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This week, Walmart went into contract to buy 58 percent of the estimated output from Pattern Energy Group's new Logan's Gap Wind farm in Texas under a 10-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA).

The 87-turbine facility was fully operational earlier this week, and the 200-megawatt facility is expected to produce enough energy to power 50,000 homes. The agreement however does not give Walmart responsibility for installing, operating, or maintaining the wind farm.

Walmart is using its scale and buying power to increase the deployment of clean energy projects by agreeing to purchase wind power over the long-term. PPAs make it easier for the project to secure low-cost financing, as there is a guaranteed buyer for the power once the project is operational, thus lowering the cost of the generated power. This is a win-win arrangement, as it lowers the business risk of the project and Walmart can secure energy at a lower cost.

Traditionally, Walmart preferred shorter term power purchase agreements, but this didn't help renewable energy projects secure low-cost financing. "Prior to 2006, the renewable energy industry sought 20-25 year PPAs, while Walmart was accustomed to buying power in 1-year or less contracts," states Walmart's Approach to Renewable Energy. "Walmart worked to bring the two perspectives closer together. Through information and education, Walmart has become comfortable with longer contracts, and helped renewable developers secure financing for much shorter contract lengths."

This PPA with is a big step for Walmart realizing its goal started in 2005 of using 100 percent renewable energy. For a company with revenue of $485.7 billion in revenue in 2014 and 11,000 stores in 27 countries, this is no small feat. Currently, 26 percent of the company's power comes from renewable sources.

“Walmart has a goal to be supplied by 100 percent renewable energy, and sourcing from wind energy projects — like the Logan’s Gap Wind facility — is a core component in the mix,” said Mark Vanderhelm, vice president of energy for Walmart. “The energy we’ll procure from this facility represents nearly one-fifth of the U.S. portion of our goal to source seven billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy by 2020. That’s a significant leap forward on our renewable energy journey.”

While some companies have reached goals of using 100 percent renewable energy more rapidly, Walmart has taken a more gradual approach, due to scale and cost concerns.  Energy efficiency initiatives are also an important component of reaching this goal, as it will reduce overall energy use.

"After assessing all of these options, we have determined an approach to renewable energy that best leverages our scale and buying power to drive new renewable projects, while demonstrating that doing what’s right for our future doesn’t have to cost more today," states Walmart's Approach to Renewable Energy.

Although the power rate has not been disclosed, a spokesman said the price is at or below utility prices. This is a major component of Walmart's overall goal in sourcing 100 percent renewable power, as it seeks cost-effective, stable renewable energy sources. As a company that takes pride in offering low prices and procuring inventory at a low cost, this is an extension of the Walmart brand.

Walmart was one of nine major companies to announce during Climate Week NYC 2015 it was joining the RE100, pledging to source 100% of its power from renewable sources.  This pledge was created to engage influential companies as global leaders in clean energy deployment, and the completion of the Logan's Gap Wind project signals a major milestone for Walmart.

Image credit: Flickr/TLPOSCHARSKY

 

By Rory Wilding

In my previous post I discussed how mental shortcuts may block us from making sensible and sustainable decisions. Now I'll look at what can be done to tackle these mental biases or how we can even use these cognitive biases to make smarter more sustainable choices.

There is a plethora of research and interventions dedicated to helping people make happier and healthier decisions stemming from Nudge Theory. The idea of the Nudge came to prominence in 2008 with the global popularity of the release of Professor Thaler's book, also called Nudge. Nudges are more formally known as "choice architecture." This architecture alters people’s behavior in a predictable way -- nudges can be successfully used to change behavior without banning any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. The UK was one of the first governments in the world to construct a behavioral insights team (BIT) dedicated to nudging behavior in the right direction.  For example, the BIT found that tax payments increased when the payment due notice included a mention of the fact that most citizens pay on time. Other nations have followed suit with both Australia and the United States now implementing ideas based around the theory.

The insights from behavioral economics are not a new fad. This research began in the 1960s, has been replicated time and time again. Principles from the lab have successfully been implemented in the real world to change behavior ranging from non-payment of debts to organ donation.

