Google it! What’s in the wind for Singapore? Investing in R&D & Data Centres

Why is Singapore attracting global players in wind energy? Its attractiveness stems from its strong foundational R&D competencies, favourable intellectual property (IP) protection and ability to attract international talent,’ he added. The wind industry falls under Singapore’s cleantech sector, which has been identified as a major pillar of growth for the country. It is expected to contribute S$3.4 billion to gross domestic product by 2015 while providing 18,000 jobs. Meanwhile Google is going for wind to power another of its Data Centres.

Jessica Cheam , Environment Correspondent , Straits Times (Singapore)  (23 April 2011): 

THE wind seems to be blowing in Singapore’s direction – when it comes to the city state’s nascent wind power industry.

In the past few years, the Republic has attracted a spectrum of wind industry- related firms to set up shop here – even though the wind surrounding sheltered Singapore clocks an average speed that is insufficient for commercial wind power generation.

Spanish wind giant Gamesa is the latest of such firms to establish its presence here. It set up a research and development (R&D) laboratory earlier this month.

Its chairman Jorge Calvet said at the opening ceremony that the firm took ‘the quickest time’ in its history to decide on opening the new centre here, primarily due to Singapore’s R&D expertise.

The research centre, the first for Gamesa in South-east Asia, will work with local institutions on wind technology research.

Mr Goh Chee Kiong, director of cleantech at the Economic Development Board (EDB), said Singapore is fast becoming a hub of choice for wind energy activities despite not having a domestic market.

‘Wind companies look to Singapore to conduct R&D as well as to set up their control towers to manage their Asia-Pacific markets,’ he told The Straits Times.

‘Our attractiveness stems from our strong foundational R&D competencies, favourable intellectual property (IP) protection and ability to attract international talent,’ he added.

The wind industry falls under Singapore’s cleantech sector, which has been identified as a major pillar of growth for the country. It is expected to contribute $3.4 billion to gross domestic product by 2015 while providing 18,000 jobs.

Cleantech refers to clean technology such as solar or wind energy that minimises the use of resources and the impact on the environment.

Danish wind power giant Vestas was among the first high-profile investments Singapore attracted. The firm invested $500 million in a research centre at Fusionopolis in 2008.

Since then, other firms have followed, such as German technology company Siemens AG, which set up its regional headquarters for wind operations here.

Last year, Norwegian wind service firm DNV also opened a cleantech centre here, which offers advisory services for the sector, such as project development support and wind turbine technology.

Mr Soren Karkov, director of clean energy for DNV, said Singapore’s strength as a financial hub is a pull factor.

‘Many of the financial institutions have headquarters here and we have seen an increasing number of requests for wind and solar energy-related assessments such as technical and financial due diligence,’ he said.

Singapore’s booming wind business – riding on the larger growing Asia wind market – is reflected in the number of staff at Siemens’s wind power unit.

When the company set up its regional headquarters here in 2008, there were only two or three staff members. Today, the number is 33, said Mr Jeyan Nadarajah, the company’s commercial head of Asia-Pacific for wind power.

‘We decided on Singapore because of its strategic location, especially in terms of proximity to potential customers in the region, and good pool of skilled manpower,’ he said.

The Siemens team in Singapore focuses on acquiring and executing wind farm projects. Although there are no large-scale wind projects here, Siemens uses Singapore as a base to serve markets such as China and India.

Nearer to home, Thailand and the Philippines also have huge potential for wind power growth, Mr Nadarajah said.

EDB’s Mr Goh said other factors contributing to the growing wind industry here are the ‘complementary capabilities from our thriving aerospace and marine and offshore industry sectors’, for instance in the fields of aerodynamics, controls and system integration.

Such firms include Singapore-listed Keppel Offshore & Marine and Swiber Holdings, both of which provide offshore services for the wind sector.

Keppel Offshore & Marine chief executive Tong Chong Heong said the offshore wind energy sector is gaining momentum on a global scale. On average, 250 offshore wind turbines are installed worldwide each year, and this is expected to increase to about 1,000 units over the next decade or so, he noted.

The firm provides installation and maintenance of offshore wind farms, and also conducts research into areas such as transport, wind turbine foundations and installation and cabling.

It recently won a contract to build a wind turbine installation vessel that will be used in the North Sea.

