
IBM to increase the amount of renewable electricity it procures
After returning from IBM’s InterConnect conference recently we chided IBM for their aping of Amazon’s radical opaqueness concerning their cloud emissions, and their lack of innovation concerning renewables. However, some better news emerged in the last few days. The Whitehouse last week hosted a roundtable of some of the largest Federal suppliers to discuss their […]

Apple, cloud computing, and enterprise supply chain management
Apple’s recent announcements around renewables and supply chain transparency, put the major cloud providers to shame. Apple had a couple of interesting announcements last week. The first was that they were investing $848m in a 130MW solar farm being built by First Solar in California. With this investment, Apple enters into a 25 year power […]

The coming together of the Internet of Things and Smart Grids
I was asked to speak at the recent SAP TechEd && d-code (yes, two ampersands, that’s the branding, not a typo) on the topic of the Internet of Things and Energy. This is a curious space, because, while the Internet of Things is all the rage now in the consumer space, the New Black, as […]

GE publishes Grid Resiliency survey
GE’s Digital Energy business produced this infographic recently, based on the results of its Grid Resiliency Survey measuring the U.S. public’s current perception of the power grid. The survey was conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of GE from May 02-06, 2014 among 2,049 adults ages 18 and older and from June 3-5, 2014 among […]

Technology for Good – episode thirty two with SAP’s Sameer Patel
Welcome to episode thirty two of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had SAP‘s Sameer Patel as the guest on our show. Sameer and I are members of the Enterprise Irregulars group – a loose group of analysts and vendors with an interest in enterprise software. Previous Enterprise Irregulars who have […]

SAP to power its cloud computing infrastructure from 100% renewable energy
Cloud computing is often incorrectly touted as being a green, more environmentally-friendly, computing option. This confusion occurs because people forget that while cloud computing may be more energy efficient (may be), the environmental friendliness is determined by how much carbon is produced in the generation of that energy. If a data centre is primarily powered […]

Here comes the sun… IBM and solar forecasting
For decades now electricity grids have been architected in the same way with large centralised generation facilities pumping out electricity to large numbers of distributed consumers. Generation has been controlled, and predictable. This model is breaking down fast. In the last decade we have seen a massive upsurge in the amount of renewable generation making […]

Internet of things, wind turbines and ThingMonk the conference.
This post was written by Tom Raftery and was published at Internet of things, wind turbines and ThingMonk the conference. Back in 2009 I remember attending Logica’s analyst day in Lisbon and being very impressed with their Renewables Management System (RMS) – a windfarm management desktop application which was at the time managing a live […]

SAP’s 2011 Sustainability Report
SAP launched its 2011 Sustainability Report this week and in terms of aesthetics and social sharing, this is one of the best Sustainability Reports I have seen to-date. The site contains many videos with SAP staff – including one from co-CEO’s Jim Hagemann Snabe & Bill McDermott which is featured prominently on the home page. […]

Facebook hires Google’s former Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl, and increases its commitment to renewables
Google has had an impressive record in renewable energy. They invested over $850m dollars in renewable energy projects to do with geothermal, solar and wind energy. They entered into 20 year power purchase agreements with wind farm producers guaranteeing to buy their energy at an agreed price for twenty years giving the wind farms an […]