The ethics of nudges in relation to sustainability has been covered elsewhere so we are not going to dive into whether it's the right thing to do. The big question we have is given the scale of the climate change challenge, what is being done or suggested to nudge people’s behavior in the right direction?

We previously discussed how sunk costs and high capital expenditure anchors can reinforce the status quo and stop individuals from acting. We think that the low carbon loans are a great way to break down these psychological barriers. Energy efficiency loans are repaid through the efficiency savings a company makes. This means they can migrate to more sustainable practices for free, however unfortunately this funding is often only available to larger organizations rather than individuals. We think it would be great to see this kind of funding extended to individual consumers by forward thinking organizations, for instance home broadband providers.

Analysis Paralysis is a tough one to challenge. There seem to be an ever-growing barrage of green led initiatives out there; so which ones are worth our time and attention? Simple - the ones that work. Interventions with clear payback should become the new default mode of operation – home automation (through smart thermostats and water meters) plus LED lighting are really easy wins that everyone household could safely benefit from. Government and industry needs to communicate this effectively so people can easily discern hero interventions from the hype to help shape effective decisions.

Often to break Status Quo biases we need to look at what the default is. In 2015 there are 2.6 billion people around the world using email. That means we should be seriously considering whether sending a paper letter needs to happen. We have noted that many businesses have set paperless billing as the default which is better for business bottom lines, better for profit margins, and, when set as the default option, better for individuals who don't need to think to make a sustainability contribution.

Attribution substitution often leads us astray when we need to make judgements that are computationally complex; to offset this we need to think of solutions that make these decisions much simpler. Home automation is a great example here. We have traditionally done a poor job of keeping track of our energy expenditure simply because its difficult to calculate how much energy we are using over a given period. Home automation apps, such as the Nest smart thermostat, are really going a long way to combatting this by showing us exactly how much we are using or even going a step further to notify us how and where we can save money on our heating bills.

A key point here is there are no one size fits all approach to using choice architecture to tackling psychological barriers to sustainability. It may even be that these interventions have not been designed with behavioral economics in mind. It is however clear that these interventions influence the mental shortcuts that have been repeatedly verified in the lab, to influence our behavior and help us make more sustainable decisions.

It has been stated in the past that nudges may not be enough and we may need tougher government policy to enforce cleaner living. That may be true but we behavioral economics and nudges hold a lot of promise in the sustainability arena. Put simply we our behavior led us into this situation, changing our behavior can lead our way out if it to a greener, cleaner, future.

Image credit: Jeff Easter, Flickr

Rory is the commercial director of Which LED Light, the UKs leading independent LED light comparison service. Rory has a background in Psychology and is interested in the climate change challenge from a  behaviour change perspective. Follow Rory on Twitter at @WhichLEDlight.

As we hoped, the past week in New York produced a number of impressive commitments from companies pledging to take climate change seriously. Nine Fortune 500 companies pledged to go 100 percent renewable in their energy use. Five more global companies pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and the United Nations adopted a new set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Companies are already lining up to use these new goals as a roadmap to progressing on a whole host of sustainability issues.

I had a chance to talk to Barry Parkin, Chief Sustainability Officer at Mars, Inc., about the company's recent accomplishments and how they plan to respond to the new U.N. Goals. It turns out Mars has already put together a comprehensive list of responses to all 17.

Parkin explained that the CSO position at Mars has been in place for about two and a half years and originally evolved out of concern for working and environmental conditions in Mars' supply chain - especially in cocoa (a very logical place to start). It has since grown to encompass a spectrum of issues from energy to working conditions.  Although not all of the U.N.'s 17 goals are immediately material to Mars' business, Parkin sees the company's efforts as complimentary to them all in one way or another.

For example, working directly with cocoa farmers to increase yields on plantations not only results in more income for farmers, but it also reduces the incentive to deforest neighboring land - with obvious environmental benefits.  More income for farmers means education, opportunity, and sustainable economic growth - and, of course, a reliable supply chain for Mars and other chocolate producers. The results mean progress on many of the U.N.'s goals at the same time. Climate change was the big issue of the week and is the heart of Mars' stated commitment to 100 percent renewable energy, starting with one of their biggest accomplishments - powering all of their U.S. operations with wind.

