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Why Best Buy Is Rooting for the Smart Grid
The retail giant that helped bring car stereos, camcorders, and CD players to the masses wants to be homeowners' best friend in the emerging world of smarter, greener technology.
Best Buy hasn't been front and center as a green business leader. The corporate responsibility section of its website focuses primarily on Energy Star appliances and e-waste recycling, which the company rolled out to all of its 1,000 or so U.S. stores earlier this year. Beyond that, the company seems to be engaged in the usual efforts to reduce its environmental footprint.
Behind the scenes, however, Best Buy has aspirations to become consumers' go-to resource for a range of green products and services, from e-vehicles to solar panels to a myriad of gizmos designed to help households plug into the smart energy grid as it rolls out in the coming years. The company's thinking, along with its initial efforts, suggests that the mainstreaming of next-gen green products is within view.
At first blush, a company better known for stereos than solar panels may seem an odd match to be ground zero for green tech. But there's a logical link. As the wired and wireless connections grow among home energy systems, electric vehicles, and information technology, consumers will need a reliable resource for finding products and expertise, as well as the ability to make everything work together as advertised. That's where Best Buy hopes to come in.
If you scan the landscape of what's coming over the next few years, you begin to see the opportunities: plug-in electric cars that not only can recharge from a household outlet, but which can serve as an energy storage device to power your home as needed; plug-and-play home solar or wind energy devices that can be installed by homeowners; smart home appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers that can negotiate with the local utility to take advantage of the lowest-possible energy rates, or power down to reduce grid stress; home energy meters and related gadgets that allow you to program lighting, heating, cooling, and appliances so as to maximize comfort and minimize energy bills; the ability to control all this remotely via any computer or smart phone; and more.
"When you turn to the smart grid, the ability to take complex technologies that are going to plug into the home, utilize home area networks, communicate back over broadband to utilities — it's going to be a fairly complex system," Rick Rommel, Best Buy's Senior Vice President, Emerging Business, explained to me recently. "We think that's a place where Best Buy can take our experience in in-home systems sales, support, and installation and apply it to the smart grid."
The fruits of these aspirations are just now finding their way into Best Buy stores. In the past few weeks, the company introduced electric bicycles at 20 stores in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area (as well as online). It also plans to offer a cool electric motorcycle, the Enertia, made by Oregon-based Brammo, in which the retailer's venture capital arm, Best Buy Capital, made an investment last fall. "An electric scooter is really just a battery and a computer on wheels," Rommel points out.
If they get traction from customers, e-bikes and motorcycles could become an entry point for Best Buy as a purveyor of other electric vehicles — both sales and rentals. "The change that's in front of us right now is the transition from gasoline to electric," says Rommel. "And if you look at the disruption that this transition in technology does to sales channels, it opens up opportunities for companies like Best Buy to begin to participate." The company hasn't made any announcements — and Rommel wouldn't say — but what follows could be small neighborhood electric vehicles like the Peapod or the Zenn. And maybe even e-vehicle rentals: "We've heard that the Zipcar community is increasingly asking for secondary cars like trucks and vans that you need just once in a while," says Rommel. "So why invest in a really expensive second vehicle when you can get it only when you need it?"
And then there's the service piece — the critical need to help consumers install and maintain all these gizmos. That's where the Geek Squad comes in. Rommel sees the Best Buy unit — the company bought the Minneapolis startup that specialized in repairing and installing PCs in 2002 — as a natural component of its greentech strategy. "We've been the smart friend that helps the consumer do it themselves, or when they need help in the home we'll do it for them. And that has allowed them to make more sense and get more value from the complex products you put in the home. From a consumer's point of view, if one device that connects to my home area network that does home energy management doesn't work, who do you think they're going to call? Geeks make high-tech house calls, and that is a tremendously valuable asset in a home environment that's becoming increasingly complex."
