Last Friday March 28th, 2014 saw an event commemorating the 35th Anniversary of Three Mile Island at Dartmouth, sponsored by The Thayer School of Engineering The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding The Steyer‐Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford The video for the entire event
Read moreI’m appearing on a panel Thursday evening April 3rd, 2014 on the Commonwealth Club’s Climate One program: “Nuclear power: Meltdown or revival?” It’s open to the public, so please join us. Here’s the program description, which can be found at the event page at http://www.
Read moreHere are the details on the April 2nd, 2014 event: Clean Energy and Climate Change, a Cleantech Open business briefing at Impact Hub in SF Wednesday, April 2, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM (PDT) Location: Impact Hub San Francisco 925 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94103
Read moreI had a wonderful interview today about data center efficiency on Bloomberg West today, which you can watch here. The focus was on our case study of eBay’s management practices, which came out last September. The interviewers were really prepared which is always gratifying. Let me know what you
Read moreMy friends at CO2 Scorecard just released a short data analysis demonstrating that coal exports from the US have more than offset carbon emissions savings from switching from coal to natural gas in the US electricity sector. This result is one important piece of evidence that an “all of the
Read moreMax Auffhammer at UC Berkeley brings his formidable economic talents to bear on the Keystone XL question, and finds that not approving the Keystone XL Pipeline will keep at least 1 billion barrels of bitumen in the ground. It is a nice counterpoint to the circular reasoning that still pervades
Read moreThe financial markets are starting to realize that the “booked” reserves of the fossil fuel companies are based on a fallacy: these estimates assume that those fossil fuel resources can be burned and still maintain a stable climate. As I and others have written for years, we must keep a
Read moreCheryl Katz at Yale Environment 360 wrote a nice article on energy harvesting in which I’m quoted. Here are the two intro paragraphs: Computers feasting on their own exhaust heat. Super-efficient solar panels snaring lost thermal energy and recycling it into electricity. Personal electronics powered by stray microwaves or
Read moreThe Corporate Eco Forum (CEF) just posted a new essay of mine titled "Bringing Enterprise Computing into the 21st Century: A Management and Sustainability Challenge". Here are two key intro paragraphs: Most companies view IT as a cost center, but the most effective users of these new technologies
Read moreI gave a talk on energy and the information economy at the Physics of Sustainable Energy Conference on March 8th, 2014. The event was sponsored by the American Physical Society, which has been doing this conference for at least three cycles. It was a great event, and I got to
Read moreGreenBiz just posted video of my keynote interview with Joel Makower of Green Biz from last fall’s VERGE conference in San Francisco, which took place on October 16, 2013. The key message: Information technology is our “ace in the hole” when it comes to facing the climate challenge. In
Read moreJoel Achenbach at the Washington Post has posted today a must-read article about pseudo science and journalism. The final two paragraphs echo the findings in my recent post titled “Separating Fact From Fiction”: There’s nothing at stake here except the survival of credible journalism. For those who are trying
Read moreI was interviewed for the WNYC radio show New Tech City last week, and the story appeared today. It’s a fun piece, and worth listening to. My one quibble is that the report explicitly creates false balance, because it contrasted my data and analysis-based view of how much electricity
Read moreThis article is an abridged, re-edited, and amended version of an article that recently appeared as Koomey, Jonathan. 2014. “Separating Fact From Fiction: A Challenge For The Media.” In IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. January. pp. 9-11. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’
Read moreLast week I moderated a panel at the Open Compute Summit V in San Jose that focused on bringing integrated design, mass production and learning by doing to the data center industry. The great irony is that information technology (IT) has had amazing success at transforming other industries, reducing costs
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