I and two former students of mine, Nicole Schuetz and Anna Kovaleva, just completed a wonderful case study of eBay’s transition to more efficient data center operations. As readers of this blog know, the barriers to achieving higher efficiency data centers are not primarily technical. Instead, they are mainly problems of management, incentives, and responsibilities. This is why I’ve been pushing for years to create case studies of companies that have actually been successful in improving the efficiency of their operations. I’ve encountered companies who have accomplished such improvements in the past, but none have ever wanted to talk about them, until now.
Nicole Schuetz*, Anna Kovaleva*, and Jonathan Koomey**
*Stanford Graduate School of Business & Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University
**Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, Stanford University
Executive Summary
This work provides a case study of the organizational changes necessary at eBay Inc. to support the development and operation of efficient data center infrastructure, hardware, and software. As a part of this process, the eBay Inc. infrastructure Engineering and Operations team (responsible for the delivery of technical services including Cloud services and data center hosting) embarked on a multi-year journey to dramatically improve the efficiency of the company’s technical infrastructure, and to connect infrastructure productivity to business drivers. eBay Inc.’s technical achievements in improving energy efficiency and decreasing infrastructure operations cost has been well documented elsewhere; instead this study focuses on illuminating the changes to eBay Inc.’s organizational structure and culture of the IT organization that began in 2008 and are still ongoing today. In addition to a literature review, the authors conducted in-person interviews with members of eBay Inc.’s staff within the IT organization between May and August of 2013.
Ken and Margot Brill, with Ken reading to one of our sons, on May 8, 2011. Photo credit: Jonathan Koomey.
My dear friend Ken Brill passed away on July 30th, and a few of his colleagues and I gathered with Ken’s family in Maine on August 17th of this year to celebrate his life. I’ve posted below links to the text of the eulogies given by me, Martin McCarthy of 451, and John T. Thornell of Upsite Technologies, and the homily by Rev. Timothy Boggs, so that people who weren’t able to attend the ceremony can read what we said, reflect on those thoughts, and add additional comments if they want.
I’ve also posted the “Core Values“ document that Ken shared with all of his employees during the twelve years I’ve known him. This document captures some of what made Ken special, and it’s worth a read.
Martin McCarthy ended his eulogy with a quote from Ken that sums it up perfectly: “‘Drop the boulder. Grab the balloon.’ Let’s all grab a balloon for Ken.”
In talking with Jim Glanz, a reporter at the New York Times who wrote about data centers, I learned a few weeks ago that Ken had been especially proud of the video he and Jim did walking through a data center, with Ken explaining things as they walked. It was created to accompany a long article Jim did that got lots of attention. But Ken was much more interested in how many people had watched the video. I post the link here, so more people can watch it!
Obituaries and Tributes for Ken Brill
There was an outpouring of discussion upon Ken’s passing, and I’ve collected some of the key links below. Please let me know if I’ve missed any important ones.
As the father of the data center industry, Ken has many accomplishments to his name. These accomplishments are the product of an insatiable curiosity, and an unrelenting passion, focus and drive. Sometimes this presented challenges for people, including myself. Ken and I achieved a lot together, but we also had our differences. In fact, in 2008, I left The Uptime Institute largely because of those differences.
A year ago March, Ken called. We hadn’t spoken in years. In fact, when I saw his number on my phone I almost instinctively sent it to voice mail! Instead, I answered. And I am glad that I did. It was a different Ken on the line. He was reflective and appreciative. He was even apologetic about those differences he and I had prior. But, more importantly, for the first time, Ken seemed content. With the Site Uptime Network launched in Asia, the Uptime Institute had become the global organization he envisioned.
Since that call in March, I’ve joined one of Ken’s companies, Upsite. Working with Ken again, I also noticed that he seemed to be in a mentoring phase of his career and life. In individual meetings he would coach not command. On board calls, he would give input not instructions. Ken seemed to have finally broken the entrepreneur’s curse! His diagnosis didn’t slow him down, either. He talked about offering a course at Redlands and other ways to share his experiences for the benefit of others. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with this new Ken.
