World is Green

Shai Agassi was predicted to be the future CEO of SAP. Instead, he started Project Better Place. This is an ambitious game changing idea to create infrastructure to support electric cars. In a way, his work is one part of the chicken and egg problem of extending the range of electric cars.

Israel and Renault-Nissan will be the first partnership to deploy electric cars on a large scale. Denmark is the second country. Shai explains it on his blog about the partnership and the concept.

You can follow more at Shai’s blog. Check out the video.

Tesla Motors, the newest car company creating only zero-emission cars decides to start building their cars in California.

Check out the announcement by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some great comments on green jobs, inspiration, innovation and government incentives for clean tech companies.

As I suggested before, Tesla is building a premium car because that is the best way to enter the market considering the constraints of technology, economics etc. Tesla wants to build a mass market electric car in the coming years.

More at Techcrunch.

Anna Clark in GreenerComputing:

Greening technology brands is a delicate balancing act. In charting a green course, it is important to understand where a company’s brand is internationally, what market a company wants to target, and how much of a premium that market expects to pay as a “green tax” for adoption.

Having a great green product offering that nobody knows about or believes in can end up creating waste rather than reducing it. Yet, having a proposition with no weight behind it, especially a brand that is expected to deliver green but does not, can compromise brands in the long run.

The greening of technology brands requires skillful mapping and foresight, but judging from the success of brands like HP and Dell, it is a road that can be successfully navigated by strategic thinking.

Photo Credit : Jonathan Gayman

Jim Butler from Hotel Lawyer gives a set of reasons and trends for Hotels to go green.

Rule #1: Get the best consultants and advisors early.

If you are going to get serious about GREENING your hotel future, the first thing you need to do is tap some of the best GREEN resources you can find, and do it from the outset.
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For more discussion about GREEN resources, including many of The Hotel Developers Conference™ speakers and a rich library of reading, please see the rich assortment of articles in the Green Hotels topic at www.HotelLawBlog.com, particularly, “Green Hotel Lawyer: Why should you do GREEN hotel development, and HOW do you do it?”

Living buildings that produce more power than they consume - sustainable design

Kip Richardson, Director of Business Development for Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects, kicked off the day of educational sessions with a presentation entitled, “Beyond LEED: The Cutting Edge of Sustainable Design.” Richardson described some of the reasons why it is  important to take a sustainable approach to hotel design and construction.
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Richardson provided a glimpse into the future of hotel design, saying that within five years, hotel buildings may produce more energy than they consume and consume more waste than they produce. These “living” buildings will capture and treat rainwater and have zero net impact on the environment.

Hotel Financing for Green Hotels
While “green” may be the current hot trend, it will not trump other value-determining business fundamentals such as location and brand identity, panelists said. Being a green hotel developer does not necessarily guarantee funding success.

“Before you can be a green hotel developer, you have to be a hotel developer who knows how to get a deal done,” Muldavin said.

The opportunity is growing.

Nytimes writes about a new book called “Nudge” which uses behavioural science in understanding many decisions made by humans. Some experiments show that price feedbacks work. This takes it further.

“Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs,” says Dr. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics. “When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful.”

It would be still more powerful, he and Mr. Sunstein suggest, if you knew how your energy consumption compared with the social norm. A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.

Economics Times interviews Martin Stuchtey, a global expert on climate change, and partner with McKinsey.

Excerpts:

We have done 160 studies over the last 12 months on climate change. Very few are for CSR and sustainability guys. Most of them are being funded straight out of the boards, and typically we talk to the head of strategy when we discuss them. It is not about making the CSR story headlines today; it’s about making your business viable in the long-term, to make your business fit for the low-carbon economy.
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Almost all of them agreed that there is a huge upside to managing this transition.We were surprised to see that almost 30% of the carbon reduction in our own cost curve actually has a negative cost — you actually profit from it! For many companies 60-70% of their emissions can be reduced at net zero cost.
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We estimate the market (carbon trading) to be about $1.0-1.6 trillion by 2030, which is about the size of today’s oil market!

It’s a new commodity market that has to be developed from scratch, and that means infrastructure — you need a world carbon bank, lots and lots of certification bodies, many controls. Without that, it is going to be very difficult, and you can’t only rely on local governments coming back with their fuel economy standard or taxes on this or that.
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Then there is green urbanisation. New cities are coming up, new SEZs are coming up. Can we really start focusing on these? Renewable energy and generation have already seen a big leap. In both solar and wind, I think we can be the front runners, as is the case in bio-fuels. We feel that 10-20% of the top companies will profit from it, and position themselves completely on the cost curve. Overall, Indian companies see it more as an opportunity rather than a threat. In the next 12-18 months, you will see a big change.

