Environment Forum

from Entrepreneurial:

Innovation is how we make our living: Is China buying?

-- Tom Lyon is the director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, and Peter Adriaens is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Zell Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies, both at the University of Michigan. The views expressed are their own. --

President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, called for America to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” But who is the competition, exactly? Who is presenting “our generation’s Sputnik moment”? Who are we racing against to put a million electric vehicles on the road? The president’s answer: China.

Encouraging American innovation is a major piece of the president’s strategy to win the future. And a global leadership position in innovation is ours to lose.

During another era of innovation, the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the U.S. was perhaps the best market in the world for the launch of the Internet. Now, China is arguably the best market today for deployment of clean technology. China is adding energy production capacity, cars on the road, and new cities faster than any other country in the world. Plus, it has the financial and political power to direct the market to move away from cheaper, legacy technologies.

So how can U.S. researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs profit from the market in China while preserving innovation leadership? That’s a question we first explored during the University of Michigan’s Clean Tech Symposium this past December. In our view, the overwhelming message of the symposium was that the U.S. and China are well matched in bringing together the supply and demand for cleantech innovation.

Keynote speakers Peggy Liu of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), and Professor C.S. Kiang of Beijing University described a cash-rich China hungry to address ballooning energy demand and rampant environmental degradation. At the same time, they said, a shift is occurring in China towards greater acceptance of foreign innovation.

The Green Gauge: Kimberly-Clark, NCR face pollution charges

Leading this week’s Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies in the news for behavior affecting the environment, are Kimberly-Clark and NCR who are being sued along with seven others for PCB pollution dating back more than 50 years.

Selections of headlines about publicly-traded companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Kimberly-Clark Corp. and NCR Corp.

The long-lasting risks of environmental pollution were revealed recently, as the U.S. Department of Justice filed a major law suit against Kimberly-Clark, NCR, and nine other companies to pay for continued clean-up and environmental restoration work relating to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) pollution in Wisconsin’s Fox River and Green Bay from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.  Although $300 million has already been paid for clean-up efforts at the site, the Department of Justice claims that $550 million of additional clean-up and $400 million of natural resource restoration work is still required.  The lawsuit claims that the companies originally responsible for the pollution have resisted taking full financial responsibility for the  clean-up costs as well as the efforts necessary to repair the long-term damage to natural resources that resulted from the pollution.

from The Great Debate:

Smart grid skepticism derails Baltimore plan

Maryland Public Service Commission highlighted the political resistance smart-metering advocates must overcome when it shot down proposals for compulsory smart metering submitted by Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE).

Smart grids are essential for the Obama administration's and power industry's plan to meet rising electricity demand while integrating more renewable generation into the grid.

Creating flexibility on the demand side to match increased intermittency in supply is the only way to maintain reliability without having to build enormous amounts of expensive back-up gas-fired generating capacity and disfigure the landscape by installing thousands of miles of transmission lines.

BGE's initiative has already been approved by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive $200 million of federal funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the centrepiece of the Obama administration's stimulus package. It is one of the largest grants for electricity infrastructure made under the act. Of the total, $136 million would be spent on rolling out "advanced metering infrastructure" (AMI). SEMI-SMART GRID But BGE still needs approval from the state public service commission (PSC) for key elements of the system. The company's proposals, as submitted to the commission, consist of three major components:

(1) Universal deployment of smart meters throughout BGE's service territory, replacing or upgrading all existing customer electric and gas meters.

(2) Installing a related two-way communication network between the power utility, the smart meter and the premise.

(3) Implementing a mandatory "Smart Energy Pricing" (SEP) schedule for all residential electric customers. The SEP schedule would vary electricity rates during the peak months from June to September based on the time of day and time of week.