So, it is in this mentoring spirit that I would like to share with you, Ken’s family and closest friends, excerpts of a set of core values that he assembled over the years. These values were drafted, as Ken said, to help people “make decisions and set priorities between conflicting objectives…” Some of the more common are:
A well-defined problem seeks its own solution
Think both/and, not either/or
Be hard on ideas, not people
Set people and projects up for success, don’t move the goal posts
Acknowledge and learn from problems, don’t hide from them
Recognize and celebrate success
Ken maintained nearly 40 of these core values. In my time working with him, I was surprised how frequently we used many of them. They would serve as short-cuts to remind us to “address structure, instead of content” which is yet another core value.
I am flattered that Ken asked me to join Upsite. To help fulfill the vision he has for the company. To contribute to his legacy. I regret not being able to work with him now, but will continue to use many of the experiences I’ve had with Ken, including his core values, in my life personally and professionally. I encourage each of you to do the same.
No doubt, Ken would be as pleased about helping others as he was about his own accomplishments.
Copyright 2013 by John T. Thornell. Reproduced here with permission.
It took me 50 years of my life to get ready to meet this man, but I loved him. And in the last 5 years he’s been such an influence and such an inspiration to me, like few in my lifetime.
We shared Harvard Business School, though he was 10 years ahead of me.. as he was 10 years ahead in pretty much everything, for me and most others.
Howard Stephensen, one of the professors there at Harvard, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”, and Ken was an entrepreneur. Ken was an inventor, Ken was an inveterate tinkerer, Ken loved new ideas, he loved to debate. And he thought it was a contact sport.
But Ken was more than just an entrepreneur, Ken was a founder. Ken created, Ken was the originator, Ken came up with ideas, processes, means of associations and ways of understanding that few people can provide.
His reputation preceded him, and I remember being more than a little concerned about meeting Ken. I had heard him speak and attended his conferences, I knew of him for years, but it took a little bit to get ready to meet Ken, because I needed to prove that I was worthy to take forward what he had devoted so much of his life to creating, in the form of his ideas and his Institute. Thank god I was fortunate to at least get the chance to do so.
I think in ways, in the last 5 years, I’ve been doing what I’m doing today, trying to explain Ken to the world. To help others understand, how focused, how seminal, how impactful this man was in his chosen field.
I have the good fortune to live in upstate New York on the weekends, near the sacred grounds of Woodstock, which just commemorated its 44th anniversary a few days ago. Ken Brill was the “Woodstock of the Data Center industry”. There were festivals that had been before and many that have come since, but Ken—like the Woodstock Music festival— was the moment, marked the moment….and this moment went on for years.
People would mark themselves in relationship to Ken. “Were you there in the beginning?” “Were you with Ken when he founded Uptime?” “How and how long did you know Ken?” In recent years I got to travel the world with Ken, in China, in Singapore, in Europe, in Oslo, in Paris, many places, and got to meet many people, and everywhere I went, people wanted to meet Ken Brill. They wanted to know this man, one who had the vision to make something solid and worthwhile out of nothing. Ken is rightfully known now as the “Father of the Data Center industry”. Who was this man, who in his own way, as much as Woodstock, really captured and embodied the zeitgeist of the time, and who really spawned a generation that followed…that’s what Ken did.
He’s an anarchist. He’s a revolutionary. He’s a counterculture figure of great impact and great reknown. He was a contrarian. He has lasted, and he will endure. His impact is profound.
Sometimes Ken would forget the broader context. He would dive in, but then get lost in the details, the technical specifics. He could go down and dive so deep, like those pearl divers, then come up for air, but he’d stay down for hours. I would try to bring him back up and remind him that “You are (and I will edit this adjective for this church audience) “freaking” Ken Brill. Remember that. Ken, come back to the top.”
He was blunt and direct.
Compelling, but not so charming.
Devoted, and undeterred.
Deeply caring, but intellectually, totally unsentimental.
But his passion, his energy, his drive, his will, his appetite were inspiring.
He was brilliant, but bristly.
And I say again now what I said to him many times when we were working through the opportunity for me to move forward with him with the acquisition of his beloved Uptime Institute.
“Drop the Boulder…Seize the Balloon”
Seize the balloon. Let’s all take a balloon for Ken.
