Feed: SAFETY IN NUMBERS

Time for a new offset project - this time it’s wind turbines on two family farms in northern Iowa.

Image credit: NativeEnergy

Once again we’re working with our partner NativeEnergy to support a small project that fights climate change and strengthens the local community. The project’s emissions reductions will be validated and verified under the Verified Carbon Standard.

This latest project involves two 1.6 MW turbines, one on Ruth and Ken Benjegerdes farm, the other on Lesley and Nora Mammen’s. Both families have watched as wind turbines transform this mostly coal-powered landscape, bringing jobs, increased tax revenue, and rural economic development. Young people who used to leave the towns have begun to stay, and farmers are welcoming a new source of critical income.

Lesley Mammen was born in Iowa, although he left for several years before returning home. He and his wife, Nora, can see a large wind farm from their property, which inspired them to investigate wind on their own land.

Ken Benjegerdes is the grandson of the original homesteaders, and his family has owned the land for nearly 100 years. From the porch of the house in which he was born, Ken and Ruth can now look over their fields of soybeans and corn to watch their own turbine produce renewable energy.

As always, we’re proud to help our customers and cardholders build a clean energy future.

We’re back from the Cleanweb Hackathon! It was a great weekend of meeting entrepreneurs in the clean tech space, joining forces with some of New York’s finest hackers, and hanging out at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications space.

Image credit: @greenskeptic, Instagram

Hacking

Andy, Seamus and I helped two teams write apps and help get others up and running with our CM1 API and public data.

I helped prototype an app, CleanGPA, which gives you a GPA-like score based on your home energy usage. We developed with Rails, and aside from a few hangups around OAuth, I was once again amazed at how fast you can build an app with tools like devise, formtastic. I’ve also been thrilled with the ease and speed of using faraday and vcr as tools to build clients against RESTful APIs.

Yoga & Juice

We also had the pleasure of sponsoring an hour-long yoga session. It was intense but energized me for the rest of the day. My abs are still a little sore!

After yoga, we enjoyed some cleansing juices from Liquiteria. I am a huge fan of ginger and these drinks really hit the spot.

The Apps

The winning apps were Econofy, an efficient appliance shopping guide and, NYCBldgs, a tool that highlights the best and worst-performing buildings in New York City. Econofy did a great job rating products on a five-point scale and helping to calculate money saved by projecting electricity costs. NYCBldgs put New York’s public building energy usage data to good use. I was amazed that the city was opening up so much useful data like this. It really goes a long way in helping us “clean tech hackers” get the job done.

One of the benefits of living in Michigan is getting to swing over to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Here are the most interesting sustainability themes I noticed this year.

More electric

Nearly every auto maker offers some sort of hybrid, electric, or diesel-powered car. It seems like not very long ago there were only a few companies offering hybrids and many alternative fuel cars were merely concepts. Even Dodge, not normally known for fuel efficiency, boasted of the new Dart offering improved fuel economy with its turbocharged engine.

I am a geek and one of the neat parts about the auto show is the way the auto makers display their technology. A few companies displayed the inner workings of their electric drivetrains and batteries. It’s very eye-opening to see how many batteries they can stuff into the cars and how may batteries are required just to propel a 2,000lb car at speeds we’re accustomed to. It was also fun to listen to visitors from the auto industry examine and critique the construction of the Tesla drivetrain. It reminded me of all the time I’ve spent evaluating and choosing open source software projects on Github.

Alternative fuels for fleets

A company called VIA really intrigued me. They convert GM trucks and vans into electric vehicles that operate similarly to the Volt. A unique benefit of essentially converting a utility truck into a mobile generator is that you can plug any of your electric tools into an outlet connected to the engine. This sort of conversion could really benefit companies looking to reduce emissions and/or save on fuel costs. Since these are OEM conversions, they will appear in next year’s EPA fuel economy guide, which means they’ll show up in our database, too!

