Yesterday President Obama announced $3.4 billion in grant awards for smart grid investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the stimulus law passed earlier this year. Among the goals of this spending are infrastructure improvements to make it easier to integrate renewable energy sources into the power grid; improve grid reliability and reduce [...]
Entries from October 2009
October 22, 2009
Lowering the Cost of Carbon Footprinting
Despite the proliferation of carbon accounting tools on the market today, calculating carbon footprints—especially product footprints–is still very time-consuming. According to David Walker, Director of Environmental Sustainability at Pepsico International, most tools “pick up the automation at the point that most of the work as been done.” The work Walker refers to is the painstaking [...]
October 14, 2009
Branding Green Research
As my consulting practice has grown, I’ve decided to invest in developing the Green Research brand as the umbrella under which to work. Next step: creating a logo for Green Research. Crowd Sourcing the Design Work I decided to crowd source the logo design on crowdSPRING, an online community of designers. I was inspired to [...]
October 8, 2009
The Supply Chain a Focus of Sustainability Strategy
I am excited to highlight my newly published research report on supply chain sustainability. The report draws on a survey of supply chain executives at 74 companies as well as interviews with firms such as Alcatel-Lucent, Coca-Cola, Diebold, Dow Chemical and Staples. Eric Klein, a quantitative market research jock formerly of AMR Research, designed and [...]
October 1, 2009
Unintended Consequences, Part III: Electricity vs. Water
The latest installment in my compilation of the unintended consequences of new energy technologies: “clean” power projects can be giant water hogs. (Here’s part I and here’s part II.) The New York Times reported today that utility-scale solar energy projects in the sun-rich but water-poor Southwest and California are running into obstacles as project developers [...]