The story can potentially spin out from there. If Best Buy can garner a following of greentech-minded consumers, the company could play a pivotal role in working with utilities, product manufacturers, and others to design consumer-friendly products — just, as I imagine, it already does for everything from cell phones to flat-screen TVs — along with the technologies that integrate them, leveraging the smart-home communications standards that are beginning to emerge. There's potential for the company to help accelerate markets.
It's a compelling story line, to be sure, but equally important is that it illustrates the potential for incumbent companies to be key players in advancing green technology. While cutting-edge innovation will likely come from countless start-ups, it will be up to the mass merchandisers to accelerate market uptake beyond the green devotees and early adopters.
In the case of Best Buy, it appears to be an early adopter itself, potentially gaining a competitive edge as the green economy truly fulfills its promise.
June 29, 2009 in Business Practices, Clean Tech, Trendwatching | Permalink | Comments (1)
The 'Gigaton Throwdown' and the Big Hairy Audacious Question
Some of my favorite questions begin with the same four words: "What would it take..." What follows those four words can be just about anything, as in: What would it take to ... make solar energy as cheap and efficient as fossil fuel-based electricity?... routinely build zero-waste factories?... recycle 90 percent of the waste in my city within five years?... make organic foods cost-competitive with conventional ones? ... make airplanes operate on electric power? ... create zero-energy low-income housing? And so on.
Such big, hairy audacious questions get past the ideal to the real, looking at the specific changes in technologies, policies, capital flows, and cultural norms that would be required to achieve a goal.
Sunil Paul has asked one such audacious question — and answered it, too. His Gigaton Throwdown report, released today, asks: What would it take to aggressively scale up clean energy to have a major impact on job growth, energy independence, and climate change over the next 10 years? Specifically, the report examines what it would take "to reach gigaton scale for nine technologies currently attractive to investors."
To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020. For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100% capacity factor) in 2020.
The good news, the study concludes:
Eight of the nine technologies that we analyzed are capable of aggressive scale-up to avoid at least 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO2e) reductions by 2020. Of these nine, there are seven — building efficiency, concentrated solar power, construction materials, nuclear, biofuels, solar photovoltaics, and wind — that are ready to scale up aggressively today. One, geothermal, can scale up fully after an intense period of research, development, and deployment of pilot plants for new engineered geothermal systems. Combined, these eight technologies can meet over 50% of new global energy demand with reliable, clean, low-carbon energy and would avoid over 8 gigatons of CO2e reductions globally.
The bad news: Annual investment in these technologies must grow more than threefold in the next 10 years to make good on climate stabilization goals.
The Gigaton Throwdown project began two years ago, when Paul — part of a wave of successful tech entrepreneurs who found their way to cleantech after the one-two punch of 9/11 and the dot-com bust — heard a friend say, "You know, you clean technology guys could make a bunch of money and not make that big of a difference." As Paul told me recently, "It struck me that, 'Wow, he's right. Many of these technologies could increase by a factor of 10 and I'd do well, but it just would not make that big a difference.' That essentially started a quest on my part to find out what does it take to really make a difference."
A big part of the challenge was creating a framework: How do you think about a problem of this magnitude? The notion of gigatons, says Paul, "made a lot of sense because one gigaton per year is enough to make a major difference by 2020. We chose an amount that matters and we chose a time frame that's relevant to entrepreneurs and investors."
Paul engaged dozens of people — the mailing list of people connected to the project listed more than 130 names, including venture capitalists, academics, entrepreneurs, lawyers, policy makers, nonprofit leaders, and corporate types from utilities, energy companies, Wall Street investment houses, engineering firms, and others. A group of post-docs at the University of Michigan and Stanford, and faculty at Drexel and Berkeley did a lot of the heavy lifting.
Their report (download - PDF) looks at nine "pathways" that could achieve gigaton scale. One of the pathways, wind power, was found to be already growing fast enough to achieve gigaton scale.
The wind industry has been growing at an annual rate of 28% over the last decade and will soon reach 100 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity globally. At currently projected growth rates, it will exceed half a terawatt (TW) of installed capacity by 2020 and deliver close to 2 gigatons of CO2e reductions. Efficiency technologies, solar, biofuels, and nuclear all offer solutions that have been tested and deployed and can scale more rapidly than the current projections. These are not laboratory curiosities. They are active technologies that are supplying power in multiple markets. With sound policy support, they will do much more.