Car alternatives

With all of the improved gas-burning cars and flashy new (and expensive) “battery-guzzling” electric cars, I was surprised to see something you’d never expect to see at an auto show - bicycles, scooters, and personal rapid transit cabs. Since these smaller vehicles only need a battery a tenth of the size of an electric car (or smaller), these could end up being a more practical solution for many.

Overall, smaller, more efficient vehicles are here in force. There were still plenty of powerful, sporty cars and trucks, but even these are seeing efficiency improvements. For everyday driving, though, better efficiency is a win for the environment - as long as we also reduce or maintain overall vehicle miles traveled.

We’re close to finishing some exciting updates to our Lodging model: soon it will be able to identify the actual hotel a client stayed at and use that property’s physical characteristics to calculate energy use and emissions.

A key piece in this process is the hotel database we just purchased from Northstar Travel Media.

Northstar’s database covers more than 200,000 hotels worldwide. Along with a unique identifier for each property, it includes locational information and building attributes such as when the hotel was built, when it was last renovated, and how many rooms it has. It also provides some important energy use indicators like how many rooms are air-conditioned.

With this new data we’ll be able to fine-tune our energy and emission predictions to reflect the actual characteristics of the hotel where a lodging occurred, rather than relying on broader averages. This is particularly exciting because it will let us start to show differences in emissions between hotels in the same city.

We’re psyched to be sponsoring—and participating in—this weekend’s Cleanweb Hackathon in New York City.

As usual, we’ll be holding a series of Healthy Hacker activities over the course of the weekend. (Above is a shot of the Healthy Hacker yoga class we held during EcoHackNYC in November.)

Brian Nygard, a YTTP instructor, will be leading a yoga session for attendees at 2pm on Saturday. If you want a spot, make sure to put your name on the list first thing in the morning, as space will be limited.

At 3pm we’re going to have fresh cold-pressed detox juices delivered by NYC’s famous Liquiteria.

If you haven’t signed up for the Hackathon, all the more reason to sign up now!

Our fuzzy_match library for Ruby can help link (cross-reference) records across data sources—for example, match up aircraft records from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Federal Aviation Administration:

90% of the way by default

Let’s look at only the Boeing 737 records for now…

bts_records = [
  'Boeing 737-800', 'Boeing 737-5/600lr', 'Boeing 737-500',
  'Boeing 737-400', 'Boeing 737-300lr', 'Boeing 737-300',
  'Boeing 737-100/200', 'Boeing 737-200c'
]
faa_records = [
  '737-100', '737-200, Surveiller (CT-43, VC-96)',
  '737-300', '737-400', '737-500', '737-600',
  '737-700, BBJ, C-40', '737-800, BBJ2', '737-900',
  '737 Stage 3 (US ONLY)',
]
require 'fuzzy_match'
puts [ 'BTS'.ljust(24), 'FAA' ].join    # print a nice table header
matcher = FuzzyMatch.new(faa_records)   # set up a matcher object
bts_records.each do |bts|
  faa = matcher.find(bts)               # given BTS record as input, find a matching FAA record
  puts [ bts.ljust(24), faa ].join      # print a row showing the match
end

which produces

$ ruby example.rb
BTS                     FAA
Boeing 737-800          737-800, BBJ2
Boeing 737-5/600lr      737-600
Boeing 737-500          737-500
Boeing 737-400          737-400
Boeing 737-300lr        737-300
Boeing 737-300          737-300
Boeing 737-100/200      737-100
Boeing 737-200c         737-100  # <- oops!

Add rules to get to 95%

Fuzzy matching may catch 90% by itself, but you will have to define rules to get to 95%.

In this case, the error is “Boeing 737-200c” matching “737-100”. Let’s use an “identity” rule for “7X7-XXX”…

identities = [
  %r{(7\d7)-?(\d\d\d)} # when comparing two records that both contain 7X7, make sure all the digits (but not the dash) are equal
]
matcher = FuzzyMatch.new(faa_records, :identities => identities)

which produces the correct match

Boeing 737-200c         737-200, Surveiller (CT-43, VC-96)

Rules and options

Check out the fuzzy_match documentation for all the kinds of rules…

• :blockings
• :normalizers
• :identities
• :stop_words

and also options you can pass to find…

• :read
• :must_match_blocking
• :must_match_at_least_one_word
• :first_blocking_decides

That’s it!