Roger James in the Business Spectator:

There was a time when green beer was something strange they did with the brews in Irish pubs on St Patrick’s day. Not any more. Green beer is now a deadly serious marketing strategy, with Foster’s and Lion Nathan releasing products which they say reach the consumer being fully carbon offset in their production, packaging and distribution. Foster’s even goes to the trouble of printing its labels using inks made from vegetable oils.

Will consumers change their beers, perhaps even their brand, in response to this? There is no doubt that being carbon neutral, having carbon offsets or reducing your carbon footprint are all issues that have recently sprung to the fore in business, in marketing and in the community.

A new target market for a new beer.This initiative raises a lot of questions about green marketing strategies.

Will consumers select beers based on their green credentials? A question for Seth Godin I guess. Here’s my take. Consumers may change products like dish washing liquids or even clothes based on their green credentials. Cars come into this category too. However, beers are different. They are personal, taste based and connect to past preferences and habits. Lion Nathan and Fosters may be better off spending their green dollars on other initiatives.

Here’s a thought: what if your most popular beer is made “green”; would that make a difference? Will it get more customers to choose that beer, bring in a new customer?

What if the company developed a greener supply chain and manufacturing systems and built their overall green image. Will that create a blanket of goodwill on all their products? Is that better?

What is a better strategy? New green products, green old products or green the company?

Forum for the Future in the UK has released a report titled “Leader Business Strategies” which explain how sustainability fits into business strategy.

When I started this blog, my aim was to understand, look at examples and provide a convincing case of how sustainability is a business strategy. This reports really takes the lead in providing a framework to take this forward.

I have suggested before that we can look at sustainability as a risk reduction strategy (cost cutting, bottom line focus) or a growth opportunity strategy (new markets, top line focus).

David Bent, a Principal Sustainability Advisor for the Forum of the Future and the report’s author suggest that  the shift has happened from risk to opportunity. In fact, David is an e-mail subscriber of this blog.

He writes, “In the past companies have asked us “What should our sustainability strategy be for our business?” Now they’re asking “What should our business strategy be, in the light of sustainability?”
The report summary (Download - PDF) explains why business needs to look at sustainability and framing the issue in a demand-supply equation. It also explains the eco-system issues as capital depletion and how that can detrimental to future business. More importantly, with change in consumer behaviours, and new opportunities for competitors it is becoming imperitive for a new operational model which incorporates the sustainability aspects.

The report suggests a practical model revolving around technologies, markets and contexts or what can be called the larger business eco-system.  And an approach to implement based on planning, managing and experimenting.

The full report can be downloaded here and the summary here.

In an interview David suggests the growing opportunities for SMEs to use sustainability as a business strategy and he sees a good future for companies which take sustainability seriously.

“I feel sympathy with the fact that SMEs don’t have lots of time and resources,” says Bent. “But there are smaller businesses that are experimenting and making it work. Cafédirect, which started off with three people and one bag of coffee, has transformed the UK market tremendously. What we’re trying to get across is that there needn’t be a trade-off between profit and being sustainable. Finding the right way is the task of strategic management.”

Bent has faith in the UK’s entrepreneurs, those who “create the disruptive change”, to spot the market gaps and make them their own. “They become leaders because they can spot opportunities,” reasons Bent. “What will guide them through this growing terrain is if they ask the question: ‘How can we build up our capabilities so that we are better positioned than our competitors to deal with problems like climate change, energy efficiency and social need and make money out of it?’”

The last question that David asks is the crux of the issue. How do we see these problems as opportunities and solve them?. History has provided proof that people who can solve important problems and create a good business model can profit immensely from it.

Heather Clancy writes in ZD Net’s Green Tech blog about monitoring carbon and advice from Michael Meehan, founder and CEO of Carbonetworks.

Meehan, who hails from Victoria, British Columbia, figures there are five steps companies need to climb on their way to getting a better grip on their carbon position:

1. Measure actual carbon emissions and document where it’s coming from. What’s true for one division may not be true for another.
2. Understand how your carbon position relates to core business values. In other words, how would reducing your company’s footprint affect profitability?
3. Gauge the financial liability/value associated with your company’s greenhouse emissions.
4. Assess the impact of various reduction strategies across the entire company. Sometimes, something that may seem like a great idea for one division may have a detrimental effect on the company as a whole.
5. Link up with verified offset providers to take action.