Meanwhile, another technology, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), was seen to face "severe challenges to achieving massive scale in the near-term."
To reach the gigaton target, the [auto] industry would need an estimated 300 million PHEVs on the road in 2020. This is equivalent to the total number of new cars to be added to the fleet worldwide in the next 10 years. While perhaps technically feasible, the disruption to current operations, the junking of existing vehicles, and the sheer amount of capital needed for this transition make this pathway infeasible by 2020 in our estimation. We do not include PHEVs in our gigaton projections.
What would it take for technologies reach gigaton scale? In a word: policies. At least, that's the principal conclusion of the Gigaton Throwdown report. And that makes sense, to a point. The Obama administration and Congress — not to mention their counterparts in other countries — are focusing on energy and climate issues like never before. This is a time for policy makers to step up with the right kinds of laws and incentives at a scale sufficient to make a difference. The report urges a range of policy prescriptions: long-term stable carbon pricing, loan guarantees, tax credits, government purchasing, renewable energy standards, fuel standards, efficiency standards, and more — a lengthy list that has long comprised the wish list of the clean-energy community.
But it's not all about government — and it's not even all about money. The markets for clean technology involve a coordinated effort in three principal areas: technology, policy, and capital. Each of these plays a role in scaling technologies, clean or otherwise, and each of these "levers" must be pulled in proper sequence so as to create sustained, orderly markets that can exist without subsidies. Oh, and education, too — lots of it, to encourage legislators, business executives, investors, and voters about these critical needs.
"We sort of already get the technology pieces of it," Paul responded when I pointed this out. "And we know there is a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines that is ready to invest given the right kind of long-term opportunity." What's needed now, he says, is political leadership and action.
"The single most important action to direct this flow of capital is stable policy that establishes a meaningful price on carbon," he explained. "This will encourage investment across the clean energy sector and allow capital to flow to the most cost-effective technologies."
There's no shortage of capital needed: The eight technologies at gigaton scale represent an investment opportunity of over $5 trillion dollars over the next 10 years, according to the report. At this scale, says Paul, clean energy — including efficiency improvements — would meet close to two-thirds of the new global capacity requirements in 2020.
I'm not able to quibble with such figures — or the overall strategy, for that matter. In fact, despite some skepticism about the approach, I like the overall vision. Thinking in gigatons should become the new metric for considering technologies, policies, and investments. Paul says that at least two companies — Serious Materials, a green buildings materials start-up based in Silicon Valley, and Novozymes, a Danish company focusing on biofuels and other "bioinnovations" — have already started doing so, with others to follow. Paul says his own investment firm, Spring Ventures, is doing likewise.
If that's the case — if "gigaton-scale" becomes a lens through which innovators and policymakers view their work — the considerable efforts of Paul and his colleagues will represent a valuable contribution to moving clean energy technology forward to achieve the scale and speed it deserves.
June 24, 2009 in Clean Tech, Climate Change | Permalink | Comments (3)
Will Radical Transparency Save the Earth?
There's a growing school of thought that unfettered information about the environmental impacts of our world will smoke out the bad guys and help the good guys win.
I wish it were that simple.
I've just finished reading Ecological Intelligence, the new book by Daniel Goleman, whose 1997 bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, helped broaden our thinking about what it means to be "smart." (It's not the IQ test, stupid.) Now, he's turned his sights on the environment — specifically, the quantity and quality of information available about the environmental impacts of the things we buy. His highly readable book describes how the lack of good information belies the hidden impacts of our purchases — the way they are sourced, manufactured, used, and disposed of when they are no longer of use.
