Bill Gates goes Green Finally, podcast and investment in Khosla Ventures

January 24, 2010 Dave Ohara

For past 3 years I’ve talked with a variety of people at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation about Bill’s interest in the environment and Green. The resounding past answers has been “the environment is not on Bill’s priority list.

I was skeptical when Bill launched his podcasts on Energy and Climate Change. Listening to them I didn’t hear anything really mind blowing.

What’s been on my mind lately

Podcast Series: Energy and Climate Change

Posted 01/20/2010

Finding carbon-free energy sources that will provide affordable power for people around the globe is a complex and difficult issue. Bill shares his thoughts on the challenges of developing alternatives to fossil fuels.

In this series of podcasts, Bill talks about why we need to develop new sources of energy that provide power without generating CO2. Among the topics he covers are the challenges with potential solutions such as carbon capture and sequestration, nuclear, wind, and solar; and why he believes the U.S. government should increase its funding for basic research in energy.
To download the podcast as a .wma file for Windows Media Player, click below.
1. Alternative energy Part 1
2. Alternative energy Part 2
3. Government’s role
4. Learning about energy

Click below to download this podcast series as an mp3.
1. Alternative energy Part 1
2. Alternative energy Part 2
3. Government’s role
4. Learning about energy

But, today cnet news reports an Bill’s investment in Vinod Khosla green-tech firm. Now that Bill has put his money in and he is hanging out with Vinod, I tihnk we can expect some big changes coming from Bill and the Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates investing in Vinod Khosla green-tech fund

by Martin LaMonica

Bill Gates, whose philanthropy is aimed at improving the lives of people in poor countries, is also taking a interest in clean energy, both intellectually and financially.

In an interview published Sunday, Gates said he has invested in Vinod Khosla's green-technology fund, which is aimed at incubating breakthrough technologies.

"He is backing some great entrepreneurs. I get some exposure to them as part of that. Innovation is called for in a big way," Gates said.

If you are not familiar with Khosla Ventures here is their site. I found Xsigo and Seamicro through his site.

Khosla Ventures has an interesting philosophy on what they can care about.

the things we care about

Making a difference is a core value of khosla ventures and we have pledged some of any investment proceeds to achieving this difference. In particular, Vinod will donate 100% of his general partner profit from khosla ventures to these and other similar causes. Some of our "social impact" interests also make for great businesses, such as alternative energy, or can at least be viable businesses ("no loss" self sustaining businesses that don't need continued outside support, they are impact maximizers instead of being profit maximizers) even if profit is not the primary goal, such as microfinance and affordable housing.

Some of the organizations we support are below. Some of these are traditional non-profit efforts. Others are "for profit" organizations. When we "invest" in ventures with these partners, we will put the equity in a non-profit trust to achieve social impact

Microfinance - SKS, SHARE, ASA, CFTS, Jamii Bora Grameen USA, Unitus - with a goal to provide credit to over 25 million "below poverty line" borrowers. See also An Anti-Poverty Success Story; Video

Environment - GE Ecomagination Advisory Council, Chairman of India Advisory Board of the Cleantech Network

Education - Indian School of Business - a world class school of business, DonorsChoose.org - teachers ask for private funding on thousands of projects

Health - Public Health Institutes of India, UNICEF

...others including eBay Giving Works - a marketplace for compassionate commerce supporting 9,000 charities

Also, just found this list of Green Papers from Kholsa Ventures. More for my reading list. :-)

green
White Papers

2008: Breaking the Climate Deadlock: Scalable Electric Power from Solar Energy (pdf)

2008: Global Carbon Caps Proposal (pdf)

2008: Policy and Perspective - the Scoping Plan for AB 32, and how to do it Right (pdf)

2008: Where Will Biomass Come From (doc)

2008: Hybrids (pdf)

2007: Food vs. Fuel (pdf)

2007: Biofuels Pathways (pdf)

2007: Biodiesel Commentary (pdf)

2007: Green Strategy (pdf)

2006: (Part 1): Imagining Tomorrow

2006: (Part 2): Is Ethanol Controversial

2006: (Part 3): Biofuels Policy Recommendations

Why Cloud Computing motivates green data center behavior

January 22, 2010 Dave Ohara

I read a post on Cloud Computing made ridiculously easy.

