CleanTechnica

Nike has been one green company lately — in the last year, it has pushed for a strong clean energy and climate bill in Congress on its own and in concert with others and it has helped to reduce deforestation of the Amazon. Now, Nike has also just reported that it reduced its own carbon footprint last year while still growing economically. In fact, it has tremendously reduced greenhouse gas pollution over the last decade and 2009 just kept the ball rolling.

On top of all of that, Nike announced today that along with nine other organizations — Yahoo!, Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, nGenera, Outdoor Industry Association, salesforce.com, and 2degrees — Nike will “collaborate and share intellectual property (IP) which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.” This “Web-based marketplace” — GreenXchange (GX) — was announced at a CEO breakfast at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this morning.

If this all has you feeling warm inside, read on.

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It’s not a team from the Sunshine State (Florida), but one from equally sunny California. The NBA team with a huge new solar installation is the Golden State Warriors.

You may think that putting some solar panels on a practice facility isn’t a big deal. But when you consider that this solar installation will save the team $2 million in electricity costs over the next couple of decades ($36,000 in its first year of operation), that changes things a bit.

The Golden State Warriors cut the ribbon on this new installation on Thursday, January 21^st.

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That takes my breath away. In one of the biggest renewable energy deals in the history of the world, a Korean consortium led by Samsung* has agreed to build 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power capacity in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Samsung C&T and the Ontario government signed the deal on Thursday, January 21^st. The agreement will bring thousands of jobs and clean energy for more than half a million homes to Ontario.

Building off of this new deal, Korean trade officials plan to make Ontario their base of operations for all of North American.

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Business leaders from a diverse range of sectors and interests have called on Obama and Congress to make clean energy legislation a reality this year. Together, they have written a letter to Obama and Congress urging them to realize that we are very quickly being left behind by Asia, Europe and others on the technologies and jobs of the future.

The “We Can Lead” companies include eBay, Starbucks, Nike, Timberland, Hewlett-Packard, Gap Inc., Virgin America, Exelon, PG&E, and dozens of others.

Why are they behind climate and energy legislation? Among other reasons (i.e. we need it to address human-induced, super fast, catastrophic climate change), these businesses make the point that it would create 1.7 million new jobs in the US.

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Yeah, that’s what I said — What?!

Apparently, Bell Labs has launched a global effort to overhaul the internet and other communication networks to make them 1,000 times greener by the year 2015!

Bell Labs is the research arm of telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent. In this effort they are coordinating with 15 other initial members from industry, academia, science labs, and NGOs, including AT&T, China Mobile, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics. “Green Touch” is the name being given to the consortium.

How much energy do the internet and other communication networks use? They emit about the same amount of greenhouse gas pollution as 50 million cars — 300 million tons each year.

This consortium, along with anyone else who joins it (more on this below), is looking to make yearly emissions in 2015 a few times less than what the current daily emissions are.

The system for producing this green internet and communications revolution is quite unique.

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The 3,000 members of the Jemez Pueblo tribe in New Mexico are looking to build the first utility-scale solar power plant on tribal land. They are also looking to make some money on it.

It is no secret that Native American tribes are more likely to be poverty-stricken and they generally have more than twice the unemployment rate of the United States. Former Jemez Pueblo governor James Roger Magdalena says, “We don’t have any revenue coming in except for a little convenience store.”

It is estimated this solar power plant could generate $25 million over the next quarter century and help create a sustainable revenue for his tribe.

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Google is doing a lot these days to help the environment. Now, they have just filed to buy and sale wholesale electricity. Are they looking to enter the utility market?

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Lanner, a business software specialist, just launched a new version of its WITNESS software suite in order to help companies evaluate how their decisions will affect the environment.

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When I read about the training workshops for small wind power dealers for WePower, I found no information on the site to let you know how much their units will cost. But if you want to sell (or buy) their vertical axis revolving wind turbines, you’d want to know how cost-effective they are.

Here is how you can calculate the cost per kilowatthour for (any given) small wind turbine install, once you know your wind speed range, the output, and how long you’d get power from it, plus the unit cost.

Once you know these numbers, you can do the math yourself. We have all the numbers we need to do the math, other than the cost per turbine. You can contact the manufacturer to get that.
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Let this serve as a caveat emptor for anyone considering buying solar from an oil company. The World Bank is being stiffed by Shell Oil for a measly few hundred thousand dollars to repair its shoddy solar panels left dangling in the developing world with no aftermarket servicing.

Shell had briefly entered the solar business in a small green-washing effort, but exited with no plans for honoring its after-sales service and warranty replacements, which thus  damaged the same small local solar installation, maintenance and repair businesses it had earlier helped to create.
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