Goleman calls for "radical transparency," a term I've been hearing increasingly lately, one of those coinages that sneaks up on you en route to becoming a full-fledged meme. Goleman didn't invent the term — it's been around for some time — but it is a central theme of his book: the virtuous circle that develops when companies, voluntarily or not, lift the veil of secrecy to reveal the ingredients and sources of their products, enabling consumers to make smarter choices, thereby moving markets toward less-harmful products. That cycle, argues Goleman, can occur only when we fully exploit the full arsenal of technologies and human networks:
Psychologists conventionally view intelligence as residing within an individual. But the ecological abilities we need in order to survive today must be a collective intelligence, one that we learn and master as a species, and that resides in a distributed fashion among far-flung networks of people. The challenges we face are too varied, too subtle, and too complicated to be understood and overcome by a single person: their recognition and solution require intense efforts by a vastly diverse range of experts, businesspeople, activists — by all of us.
I can't argue with the premise, but my 20 years of watching the green marketplace leaves me, well, unsold.
Like Goleman, I am a steadfast believer in the power of transparency: the more we know, the smarter decisions we can make. But I'm more skeptical than Goleman about how willing and able consumers are to actually harness such information to make changes in the way they shop and live. At least, not at the scale and speed needed to transform the marketplace toward one that embraces sustainability, in all its many forms.
Here's what I see as the central flaw in Goleman's case: While he is correct in stating that the complexity and sheer number of products and manufacturing processes requires the collective intelligence of the global village, actual shopping choices are still made at the individual level. And it's here that saving the Earth often takes a back seat to simply saving the day.
It's been almost exactly 20 years since the first-ever survey of Americans' attitudes toward making green purchases, by an outfit called the Michael Peters Group, told us that a whopping 89% of shoppers said that they were concerned about the environmental impact of the products they purchased. And nearly as many — 78% — said that they were willing to pay as much as 5% more for a product packaged with recyclable or biodegradable materials compared with its conventional counterpart.
Since that August 1989 survey, dozens of market researchers have unearthed similarly tantalizing findings describing consumers' interest in aligning their purchases with their environmental concerns. But behind those impressive numbers are some conditionals that aren't always picked up. They sound something like this: "Yes, I'd happily pick the greener product — IF it comes from a brand I know and trust, IF I can buy it where I currently shop, IF it is at least as good as the product I'm currently buying, IF it doesn't require me to change habits, IF it doesn't cost more, and" — this last one is significant — "IF it is somehow better — for example, that it lasts longer, performs more effectively, saves money, is healthier for my family, or will be perceived by others as cool."
That's a pretty high bar to clear. The result is that while the research data haven't changed much over the past 20 years — neither have most consumers' purchases.
Can radical transparency change this? Admittedly, things are different now. Companies are opening up — some voluntarily, others less so — disclosing more about their ingredients and supply chains than ever before. Technology is helping too: the myriad blogs, widgets, websites, and apps, and the networks they enable, are allowing more information to be shared faster and more effectively than ever before. An emerging era of Environmental Product Declarations is upon us, using an ISO-blessed standard for reporting life-cycle impacts. Everyone from Washington to Wal-Mart are demanding companies to provide more information about the environmental (and health) impacts of what they do, and much of the information that results is being made public.
Says Goleman: "These new approaches to managing information herald a coming flood of data about the heretofore unnoticed consequences of a host of common ingredients in everyday products. What had previously been successful brands may be in danger of becoming tainted in our minds."
But content is of little use without context. Goleman and I are both fans of a website called GoodGuide, in which a team of researchers and credentialed experts have pulled together millions of data points about thousands of products, on everything from toxic ingredients to the climate policies of its manufacturer. It makes comparing products easy, providing a high-level view for those who want to know simply "Is it good?" and a deeper dive for those wanting the gory details. GoodGuide's growth trajectory during its roughly 14 months of operation suggest that there's a hunger for this information, and that's encouraging.
Says Goleman:
Radical transparency promises to create a marketplace mechanism that takes the consequence of shoppers' choices to scale: each individual purchase, aggregated with all the others, becomes tantamount to votes on the nature of the goods they buy. As businesses respond by making more of the improvements that shoppers want, shoppers can feel empowered by seeing that their ethical choices matter.