Copyright 2013, By Martin McCarthy. Reproduced here with permission.
We’re here to honor the life of a good friend and a great man: Ken Brill. In preparing for this event, I contacted many of Ken’s friends and colleagues, all of whom spoke of him with gratitude, love, and admiration.
Ken’s was devoted to truth, which meant he was a real “data guy”. That’s one of the things that drew us together. During the first Internet boom and the California electricity crisis (around 2001), some people with an ax to grind claimed data centers were using lots of electricity (hundreds of watts per square foot). Ken called me one day out of the blue (he had helped one of my students, but we had never met) and said “I think I have some data that might be useful to you.” Those data showed power use that was about one tenth of the conventional wisdom, and they changed the public conversation to better reflect reality.
Ken revered “getting it right”, even when inconvenient or unprofitable. John Stanley (now at Google), who I introduced to Ken and who worked with him for several years, told me about writing projects where the production people were driven crazy by last minute changes, but they were important substantive changes, not arbitrary or trivial ones. He told John and me many times, “if you can’t afford to do it right the first time, how come you can afford to do it twice?”
Ken cared deeply about others doing well, and lived that caring by example. Andrew Fanara, formerly at the EPA, told me that he wouldn’t be where he is today professionally without the doors Ken opened for him. And that feeling was echoed by every single person with whom I spoke. Ken built an industry, in part by encouraging others to achieve their very best. He multiplied his impact by influencing others, which is one mark of a truly great man.
Whenever I spoke with Ken, I felt like he was really listening to me, thinking about what I had said, and addressing my concerns. He was genuinely interested in what others had to say, and was intensely curious about people with different views. This curiosity is rare and special. It’s something with which almost everyone is born, but most people lose it along the way. Ken never did.
I also knew from the conversations we had that he loved his family very much, even though he knew he wasn’t the perfect father or husband (who among us is?). So his caring extended to his entire life.
Ken didn’t dwell much on the past, he focused on creating the future. Christian Belady, who many of you know, talked with Ken about two months ago. In that conversation, Ken spent all his time talking about the future, even though he knew he only had a short time left on the planet. Truly inspirational!
So what makes a great man? Someone who stays true to himself, who faces reality as it is (not as he wishes it would be), who cares about others, who’s devoted to something larger than himself, and who keeps focused more on the future than on the past.
Ken Brill: A good friend and a great man.
We’ll miss you, Ken, but we’ll carry forth your legacy by helping others to do their very best, with our eyes fixed firmly on the future. I know that’s what you would have wanted.
Gracious God, please listen this hour to our words of joyful thanks and our sighs of grief. And in these contrasts, in the midst of our laughter and our loss, speak your clear words of life. Amen.
Good morning and thank you for being here. This is a rich day that we share, a rare time, full of so many precious and complex memories and emotions. You will each have your own personal understandings of this, your personal truths about rich times like these, but I hope you will agree that this is right where we should be today, together in this welcoming place, in this company, giving our time and our attention to this turning point, this intersection we all find ourselves in.
I honor all your understandings of this time, yet I want to suggest that from where I stand, there are three distinct things that we are doing together in this place at this hour.
We are here first of all to simply and fully offer our gratitude for the life and love of this generous man. To celebrate a life of such consequence, and to give thanks to God for Ken.
We have just heard this morning such wonderful witness of his gifts and his sharing of them. I only knew Ken through our occasional and too brief visits over these past months. I was smitten by him, his intelligence and curiosity and sparkle. And I’ll confess that I selfishly regret that I did not get to know him and love him as you did. So, I won’t presume to speak of that which you know so much better.
I am struck by the joy in Ken’s words and their echo in the family’s voices. Joy is different than mere happiness or satisfaction. Joy is a sense of the rightness of life. We do not make joy. We do not even discover it. It discovers us. It discovers us when we are open to the wonder and possibilities in all the gifts of God we have been given. I think Joy discovered Ken.
And then, in his own way, he shared it. He knew the truth that in giving we receive and each of you have been graciously gifted by him. We remain empowered by that love.
Of the many things we cannot avoid in life, one is that of becoming a teacher. For better or for worse, we are all teachers of those with whom we live and love and work and play. Ken was obviously such a fine teacher, a natural teacher, a teacher who opened doors for students, doors into. And I know that however you knew him, you have each learned much from him, including a central lesson of his: that living life in a posture of gratitude.
So, we are here first to give thanks to God for the wonder and constancy of Ken’s generously-shared life, a life of such consequence and to shout right out loud our abidingly grateful love of him.
And we are also here to acknowledge our sufferings at this great loss, a loss which comes too soon. One of the reasons we are truly human is that we affirm that life is so very precious, and that death, expected though it is, confronts us with painful mysteries we cannot fully grasp.
We acknowledge the significance of this here in the midst of the traditions of our faith. The symbols, music, words of this service and the images, and light around us, the vaulting above us; these are all not so much meant to convey wisdom as wonder. Part of the reason we are here, in this place, embracing these traditions, is to acknowledge that life and love and death are part of a mystery we can know only in part.
We are seldom closer to the core of what makes us human than in moments like this, moments of great and acknowledged loss. So don’t be embarrassed by your tears or shy away from your sadness, they reflect your humanity…and Ken’s.
We are reminded this morning that it hurts to be in the valley of the shadow of death. The loss of people intertwined in our lives hurts us terribly when they are taken away. It leaves a hole, and holes in us hurt. That hurting reminds us that we are real, that we are human.
As Ken knew and taught so very well, there is only one antidote to loss and that is life. Grief is part of the story, but it’s not the end of the story. He knew that the holes of our lives, small and large, must be filled with something that is alive and life-giving, something like love.
So, we are here to give thanks, and we are here to mourn and we are also here in the crazy, radical hope of our faith that God will be in our lives and be with Ken still, that he may be ever closer to him. This hope at death is such a mystery to us. It is tied deeply into the entire gift and story of resurrection, that possibility of enduring, continuing relationship with God. Ken is not alone in finding this claim deeply mysterious and this is not the place for a discourse on the resurrection, except to say sitting with the uncertainty, as Ken and I were privileged to do, embracing the question is as any good engineer would know the first essential step.
What follows in our service are our songs and prayers and hymns and fellowship. They give us a chance to step back and experience the wholeness of all that we are doing today: our thanksgiving, our grief and our hope in enduring relationship.
And in that they allow us to hold up this dear man to the healing and illuminating light of God. I suspect God is not through with him just yet.
A priest friend recently wrote: “I’ve come think that if there is one single virtue: it’s integrity. By integrity, I don’t mean simply mean honest, I mean the word literally. It’s the quality of being an integer, an entity. He said, integrity is what happens when at your funeral your spouse talks to your pastor, who talks with your daughter, who talks with your neighbor, who talks with your colleague, who talks with your best friend, and they all discover that they knew the same person. You weren’t a series of masks worn for different relationships. You were complete.”
Ken was indeed that. An integer. An entity. Complete. No matter how much or little you knew of Ken or about Ken, what you always got was Ken.
May Ken now know the full reward of his life, may his relationships continue in your hearts and in his, may he somehow take joy still in God’s great creation.
And as a priest who came to him late in his life, may I say:
May he rest in peace. May he rise in glory. Amen
Copyright 2013 by the Rev. Timothy A. Boggs. Reproduced here with permission.
What follows is the statement of values Ken Brill shared with all his new employees in the twelve years that I knew him. They reflect the kind of man he was: someone who cared about people and who valued truth above all else, even when inconvenient or unprofitable.
Brill Family of Companies Core Values
Purpose of Core Values: We make strategic and operational decisions and set priorities between conflicting objectives using our core values. The following listing divides these everyday values into four major groupings:
1) First and foremost is our overarching, external focus on the customer.
2) The second category has to do with how we encourage everyone (employees, stakeholders, and consultants) to think about problems and tasks.
3) The third category is principles for how we relate with one another.
4) The final category relates to doing the right thing.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how new computer tools can help us derive meaning from data that haven’t been pre-structured for ease of machine readability.
Dave Roberts had a wonderful post on August 30th, 2013 titled “Hope and Fellowship”, which addresses the question “Is there any hope? Or are we just f*cked?” Here’s his brilliant summary:
And really, what else are we going to do?