‘Our global yards are able to offer integrated solutions that can help to improve reliability and reduce the cost of offshore wind projects,’ Mr Tong said.

‘In the absence of a wind industry of its own, Singapore is still able to support the sector’s growth by participating in different aspects of the value chain.’

Source: www.lexisnexis.com

James Niccolai , IDG News Service (22 April 2011):

Google has invested in a wind farm in Oklahoma to help offset the environmental impact of its data centers, even as Greenpeace stepped up its criticism of big Internet companies for using “dirty power” that contributes to global warming.

Google has signed a 20-year purchase agreement to buy all the power generated by a 100-megawatt wind farm to be built near one of its data centers in Mayes County, Oklahoma, Google announced in a blog post Thursday.

It’s Google’s second investment of this type in the past year. Both were made by a subsidiary company, Google Energy, which is certified to buy and sell power on the U.S. wholesale market.

“These purchases represent long-term, meaningful actions to reduce our carbon footprint and power our operations with clean electricity,” Google said.

The company also published a white paper Wednesday that explains the complexities of trying to use renewable energy to run a data center. For regulatory and other reasons, Google can’t take the power generated by the wind farms and apply it directly to its data centers.

“At our data centers, Google is a retail customer — we have no way of taking power off the grid wholesale and applying it to our load,” it says in the white paper. “We have to buy power just like you do: from our local regulated utility.”

Instead, Google sells the power it agrees to purchase back to the grid at local, wholesale prices. The purchase agreements provide the financial incentive for the wind farms to get built, it said, and Google gets to collect Renewable Energy Credits for the wind power it sells. RECs are akin to carbon offsets, except Google says they are more effective because they represent renewable power that has actually been produced.

“Even if we can’t legally or physically transfer the [wind] power to our facility, being in the same power market ensures we are contributing to greening the grid where we operate,” the company said.

Both the wind farms are being built by NextEra Energy, in which Google has made an investment. It said the Oklahoma facility will be operational by late this year.

Google made its announcement at GigaOm’s GreenNet conference in San Francisco. Greenpeace was also there, to step up its campaign against Internet companies that it says rely on power from coal-fired plants to run their data centers.

A new Greenpeace report, “How Green is Your Data?” criticizes Facebook, Google and Apple for building data centers in North Carolina, where it says “cheap and dirty coal-powered electricity is abundant.”

“The IT industry points to cloud computing as the new, green model for our IT infrastructure needs, but few companies provide data that would allow us to objectively evaluate these claims,” Greenpeace says.

Greenpeace argues that big Internet firms should locate their data centers where the local utility companies are producing renewable energy, in order to reduce their carbon footprint and encourage further investments in renewables.

It also credits Google for its efforts, however.

“Of the 10 brands graded, Akamai, a global content distribution network, earned top-of-the-class recognition for transparency; Yahoo had the strongest infrastructure siting policy; Google and IBM demonstrated the most comprehensive overall approach to reduce its carbon footprint to date,” Greenpeace said.

Google, in its white paper, suggests running a data center on renewable energy is more complicated than Greenpeace implies.

“We know from Kirchoff’s circuit laws that electricity generated in one spot cannot be directed to a specific user over the electricity grid,” Google said. “Once you put electricity on the grid there is no actual way to say ‘the energy from wind farm X is going to my data center Y.’”

Source www.goodgearguide.com.au

Growth in Investing  in Sustainability in Australia and Singapore

The Australian sustainable business market will grow to A$2.9bn in 2014 from $1.6bn in 2010, according to a new report from independent analyst firm Verdantix. The forecast is based on analysis of spending by 139 firms with Australian revenues of at least $900m and cross-industry research into over 1,000 Australian corporate sustainability initiatives, including energy efficiency, carbon management, sustainable supply chains, cleantech and sustainable product innovation. And investing in a paperless future is good for the earth and the bottom line. So GreenPost is underway, as Singapore’s only aggregator of electronic bills and statements, presenting them on a single platform for the user’s convenience.

Verdantix report from London (19 April 2011):

The Australian sustainable business market will grow to $2.9bn in 2014 from $1.6bn in 2010, according to a new report from independent analyst firm Verdantix.