Using the U.N. Goals as a roadmap is a logical way to realize the connectivity of a company's sustainability efforts - to see how they pay off in ways one might not expect and, hopefully, to mark progress.

Image credit: Pexels

Back in 2013 we did a story on a Smart City pilot that was underway in Japan. The experimental program, which began in 2010, took place in four cities: Yokohama, Toyota City, Keihanna Science City (Kyoto Prefecture), and the city of Kitakyushu. Among the concepts that were incorporated in the project were the integration of electric vehicles with renewable power sources on and off the grid and sophisticated home and building energy management systems.

The pilot was completed in March of this year and Professor Takashi Iwamoto of Keio University, who was instrumental in its development, came to Boston last week to discuss the effort at the Council on Business & Society Forum. The project was undertaken with the support of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in the hopes that it would lead to exportable technology. The scope of the project included elements for energy-efficient business and industry, energy-efficient homes, support for green consumer behavior, and a low-carbon transportation system.

A number of metrics were developed which will hopefully lead the way to international standardization at the levels of infrastructure, facilities, and services. These are being coordinated through an International Standards Organization (ISO) task force on smart cities. The outlook for smart cities is for an $8 trillion market by 2030, with the primary sectors being energy, public service, home network, and healthcare.

Among the results, in Yokohama City, Demand Reduction (DR) efforts found varying degrees of success, depending on how the DR was implemented. Reductions in electricity demand ranged from 4.2-7.2 percent with the highest reductions seen among those who were given incentives. The large amount of data collected by the Home Energy Management System (HEMS) provides the opportunity to learn a family’s lifestyle and balance the desire to conserve power with comfort. One of the panelists in a public debriefing session, Professor Takanori Ida of Kyoto University, said that "The entry point here was our aim to realize smart lives and smart cities through energy, but I feel that health care will be a focus at the exit of the project."

The Toyota City portion of the project, entitled, “Smart Mobility & Energy Life in Toyota City” deomstrated that energy savings could be achieved with a DC control system that utilized as much of the rooftop PV power as possible, combining battery storage with DR-type strategies that utilized equipment at optimal times. Results were sufficiently encouraging, that according to DENSO, rooftop PV should achieve grid parity before 2020.  The software, which is called Naviehe, collects data on electricity usage as well as that of water and gas. Its use of automation reduces energy waste. The company plans to market the software abroad.

In Keihanna, some 700 households participated in the study. These were divided into four groups, each receiving a different level of information regarding their electricity consumption. Included were basic consumption, time-of-use pricing (TOU), critical-peak-pricing (CPP), and energy consultation. These were combined with demand reduction opportunities which included financial incentives. Energy savings for the TOU group were 7 percent in summer and 14 percent in winter. The CPP group, on the other hand, saw 7 percent in winter and 33 percent in summer. Analysis shows that much of the variation correlated with times when people were at home and were able to take advantage of DR opportunities.

In Kitakyushu, building energy managements systems (BEMS) that included solar hot water were tested. Results there showed that when automated response systems were supplemented by human interaction (building occupants were notified by email when rates were about to go up,) energy savings of up to 45.9 percent were achieved.

Now that the pilot program has completed, the group of companies involved are now looking to export their gained knowledge and technology, which was Iwamoto’s primary message at the Boston conference. Some of the 40 companies involved include: Toyota Motors, DENSO, Dream Incubator (consultant), Hitachi, Sharp, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Yamaha, Sumitomo Electric, Hewlett-Packard (Japan) and others.

Image courtesy of Takashi Iwamoto

By Janine Benyus

Biomimicry has grown tremendously since I first wrote about it in 1997. In fact, it has graduated from a meme to a movement.

We now find ourselves asking: What if biomimicry influenced as many areas of human endeavor as possible, from urban renaissance, to food security, to CO2 drawdown?

Biomimicry is best known for the design of smarter products and cleaner manufacturing. Today, biomimics also are delving into the patterns of entire ecosystems to bring wisdom to complex worlds such as city planning, finance, and social innovation.