Remember, there is no “too late” here, no “game over” — it will be a tragedy to shoot past 2 degrees to 3, but 4 is worse than 3, and 5 is worse than 4. Being unprepared for any of those will be much worse than being prepared. The future always forks; there are always better and worse paths ahead. There’s always a difference to be made.
When we ask for hope, then, I think we’re just asking for fellowship. The weight of climate change, like any weight, is easier to bear with others. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in these last 10 years, it’s that there are many, many others. They are out there, men and women of extraordinary imagination, courage, and perseverance, pouring themselves into this fight for a better future.
You are not alone. And as long as you are not alone, there is always hope.
Dad, isn’t Jim Hansen that NASA mega-whiz you call “America’s pre-eminent climate scientist,” which is like geezerese for the smartest guy in the room? And what is brain dude thinking when he says “Game over for the Climate”?
Which part of this sounds like a game to you? The billions? The people? The poverty? The civilization? The collapse? Daaad, back away from the smartphone. I mean it. Focus! You can’t just go “game over for the climate… New game!”… like there’s an app for what happens after you lose this one.
Dad, dude, Angry Birds is a game. Climate disruption is just dumping on your kids’ head. Are you laughing? Because if you’re laughing, I can find an assisted living facility in Siberia. Don’t push me.
The basic message is right on: "It’s no game, and it is never over". It resonated strongly with me because of the evolutionary approach I lay out in Cold Cash, Cool Climate:
“I advocate instead an evolutionary approach to this problem, implementing many different technologies, failing fast, and doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. This approach, which the National Research Council dubs “iterative risk management”, recognizes the limitations of economic models and puts such analysis into an important but less grandiose role: that of comparing cost effectiveness of different mitigation options in achieving a normatively defined target (like the 2 degrees C warming limit).
I call this approach “working forward toward a goal” and it’s a more business-oriented framing of the problem. It mirrors the way companies face big strategic challenges, because they know that forecasting the future accurately is impossible, so they set a goal and figure out what they’d have to do to meet it, then adjust course as developments dictate. It also frees you from the mostly self-imposed conceptual constraints that make it hard to envision a future much different from what exists today.”
This is why I’m somewhat critical of Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency declaring that “the door to a 2 degrees C trajectory is about to close”. While I agree that there is real urgency to the climate problem, and it gets harder and harder to meet that limit with each passing year of inaction, we won’t be able to identify a moment in real time when it was possible before but it is now impossible. Of course, we can say that if we continue on our current path for several more decades, we will indeed overshoot the 2 Celsius degree warming target, but there is significant uncertainty about exactly when we reach that point. We won’t know until we’re well past the point of no return.
Each assessment of what is possible is flawed because of our imperfect foresight, and they all embody assumptions about what is possible and what isn’t. The most common error is assuming that because we’ve built a capital stock we need to use it until it reaches the end of its life, but we probably won’t have that luxury. The analysis of stock turnover I did in Chapter 5 of Cold Cash, Cool Climate convinced me that we’re going to have to scrap some capital even if we start aggressively reducing emissions tomorrow, but of course the more we build now the more we’ll have to scrap later.
That in itself should clarify things for those now fighting to build more emissions intensive infrastructure–there’s a real business risk to them because once the world finally accepts that rapid reductions of emission are required, those investors will lose their money. This change of situation will occur in the next decade or so (it really must if we’re to turn this around–reality is a harsh mistress). Some investors have already gotten that message and are starting to divest from fossil fuels. Once markets turn, they move very rapidly, and this situation will be no exception.
I also like Golden’s and Robert’s framing because there are always people eager to throw up their hands and say “we’re doomed!”. That’s not helpful, of course–better that we give it our best shot even if we think it’s going to be very difficult to succeed. Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future, for some very good reasons, so better not to be paralyzed by forecasts that are very likely to be wrong in any case.
So have hope, and be optimistic. There’s every reason to believe that we can make more rapid changes than conventional wisdom would indicate. The future is ours to create. With every choice we make, let’s ensure the future we create is a hopeful one.