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

One small click for man, one giant cloud for mankind!

BY CHRISTOPHER KEENE

With all the hullabaloo about cloud computing, it is easy to get caught up in the trend of the day and miss the big picture. The big picture is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application.

If that is the big prize, then most of what passes for news in cloud computing is more along the lines of "me speak cloud too."

This ease of use and the business/economic model is driving the growth of Cloud Computing.

Amazon Web Services Economics Center, comparing AWS/cloud computing vs co-location vs owned data center

Amazon Web Services has a post on the Economics of AWS.

The Economics of AWS

For the past several years, many people have claimed that cloud computing can reduce a company's costs, improve cash flow, reduce risks, and maximize revenue opportunities. Until now, prospective customers have had to do a lot of leg work to compare the costs of a flexible solution based on cloud computing to a more traditional static model. Doing a genuine "apples to apples" comparison turns out to be complex — it is easy to neglect internal costs which are hidden away as "overhead".

After watching multiple presentations and efforts to get people to measure their energy consumption in the data center, I am ready to throw in the towel on changing human behavior in this area. Not to say energy monitoring shouldn’t be done, but moving beyond the current user base is difficult.

Here is an example to think about when consumers get their bills what amount of attention do they spend on their credit card bill vs. their electricity bill? 10 to 1? 20 to 1? Maybe 100 to 1. It is ingrained in human behavior to look at the money more than the electricity.

The Cloud Computing infrastructure is getting easier too even though his article makes it seem difficult.

Today, cloud development and deployment is still the exclusive domain of highly paid web experts and just as highly paid hosting providers and systems administrators. As much as cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace have done to simplify web hosting and eliminate people from the equation, it still takes far too much expertise and effort to get applications built and deployed in the cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to make web development and deployment something that any bum can do and charge in on their credit card with nary a care in the world.

In fact, I think it is easier to get people to discuss cloud computing infrastructure than energy monitoring infrastructure.

Eucalyptus provides AWS compatible infrastructure.

Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.

If you want Google Application Engine Cloud Computing compatibility than there is AppScale.

AppScale is an open-source implementation of the Google AppEngine (GAE) cloud computing interface from the RACELab at UC Santa Barbara. AppScale enables execution of GAE applications on virtualized cluster systems. In particular, AppScale enables users to execute GAE applications using their own clusters with greater scalability and reliability than the GAE SDK provides. Moreover, AppScale executes automatically and transparently over cloud infrastructures such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Eucalyptus, the open-source implementation of the AWS interfaces.

If you going to manage the Cloud there is RightScale.

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform

Overview

RightScale is the leading provider of cloud management solutions that enable you to design, deploy, manage, and automate business-critical applications on the cloud. To date, hundreds of thousands of deployments have been launched on the RightScale Cloud Management Platform – running everything from scalable websites to complex grid applications. Cloud computing represents a tidal shift in the way IT infrastructure operates, enabling greater agility and lower costs across company sizes. RightScale delivers the power of the cloud to every business.

I’ve already blogged about Elastra’s management tools.

Is Elastra one of Amazons Cloud Computing infrastructure tools? An ...

Jan 19, 2010 ... I plan on having a meeting with Elastra next week when I am in the bay area. I wrote about their tools last week. Elastra's Cloud Computing ...
www.greenm3.com/.../is-elastra-one-of-amazons-cloud-computing-infrastructure-tools-an-awesome-pdf-to-understand-a-better-approach-to-...

Elastras Cloud Computing Application Infrastructure = Green IT ...

Jan 14, 2010 ... Elastra connects the power use in the data center to the application architects and deployment decision makers. Plan Composer function lets ...
www.greenm3.com/.../elastras-cloud-computing-application-infrastructure-green-it-with-a-model-approach.html

And in fact Elastra can be used as power metrics tool in cloud computing.

Plan Composer function lets customers set their own policies based on application needs and specific power metrics (such as wattage, PUE, number of cores, etc.). Therefore, if an application requires 4GB of RAM and two cores for optimal performance, and if the customer is concerned with straight wattage, Elastra’s product will automatically route it to the lowest-power 4GB, dual-core virtual machine available.

So, I think it will be easier to create greener data centers riding the momentum for cloud computing deployments than educating the masses on the benefits of energy monitoring in the data center.

Keep in mind the goal of green/energy metrics is to change behavior. Not to sell energy monitoring solutions.

GreenM3 #1 Google Search Results for “facebook data center”

January 22, 2010 Dave Ohara

Last night I was showing Vanessa Harder how I blog and look at my metrics. I was showing what I had just written on Facebook’s data center. I have a few posts about Facebook.

Facebook Data Center, 1.15 PUE - Green Data Center Blog

Facebook and Prineville, OR officials have made the announcement Facebook is building a data center. Let's bounce around to the various news reports.
www.greenm3.com/2010/01/facebook-data-center-115-pue.html

Where is Data Center Innovation developing? Facebook as an example ...

Jan 21, 2010 ... I've bounced around a bunch in many parts of the data center ecosystem. The big data center operators, the construction companies, ...
www.greenm3.com/.../where-is-data-center-innovation-developing-facebook-as-an-example.html

Green Data Center Blog: Facebook Technical Operations VP Jonathan ...

Jun 26, 2009 ... GigaOm has an interview with Facebook VP Jonathan Heileger. Heiliger had strong words for OEMs and system builders during his chat with Om. ...
www.greenm3.com/.../facebook-technical-operations-vp-jonathan-heiliger-tells-server-oems-you-guys-just-dont-get-it.html - Similar

Facebook Prineville Data Center Announcement Pictures - Green Data ...

Jan 22, 2010 ... Here is something you don't see from the other Data Center ceremonies a bunch of pictures on Facebook. Here the execs who get there ...
www.greenm3.com/.../facebook-prineville-data-center-announcement-pictures.html - 3 hours ago

Last night my blog post on Facebook Data Center, 1.15 PUE was #11 on google search for “facebook data center.” This morning #7.

And now #1. Wow. I’ll see how long my position lasts. But, pretty cool.

Energy Management shows up as a Vancouver Olympic event

January 22, 2010 Dave Ohara

CNET news has a post on the Vancouver Olympics reporting on the energy consumption from Olympic buildings.

A new Olympic sport: Tracking building energy

by Martin LaMonica

While people are watching the Olympic Games, building managers will be watching their energy dashboards.

Energy management software company Pulse Energy on Friday showed off an energy-monitoring system developed to make the Olympic Games in Vancouver more efficient.

Building energy is the latest spectator sport in Vancouver.

(Credit: Screenshot by Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The software gives facilities managers a real-time readout of energy consumption at different venues. By tracking that data, building managers can make adjustments to save energy, such as turning off equipment that's not in use. The information is also available online at VenueEnergyTracker.com.

BC Hydro has been trying to attract data centers to the BC area.

Here is more information about VenueEnergyTracker.

about the venue energy tracker

BC Hydro and the Vancouver Organizing Committee of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) created the Venue Energy Tracker to showcase the innovative sustainability measures implemented in various 2010 Winter Games venues and associated sites through an energy management software.

challenge

The communities involved were challenged with producing world class facilities with a minimal environmental footprint, while maximizing the long term legacies for their residents. The Venue Energy Tracker communicates the energy consumption and savings being realized by various partner venue buildings.

actions

Employing the latest in energy management software technology, BC Hydro with the energy tracking software tracks, analyzes and reports on real-time energy consumption from the venue sites in order to see energy and green house gas savings and set benchmarks from which similar venues can compare themselves to.

Learning from past Games, applying best practices in green design, construction, and occupant engagement, the communities were able to mitigate local and global sustainability challenges and embrace opportunities to make a difference. Actions taken include implementing green building features, including but not limited to: implementing energy saving technology, sequestering BC Pine Beetle wood as a construction material, rainwater capture and reuse, waste heat reuse, targeting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) building certification, and incorporating green principles and practices into operations and events.