The report forecasts that sustainability spending will exceed $1.8bn in 2011, grow to $2.1bn in 2012 and reach $2.5bn in 2013. The forecast is based on analysis of spending by 139 firms with Australian revenues of at least $900m and cross-industry research into over 1,000 Australian corporate sustainability initiatives. The Verdantix model categorises spending by 29 initiatives including energy efficiency, carbon management, sustainable supply chains, cleantech and sustainable product innovation.

“Many Australian business leaders perceive climate change and sustainability trends as a break on growth and a cost to business” commented Susan Clarke, Verdantix analyst and author of the report. “But carbon regulations, rising energy prices and natural resource scarcity also create new market opportunities. Innovative firms like CarbonSystems, Energetics, Intelligent Pathways and WSP Environment & Energy already benefit from the market for energy efficiency and carbon management. A pure focus on blocking and tackling new energy and climate change regulations will protect margins in the short-term but misses out on big opportunities like bio-diesel refining.”

According to the Verdantix report, Australian Sustainable Business Spending 2009-14, the market will experience a 13% CAGR from 2009 to 2014. Sustainability spend will increase by 9% in 2011 compared to 2010. This positive trend will continue with a year-on-year increase of 13% in 2012. The recently proposed carbon price mechanism, if it is implemented by 2013, will cause an increase in year-on-year growth rates, reaching 20% in 2013 and 2014.

Across 29 sustainable business initiatives the Verdantix market forecast finds that spending on smart grid and electric vehicles will grow fastest. Spend on smart grid will grow at a 27% CAGR to reach $72 million in 2014. Electric vehicles and infrastructure will grow at a 22% CAGR to reach $58 million in 2014. Public-private consortium partnerships such as the ‘Smart Grid, Smart City’ demonstration project encourage investment from firms like AGL Energy, Ausgrid and Sydney Water.

Reflecting the structure of the Australian economy, energy and emissions intensive industries account for 43% of sustainable business spending in 2011. The basic resources sector will invest $360 million, accounting for 20% of spend. Oil and gas firms account for 12%, travel and transport 6%, and utilities 5%. Despite strong commitments to sustainability by services firms like National Australia Bank their budgets are significantly smaller than the industrial sectors.

“Australia is already experiencing a boom in commodities demand as the Asian economy gathers steam. Our forecast for a 13% CAGR between 2009 and 2014 assumes economic growth in Australia of 3% to 3.5% over the period,” stated David Metcalfe, Verdantix Director. “Spending on sustainability is positively correlated with global and national economic growth because they drive up the price of fossil fuels and other natural resources. As a result, spending on initiatives such as energy efficiency, sustainability communications, lobbying and renewable energy production will be higher if economic growth is above current forecasts.”

The Verdantix report, Australian Sustainable Business Spending 2009-14, launched today and is available to Verdantix clients at www.verdantix.com.

Verdantix is the fastest-growing, independent, analyst firm focused on sustainable business strategies and market opportunities.

Source: www.verdantix.com

29 Mar 2011

The Business Times (29 March 2011):

Pay your bills and save the Earth at the same time and with the support of a dedicated engineering team from StarHub.

However, with the aid of a co-investment from Spring Singapore and a round of private angel funding, the team managed to reconceptualise the product to draw the data from the biller.

E-BILLING is great. You save trees while you pay your bills, with the mere click of your mouse. When more and more companies start to offer e-billing services, you eagerly take them up, you love the thought of doing your part for the environment, not to mention how convenient it is.

Then comes that one night, which finds you seated in front of the computer, all ready to settle your monthly bills. You soon begin to realise that what was once ‘a mere click of the mouse’ has become a tiresome labyrinth of portals and Web interfaces – a much more tedious process than before.

What you would have experienced, is what Harveen Narulla, director of GreenPost, calls ‘multiple log-in fatigue’, a phenomenon he feels is the main reason why many people are not going paperless with their bills.

‘At a time when people are increasingly under pressure, dealing with work commitments, family commitments, and a shortage of time, they want technology to make their life easier, not harder,’ he explains.

This is where GreenPost comes in. GreenPost is Singapore’s only aggregator of electronic bills and statements, presenting them on a single platform for the user’s convenience.

‘Every biller wants to pull customers to their website to check bills. It takes a third party who’s not a biller, to say ‘Hey, I’ll aggregate all your bills,’ and that is what we are,’ says Mr Narulla.

GreenPost currently aggregates bills from some of the highest volume billers in Singapore (M1, StarHub, SingTel, Singapore Power services, NUSS Alumni club), and plans to link up with all billers – not just the top volume ones – by 2012.