I just encountered another example of how re-imagining the way we deliver services can enable very low-cost access to communications. My friend RJ Honicky wrote a paper in 2007 with colleagues at UC Berkeley describing how a “voice message mostly” mobile phone system could lead to improved equipment utilization, better service coverage, better quality of service, and much lower costs in developing countries.
The paper came out six years ago, so some technical details have no doubt changed, but the basic lesson is still a powerful one. Just because we deployed mobile communications in a certain way in developed countries doesn’t mean we need to do the same thing in other places, and changing the business model for these services can result in substantial cost reductions and energy savings.
I visited my friend Saul Griffith at Other Lab on August 9th, 2013. The lab is housed in the old Schoenstein & Sons pipe organ factory in San Francisco. It’s a beautiful building, with its offices and hallways straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel.
I loved visiting the lab because it was so inspirational. I encountered inflatable robots, pneumatic solar mirror controls, a new kind of high pressure tank for storing natural gas or hydrogen for vehicles, 3D milling machines, high powered laser cutters, and custom-designed bicycles sized to fit your measurements. Cool stuff, and it reminded me that we need not be hamstrung by how things have been done in the past. The future is indeed ours to create!
Saul was good enough to write the forward to Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs in 2011, and he’s given permission for me to repost it below. This will give you a flavor for how a brilliant entrepreneurial innovator thinks about climate solutions at a high level.
If equations aren’t your thing, just skip them and read the summaries just below each one. You’ll get the gist.
Climate change, energy independence, and sustainability: all of these things are rightly getting more attention than ever before. They are complex global problems requiring not one, but thousands, of solutions. Some solutions require mandates, some rely on politics, some need technology, and some hinge on behavioral change. All of the solutions will require entrepreneurs – stubborn, fast-moving, single-minded, goal-oriented individuals, either in the private or public sector. Without these entrepreneurs pushing boundaries and the speed of deployment, uptake of these solutions will be too slow to avert the worst consequences of these global challenges. This book is a motivational treatise that pushes the green entrepreneur of the future to fulfill this important role.
More than that, this book is about the scientific knowledge that helps define the character and limitations of these solutions. If we are to leave a livable world (and hopefully a vital and vibrant world) for our children and grandchildren, the scale of what needs to happen this century is daunting. Achieving even a mildly ambitious outcome of stabilizing the climate at 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 equivalent will mean the world of our future will look very different from today. Our transportation systems, heating and cooling systems, built environment and architecture, food systems, and even healthcare and education systems will all need to change – some a little, most a lot. Lots of people are scared of change, but the true entrepreneur embraces it. This is the green entrepreneur’s century.
Back in 2007 I was bedridden with chicken pox. Like most entrepreneurs I don’t take to idleness very well, so I set myself a task: measure every measurable impact of my lifestyle in terms of energy. I was already a ‘Green Entrepreneur’ – the CEO of a venture-financed, utility-scale wind energy start-up – and generally someone that people would look at as a model citizen when it comes to the environment and combating climate change. I was (mostly) a bicycle commuter; I was working on audacious new energy technologies.
What I learned shocked me. Although I thought I was a model citizen of the new cleaner world, I found that my lifestyle was consuming double or more the amount of energy that the average American was, and more than ten times that of the average Chinese citizen! Measuring everything that I did, quite literally down to my use of aluminum foil for cooking, and of the choice of textiles that I wore (as well as the more obvious things like miles travelled and electricity consumption), I realized that we now live in an age of consequence. It is possible to measure everything that you do – and its environmental impact. Whether you care about water, energy, carbon, or habitat destruction, we can now infer or estimate the impact of any purchasing decision on any of those outcomes. This exercise also made me furious with the often misleading reporting on new ‘green’ products and technologies. I became an angry young man again.
Being angry doesn’t help much though, whereas being an entrepreneur does. It’s been a few years since I had my wake-up call. People typically believe that the future for their children will be better, brighter, cleaner, and more wonderful than the past. That’s our challenge right now. We have to figure out how to make the future better than the past, while meeting the implied demands of the science of climate change. I no longer get angry about poorly written press releases and green-washing. In fact, they’re probably useful in that they socialize the idea of a cleaner and greener future, while the entrepreneurs who do the math, and have the analytical rigor, create the truly revolutionary products consumers are increasingly starting to demand.