In reality, this positive feedback loop hasn't worked very well. On the one hand, when it comes to green business practices, many companies are walking more than they're talking — that is, they're making more green improvements than they're taking credit for. One reason is that many of their green achievements are about "doing less bad" — using fewer toxic ingredients, creating less waste — which are tough stories to tell. Moreover, a lot of their most significant efforts don't end up directly in the products or packaging — they're embedded in their suppliers, perhaps far upstream — or aren't part of the value proposition for those products. (If I'm buying potato chips, should I care that the potato processors are recycling their rinse water, thus saving millions of gallons of water and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? Or do I just want a salty, crunchy underpinning for my guacamole dip?)
Moreover, these things aren't being done so much for the planet as for profits; the fact that it has a positive environmental impact (or, at least, a less negative one) is a happy outcome. Does consumer power born of radical transparency play a role in spurring companies to make such changes? Likely not.
The same is true with one of the stories Goleman tells, about how Procter & Gamble did a life-cycle study of several of its products, measuring their impacts at seven stages, from materials selection through manufacturing, use, and disposal. When they plotted the various impacts on a 3-D bar chart, one of the bars loomed far longer than any other: the home-use stage of liquid laundry detergent — specifically, the energy used when people do their wash in hot water. The result, Tide Coldwater, has significant potential: if everyone in the U.S. used it, we'd reduce household energy use by about 3 percent.
Neither radical transparency nor consumer concerns about hot-water use had anything to do with this move. No one told them to do it. It was simply good business: a win-win-win for the company, their customers, and the environment.
That's where Goleman's thesis falls short, discounting that change happens fastest when there's something in it for everybody. Sure, increased information will get some consumers to change a little, prodding manufacturers and markets along the way, but unless companies make products perceived to be better, however that's defined or measured, and can make money doing it, we won't see wholesale change at the scale required. And all of the data in the world won't get mainstream consumers — the 80% or 90% who aren't true-blue green consumers — to become part of the solution.
Note: Daniel Goleman's response can be found here.
June 16, 2009 in Business Practices, Green Marketing, State of the Art | Permalink | Comments (13)
Intuit Helps Small Business Capture a 'Green Snapshot'
Can the company that tamed financial accounting do the same for carbon accounting?
That's the aim of Green Snapshot, a just-launched free service of Intuit, the company that makes popular financial management software like Quickbooks and TurboTax. Snapshot is aimed at the same market as those products: millions of small and midsized companies, few of which have the time, temperament, or temerity to calculate their company's carbon footprint, let alone take action to reduce it.
The program is fairly straightforward: It automatically mines your Quickbooks data, culls the various payments you've made, and taps an online database that assigns a rough carbon equivalent to each of the payees. Based on that information, it instantly creates a carbon footprint analysis, along with a set of recommendations of ways to lower it.
It's simple and quick. Did I mention that it's free?
At first blush, Intuit may seem an unlikely source of such a program. But if you think about what Quickbooks and similar programs do, it makes sense. In essence, those financial management programs take a jumble of business information (expenses, payroll, income, payables, receivables, etc.) and organizes it in the form of income statements, balance sheets, budgets, and other documents. The goal: understanding your finances in order to help you manage your money and your business more effectively.
Snapshot does the same, taking disparate business information about purchases and activities and organizes it. The goal: understanding the parts of your business that have the greatest contribution to global climate change in order to help you manage those activities and your business more effectively.
The idea for Snapshot began in 2007 when Rupesh Shah, Director, Corporate Sustainability at Intuit, who joined the company eight years ago with a freshly minted MBA from Northwestern University, was tapped for Intuit's first environmental post. Shah had worked in product development, which turned out to be a good fit: The company wanted someone who could mesh improving the company's footprint and engaging its workforce with the potential to develop new products.
That last part was key. "We could do a lot of stuff with employees, or supply chain, or packaging, but that wasn't going to make a big difference," Shah explained to me recently. "Where we could make a big difference was from a customer-facing perspective. So once we started to throw some examples out about what Intuit could do and what opportunities our customers could have around green, then [senior management] started to get it, and then they started to invest in it."