At SXSW Eco, dozens of speakers from our growing edge will paint a portrait of where we are now—like one of those amazing photo mosaics assembled from smaller images. Here’s what you can expect to see and hear in each session:

Business as Nature: New Models and Innovation

Here we’ll see how the discipline of biomimicry is evolving to help business and social innovators learn from complex ecosystem relationships. We’re looking to communities of organisms to understand how to self-organize, how to build resiliency, and how to communicate and cooperate on grand challenges.

I’m especially excited to see biomimicry applied to something as pivotal as investing. Katherine Collins is looking to nature to understand how we can invest in tangible enterprises that nourish community and create true wealth, rather than just multiplying margins a la “Flash Boys.”

At the foundation of all these new models is a paradigm shift. It’s the realization that as part of natural systems ourselves, we needn’t be in head-to-head competition with one another. Rather, we can create networks of symbiotic support.

From Metaphor to Metrics: Net Positive Businesses

This session will examine what it looks like when businesses literally try to function like an ecosystem.

Companies like Kohler and Interface have demonstrated that progressive corporations can be sources of environmental and social solutions, not just problems. For many years the conversation has been about reducing the negative impacts of business—reaching net zero. Now the conversation is shifting to net positivity. How does a company do business so that it heals local economies and ecologies?

Biomimicry can supply companies with the metrics and models for cleaning air and water, supporting biodiversity, building soil, and beginning to reverse climate change. Here, we’ll see that ambitious innovation is no longer about single inventions, it’s about systems-level thinking.

Beyond Biophilic Cities: Solutions Rooted in Place

As with business, we’re also beginning to ask more of another complex system—the city.

When we talk of biomimetic cities, people tend to think: greener, with more trees. That’s part of the equation, but we’re actually setting the bar much higher. We’re asking buildings, and cities at large, to provide the same ecosystem benefits that forests in those locations would. It means designing solutions that produce much cleaner air, much cleaner water, much more fertility. This is a first for city planning.

Behind the Innovation: The Biomimicry Success Stories You Haven't Heard

Building a circular economy, investing in companies that do good—those are all intentions that have to be supported by innovation. What makes biomimicry so compelling is that it provides a coherent vision of a world that works and outlines a granular, practical innovation path.

At Biomimicry 3.8, we haven’t spoken publicly about most of the client work we’ve done over the years. I think people will really enjoy hearing these case studies and learning about how our biomimics assist in solving complex, functional challenges. We’ve created a methodology for distilling the design principles beneath so much amazing biodiversity. We’re just as proud of our code of ethics, which aims to make every cool invention an earth-friendly one. I know my co-founder Dayna Baumeister is going to make this an eye-opener.

Open Innovation Challenges, Inspired by Nature

In six years of Global Design Challenges at the Biomimicry Institute, we’ve learned a lot about what 21st Century inventors look like.

To help solve society’s major problems, we need to look beyond the lone inventor model.  Today’s successful inventors don’t have to be a part of a university or a company, either. You just need an earth-savvy idea, the ability to articulate it, and be able to envision it as a business.

We’ve had people from 70 different countries participate in our Global Design Challenge. In fact, the last four winners were from emerging economies: Iran, Egypt, South Africa and Mexico. Here’s another statistic many find surprising: Challenge participants are split 50-50, male and female. I think this diversity is the root of the ingenuity you’ll see in this year’s group of finalists.

Tools to Bridge Science, Design & Discovery

The big goal is to empower people to do biomimicry, to practice the discipline and bring it into the world.

As with any discipline, certain tools are necessary to make it real. Our network is now creating those tools, and several will be discussed in this session. The new version of AskNature.org makes biological intelligence globally accessible and actionable. Zygote Quarterly, a beautiful publication at the nexus of design and biology, is a crucial record and voice of the biomimicry movement. And Terrapin Bright Green is successfully matching biomimetic innovators with the financing they need to enter the market.

Nature is the Epicenter of Innovation

Moving biomimetic solutions into the marketplace on a disruptive scale is the topic of this session.

Mark Dorfman is Biomimicry 3.8’s in-house chemist. Despite the bad rap chemistry often gets, nature is proof that toxins are not necessary to create amazing products. But there’s a big challenge to break away from entrenched product development and manufacturing processes.