I’m personally dedicated to creating these new products and services and bringing them to market. I have to acknowledge, however, that we need lots of entrepreneurs, working on lots of things, so that all of our contributions will add up to the kind of future that we want to live in – one that will be more wonderful than the past. It means that we’ll need to develop new sources of energy, and that there are thousands of technologies, solutions, and great companies to be built in the trillion-dollar energy generation game. There are even more technologies, solutions and great companies to be built in the consumer space. Here’s the trick: think of any product or service that you use today, whether it be how you get your milk, how you heat your home, or how you get your music. Figure out a way to deliver that product or service at one-half, or even better, one-tenth the amount of energy/water/habitat destruction/toxicity, and you likely have yourself a multi-million or multi-billion dollar product or service. This is why this book will be a great guide for the entrepreneurs of this century, and why Koomey’s treatment of the subject matter provides a great handle for the time-strapped entrepreneur.
There is a huge amount of science and engineering and math that the entrepreneur of the future would like to know, but in some sense we can reduce the problem to a few handy pieces of technically grounded practical advice. In the sections that follow, I include the equations for the technically minded reader, but you can just jump straight to the summaries that immediately follow those if you prefer.
Regarding travel of any kind
In high school, we learn mechanics in the Newtonian world, but in reality, almost any time we move, we do so through a fluid, usually air or water. Thus, for almost any transportation the power P required to move an object is given (roughly) by
where ρ is the density of the fluid (usually air or water), A is the frontal area of the moving body, Cd is drag coefficient, which is determined by the shape, and v is the velocity of movement. Colloquially speaking, this means to design any product or service that has to move with a lower power or energy requirement:
• Decrease A. Make it small and long.
• Decrease Cd. Make it aerodynamic, or ‘fish-shaped’.
• Decrease v2. Travel slowly.
This means that a really big, fast, low-energy super car is never going to exist, despite the attractiveness of the idea. Beautiful designed cars that recognize the constraints of the physics above could be far more efficient, and more of a pleasure to drive (or be robotically driven in). For short trips we will do even better by not driving at all, and by utilizing modern electric drive trains in lightweight personal vehicles.
Regarding the heating or cooling of anything
The power P required to heat or cool any object is given by
where k is the object’s thermal conductivity, A is the cross-sectional area between hot and cold, ∆T is the temperature difference, and ∆x is the distance between hot and cold. As above, this equation implies that to make more efficient transfers of heat, we must
• Decrease k. Insulate well.
• Increase ∆x. Use thick walls.
• Decrease A. Small is beautiful.
• Decrease ∆T. Heat or cool only as much as necessary.
Regarding the manufacturing of anything
The average power requirement over the life of a product is given by
And Eembodied is the energy content of the material of which a device is constructed.
What these equations say is that we must:
• Decrease Mmassofobject. Make it weigh less.
• Decrease Eembodied. Use materials with lower embodied energy (e.g. substitute wood for aluminum).
•Increase Tlifetime. Making objects that last much longer, perhaps with service and repair-based business models, will have the biggest effect.
Regarding the design of electronics
The average power requirement over the life of a product is given by
where I = current and R = resistance.
This equation implies that lowering resistance and current will reduce the power needed to accomplish a task. For electrical devices:
• reduce the current (I) by improving efficiency and redesigning the task
• make the wires bigger (reduces R)
Harness the power of information
Of course, the most important new tool we have in our toolbox is information. Wherever possible, use information technology to eliminate wasteful energy use. Examples abound: Replacing flights or driving by teleconferencing is a huge win for the environment. Using information to match needs with wants, such as ZipCar or City Car Share, eliminates the need for ownership of energy-intensive items. Using information technology such as Netflix, the Kindle, or the Apple iPad eliminates the physical delivery of goods.
A call for prompt action
The battle is not over once we have pioneered newer, more ecological technologies. We must still overcome the political, cultural and economic barriers to get people to adopt the low carbon options really fast. With these challenges, the imperative of this book is more apt than ever: we need entrepreneurs to lead the decarbonization of our lives now, and to make it happen pronto! I hope this book serves as a call to action for the next generation to capitalize on this age of consequence, building an awesome future harmonious with our understanding of how our home planet works.