Have we really created a RESTful web service? If so, why are we specifying that users send POST requests to get calculations? I asked this question to the rest of my team and a lively debate ensued among us.

Under the REST convention we use GET requests to retrieve data that represents some entity pointed to by a URI. We use POST to create a new entity on the server.

When a CM1 user POSTs a calculation request to our service, e.g. POSTing “airline=Delta” to http://brighterplanet.com/flights.json, a flight calculation isn’t actually stored on our server. Instead, a calculation is run against the data that exists in our database. Why then do we use the POST verb if no resource is actually created?

To answer this question, W3C has a handy guide for determining which verbs are appropriate in different situations:

1.3 Quick Checklist for Choosing HTTP GET or POST

Use GET if:
  * The interaction is more like a question (i.e., it
    is a safe operation such as a query, read operation,
    or lookup).
Use POST if:
  * The interaction is more like an order, or
  * The interaction changes the state of the
    resource in a way that the user would perceive
    (e.g., a subscription to a service), or
  * The user be held accountable for the results
    of the interaction.

However, before the final decision to use HTTP GET
or POST, please also consider considerations for
sensitive data and practical considerations.

In our case, we have two reasons to use POST:

1. The calculation request results in the user being billed for usage – “the user is held accountable” for the results.
2. The request contains sensitive information – the user’s API key – which should not be included in a link to a calcuation. That is, a GET URL should double as a hyperlink reference, but we don’t want the API key to be revealed (as in http://impact.brighterplanet.com/flights.json?key=ABC123.) Every calculation result includes a GET-able methodology link that doesn’t include the API key, so you can safely share the link once the calculation is made.

We’ve just posted a brief report on our research page with the top five sustainability trends we’re watching out for in 2012. From new pressures to new areas of focus to new management techniques, we think the next year is gearing up to be a big one for the sustainability aroud the world. What would you add to our list?

As of today, Brighter Planet’s cardholders have offset more than 285,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. By simply using your Brighter Planet credit and debit cards in your daily lives, you’ve helped fund 20 renewable energy and sustainable forestry projects, bringing green jobs to rural America, proving the viability of community-scale clean technologies, and preventing nearly two weeks worth of GHG, SO₂, mercury, and particulate pollution from a typical coal-fired power plant.

The CO₂ you’ve collectively prevented is equivalent to:

• Every home in the US shutting off all its lights for more than 4 days
• The emissions sequestered by 33 million tree saplings in a year
• More than 10 million people biking to work for a day instead of driving
• Each cardholder powering their home with renewable energy for 3 weeks
• Grounding all air travel to and from NYC for more than 5 days

Keep up the good work!

Last week we posted our 2011 holiday card, which has seen quite a bit of traffic since. There’s actually some pretty interesting new technology under the hood, so I thought I’d put together this behind-the-scenes blog post for anybody who’s interested.

When designing the card, I knew that I wanted to use a kind of real time animation to express the diverse flow of calculations that CM1 is performing at any given time. Until recently “real time” on the client side meant polling, but the recent introduction of WebSockets has changed all that.

Ultimately I decided to use Pusher, an incredible service that abstracts away a lot of the messiness of using WebSockets in a “pubsub” architecture. Implementing Pusher on the server side meant adding this single line to the right place in CM1’s codebase:

::Pusher['queries'].trigger!('announce', billed_query.slice('emitter', 'carbon_value'))

What this does: every time a calculation is made on CM1, the “queries” channel within the “CM1” app of our Pusher account receives an “announce” notification including two details from the query (the name of the impact model and its footprint).

On the client side, the app sets up every browser to act as a “subscriber” to this channel with these three lines in index.html:

pusher = new Pusher('4441a27a742385492eb3'); // that's our public Pusher key
queries = pusher.subscribe('queries');
queries.bind('announce', displayQuery)

Now, every time a query is performed on CM1, Pusher gets a notification, and this kicks off notifications to all of the browsers currently looking at the card, each of which execute the displayQuery function with the impact model’s name and footprint as parameters.