The company also aggregates bills from Malaysia (Maxis, Digi, TNB), and Australia (Optus), and intends to expand its presence in both. Plans for India, Hong Kong, and America are in the pipeline.

This will save upwards from two million pages of paper per month, a conservative estimate based on a function of user take- up rates, the average number of bills per person, and the average amount of paper used to mail a single bill.

‘We will achieve these numbers with 125,000 users,’ says Anand Singh, the founder and CEO of GreenPost, who pointed out that signing an agreement with any of the six banks they are currently in negotiations with would allow them to hit 400,000 users within six months. These six banks include OCBC, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, UOB, ICICI, and ANZ.

Under the pending agreements, users can choose to display the bill information aggregated by GreenPost within an Internet banking platform of his choice. This gives the user the convenience of having his bill information alongside the bank’s existing payment service, making it much easier for him to make payments.

GreenPost is also in the process of negotiating commercial terms with the most common payment collection providers, which will enable users to pay their bills from the GreenPost portal itself.

Data analytics and a bill archive are also available, allowing users to keep track of their bill history from up to two years ago.

To top it off, all these benefits will be provided to users for no charge at all. So where does the money come from?

Former Bloomberg news anchor Bernie Low posed Mr Singh the same question in 2009, describing the company as a free service, an effort to save the trees. ‘It’s not a business model right?’ asked an incredulous Mr Low. ‘You’re not a money making proposition.’

Mr Singh disagreed, describing three ways in which the company intends to make money, charging billers a portion of the cost savings GreenPost affords them through reduced paper costs, advertising revenue from intelligent ad banners (replacing the marketing pamphlets often sent together with bills), and charging a fee for payment collection.

Today, the business model has evolved to include two more – the accumulation of carbon credits from forest savings, and a paid curtain where users can pay to upgrade their accounts to include more in-depth bill data analytics and a larger archive.

Things weren’t always smooth going though. The company struggled to attract initial investment due to the financial crisis in 2008 and a general wariness toward B2C (business-to-consumer) companies by investors in Singapore – something Mr Narulla attributes to the unique revenue cycle of a B2C company.

The revenue cycle of a B2C company ‘is almost flat for a long while, hits an inflection point and then spikes’, something Mr Narulla feels Singapore investors are relatively unfamiliar with, compared to the gradual growth curve of a traditional company.

To make matters worse, the original idea, incubated with the assistance of NUS in 2005, of linking up biller systems with the GreenPost platform was deemed unfeasible despite successful technical integration due to cost, says Mr Narulla.

‘Integration by connecting directly with biller systems, and pulling data from biller customer management systems is a very expensive exercise,’ he explains, referring to the pilot tests done with the support of a dedicated engineering team from StarHub.

However, with the aid of a co-investment from Spring Singapore and a round of private angel funding, the team managed to reconceptualise the product to draw the data from the biller’s portals, which avoids the hugely expensive integration challenges the company had faced before.

From then on, the company launched its beta platform in September 2009 and launched commercially in March 2010.

It has since developed mobile apps for the iPhone and iPad in June and August of 2010 respectively, with plans to release an Android app in May 2011, making it the first bill aggregator in the world to incorporate a mobile platform.

GreenPost was also selected as technology partner by CrimsonLogic for its bid for the Singapore government’s OneInBox tender, which, if successful, would see them aggregating all Government-to-Citizen correspondence.

Mr Narulla hopes to be supporting the top 20 billers in Singapore, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia by the end of 2012, and to fully commercialise three of these countries in a three to five year time-frame.

Says Mr Narulla, ‘We believe that we are doing something that could change the shape of the world. It could lead to hundreds of thousands of trees still standing.

‘If people’s mindsets and attitudes don’t change, the last tree will fall one day. But if through our lives, work, and involvement we can delay that by even 20 to 50 years, we will have done our job.’

Source: www.spring.gov.sg  and  www.gogreenpost.com

Climate Change Understanding Falls Along Political Lines

While public opinion on climate change might be polarized, it’s a stark contrast to the scientific community’s unified stance regarding the warming of our planet.

The latest research finds public understanding of the issue falls along political party lines, with Republicans (in the US) most often saying Earth’s climate is either not changing or agreeing it is changing — but that those changes are due to natural causes.