-Saul Griffith, Ph.D., Other Lab, San Francisco, CA, October 12, 2011
My old Kindle 2 gave up the ghost awhile back, and I finally got around to doing something about it. I ended up getting a refurbished PaperWhite, which works fine, and has much longer battery life than the Kindle 2 (thanks to progress in battery, screen, communications, and computing technologies, which we discuss in detail in a forthcoming article in the Annual Review of Environmental and Resources).
The part of the process that I didn’t expect to be so easy was recycling the old kindle. Instead of having to hunt around for local recyclers, I just searched for Kindle recycling online and found this site through Amazon.com: http://recycling.ecotakeback.com. I entered my name, address, and email, and it printed a prepaid UPS label. That was it, so off to UPS it goes. That counts as responsible environmental stewardship by any measure!
I’m sure other companies have programs like this, so I’m interested to hear your experiences, both good and bad. Email me!
Mark Mills created headlines in the past week by claiming that all the power needed to bring data to the iPhone, plus all the related energy to manufacture it and the related network equipment, makes it responsible for as much electricity as two refrigerators. A more careful analysis confirms that Mr. Mills has overestimated the electricity associated with an iPhone by at least a factor of 18. Unfortunately, some parts of the media seem unable to ignore this verifiably false but otherwise quite memorable headline.
Introduction
Last week several of my friends alerted me to a claim that the iPhone uses as much electricity as two refrigerators when you count the energy needed to make it, run it and power the “behind-the-wall” equipment to deliver data to the device. Discussion of the original report (“The Cloud Begins with Coal”, hereafter CBC) showed up on the Breakthrough Institute site, Time Magazine Online, MSN News, the Huffington Post, MarketWatch, and Grist, among others (with most focusing on the comparison between a smart phone and one refrigerator.
When I heard this claim, it took me back to the year 2000, when Mark P. Mills and Peter Huber first made the claim that the networking electricity for a wireless Palm VII exceeded the electricity for running a refrigerator (1000 to 2000 kWh, they claimed, the lower bound of which was a bit higher than the average installed base for US fridges at that time). It didn’t sound plausible, and so I and some colleagues investigated, finding that Mr. Mills and Mr. Huber had overestimated the electricity needed to feed data to a wireless Palm VII by a factor of 2000 (Koomey et al. 2004).
Just as happened last time, Mr. Mills, in the CBC report, has made attention-getting claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny (Kawamoto et al. 2002, Koomey 2000, Koomey 2003, Koomey 2008, Koomey et al. 1999, Koomey et al. 2002, Koomey et al. 2004, Romm et al. 1999, Roth et al. 2002). He cherry picks numbers to achieve his desired results, and his report has vague or non-existent references (but lots of footnotes). This appears to be an attempt to create a patina of respectibility for his calculations while obfuscating his methods, but I don’t know for sure.
The big story here is why the media is paying any attention to this report at all. Mr. Mills proved more than a decade ago that he is not a reliable source on the issue of electricity used by information technology. His recent work simply confirms this conclusion. Unfortunately, it also confirms what seems to be an inability of most media outlets to report sensibly about technical topics, in part because of the pressure to generate attention-getting headlines, regardless of their veracity. This sorry episode does not make me optimistic for our ability as a society to deal with complex issues like climate change in the 21st century unless we change the way media reporting is conducted on technical issues.
Adriene Hill of NPR’s marketplace program did a nice job describing the fridge vs. iPhone story today (“No, your phone doesn’t use as much electricity as a refrigerator”). My favorite part of the story was my friend Bruce Nordman’s analogy about the three headed cat:
“If I came up to you and remarked to you that there is a one-headed cat around the corner from your house you would be totally uninterested,” says Bruce Nordman, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory*, “but if I said there was a three-headed cat you’d be amazed that it exists and want to go see it; so these fantastical assertions naturally attract people’s attention, whether or not they are real.”
Now that’s a great analogy. I wish I had thought of that!
For more background and history about the last time people made claims like these, see this recent post.