OK, now we now how the card gets the details to display as snowflakes, but how do we draw the actual snowflakes themselves?

For this we use HTML5’s Canvas element for dynamic drawing and animation. In truth, most of the messy animation stuff is handled by the excellent Three.js library; the appearance and motion of the snow was inspired by a post from Seb Lee-Delisle. I just made a few visual modifications and wired it all up to the notifications coming in from Pusher.

So, there you have it. Happy to clarify things or answer questions in the comments. Happy holidays!

Every year we do a holiday card for our friends (remember last year’s?) that connects the work we do to some aspect of the season. Click the image to check out this year’s card:

There’s some fancy new technology under the hood (more on that in a later blog post here), so you’ll need a new-ish browser.

Wishing you all the best in 2012, Patti and the team

Two years ago we reported the results of our first survey on employee sustainability engagement, to a surprising amount of interest from non-profits, businesses, and governments. Today we’re releasing our second biennial survey results on the subject, updating the picture of engagement initiatives, digging deeper into best practices for effective programs, and analyzing trends in this fast-evolving space.

We heard from nearly 1000 respondents in 47 states and 51 countries, including employees at WalMart, Visa, UPS, Coca-Cola, Exxon, McDonalds, the US Government, and many other leading organizations. Three things that surprised us from this year’s findings that folks working on green engagement initiatives should keep in mind include:

1. It’s not all rosy. Green engagement programs are becoming less effective as they spread. Employers are promoting staff conservation at higher rates than in 2009, but the number of programs rated as “very effective” or “somewhat effective” at actually eliciting green employee actions dropped notably. Are program leaders failing to heed best practices established at the most successful organizations, or are new programs simply slow on the uptake? Either way, it suggests the possibility that employee weariness at ineffective sustainability initiatives could undermine promising progress in this space if it’s not taken seriously.

2. Breadth is key. A defining characteristic of the most effective programs (compared to those that promote sustainability frequently but have low effectiveness) is that they focus more in emerging green issues like procurement, water use, and business travel. Interestingly, they’re no more likely to promote traditional sustainability issues like recycling, energy use, and commuting than their less successful counterparts. Expanding beyond these basic issues signals forward thinking and perhaps a more genuine environmental commitment – characteristics that are more likely to inspire employee action.

3. Data is power. Organizations that collect data on their footprint, the impact of staff travel and commuting, and employee sustainability efforts were roughly three times as likely to have a very effective program. And this group is growing, with the number of employers collecting these data increasing 15% since 2009, to three in ten.

The full report is available for free download on our research page.

We’d also like to thank Conservation International’s Business & Sustainability Council for helping to get the word out about the survey.

The primary way to experiment with CM1 is to hit the API directly—either with code, a tool like cURL, or with our CM1 console. But sometimes it’s just easier to play around in a browser, so today we’re rolling out a Query Builder feature for each of our impact models. Details after the jump.

To get started, visit the details page for any of our impact models—you’ll find the model’s query builder at the bottom of its page.

On the left is where you build your request by adding, defining, and tweaking characteristics according to the model’s API (click the “characteristics API” link on that same page for full details).

As you type, the query builder will continuously submit your request to CM1. Interpretations of your characteristics will display below the text fields, and the carbon impact will update on the right. In the lower right you’ll find some useful representations of this query, including a human-readable methodology link and a copy-pastable cURL command.

Check out some pre-built queries by using the example dropdown in the upper-right. We’ll be adding many more example queries over the coming week.

This is a time of unprecedented threat to the environment brought about by increasing population and consumption – but it’s also an age of unprecedented opportunity for innovating solutions to these challenges. Increasing migration of daily decisions and activities to cyberspace, and increasing availability of valuable data resources, are giving software developers more opportunity than ever to build data-driven apps that power more sustainable decisions. The movement to build data-driven green apps is just getting started, and the government, business, and non-profit organizations with the data to power these innovative tools have an important role to play in helping ensure their success.

