Last week, at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in Seoul, Autodesk, Inc., a world leader in 2D and 3D design and engineering software, announced that it will collaborate with the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) and the Microsoft Corporation, to provide visualization technology for Project Two Degrees. Project Two Degrees is an Internet-based application that provides cities with a set of tools to measure, compare, and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at a local level.
Autodesk joins forces with the Clinton Foundation to build sustainable cities
Autodesk will provide the technology, initially based on Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise, that will act as the model-based visualization environment used to view, evaluate and compare the results of analysis and monitoring in the C40 city. Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise software is a powerful mapping solution for delivering information more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively via the web.
Green Building Elements had a chance to speak with Brett Smith of Autodesk and Olivia Ross of the Clinton Foundation. Here is what they had to say.
GBE: How does the software track emissions?
Brett Smith (Autodesk): The Project 2° Emissions Tracker is designed to measure as many municipal and corporate activities as possible. Users enter data on emission producing activities such as fuel and electricity consumption, vehicle traffic, waste production, industrial processes and air and sea vessel fuel use. The software then converts the data into greenhouse gases, including tons of CO2 equivalent, taking into consideration the source and type of activity.
By Alex Felsinger •
March 12, 2009
Microsoft has announced plans to make both their headquarters and their products more environmentally sound.
With energy-conservation, use of renewable energy, improved data center design, and reduction in air travel, the company plans to reduce their carbon emissions by 30 percent compared to 2007 levels by 2012.
By Alan Smith •
March 4, 2009
After years of railing against special interests, I find myself presented with a quandary. Special interests are lining up behind the Smart Grid technology I love and, in doing so, risk saddling this cool program with the baggage intrinsic to special interests.
By Lucille Chi •
March 1, 2009
Microsoft presents it’s vision of the year 2019, and I’m so pleased to see some thinking on the green tech side, as I’ve tried to capture in the screen-stills below. Ten years is not too far out, and some of these ideas are fun. For example:
* Connected classrooms where learners share a lesson in natural systems
* Smart home energy monitoring
* Better ecological awareness (through cataloging and intuitive access)
* Urban green roofs
By Matthew Phelan •
February 20, 2009
Sun Well Solar—a subsidiary of the notoriously poor CD and DVD manufacturer, CMC Magnetics—has announced today that it is one month ahead of schedule in the ramp-up of its new photovoltaic production line.
By Reenita Malhotra •
February 13, 2009
It’s official. Microsoft has announced its latest ‘Me-too’ venture to emulate its rival Apple: a PC and Microsoft retail purchase experience for consumers worldwide through the development and opening of the company’s own retail stores.
By Ariel Schwartz •
September 16, 2008
It’s that time of year again—Greenpeace has released the 9th edition of The Guide to Greener Electronics. The guide scores companies based on a set of criteria for chemicals, e-waste, and energy.
This year, Nokia regained its first place crown with a rating of 7 out of 10 points. The company performed well in a variety of areas— it has an excellent take-back policy in India, and all new products since 2005 are vinyl-plastic (PVC) free. Additionally, all models released after 2009 will be free of brominated flame retardants (BFR) and antimony trioxide.
Once consigned to reading tech magazines, green entrepreneurs in the tech space now are drifting to business sites - as it should be. More and more tech sites are covering business issues and more importantly, business sites, particularly those focused on green business are delving into the technology, particularly computer technology, fields.
Green entrepreneurs of every stripe face similar business challenges.
How to write a marketing plan.
How to handle inventory.
And in a tighter money era, how to find financing.
By Mark Seall •
February 13, 2008
Just how green is the Internet? Going virtual has the potential to save significant amounts of energy, with a recent study predicting that Internet services could reduce carbon emissions by staggering 1 billion tons.
But look beyond the green hype, and the web has a dark secret - at the other end of your Internet cable, humming away, and hidden from sight, are thousands of energy hungry datacenters, running 24/7 and estimated to be using energy equivalent to all of the color televisions in the US. Worldwide datacenter energy usage has doubled since 2001 and is set to double again by 2011.
Google is today’s biggest datacenter operator, having more than twice the server capacity of any other firm in the world, but this could be set to change. The proposed merger of Microsoft and Yahoo would create a rival Internet giant with similarly huge capacity, creating new competition at many different levels.
By Kristin Dispenza •
December 18, 2007
It seems that journalism has become a pretty green profession.
Whether I am blogging or working for a more traditional media outlet, I can get almost any information I need simply by using the internet. So with a paperless home office, and no travel to speak of, just about the only ecological cost of doing business is the electricity that my computer uses… my computer, and, well, all of the servers that transport the e-mail, photos, and other data that I need.
How much electricity might that require, exactly? It turns out that our worldwide increase of internet-based data transmission relies upon a growing number of data centers, or Web server farms, as they are sometimes called. A single server farm consists of an enormous warehouse holding data storage systems and tens of thousands of smaller, state-of-the-art servers which process the information for all of our online activities. In recent years the construction of new data centers has increased dramatically, driven by the fact that most software applications will soon be delivered as online service products rather than via physical means (such as CD-ROMs). An article in Fortune magazine last year described the building boom of these server farms; a good single case study is the spate of data centers that have recently located along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
By Jennifer Lance •
September 20, 2007
Green Options writer Maria Surma Manka suggested this simple tip she heard on NPR: change the margins of the documents you print, and save lots of paper. Smaller margins means more text per page with less wasted white space. The idea is simple: by switching the margins from the default 1" or 1.25" to .75" or less, we would us 4.75% less paper. This may not seem much for
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