Shah saw an opportunity to help small businesses, Intuit's core audience. "Everyone recognizes they're very important in the environmental game but few people have been able to really engage them."
He got that right. Since the dawn of the green business movement, small and midsized firms have been largely left out of the picture. Regulators and activists have focused on large industrial players — the ones with the spewing smokestacks, drainpipes, and dumpsters — all but ignoring the roughly 98 percent of the companies around the world that have under 100 employees. With the exception of a relative handful of green business programs sponsored by local governments and chambers of commerce (most of which have pretty low barriers to entry), there are few robust and affordable resources to help the countless printers, dry cleaners, parts manufacturers, warehouses, hair salons, restaurants, and butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers that are the backbone of most countries' economies.
Shah also understood another key: "The key hypothesis I had was that in order to get them in the game we had to make it super easy for them."
Along the way, Shah met Michael Gelobter, founder of Cooler, a company I profiled in 2007 that utilizes complex life-cycle databases to provide an economic model, rather than an engineering-based one, for determining the climate footprint of a given purchase. It's a blunt-instrument approach that's cheap and fast — and yields pretty accurate data.
Cooler's database became the engine for Snapshot. As Shah explains: "Snapshot reads your Quickbook data, pulls every dollar the business has spent over the past twelve months, and works with Cooler's economic input-output matching engine. It looks at the payee and the vendor of every transaction and tries to match it to the closest of about 1,000 carbon categories that the Cooler engine has. And for each of those carbon categories there's a carbon intensity — emissions per dollar spent." The result is a report detailing a company's carbon footprint and cost-effective opportunities to reduce it.
Presently, the system typically matches about 8 of 10 transactions. The report you get shows which transactions weren't included in the carbon footprint calculation. In the coming weeks, Intuit plans to add the ability for users to link those unmatched transactions to the Cooler engine, and each user's contribution will help make the system smarter for everyone.
I asked Shah, what's in this for Intuit? Is there a business model here that the company hopes to exploit?
"We have a business model that we're testing," he responded. "The savings engine has a bunch of actions that we recommend. About half of the actions are behavioral — clean your HVAC, drive smarter — and about half involve buying something — an Energy Star computer, or some other greener product." Intuit is planning to point customers to retailers and earn affiliate fees, though Shah quickly noted, "We haven't made a penny yet, and I don't think that we're going to make any meaningful money any time soon."
Beyond that, Shah hopes Snapshot will help small businesses to communicate their environmental achievements to their own customers. "I was struck when I was interviewing small businesses, how many of them were trying to get their customers to see that they're doing something green. But there's no real authentic way to message that." Shah believes Intuit can play a role in providing "a little bit more transparency and legitimacy for those claims around green."
Will it work? Hard to know — the product is barely a couple weeks old — but you've got to like the strategy: a free add-on to a popular product that provides genuine value to customers and, just maybe, to Intuit itself, all the while burnishing the software company's green cred.
As Shah put it: "Our goal in this was not pure charity or philanthropy. It's to build a tool for customers that they would find valuable, help increase the reputation of Intuit, both as a corporate citizen but also from an innovation perspective, and to try to monetize this. We'll see."
June 7, 2009 in Business Practices, Climate Change | Permalink | Comments (1)
The Green Future of the "New GM"
What to make of this week's bankruptcy filing by General Motors? The beginning of the end? The end of the beginning? A death? Rebirth? Something in between?
Given the months-long anticipation of this development, much already has been written and said, and many fingers pointed. GM, as Paul Ingrassia recently opined in the Wall Street Journal, made "decades of dumb decisions." And while there's truth to that, GM, Chrysler, and the other automotive companies didn't create this mess by themselves. It took a village — unions, consumers, regulators, and assorted others — to bring the car companies to their knees.