Democrats, on the other hand, most often agreed that the climate is changing now due mainly to human activities. The research is published in a report put out by the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute and announced this week.

“Although there remains active discussion among scientists on many details about the pace and effects of climate change, no leading science organization disagrees that human activities are now changing the Earth’s climate,” said study researcher Lawrence Hamilton, professor of sociology and senior fellow with the Carsey Institute. “The strong scientific agreement on this point contrasts with the partisan disagreement seen on all of our surveys.”

The reason may have to do with where we get our information on climate change, which Hamilton suggests is not scientists, but instead through news media, political activists, friends and other non- science sources. So writes Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor. Read More

Report from Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor (22 April 2011):

While public opinion on climate change might be polarized, it’s a stark contrast to the scientific community’s unified stance regarding the warming of our planet. The latest research finds public understanding of the issue falls along political party lines, with Republicans (in the US) most often saying Earth’s climate is either not changing or agreeing it is changing — but that those changes are due to natural causes.

Democrats, on the other hand, most often agreed that the climate is changing now due mainly to human activities. The research is published in a report put out by the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute and announced this week.

“Although there remains active discussion among scientists on many details about the pace and effects of climate change, no leading science organization disagrees that human activities are now changing the Earth’s climate,” said study researcher Lawrence Hamilton, professor of sociology and senior fellow with the Carsey Institute. “The strong scientific agreement on this point contrasts with the partisan disagreement seen on all of our surveys.”

The reason may have to do with where we get our information on climate change, which Hamilton suggests is not scientists, but instead through news media, political activists, friends and other nonscience sources.

“People increasingly choose news sources that match their own views. Moreover, they tend to selectively absorb information even from this biased flow, fitting it into their pre-existing beliefs,” Hamilton said. (For instance, a study published in 2009 in the journal Communications Research showed that college students chose news sources that matched their views on abortion and gun ownership issues.)

Another survey of American and Australian participants published this year showed that the weather affected acceptance of manmade global warming. The weather-warming link may be the result of global warming and climate being such complex and long-term trends. That would make it more likely for people to grasp onto a simpler, more easily accessible explanation — the weather.

In the new study, Hamilton and colleagues gathered their data from surveys conducted in 2010 and early 2011 asking nearly 9,500 individuals in seven regions in the United States about climate change. The three climate change questions included:

•How much would you say you understand about global warming or climate change?

•Which statement is more accurate? Most scientists agree that climate change is happening now, caused mainly by (human activities/natural causes).

•Which of the following statements do you personally believe? Climate change is happening now, caused mainly by (human activities/natural forces).

Overall, most respondents said they understand either a moderate amount or a great deal about the issue of global warming or climate change. And though many participants agreed that climate change is happening now, they were split on whether this is attributed mainly to human or natural causes.

For the political split, the greatest difference between Democrats and Republicans was found for those who were most confident of their climate change knowledge.

For instance, out of the Olympia Peninsula respondents who said they had a moderate or great understanding of climate change, just 19 percent of Republicans said they personally believe that warming is due to human activities; that’s compared with 78 percent of Democrats who said the same. Among those who said they have little or no understanding, the gap narrowed to 23 percent versus 52 percent of Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who said they believe climate change is caused by human actions.

The take-home for all those involved: “There are things scientists could do better to communicate, using the new media; and journalists could do better if they gained science literacy,” Hamilton told LiveScience. “But such improvements would still be arrayed against a political climate that rewards wedge-issue polarization.”

Perhaps in the future, global warming will have its say, though. “As the environment changes, visible realities such as Arctic ice or extreme weather events might eventually play a larger role in public perceptions,” Hamilton said.

The research was supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Neil and Louise Tillotson Fund, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Office of Rural Development in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, UNH Sustainability Academy and the Carsey Institute.

You can follow LiveScience Managing Editor Jeanna Bryner on Twitter @jeannabryner. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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Source: www.livescience.com

John Pearson tells us that the British High Commission wishes to fill a position, leading on its climate change policy work in Singapore. Promoting a low carbon, high growth global economy is one of the key policy goals of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and its missions overseas. To promote the climate change agenda, the FCO has a regional network of staff whose priority is to promote low carbon growth in South East Asia. For more information on the Singapore based position of Climate Change Director, go to: http://ukinsingapore.fco.gov.uk/en/