches

Now for the fun part. As part of its carbon disclosure, Google also revealed a very interesting fact – that each 100 web query uses up about 20 grams of CO2. That, according to Google, equals about the same energy as operating a 30W laptop for an hour, keeping a 60W light bulb on for 28 minutes, or the energy needed to produce 1.5 tablespoons of orange juice.

With that figure however, we can now estimated how much CO2 we all use for web searches on a daily, or annual basis.

My calculations as follows:

- 100 searches = 20 g CO2

- Google searches in June 2011 (comScore) = 11.1bn

- 11.1/30 days = 370m Google searches/day

- 370m/100 x 20g = 74 million grams, or 74 metric tons

- 74 metric tons x 365 = 27,010 metric tons a year from Google searches.

So there you have it. The world generates about 74 metric tons of CO2 per day conducting Google searches. On an annual basis, that’s 27,010 metric tons, or roughly one fifth of the CO2 from Google’s purchased electricity.

Applied the same formula to comScore’s total number of web searches in June 2011, and the result is 112 metrics of CO2 per day, or some 40,880 metric tons of CO2 every year.

So what does 40,880 metric tons of CO2 mean?

According to the EPA, that equals the same emissions from about 7,000 passenger cars in a year, about 4 million gallons of gas, and about the same amount of CO2 needed to generate electricity to power 4,500 homes in the US for a year.

Obviously, the figure doesn’t include the energy used by the PCs and increasingly mobile devices that are doing the searching. While coming up with a realistic CO2 profile of the Web is nearly impossible at this point, at least we know have a pretty good idea of the energy profile of one of the more popular components.

Lastly, Google also revealed the CO2 profile of YouTube – 1 minute = 0.1 g, or 3 kg over 3 days. Anyone want to calculate how much CO2 we all use watching videos?

Mitsubishi iMiEV electric vehicle

The project, dubbed “V2X,” will be rolled out in a trial deployment at the parking facility of Mitsubishi Motors’ Nagoya plant by March 2012, and will use the batteries of electric vehicles as storage for energy generated by a set of solar panels on the roof, according to this report by Utility Products citing Electric Daily News.

The system is designed to take the energy generated by the solar panel and then store them in the batteries of the vehicles. While I’m not absolutely sure on the technical details, but the system seems to work by ensuring that none of the power generated by the solar panels are wasted by storing it inside the vehicles. The installation includes built in units that draw power from the vehicles as the grid requires power, including converting it to alternating current for general use.

I’m assuming that the system will have control mechanisms in place so it doesn’t drain the vehicles completely – so employees can get home, and that the vehicles will come into the facility with sufficient [empty] storage capacity to make a difference.

Still, it is an interesting concept. After all, electric vehicles do have the potential to transport energy from one place to another. For example, all parking lots can have solar powered roofs, which will charge the vehicles during the day. Once fully charged, the vehicles can then be configured to pipe some of that power the home in the evening when the use gets home. That would enable every home with an electric vehicle to benefit from renewable energy to some extent – now that would be pretty cool.

Green Charge Networks’ new GreenStation product is an energy storage and management device that is designed to be deployed in public and commercial facilities such as grocery stores and your neighbourhood 7-Elevens. What it does is store energy from the electricity grid during low consumption hours and then feeding it back for use by the facilities, or back into the grid during peak demand.

The benefit of GreenStation is that it allows the facility to avoid high power prices during peak hours, as well as giving them the ability to offer additional services such as electric vehicle charging, the company said.

“While the majority of energy management companies force changes in energy usage patterns, for example by regulating store temperature remotely, GreenStation™ uses the natural highs and lows in energy usage patterns of any facility to its own benefit,” said Ron Prosser, president and CEO of Green Charge Networks. “By providing demand response on previously dispersed, fixed and difficult-to-manage loads, GreenStation™ avoids demand charges that can range between $12 and $20 per kW of power. This significantly reduces the monthly electric bill.”

Additionally, GreenStation™ also avoids last-mile electric grid infrastructure upgrade costs. As such, electric utilities benefit by maximizing efficiency in existing infrastructure assets and deferment of large capital expenditures. “Utilities around the country are starting to experience the effect of growing EV adoption,” explains Vic Shao, CTO of Green Charge Networks. “Often, the increase in electrical load is necessitating upgrades ranging from the electrical panels to the transformer itself. Infrastructure upgrades involving utility transformers could easily exceed $20,000 for one location. With GreenStation™, not only are these kinds of upgrades unnecessary, but EV charging becomes reality while saving money throughout the system.”

Another benefit is the fact that power generated by renewable energy such as solar and wind can also be maximised with the GreenStations, which can store all the energy generated and deliver back for consumption when the sources become unavailable – at night, or when there’s no wind.

Additionally, the company has introduced a mobile version of the GreenStation, which can be used to support event-based energy spikes, such as during a ball game or concert at a stadium.

Green Charge Networks designed GreenStation™ with the technical support of Con Edison of New York under a smart grid demonstration project funded by the Department of Energy.

via Green Charge Networks Launches GreenStation(TM) at Plug-In 2011.

According to a report in the China Daily, the State Grid Corp of China now has an addressable market of 300 million potential smart meter users, worth some 50 billion yuan, or roughly US$7.7 billion. In comparison, a recent research report by Pike Research projects a total of 250 million smart meters deployed worldwide by 2015.

Fei Yuhang, a member of the National Standardisation Committee for Electrical Meters and an engineer at Chinese smart meter chip maker, Shanghai Belling Co., says that vast potential market is a huge opportunity for the smart meter manufacturing industry in China.

More importantly, the report revealed that State Grid Corp has already deployed 45 million smart meters, or some 26% of its user base, and is expected to have smart meters to all of its users by 2014.

Fei added that Chinese manufacturers now have an edge over their overseas counterparts because they can produce smart meters for between US$160 to US$300 dollars each, a price point that is hard to match for foreign firms. However, he added that smart meters by foreign companies often offered more advanced features because they collect more information of the user’s consumption.

via: State Grid’s meter market valued at $7.7b.

According to a report from Seeking Alpha, data centres will be exempt from the power conservations restrictions, that will be applied across corporations operating in the country. The policy puts data centres in the same category as critical infrastructure like railways and hospitals, which are also exempt from the power conservation efforts following the earthquake and tsunami that shut down one of the country’s core generators – the Fukushima Nuclear plant.

Despite the news, all three Japanese telcos are making provisions to migrate at least some of their infrastructure overseas. KDDI has partners with HKCOLO to set up a new data centre in Hong Kong. Softbank has joined up with Korea Telecom to set up a data centre in South Korea, citing specifically the availability and cost of power as a reason for the move. Meanwhile, NTT Communications announced last week that it will be opening up another data centre in Malaysia called Cyberjava 3. All three operators cite the stability of the environment in those markets, as well as the availability of power as key reasons for the sites of their new facilities.

In Japan, corporations are now adopting some innovative measures to cope with the energy shortage. According to Seeking Alpha, car companies like Nissan Motors are shifting operating days to the weekends and shutting down on Thursday and Friday to help utilities cope with peak demand.

via: Japan’s Data Centers Excluded From Power Conservation Measures – Seeking Alpha.