Our aim, whether at Biomimicry 3.8 or the Institute, is to work with partners to catalyze nature-inspired innovation. Panelists will discuss how that could be done on a scale large enough to tackle a global issue like climate change.

The Great Reunion: Seeds of a Biomimetic Future

Lastly, in my presentation, I’m going to imagine what the world would look like if we truly succeeded at scaling biomimicry.

That brings us back to the questions I asked above.

What if we embedded biological intelligence in as many human endeavors as possible?  How would that move us toward a safe and just world, and how do we unify as a network to get there?

That’s the call to action.

 

Janine Benyus is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books. Over the past 17 years, she has personally introduced millions to the meme of biomimicry through two TED talks, hundreds of conference keynotes, and a dozen documentaries such as 11th Hour, Harmony, and The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. She is the co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8 and the Biomimicry Institute.

Image courtesy of Biomimicry, used with permission

Entries are now open for the inaugural Asia Sustainability Reporting Awards, the first such awards for the region.

An independent panel of judges including Alex Mavro (coo, Centre for Sustainable Management, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok), Dr Annie Koh (professor of finance, Singapore Management University), Christopher Ang (executive director, Global Compact Network Singapore) and Elaine Cohen (ceo, Beyond Business) will judge the entries and decide the winners.

The Awards are being offered in 14 categories including Asia’s Best Sustainability Report, Asia’s Best Integrated Report, Asia’s Best Sustainability Report (SME), Asia’s Best First Time Sustainability Report and other specialized categories with focus on carbon disclosure, stakeholders, supply chain and community.

The Awards, an multi-stakeholder initiative are being organised by CSRWorks, the Singapore sustainability advisory firm. The company believes that the awards will create a much needed platform for sharing best practices, benchmarking and peer learning by bringing together the leaders in sustainability reporting. 

Entries are welcome from all sizes of organisations from all sectors.The final deadline for entries is 23 November 2015. The winners will be announced in mid-January 2016 at an awards function in Singapore. 

For further details click here.
 

Almost a third of all natural World Heritage Sites has the threat of oil, gas and mining exploration hanging over it, according to a new report.

The threat rises to 61% in Africa. Natural World Heritage Sites are places of outstanding natural value, such as the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania.

The new assessment - in a report called Safeguarding Outstanding Natural Value, produced by WWF, Aviva Investors and Investec Asset Management - puts the risk at a higher level than previously thought. The report also brings to light the risk to investors of involvement with extractives companies working, or intending to work, in or near these special places.

Covering less than 1% of the planet and containing outstanding natural value such as iconic landscapes and species, natural World Heritage Sites are in increasing danger of exploitation and irreparable damage, which in turn damages the communities who depend on these amazing places for their livelihoods. Furthermore, natural World Heritage Sites are home to some of the rarest animals on Earth.

The threat level relates to active operations by extractive companies, or intrusion that may come as a result of concessions for exploration of minerals or oil and gas overlapping these sites.

Investors are being warned in the report of their risk exposure if they back the companies involved, both in terms of financial risk and threats to their reputation.

To access the full report click here.

 

Picture credit: © Slav8 | Dreamstime.com

Diversity in the tech community is a hot topic these days as several industry giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google try to shed the unfavorable public perception of being a boys club. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is made up predominately of straight, white, men. However, there are several tech companies who are aware of the lack of diversity and have made a commitment to undergo significant changes.

“We have a goal to reach every person on the planet.” Twitter stated in an article published on their blog last year. “We believe that goal is more attainable with a team that understands and represents different cultures and backgrounds.”

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc. echoed this sentiment stating, “Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future. We aspire to do more than just make our company as diverse as the talent available to hire. We must address the broad underlying challenges, offer new opportunities, and create a future generation of employees as diverse as the world around us.”

In an effort to fuel this movement towards a more diverse tech industry, one startup is partnering with innovative companies like Pinterest and Airbnb to help build a stronger, more diverse organizations. Paradigm works with companies to cultivate and leverage the power of diversity by using an innovative, iterative, and metrics-driven approach. The company, spearheaded by CEO Joelle Emerson, uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify potential patterns of biases and disparities.

Emerson has identified five strategies that she believes tech companies should engage in to build more diverse and inclusive organizations.

