Viewing posts tagged "Green It"

The Case for Ditching PCs

$4,500 a month.

That’s the amount that Trent Ratcliff, the IT Infrastructure Manager for the Regional Transportation District (RTD) in Denver, says he will be able to cut his power bills once his agency replaces 800 desktop PCs with 800 thin clients and back-end servers.

“It’s over $50,000 a year,� he says.

The agency has already installed 400 of the machines and the rest will go in in a few weeks. On top of that he expects to save close to $600,000 in hardware and maintenance costs over the next eight years. The overall network he oversees has about 1,000 notebooks and desktops on it.

Thin clients — which are essentially terminals that scrape data and information from servers in a computing room — have historically been the girlie man option in the corporate workplace. Nobody requested one. In many places, getting one was a sign that you were probably destined for a long career on the help desk.

Contracting budgets and rising power prices, along with improved performance of these devices, however, has begun to change the picture. And the thin or PC debate could become one of the big corporate computing issues in 2010. While you can argue whether or not the switch makes sense -- PC advocates will point out things like application compatibility and productivity -- the thin client advocates will probably be able to put up at least some kind of hard numbers to prove their case for lower operating costs. Either way, it will be discussed.

“It is something everyone has to consider,� Ratcliff said, who has also been evangelizing the concept to co-workers in other departments.

Another factor that will push adoption: Utilities like Xcel Energy are offering (or planning to offer) subsides to companies to switch.

If this becomes a trend, it’s good news for a wide variety of companies. VMware will sell more virtualization software, which effectively allows the server to act as the brains for multiple desktops simultaneously. Hewlett-Packard sells servers as well as software for optimizing thin clients. Then of course there are the terminal companies themselves like Wyse (which sells boxes to RTD) and NComputing (which has installed over a million thin of its roughly $100 thin clients worldwide in the last two years). See perhaps the finest thin client movie ever made here.

But it could make like a little more difficult for sales people hawking notebooks.

What’s the Smart Grid/Cool Data Center Angle With IBM-Sun Deal?

The Wall Street Journal reported today that IBM hopes to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion dollars.

The deal, if completed, will put to end one of the more enduring, and sometimes comical, rivalries in computing. Sun and IBM for years have competed against each other in servers, storage systems, consulting and other high-end computing markets. The comical part was how former Sun CEO Scott McNealy would try to characterize the rivalry as “humankind versus IBM Global Services.”

Somehow, that titanic battle occurred (on my behalf) without me even noticing. You too?

But in any event, the deal will also have implications for the future of efficient data centers and the smart grid.

Although it’s relatively small compared to IBM, Sun has always done quite well in exploiting lab results commercially. In the past two years, Sun has showcased a number of technologies and design techniques it has employed to reduce data center power consumption. Last week, for instance, Sun showed off a flash-based hard drive for servers.

IBM conducts a lot of the same research and has similar products, but sometimes these developments get lots in the heft and mass that is IBM. Sun, partly by virtue of its size and party by virtue of a strong talent for marketing complex technologies, can help IBM hone its message. In other words, the real value of this acquisition, beyond a large customer base, could be in Sun’s ability to communicate.

The combined companies will also now tower over HP and Dell in terms of sheer size when it comes to bidding on contracts for new data centers.

Powering LEDs With Candles

Here’s a novel lab experiment, courtesy of Tetsuo Nozawa at Nikkei Electronics: it’s an LED powered by candle flame. Check out the photo at the above link.

The heat from the candle goes through a thermoelectric material and is converted to electricity, which powers the LED. Nozawa saw it at Nextreme Thermal Solutions. The LED actually shines brighter than the candle flame because most of the energy in the candle is dissipated as heat. In LEDs, most of the energy gets consumed in producing light.

Thermoelectric materials like bismuth telluride have been studied for decades. Researchers, however, have begun to experiment with different types of materials (such as germanium) that they say can convert heat to light and vice versa much more efficiently. Companies trolling in thermoelectrics include GMZ Energy, Promethean Power, and Cypress Semiconductor. UC Berkeley is concocting some startups too.

Although thermoelectric materials technically exploit waste heat, most of the waste heat companies that have been in the market for years use very different underlying technologies. These companies typically capture heat, compress it, and then use the resulting pressure to run a turbine and create electricity. Alternatively, they pipe the heat back into the factory to warm water or offices.

Apple Choosing ZPower for Batteries? Good Chance of It

On the eve of Macworld, the rumors are buzzing that Apple will release a new notebook that features batteries from ZPower, which makes a silver zinc battery.

Ross Dueber, CEO of ZPower, declined to comment. ZPower has a deal with a notebook manufacturer, but it’s up to the unknown manufacturer to make any comments, he said. (Ross is speaking at CES in Las Vegas on Thursday so we might get more there.) However, looking at all of the circumstances, I believe that the odds are pretty good, around 50 percent. Here’s why:

1. ZPower has already said that they have landed a notebook win with a major manufacturers and that the deal will be announced in early 2009. Macworld is this week.

2. Selecting ZPower would allow Apple to claim a first. Right now, notebook makers virtually rely exclusively on lithium ion batteries. ZPower’s batteries are based on a silver zinc chemistry. It’s been tough to make rechargeable zinc batteries that can last—Thomas Edison himself worked on the problem—but both ZPower and competitor PowerGenix, which makes a nickel zinc battery, say they’ve solved that problem. Zinc batteries are less prone to “thermal runaway reactions.” Zinc batteries will also be able to store far more energy than lithium ion cells as time goes on, say advocates. Lithium cells, they argue, have peaked.

Zinc potentially could become a really large business for a lot of applications.

These wouldn’t be the first zinc batteries on the market. PowerGenix started selling some last month. But these would be the first in a notebook. Thus, Apple could hold itself out as an innovator by being the first to come out with a zinc notebook.