That’s the focus of our latest report, entitled Growing the Green Apps Ecosystem. The paper, edited by Ethan McMahon at the EPA’s Office of Environmental Information, outlines best practices for data providers in engaging green developers and ensuring their data provision is as developer-friendly as possible. The paper combines the results of interviews we conducted with various green developers, our own experience working with data providers and green apps, and Ethan’s fact-checking perspective as an EPA official helping lead the movement for green apps innovation.

In the paper we reassess open data practices for data providers, explaining how a focus on data orientation and life cycle can help ensure that open data practices actually meet developer needs. We also outline seven tactics for engaging developers in the creation of green apps, including hackathons, APIs, contests, and data support channels. You can read the full report here.

Sometime in the darkest hours of Halloween night, our CM1 platform processed its 20,000,000th calculation. Hurray!

But wait: after a couple days of intense analysis, we’re concluding that the Residence impact being computed was that of a bona fide haunted house. We present our argument below.

Here’s the raw request characteristics (location removed to protect the innocent residents):

{ :acquisition => "2008-09-01",
  :air_conditioner_use => "NOT USED AT ALL",
  :annual_coal_volume_estimate => "0.0",
  :annual_fuel_oil_volume_estimate => "0.0",
  :annual_kerosene_volume_estimate => "0.0",
  :annual_propane_volume_estimate => "0.0",
  :annual_wood_volume_estimate => "0.0",
  :clothes_drier_use => "1",
  :dishwasher_use => "4 TO 6 TIMES A WEEK",
  :floors => "1",
  :floorspace_estimate => "111.484",
  :freezer_count => "0",
  :monthly_electricity_use_estimate => "600.0",
  :occupation => "0.937",
  :ownership => "false",
  :refrigerator_count => "1",
  :residence_class => "APARTMENT BUILDING WITH 2-4 UNITS",
  :residents => "3",
  :retirement => "2009-10-07",
  :timeframe => "2011-01-01/2012-01-01",
  :urbanity => "TOWN" }

As you see, the evidence is clear. Who, besides restless spirits, never use air conditioning? And the 94% occupancy rate means the “residents” are absent 21 days per year—roughly the number of days with a full or near-full moon. Could these dear tenants be, perhaps, quietly stalking the unaware?

Sure, we can’t explain why these three poltergeist lodgers would need a refrigerator or wash so many dishes, but, after all, there’s no accounting for taste.

So there we have it, proof positive: ghosts are using CM1.

HootRoot, our travel footprint mapping app, has been declared a winner in the EPA’s Apps for the Environment Challenge! Of the five awards announced in this nationwide contest for the best apps powered by EPA data, HootRoot was named the number two Best Overall App. Light Bulb Finder, a great mobile app that guides your transition away from incandescents, took first place.

Hootroot helps you navigate efficiently from point A to point B. It’s powered by Brighter Planet CM1, Google Maps, and HopStop. The app provides directions, travel times, and carbon footprints for driving, public transit, flying, and human-powered transportation options on any route. Check out video and screenshots of the app on our contest submission page.

The contest required participants to use EPA data. HootRoot relies on multiple EPA data sets to power its transportation carbon calculations: Fuel Economy Guide for car trips, eGRID for train and bus electricity emissions, and US Greenhouse Gas Inventory for fuel emissions factors across all transport modes. It’s also powered by data from Energy Information Agency, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and other sources.

The EPA has emerged as a leader in recent years in the push for opening government data and engaging the developer community in creating apps useful to the public, and this contest is an innovative part of that strategy.

We’ll be at the EPA’s Green Apps Forum in Arlington, VA on November 8 to accept the award and participate in discussions about the future of the growing environmental apps movement. It promises to be a very engaging event, and will be streamed online if you can’t make it in person.

1. Come at 7:30PM on November 4th to Tisch ITP's turn-of-the-century industrial loft and see if there's a project you want to hack on.
   
   
2. Advance the new Science Code Manifesto:

   Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress.

3. Share food, drinks, and yoga provided by Brighter Planet (who clearly know how to throw a party, e.g. Friday night at CodeConf 2011): (and here's the tweet to prove it)

Needless to say, we’re proud to sponsor Eco Hack NY!

Brighter Planet is working on a paper outlining the growing ecosystem of green apps, and if you are a software developer who’s worked in this area, we want your perspective. By sharing your thoughts about your own apps and the broader movement, you’ll help inform our best practices for engaging developers and could get a bump by having your app covered as a case study in the paper.

The short questionnaire shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes: https://brighterplanet.wufoo.com/forms/green-apps-developers/

Within the broad field of environmental apps, we’re particularly interested in one subset: tools that use hard data to help individuals and small organizations make more informed, sustainable decisions. The EPA has recently put the spotlight on apps like this in their Apps for the Environment Challenge. At Brighter Planet, our Developer Fellowship also provides support for work in this space. We’d love to hear from developers participating in these initiatives and others.

The paper will present our thinking on the state of the green apps ecosystem, explore challenges and opportunities in igniting innovation, and highlight examples of cool apps and developer engagement initiatives.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We’ll let you know when the paper is released!

Last week I joined a panel on effective sustainability at the World Energy Engineering Conference (WEEEC). I used the findings from our 2010 employee engagement in sustainability survey to argue that effective sustainability programs bring sustainability information to the right people in the right places. Something, according to our survey, far too few organizations are doing.

We’re undertaking a second survey on sustainability in the workplace to see how/if things have evolved over the last year. We’d love to hear your insight on the topic

Here’s a guest post from our good friend and former Planeteer Carolyn Barnwell, who’s now involved, among other things, in Carbon Nation, an important new documentary on climate change. Without further ado …

Sometimes the best way to promote clean energy is to ignore climate change and focus on things like jobs, money and national security. Carbon Nation is a solutions-based, non-partisan documentary that illustrates why it’s smart to be a part of the new, low-carbon economy. It just came out on DVD and Video On Demand! The movie’s message dovetails perfectly with the trail-blazing carbon data integration that Brighter Planet is doing.

Award-winning director Peter Byck has traveled around the country with the film for over a year. He says, “We seem to have cracked the nut of communicating clean energy, energy efficiency, energy & national security to conservatives, even Tea Party folks.” When it comes to the low-carbon economy, he says, we are not a polarized country. It’s good business, it emboldens national and energy security, and it improves health and the environment.   Carbon Nation features a cast of engaging characters from towns big and small, and introduces us to a new wave of American ingenuity. One-armed Texas cotton farmer Cliff Etheredge & his small farm-owning neighbors create the world’s largest wind farm.

Colonel Dan Nolan (US Army, Ret.), an outspoken “Green Hawk,” is working to make military bases and the Pentagon more energy efficient, not only saving fuel, but soldiers’ lives. Col. Nolan says, “Climate change in fact is a national security issue. This is no longer the purview of Birkenstock-wearing tree huggers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

The cast also includes: Richard Branson (CEO, Virgin Group), Thomas L. Friedman (The New York Times), James Woolsey (former CIA Director), Bernie Karl (Geothermal pioneer from Alaska), Denis Hayes (Founder of Earth Day), Van Jones (Founder, Green For All) and more climate change pioneers. I have been fortunate to seen Van Jones speak in person a few times and his openness in this movie showed a more vulnerable and accessible side of him that’s quite moving.
  In a final plug, I’ll share the Huffington Post’s review: “Entertaining … endearing … and exceptional. This is not just a film worth seeing, but it is one that is well worth sharing—as widely as possible.” You can watch the trailer, buy the DVD, or even sign up to join over 400 others who have hosted a screening at their website. At the moment I’m writing this, there are only 10 copies left on Amazon … I say go for the DVD because it includes tons of special features and even a full second documentary, “Garbage,” which was a Best Documentary winner at SXSW Film Festival!