1. Founders and leaders: get involved

Diversity initiatives are far more successful when a leader within the organization plays an active role. An increasing number of startups have individuals or teams thinking about diversity, which is a step in the right direction. However, these roles are often filled by recruiters with a passion for diversity who often lack the necessary support and resources to make meaningful changes company-wide.

For example, when Etsy decided to boost its gender diversity, former CTO Kellan Ellitot-McCrea was involved in restructuring the company’s recruiting and hiring approach. After a year, Etsy had grown the number of female engineers by almost 500 percent.

Emerson recommends that at least one C-suite level executive, and preferably a founder in new companies, should be directly involved in these efforts, developing company goals around diversity, supporting and rewarding employees who dedicate their time to building a diverse organization and ensuring accountability.

2. Collect better data

The release of diversity data from a number of tech companies in 2014 helped to quantify the industry’s problem and sparked a broader conversation about solving it. However, despite this move towards transparency, there is often a reluctance to collect more meaningful and granular data related to diversity. Without good data, it’s nearly impossible to know which processes in an organization are most inhibiting diversity and where strategies should be targeted to produce the best outcomes.

In general companies should be looking at the following areas: how candidates are attracted and recruited; how work is assigned; how performance is evaluated; how much employees are paid; how employees advance in the company and when they leave; and how happy employees are. Embedding these data-collection measures early will make it far easier for companies to identify and address barriers to building a diverse organization.

3. Expand your network

Emerson explains that tech companies often attribute their lack of diversity solely to the lack of diversity in computer science and computer engineering programs where most hiring comes from. But this pipeline problem doesn’t account for the significant gap between the percentage of African-American and Hispanic graduates in computer science and computer engineering (11 percent from top research universities alone) and the representation of those groups in technical roles in Silicon Valley (around 5 percent). Nor does it explain the diversity gap in non-technical roles.

Until the pipeline is more diverse, tech companies should prioritize finding and hiring diverse employees from sources outside their traditional networks. The process most companies use to find candidates — relying on informal social networks and referrals from current employees — is a great approach for finding more employees like the ones you already have. For a company that’s not yet diverse, this can perpetuate the problem. Companies committed to diversity need to make a conscious effort to build more diverse networks and find these candidates.

4. Think deliberately about your hiring process

There is a common perception among startups that the hiring process is designed to attract and select the best person for a given role without regard for gender, race, or ethnicity, and that efforts to hire more diverse candidates require changing standards. This is based on the flawed assumption that the hiring process is purely based on merit. However, In the overwhelming majority of companies, even despite best intentions, it’s not.

Social and psychological factors like unconscious bias and stereotypes can hinder success in the recruiting process for diverse candidates who apply. Unconscious bias can lead interviewers to unintentionally apply different standards to diverse and non-diverse candidates. Awareness of these issues, and a focus on strategies that minimize their impact, will lead to more effective recruiting of diverse candidates and better hiring decisions overall.

5. Create a company culture that supports diverse employees

The high attrition rate among women in tech and the lack of diversity in leadership roles in tech companies indicate that there are obstacles to success for women and people of color in the industry. Building a diverse organization requires a focus not only on recruiting diverse candidates, but on creating a culture that welcomes and cultivates diverse employees.

Creating such a culture should include establishing explicit structures that support diverse employees, like better paid leave for new parents — a benefit that significantly reduced women’s attrition at Google.  Instead of waiting to be in the position that larger tech companies are in now — investing heavily in diversity to achieve only incremental change — startups should begin focusing on diversity today.

 

Image Credit: Flickr/Oregon Department of Transportation

We've tried getting rid of carbon emissions in multiple ways: by reducing them through regulation and incentives, by establishing cap and trade programs that balance the impact and reward reduction, and by incentivizing corporations to reduce them through innovation.

That last concept highlights better than most, just how hard it is to replace carbon emitting technology. Some would argue that the Volkswagen scandal is not just an indicator of values gone awry, but the considerable challenge of creating technology that meets our ecological standards. Judging from recent studies, it's harder than we think to replace our old way of generating power.

So the backers of the renowned XPrize has come up with another option: carbon conversion.