You can just imagine the obligatory gushing at Macworld now.

3. Love or hate it, Apple is good at harvesting components. The touch pad from Synaptics and the 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drives effectively allowed the company to make the first iPods. No one else really wanted the 1.8-inch drive. With some careful component shopping and good design, Apple was able break into a new category.

4. ZPower (formerly Zinc Matrix Power) has a long history. It got started back in the ‘90s. Thus, the company can provide a lot of testing materials to notebook makers.

5. ZPower is also heavily associated with Intel. Intel even invested in it. Despite some friction, Apple and the Big I still collaborate.

6. The other new age battery companies I’ve contacted don’t have announcements coming up. I haven’t called them all, but some.

7. Some other large notebook makers have already selected their new age battery supplier. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, has said it will offer a lithium-ion battery from Boston Power as an option in some notebooks. Sony and Toshiba, which both make lithium ion batteries, are a little less hot on the new battery category.

8. The zinc batteries will likely come at a premium and Apple has had a knack for getting its fan base to look beyond price points.

9. Tom Krazit, an former colleague at CNET, says it makes sense for Apple to do a new notebook this week.

But, again, nothing is guaranteed. Here’s a list of other notebook makers that could be interested in zinc batteries: Dell, Acer, Lenovo. And the Macworld coincidence may be getting overplayed. Last April, Dueber said that ZPower’s batteries were slated to come out in a thin laptop in August 2008. Didn’t happen.

A Record Year in Greentech Investing—$7.7B in 2008

We began tracking venture capital investment in Greentech in 2004 when the sector really didn’t have a name and represented only 1 percent of VC investment totals.

Companies like Nanosolar and Miasolé were just getting started and most VC investors were simply trying to get their heads around this relatively underinvested trillion dollar market.

A few years later, Greentech VC investment represents about 20 percent of the VC asset class -- 2008 finished with a total VC investment of more than $7.7 billion in more than 350 funding rounds, roughly one investment a day, with time off for Christmas and New Years.

Greentech Media just released the most recent quarterly data showing that venture capital investment in green technologies exceeded $2.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008, a modest decrease from the previous quarter’s total of $2.9 billion.

We asked Erik Straser, a partner at leading cleantech investor Mohr Davidow Ventures and an insightful analyst of these markets to weigh in on these numbers and here are his comments:

“2008 marks the 'end of the beginning,' an end to the first few years of investment enthusiasm.  In the next period, we’ll see investors focus on strong investor syndicates, management teams that have proven they can execute, and value propositions that can truly deliver differentiated economics to the world’s largest markets.�

Rob Day of @Ventures weighed in on his blog last month with his take on the state of greentech investing. His presentation on the subject is here.

Rob sees cause for worry in the way the VC model tracks greentech startup timelines. No argument there -- it takes a long time and a lot of money to scale a new solar or biofuel technology to meaningful volumes. But he also saw a shortage of early stage investors and I’m not sure the numbers bears that out.

My preliminary data shows that investors continue to fund early-stage deals as well as later-stage deals. At least 30 of the 115 greentech deals this quarter were seed stage or A rounds.

Rob also saw the need for VCs to enlarge their scope and stop focusing on solar and biofuels. And VCs seem to be doing just that -- they are digging deep in the greentech sector and looking outside traditional technologies at previously underinvested areas like energy storage, energy efficiency, recycling, water, cleaner coal and green IT.

Still, the IPO door is closed for now and probably for the next four to six quarters. And although consolidation in this market has already begun -- meaningful, profitable VC-scale acquisitions will also be scarce for the foreseeable future.

“We will continue to see investors allocate capital, albeit more cautiously, to cleantech as the underlying macro forces driving cleantech remain unchanged and cleantech looks well positioned to be a significant part of the new administration,� Straser added.

Startups will need to work harder and smarter and VCs will need to be patient. Look for 2009 to be the year of smart grid, energy storage and energy efficiency.

A Smart Meter Map of the World

Have you had trouble keeping track of smart metering projects? So have we, which is why we’re glad to see the Smart Metering Projects Map run by the Energy Retail Association in the UK.

The map essentially pinpoints smart metering projects across Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia on a zoom-able Google map. If you click on one of the flags, a few paragraphs pop up explaining the scope and purpose of the project. Distrigaz Sud, for instance, is installing 1.1 gas meters in southern Romania to offset gas network balancing concerns. The meters in the trial utilize snap-on Zigbee devices to permit communication.

In Kyrgyzstan, a utility will test out pre-paid gas meters. (Pre-paid gas meters used to be a common fixture in the U.K. after World War II and are going to be trialed in parts of the U.S. for lower-income housing developments.)

And my personal favorite, Bosnia Herzegovina’s Elektroprivreda HZ HB Mostar is installing meters that communicate through power-line networking provided by Echelon. Echelon has also landed deals, and installed, power line-enabled meters and street lights in Italy, Norway and Texas. Italy already has 30 million smart meters, according to the map, which makes the country one of the more popular nations for smart meters. Elektroprivreda will initially only put in 200 meters but wants to boost the number to 200,000.

There are no projects yet, according to the map, in South America or Africa, but there are proposals in the works for South Africa.

At the risk of sounding redundant, smart metering will be one of the major issues and market for greentech in 2009 and beyond. Proponents say that smart meters and demand response programs can substantially curb greenhouse gases and energy consumption by more finely controlling the distribution and consumption of electricity, water and natural gas. Electrical grids, water utilities and gas pipelines, however, weren’t designed with two-way communication and control in mind so bringing intelligence to these systems will require investments in networking, hardware and software.

Contact Simon Harrison if you want to collaborate or have questions.