[I recently gave a talk at the Carleton University Lead to Win program – a very exciting initiative to help boot start small businesses, mostly in the IT sector. One of the biggest challenges for any small business is signing up the first few customers. It is very difficult for customers to convince others within their organization to purchase unproven products from small unknown companies who may not be around in a year’s time. A more successful selling strategy might be doing an end run around the direct sales approach and instead offering a product or service for free in exchange for a share of the reduced cost in energy or CO2 emissions. This is not a new concept. Companies called ESCOs (Energy Service Companies) have been doing this for years where they make deals with organizations to reduce their energy consumption and they take a percentage of the resultant savings. The ESCOs invest in new lighting systems, new insulation, roof top solar systems, campus windmills, etc. Most Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) products or services have the same or greater potential to reduce energy consumption or reduce CO2 emissions (although surprisingly many ICT companies have not thought of their products in that regard). Everything from Smart boards to cloud applications can be structured in this way. Even if the product or service cannot demonstrably be proven to reduce energy or CO2 in emissions in its own right it can still might be deployed as part of a “cap and reward” strategy where the product is offered as a reward for an organization reducing its energy consumption in other ways.
One of the big challenges with such a strategy is most energy savings and CO2 reductions from computer enabled applications are small and a umbrella organization is needed to aggregate such savings from many companies and institutions. Research and education networks and/or organizations like the recently announced Coral CEA may be ideally positioned to represent SMEs in negotiating the necessary protocols in order to aggregate and claim the energy offsets of carbon credits. Again this is not a new idea – farm collectives are doing this in order to collect carbon offsets from individual farms who undertake no-till crop systems. –BSA
My presentation on “SME business opportunities in low carbon economy through Communications Enabled Applications”
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/lead-to-win-may-18
Coral CEA announcement
http://www.mri.gov.on.ca/english/news/SOP100209.asp
Bill
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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles
Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview
Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.
Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37
Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG
High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP
Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g
How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd