Can You Spare 16 Cents?

Last month, politicians in Virginia shot down a deal in which Invenergy would sell its wind power to a large local utility. Regulators believed that the project would unfairly raise electricity costs in lieu of cheaper alternatives like natural gas. According to the New York Times, residential electric bills would have increased by 0.2 percent. Assuming the average residential bill is $80 (which it is), this would have increased the average homeowner’s bill by a whopping 16 cents. That’s about 2 tablespoons of a Starbuck’s coffee.

Healthy and secure world for ourselves and our children? No. Grande mocha frappuccino? Yes, please.

Our electric grid is very different than most people think. People assume that electricity production is subject to a thorny thicket of environment regulations. They also think that a mix of corporate greed and environmental legislation has caused sky-rocketing electricity bills unheard of in years past.

According to Credit Suisse, however, the American electric fleet is a dirty aging behemoth. Currently 70% of the coal fleet is over 30 years old and much of the fleet is lacking meaningful environmental controls like scrubbers and SCRs. “Of the roughly 340 GW of coal capacity, a little over 140 GW lack scrubbers or SCRs, 60 GW have scrubbers but no SCRs, 60 GW have SCRs but no scrubbers, and about 85 GW have both scrubbers and SCRs.” Thus, there is a meaningful hole in environmental controls across the US power generation fleet.

Not only is our electric fleet a lot dirtier than anyone imagines, electricity is cheaper than we imagine as well. The real cost of electricity nationally has actually fallen over the past 30 years, even with the rate step-ups from the early 1980s. Furthermore, spending on electricity and natural gas as a percentage of personal disposable income is currently at 50 year lows.

If you think solar power is an evil ploy from abroad destined to take down the US economy, you may point to the fact that three of the world’s largest solar markets are Germany, Japan and Italy, aka the original axis of evil. Today 2% of Germany’s power is supplied by solar power, compared to 0.1% in America. The country is on track to provide 20% of its power from solar by 2020. This momentous transformation has created thousands of jobs while providing much needed energy security for the nation, not to mention cleaner air and water. This has cost the average German ratepayer the equivalent of $1 per month.

Americans think that they have two options when it comes to green energy: pay now or don’t pay at all. Unfortunately, if we don’t pay now we will pay later and the pay later method is a HUGE environmental and economic unknown. The coal fleet is dying and it’s being replaced by a new breed of natural gas plants that rely on a dubious and undocumented extraction method known as fracking. Right now most of the negative externalities of fracking such as waste water creation, intense water usage, pumping billions of gallons of undisclosed chemicals underground, natural resource destruction, and green house gas emissions, are not incorporated in the price of the gas. If they were, natural gas would go up at least a percentage or two, and at most a whole lot of percentages.

In Kentucky this year, the public service commission voted down a contract for a local utility, Kentucky Power, to buy electricity from renewable energy provider NextEra Energy.

Kentucky’s Attorney General Jack Conway, joined by business and industrial electricity users, opposed the deal, contending that it would have increased a typical residential customer’s rates by about 0.7 percent and was “a discretionary expense” that the utility’s customers could ill afford.

What we can ill afford is to live in fear because we are killing our planet, losing the international green energy race, and all the while delaying the inevitable and unknown payments of cleaning up a mess of our own making.

Way to go Jack.

Water

La Blogotheque

Aloe Blacc | A Take Away Show - Part 2 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Portable Solar Powered Water Desalination System

A group of students from MIT recently put aside their gravity bongs and all night keggers to develop a portable solar powered water desalination system. The system can produce clean water in places where there is neither electricity nor clean water (nor?).

According to Steve Dubowsky, a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, "a small prototype desalination system can produce 80 gallons of water a day in a various weather conditions. A larger version could cost about $8,000 to construct and provide about 1,000 gallons of water a day."

The system uses reverse osmosis to remove salt from seawater. Electric power produced by the photovoltaic panel pushes seawater through various pumps. High-pressure water enters a vessel with a permeable membrane where minerals such as salt are removed as the water diffuses through the membrane.

I recently revisited Socotra via Google Earth (my favorite desert wasteland island teeming with somali pirates and burka clad housewives) and imagined myself plopping down one of these things along the coast. Would they welcome me and serve me some piping hot tea from their recently desalinated water? Perhaps they would put down their arms and get into the water business.

NorCal Google Earth screenshot

That's Fracked Up!

I just read that Chesapeke Energy is selling a $1.1 billion stake of its holdings in the Eagle Ford Shale to the Chinese state run oil company Cnooc. This is the largest ever purchase of US energy assets by a Chinese company, and it’s a scary thought to know this deal is happening in Texas.

Texas is notorious for slack environmental oversight on their oil and gas industry. The EPA has no authority to address contamination on active oil fields in the state. Instead, that authority is deferred to the Texas Railroad Commission, a department originally designed to regulate shipping rates. Unlike regulators in California and Pennsylvania, the Railroad Commission’s official policy is to allow companies to hire their own environmental consultants to monitor contamination. This has led to a long history of abuses by major oil companies like Exxon and Chevron.

Eagle Ford Shale is a rock formation located in multiple counties across South Texas. With huge deposits of oil and natural gas, its being billed as one of the hottest shale plays of the year! Chesapke Energy alone controls over 550,000 acres of this prized desert land bubbling with coyotes, marine toads and rattle snakes.

Unlike traditional oil drilling, which is considered a tried and true form of gas and oil extraction (think Deepwater Horizon), shale extraction is a much more dubious process. Shale is a fine grained rock that is known for its “fissility”, meaning its ability to shatter into many thin layers, almost like sand. Drillers exploit this phenomenon by using enormous volumes of water and chemicals to rupture the rocks and thus set free the decentralized oil and gas deposits. This method is known as “fracking”.

The scariest thing about fracking is that drilling companies do not have to disclose which chemicals they are pumping into our earth. They defend this industry secret by claiming that the chemicals are so far underground that there is no chance that they can leak up and infiltrate the water table.

This investment will quadruple the amount of rigs currently operating on the Eagle Ford Shale project. Let’s hope the Chinese government owned oil conglomerate employs some really honest regulators.

Renewable Girls Calendar is Here!

Hey Everyone! My calendar is finally printed and ready for order. Take a look at the solar girls and buy a calendar while supplies last! Holler

ama

Iwase Yoshiyuki was born in 1904 in Onjuku, a fishing village on the pacific side of the Chiba peninsula, which encloses Tokyo Bay on the east ... In the late 1920's Yoshiyuki received an early Kodak camera as a gift. Since the main livelihood of the town came from the sea he gravitated there, and soon found a passion for "the simple, even primitive beauty" of ama - girls and women who harvested seaweed, turban shells and abalone from beneath the coastal waters. 

Water temperatures on the Onjuku coast are bearable only between June and September. Large harvests were impossible to haul up in strong currents, so tides had to be favorable, limiting diving days to about 20 per year. Ama dove in three sessions per day, requiring extensive eating and warming at the fireside between runs.  A good daily harvest required 60 to 80 dives of up to two minutes each, soama had to develop and maintain substantial body fat to guard against hypothermia. With such rigors and risks, ama were paid enormous salaries, often making more in the short season than the village men made the whole year. In the late 1920s, there were around 200 active ama in Onjuku and the seven harbors of the region (Kohaduki, Ohaduki, Futamata, Konado, Tajiri, Koura and Nagahama). By the late 1960s, they had disappeared. This body of work stands as the final, most comprehensive visual document of the life and work of these divers.

this one's a tear jerker

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Speedzee

SPEEDZEE

The best business idea I’ve ever had.

This one has nothing to do with the environment. Nor does it help the common man.

Nonetheless, the other day, I came up with an idea that, strictly from a business perspective, might be the best one yet.

Name: Speedzee.org

Slogan: Speak with a human immediately. No Quete stuff.

Value Proposition: Speedzee offers consumers the option to pay a small fee to bypass telephone customer service lines.

What is Speedzee: When someone calls a company hoping to talk with customer service and are then put on hold, they will be offered the opportunity to pay a small fee to cut the line.

The script: We are experiencing higher than normal call volume. To speak with a customer service representative immediately please enter your speedzee.com password now.

At which point, a customer would enter their password and the next available customer service representative would pick up their call.

“Thanks for calling time warner cable, this is a Speedzee immediate call, how can I help you?”

The money: The price to cut the line will be fixed, so no matter what company the customer is calling, they know how much they will be charged to use Speedzee. Assuming the Speedzee fee is $1, when a customer enters their password they will be automatically charged. Of the $1 charged a certain percentage will go to Speedzee and another percentage would go to the company. Finally, to get over the moral qualms customers, companies, and I have with a pay to cut the line business model, another percentage would go to charity. So, assuming the charge is $1. When a customer enters his password, $0.50 will go to the host company, $0.25 will go to Speedzee, and another $0.25 will go to charity.

Thought: This was Speedzee can probably claimn that: “50% of Speedzee revenue goes to charity”. That would be pretty dope.

The host company: From the perspective of the host company, this should be a no brainer. Assuming the technology and workflow are easy to implement, this offers companies a brand new, dependable revenue stream. Furthermore, companies can now offer white glove service to customers that demand it. It also gives them the ability to fragment public sentiment, especially if they previously were branded as having dependably poor customer service.

“Will this piss off the other customers that don’t use Speedzee?”whispers the Customer Service Manager.

Perhaps. But not likely. First, if customers are using Speedzee, it probably means that they are already pissed off at the company and can’t stand waiting anymore. This is an opportunity for improvement. Think of the postal service. It used to be that you only had one option to mail your package. Then they created a new service where you could pay more to overnight ship a package. With Speedzee you are giving customers the opportunity to pay for an upgraded service.

Second, customers are very familiar with a pay to cut the line model. Think about Disney Land or Six Flags where people with the speed passes can saunter onto whatever ride they want bypassing the serpentine line filled with goth teenagers, awkwardly making out with braces. This model works quite well for amusement parks. Furthermore, in this case the customers can even visualize the fact they are getting cut. Third, Speedzee will be priced at a point that ensures some, but far from all customers will use service. Fourth, if the customer goes to Speedzee.org, they will be impressed with its bold social mission.

Now that we have nipped that question in the butt, let’s see if the host company has any incentives to use and abuse the system. Examples of that could be:

1.) Purposely exaggerate the wait time to encourage people to use Speedzee.

2.) Take the money but do not offer the immediate customer service that the brand gaurentees.

These are the only areas of abuse that come to my mind right now. How can Speedzee safeguard them from happening.

1.) In terms of the first concern “over-use of Speedzee,” this is a threat to the Speedzee model, because it could erode the brand over time. There are a couple mechanisms that Speedzee could use to keep this from happening.

a. Price the service at a low enough point so that the cost of sullying their own brand with the mirage of long call center wait lines is far worse than the money that could be made by the company from abusing the Speedzee system.

b. Maintain the right to see basic call center data, such as number of customers calling the company and the numbers using Speedzee. This will allow Speedzee to easily police any abuses. If the percentage of users is unreasonably high, this will set off an alarm for Speedzee users.

2.) In terms of the second concern above, I see this as a very real risk. How can Speedzee be sure that once people pay the fee they will indeed skip the line. A couple ideas:

a. The Speedzee No Quete Stuff 30 second guarantee- you speak in 30 seconds or Speedzee refunds in full—this would be a great mechanism to track bad service too based off of complaints.

b. Not in line with business incentives. If the company does not honor speedzee, then less people will use it. If less people use it, the business will lose money as well.

Marketing: One of the reasons I love this idea is because the product will market itself. What better time to learn about the new service then at the exact moment you would use it. If you’re sitting in line waiting to speak to a customer representative and they ask you to enter your Speedzee.org password to skip the line, wouldn’t you maybe go to speedzee.org to see what that is?

No? Okay, well certainly you would if over the course of a month you waited on three different companies’ customer service lines and each one of them asked for your Speedzee password.

The much harder sell will be getting companies to use Speedzee when the product is brand new.

Barriers to Entry: Very large barriers to entry because no host company can compete. It needs to be an independent third party whose password you can use at multiple companies sites. You make one account and, if you want, you never wait for customer service again.

The only other concern would be the same service offered from a new competing company. At which case, if Speedzee hit a critical mass of customers and businesses, it would be very hard for that company to offer a value proposition to customers to leave Speedzee and go to another company. Also, the companies would not want to have two different providers.

Potential Problems to the model: 1- Customer service wait times aren’t as long as I envision them, and perhaps they could go down with more online help.

-could be a problem, but one would think that companies would reduce their call center staff, and then, at times of high traffic, long waits would still arrive. Still though, a concern.

2- Clients with notoriously long lines will be unable to use such a service: aka: government and utility clients. Legally are they allowed to do this?

3- Technology is expensive to implement. I don’t know a goddamn thing about call center technology. If this is complicated and expensive to implement, it could be hard to get companies to sign on.

4- Fragmented call center work flow. If companies outsource to third-party call center services, could be harder to implement.

Wine In A Canteeni

I was completely ready for my first blog to be a masterpiece. It was a textbook one, two punch. Lightning bolt idea, visualization of the product, market opportunity, and a name. It always goes back to the name.

In my euphoric haze I went about envisioning the minor details that would lead to complete domination. I saw glittery pink fancy cursive letters with the words "Wine in a Canteeni" wrapping around a shiny silver mini can.

Ahh. Say it again. Wine in a Canteeni. Dot. Com.

Or if you want, just say: Canteeni. You know those cute little mini cans. Whatever they are called, from now on they will be called Canteeni's.

I could practically see it on the shelves next to a thousand other products each vying for the attention of a certain lucky customer.

Love wine but hate carrying around the big bottle- try Wine In A Canteeni.

Do you want a glass of wine but can't justify opening an entire bottle- Wine In A Canteeni.

Show all your friends how witty wine (and you) can be- Wine In A Canteeni.

And then it was all shot down by my sister who informed me that Sofia Coppola (“yes I know Sofia Coppola,” I retorted) had the same great idea and had been selling her wine in those cute little mini-cans for a while now.

“we even carry them at my market,” she added.

I couldn’t believe it.

Somehow Sofia Coppola had lodged herself into the middle of my sanguine fantasy. She had crushed my idea and threw it away in the garbage. She and her damn retro sensibilities. And that perfect last name (though I may have her beat on that). She stole my idea and left me with a half empty can of dreams. Ohhhh lord!

It’s not an easy thing to be truly original. This blog is a celebration of fun, irreverent ideas. While I will focus on matters that matter to me: environment, entrepreneurship, music, etc., I look forward to making as many tangents as possible.

When we look at our own ideas we find that they are intricately enmeshed in a larger conversation. This doesn’t mean that we are copycats. It just means that a similar music is buzzing in our ears. There is a deep tension between this realization and the equally powerful urge to be the idea man. The spring fountain deep in the forest gushing forth with activity and purpose.

Ideas are Bourne starts with the fountain, revels in it, and then follows it back to its source.