As is so often the case, this year's XPrize is dedicated to answering the seeming unanswerable -- figuring out how to capture those carbon emissions and convert them into handy uses -- really handy uses. Potential contenders will be happy to know that some of the work has already been done for them: scientists have already dabbled in converting carbon to synthetic diamonds.

But the XPrize backers, which include the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance and NRG, are looking for more. The contestants, when presenting their ideas, must be able to "prove they can be deployed at power plants and other industrial facilities.

"Ultimately, the impact of the prize will go far beyond the critical demonstration of innovative technologies," says the website, by incentivizing new markets and new investments. Reducing the current exorbitant cost of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology is also essential.

And the prize for doing so is nothing to sneeze at. A total of $20 million has been pledged by the backers, to be divided according to several benchmarks of competition: the proposal and testing in a lab setting, and the formal demonstration in a power plant.

Two tracks of competition have been developed: one for coal power plants and one for natural gas. For each track, a pool of $2.5 million will be divided among the contestants that pass the lab stage, and $7.5 will be awarded the winner who can demonstrate the most practical application for carbon conversion in a power plant. Teams will be scored on how much C02 their technologies convert as well as the net value of their products.

The Carbon XPrize formally launched on Sept. 20, and is expected to garner a fair amount of attention across the globe, which is of course just what the XPrize team is looking for. The more entrants, the better the chance of finding a more affordable, useful technology for CDR.

"As with any Prize it’s open to any innovator,” said Peter Bunje, XPrize's principal and senior scientist for energy and environment. “But you have to prove you can do something impressive.”

Image credit: Carbon Visuals, Flickr

 

 

 

 

The dominoes continue to fall as the impact of the Volkswagen emissions scandal deepens. There are now allegations that high-level managers in the company’s research and development department were warned about possible illegal practices, a revelation that came out a day after the company suspended several R&D chiefs until more details about the “defeat device” fiasco become more lucid. Volkswagen has also said it will come up with a plan to retrofit cars affected by this software installation, a cost that could reach in the billions of dollars as 5 million of those affected cars alone are in the U.S. Failing at explanations that are falling short of satisfying the media and consumers alike, Volkswagen has hired a new global head of communications.

And there will still need to be a lot of explaining to do as yesterday Volkswagen and Audi agreed to return “Green Car of the Year” awards bestowed upon their 2009 and 2010 “clean diesel” models. San Luis Obispo-based Green Car Journal rescinded its prizes for the 2009 VW Jetta TDI and 2010 Audi A3 TDI in the wake of Volkswagen's admission that the company had deceived government regulators about the emissions levels of the 2010 Audi winner.

“We only want to win fair and square,” said Audi of America President Scott Keogh in a written statement. Keogh added that the Volkswagen group of brands had won hundreds of awards over the years throughout the company’s history, and says it hopes to win the award “properly” in future years.

Critics of the company, however, are not stopping with any green or environmental awards. They are increasingly demanding that Volkswagen return additional awards the company has recently won, including the prestigious North American Car of the Year and Motor Trend Car of the Year. Volkswagen had swept both of those awards earlier this year with the 2015 Volkswagen Golf and Golf GTI. Motor Trend in particular called out the Golf models for its improved fuel efficiency and fuel economy gains.

But now the knives are out.

“In light of the fact that VW has been cheating the emissions on their vehicles for the past 10 years with their TDI's, Motor Trend should rescind the award for Car of the Year,” said one anonymous reader, with others on the thread agreeing with that sentiment.

Whether or not these calls will crescendo and force Volkswagen to humiliate itself even further by returning even more awards remains to be seen. What is definite, however, is that Volkswagen has larger problems than returning a few shiny plaques and trophies from the lobbies of its corporate offices. The U.S. federal government had reportedly paid $51 million in subsidies for purchases of the Volkswagen and Audi models in question. Across the Atlantic, Spain’s government has demanded Volkswagen’s subsidiary operating in that country return subsidies that had been paid to develop more fuel efficient automobiles.

No matter how sour the public goes on Volkswagen, it will be possible for the company to recover and regain trust. But that process could take years, and in the meantime, the financial penalties the company is confronting will become an even larger hurdle for the world’s largest automaker.

Image credit: OSX