June 13, 2011
Carbon Management Market ‘to Grow 700% in 7 Years’
By Environmental Leader
The global market for carbon management grew 84 percent from 2009 to 2010, and is now set to expand by over 700 percent by 2017 to $5.7 billion, according to a report by cleantech analysts Pike Research.
The projection is a 30 percent upgrade to Pike’s previous forecast, from Q1 2010, which projected a $4.4 billion industry by 2017. In the most recent report, “Carbon Management Software and Services”, Pike forecasts that the market will reach $1.3 billion in 2011, from $705 million last year, and will grow at a rapid compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 35 percent through 2017.
The strongest forces driving this growth will be the need for energy efficiency, regulatory compliance requirements, supply chain mandates, and an ability to maintain or enhance brand equity to respond to pressures from shareholders and consumers, Pike says.
It notes that the carbon management market has evolved to take a much broader focus on energy management, and in many cases, on corporate sustainability. This is particularly true in North America, Pike says.
As the young market matures, revenue from carbon management services will increasingly outweigh that from software purchases. Services will grow from 55 percent of the total market in 2010 to 67 percent by 2017, Pike predicts. And while most services revenue today comes from consulting and implementation, Pike projects that spending on outsourcing services will begin to equal or exceed these sectors by 2016.
June 13, 2011
California re-embraces carbon market
By Peter Henderson and Rory Carroll, Reuters
A new, court-ordered analysis of California alternatives for regulating greenhouse gases shows that a carbon cap-and-trade market is still the "correct" choice, the state's top climate regulator said on Monday.
The cap-and-trade plan that would let factories trade rights to emit greenhouse gases, allowing the ones that cut the most to profit most, is one of the highest profile and most contested planks of an environmental effort watched around the world.
A court ordered the state to consider alternatives to cap and trade, and the Air Board released its report on Monday while appealing the ruling that it did not thoroughly look at other ways to curb emissions from big sources.
"The analysis that led us to conclude that a cap-and-trade program was the correct alternative choice is fundamentally sound, and I think that this document lays that out quite clearly," Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols told the Reuters Global Energy and Climate Summit.
Governor Jerry Brown has yet to weigh in on whether he believes a carbon market is an essential component of the state's effort to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
But Nichols and Brown share a history -- Nichols also headed the Air Board under Brown when he was governor three decades ago. "He trusts the ARB and he trusts me," she said.
June 08, 2011
AT&T sets goal to cut data center energy use by 1.8m kWh in 2011
Firm exceeds total reduction targets it set for 2010
By Yevgeniy Sverdlik, Datacenter Dynamics
AT&T is targeting aggressive reduction of the amount of energy its infrastructure consumes in 2011. The company’s data centers are a big piece of the puzzle, and it has set a goal to improve their energy efficiency by 17%, while compute-capacity requirements for its internal business grow 20% in 2011.
The global telecom and technology service provider has set a goal to reduce total power its data centers consume by 1.8m kWh in 2011, according to the company’s newly released corporate sustainability report for 2010.
AT&T chief sustainability officer Charlene Lake said in a statement, 2010 was the first year the company started seeing tangible results of its investment in sustainability for the past several years. “We’ll continue to build upon this momentum and seek more shared value opportunities for business and society,” she added.
AT&T exceeded its goal of reducing electricity consumption by 16% in 2010 as it relates to data growth on its network. The company used 415kWh per terabyte of data the network carried – a 16.6% decrease from 2009.
June 06, 2011
Connecticut to set up green bank?
By Gloria Gonzalez, Environmental Finance
Stymied so far at the US federal level, green bank supporters appear close to winning legislative support for the first such state-level institution in Connecticut.
“I think the chances are very, very good,” Ken Berlin, general counsel for the Washington, DC-based advocacy group Coalition for Green Capital, told Environmental Finance at the Financing Energy Efficiency in the Commercial Building Sector conference in New York last week. “It was the highest priority of both the legislature and the governor. [But] you still have to get it through.”The Connecticut legislature is expected to vote this week on a bill authorising a green bank, which will provide financing for clean energy and efficiency projects in the state.
Connecticut could secure the bank’s start-up funds through an existing charge on electricity bills used to fund clean energy and efficiency projects and revenues generated from auctions of carbon allowances from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, he said.
Once the Connecticut bill passes, the coalition plans to turn its attention to developing green banks in California, Colorado and Maryland.
Nation-wide green bank also vital - Coalition
The coalition is also working to develop financing options for clean energy and efficiency projects at the national level and the proposed Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) is vital to these efforts, Berlin told the conference.
June 06, 2011
Study rates green credentials of 14 green IT services firms
By Heather Clancy, ZDNet
One of the best ways to tell if a green IT services firm really has what it takes to handle your company’s carbon and energy management strategy is to look at what that company is doing internally to manage its own corporate sustainability metrics. That’s the spirit of a new report from independent analyst firm Verdantix, which has just released a Carbon Strategy Benchmark that looks at the strategies of 14 different enterprise technology services firms.
The companies covered in the report include: Accenture, Atos Origin, BT Global Services, Capgemini, CSC, Fujitsu Services, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Infosys, Logica, Orange Business Services, TCS and Wipro.
The first thing you will notice is that these companies are at very different stages of maturity. The ones that aren’t “pure” services companies — Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP and IBM — actually have an advantage because they also run manufacturing operations. Those companies have spent longer looking at the impact of energy management and supply chain metrics. The location of the company’s operations will also have an impact, Verdantix reports. So, for example, Capgemini and Orange will have fewer opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions reductions because their primary data centers are in nuclear-powered France and they already started from a lower-footprint position.
The thing all of these companies are grappling with, Verdantix reports, is the shift to cloud computing. That’s because as the clients of these companies outsource more of their applications to the cloud, the cloud service provider ends up using more energy.
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