What of the environmental community? That term, of course, is a loose one, given that this "community" rarely speaks with a singular voice. As a rule, environmentalists have long been harsh critics of GM, citing the gas-guzzling Hummer, the company's participation in an industry lawsuit against California's regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, its longstanding opposition to government-mandated fuel-efficiency regulations, and that "fact" that it "killed" the electric car. Of course, it wasn't just GM. Many other car makers — foreign and domestic — sided with GM on the lawsuits and the regulatory stance, marketed gas-guzzling behemoths, and dragged their collective feet on developing alt-fuel technologies. But the iconic GM got the brunt of the activists' criticism.
Today, many of these criticisms are nearly moot. GM reportedly has found a buyer for Hummer, something it has been trying to do for the past year. Several weeks ago, the White House proposed the first federal standard for greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions, and said it would harmonize those standards both with California's proposed "Pavley" emissions standards and with national corporate average fuel economy standards. And, of course, GM has been working for more than two years on its revolutionary Chevy Volt, an "extended range" electric vehicle that's received high praise from activists and engineers alike. Even with the bankruptcy, the Volt remains on track to hit the market at the end of next year.
In my recent book, I chronicled how GM began changing the conversation with the environmental community, beginning in late 2005, as the company promoted biofuels as a potential alternative fuel. In late 2006, GM leaders briefed a group of environmentalists about the Volt, even before it unveiled the car to the press, helping to ensure a group of supportive voices at the car's debut in early 2007. (Remarkably, the greenies kept their promise of confidentiality: There were no leaks.)
Over the past year, and especially over the past six months, GM stepped up its outreach to the major environmental groups, engaging them several times in conference calls and face-to-face meetings, seeking their support during the federal government's deliberations over its fate. GreenOrder, the sustainability strategy firm with which I am affiliated, helped facilitate many of these calls, which included Elizabeth Lowery, GM's Vice President, Environment, Energy, and Safety Policy, and — on two occasions — Rick Wagoner, GM's now-vanquished CEO. The calls offered an opportunity for GM's leadership to engage directly with one of its key stakeholder groups to describe its vision and plans, field questions, and listen to concerns.
I was struck by the civility of the whole affair, as two battle-scarred warriors — Big Auto and Big Green — came together, if not as friends, at least as colleagues with shared goals. The enviro leaders were surprisingly supportive — surprising, that is, because of the animosity and lack of trust that had grown and hardened over the years between the two camps. The activists offered support and encouragement to the auto maker. It was heartening to witness the rapprochement, though in the end, it may have been too little, too late.
But those conversations may yet prove their value, as the "New GM" emerges in the coming months. Before the economy tanked last fall, GM seemed to be "getting it," shifting its focus toward vehicle electrification and renewable fuels for the vehicles on its drawing boards. Its R&D leaders were pondering a world in which there could someday be 2 billion vehicles, roughly twice as many as today, and what that might mean for safety, road congestion, and the environment. They were designing prototypes of small neighborhood electric vehicles. And they were thinking about the second and third generations of the Volt technology that will follow in 2011 and beyond.
No one really knows what form the New GM will take, of course, but from what I can tell, all these efforts will continue. Earlier this week, on the day GM filed its bankruptcy petition, Beth Lowery sent an email to her network of environmental leaders and other stakeholders, offering her perspective of what the filing meant for the car company's future. It said in part:
The New GM will focus on reinventing not just ourselves, but transportation systems around the world. An essential starting point is vehicle electrification, including our new advanced battery lab in Warren, Michigan, where we will continue to develop battery technology to support electric vehicle programs such as the Chevrolet Volt. Also, we will continue to work with partners to develop the infrastructure necessary to support advanced technologies, from flexible-fuel vehicles to urban electric vehicles.
I'm encouraged by that. While it will take months, if not years, to see whether and how the New GM will survive, let alone thrive, there are rays of hope amid the corporate carnage. And while the cynics and skeptics may deride the taxpayer-funded New GM as "Government Motors," I still have high hopes that in the coming years, it actually could stand for "Greener Mobility."
June 2, 2009 in Business Practices, Clean Tech, Trendwatching | Permalink | Comments (5)
