Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: 80% of green ICT initiatives don’t have measurable targets!

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

80% of green ICT initiatives don’t have measurable targets!

The OECD has just published a great summary of the various Green ICT programs around the world. As this article points out many of these initiatives have no way of measuring whether the initiatives are actually reduce GHG emissions. This is quite a common problem with most energy efficiency initiatives. Unless a program undertakes a valid carbon verification and audit process such as ISO 14064 then there is no way to really determine if these programs are being successful. In fact many initiatives on energy efficiency may be making the problem worse because of the Jevons paradox. This is why the CANARIE Green IT pilot insists that applicants go through an ISO 14064 process to insure that their low carbon Internet architecture actually reduces GHG emissions.

http://www.greentelecomlive.com/?p=1180

A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that only one in five green ICT programs by governments and industry organisations actually have any type of measurable targets, or ways of measuring whether they are working as plan.

According to the report, authored by consultant Christian Reimsbach Kounatze and presented to the Working Party on the Information Economy, while most programs have some form of broad objective, only one-fifth of all government programs and industry association initiatives have measurable targets and indicators to measure whether these targets are being achieved.

Of the government initiatives, all have set objectives, but only 17 out of 50 have measurable targets, the report said. Of these, only 10 actually have formalised assessment and evaluation. More astonishing is the fact that the report found only two out of the 42 green ICT programs by industry associations had any measurable targets.

ICT IMPACT
At the same time, the report found that while there are many approaches to green ICT as illustrated by the 92 programs, and that each program would have its own objectives, the majority, or two thirds, are focused on improving the direct environmental impact from the use of ICT, thus neglecting the greater benefits of using green ICT to lower the impact of the society in general.

Only one third of the programs actually focused on “using ICTs across the economy and society in areas where there is a major potential to dramatically improve performance, for example in “smart” urban, transport and power distribution systems, despite the fact that this is where ICT have the greatest potential to improve environmental performance,” the report said.

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OECD report
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/12/42825130.pdf

TOWARDS GREEN ICT STRATEGIES
Assessing Policies and Programmes on ICT and the Environment