Tag: Climate

As Amazon (AMZN) continues the expansion of its delivery fleet, the online retailer has revealed its electric delivery van developed in partnership with Rivian.

The all-electric vans have begun to arrive just a year after Amazon made a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040. The company has plans to take delivery of 100,000 electric vans from Rivian by 2030, with 10,000 expected to be on the roads by 2022.

The Rivian vans were developed to “enhance the driver experience and optimize safety” with a customized configuration that comes in three different models. The vans feature sensor detection, highway and traffic assist features, larger windshield, exterior cameras with digital display, Alexa integration, stronger door design, interior “dancefloor” for added space, multiple tail lights, and three levels of shelving to store packages.

“When we set out to create our first customized electric delivery vehicle with Rivian, we knew that it needed to far surpass any other delivery vehicle,” Ross Rachey, director of Amazon’s Global Fleet and Products, said in a statement.

“We wanted drivers to love using it and customers to feel excited when they saw it driving through their neighborhood and pulling up to their home. We combined Rivian’s technology with our delivery logistics knowledge, and the result is what you see here–the future of last mile delivery,” he added.

The deal with Rivian for the electric vans followed an investment by Amazon into the electric truck maker. Rivian, which also received investments from Ford, Cox Automotive, and T.Rowe Price Associates, is set to release the R1T electric truck and R1S electric SUV in 2021.

“The vehicle we’ve developed with Amazon is not just electric,” RJ Scaringe, Rivian CEO, said in a statement. “We prioritized safety and functionality to create a vehicle that’s optimized for package delivery. We thought through

A Ugandan environmental activist was suspended from Twitter in the midst of a high-profile campaign — a suspension he believes is connected to his opponents in the country’s government and industries linked to deforestation. Twitter won’t say what caused the account to be frozen, but environmental groups worry it’s part of a broader trend of powerful stakeholders exploiting Twitter’s moderation system to silence climate activists.

The suspension happened on the night of September 12th, after 22-year-old Nyombi Morris had just finished a television appearance about the preservation of the Bugoma Forest. The morning after the interview, he woke up to find his account was frozen without explanation. He says he contacted Twitter’s Help Center at least five times during the weeks his account was suspended but couldn’t figure out what had triggered the freeze, and began to suspect the suspension could be connected to his advocacy. Another Ugandan activist with Fridays for Future who fights deforestation, Leah Namugerwa, had her account frozen in September, too.

“I was very, very disappointed,” Morris told The Verge. “What I suspected is that because our government was trying to silence us about this Bugoma Forest, they used some people to suspend our accounts.” Morris regained access to his original account on September 30th, after The Verge contacted Twitter regarding the suspensions. Neither Morris nor The Verge was told why the account was suspended in the first place.

Twitter says that at least two of the suspended accounts belonging to environmental activists were caught in a spam filter and have since been reinstated. The social media giant didn’t give any more information on why those accounts might have been flagged as spam, what happened to other accounts, or how many in all have been suspended.

The suspension

VC funding raised by climate tech startups headquartered in the following cities from 2013-2019 Photo: Statista/IBT

With heatwaves, droughts, and other extreme weather events becoming more frequent and wildfires wreaking havoc across the globe, the consequences of climate change are becoming more and more visible. And while the calls for more sustainable solutions to many aspects of our everyday lives are growing louder, large established companies often struggle to make bold, radical changes, paving the way for startups to innovate and re-think the way things are done in a given industry. Tesla is possibly the best example of a fast-moving upstart beating industry heavyweights at a game it shouldn’t be winning, considering the goliaths it is up against.

According to a recent report from PwC, venture capital investment in “climate tech” startups, including companies from a broad range of sectors tackling the challenge of decarbonizing the global economy, has risen sharply over the past decade. PwC finds that climate tech startups attracted more than $16 billion in VC funding last year, up from less than $500 million in 2013. In total, $59.5 billion of venture capital flowed into startups contributing to the reduction of global carbon emissions, be it in the mobility sector or elsewhere.

As the following chart shows, the San Francisco Bay Area is by far the largest climate tech hub, with companies based there attracting $11.7 billion in funding since 2013. With five cities in the top 10, China also plays a leading role in the climate tech startup scene, while Berlin and Bengaluru are the only non-U.S. or Chinese cities in the top 10.

Future offshore oil and gas fields are most likely to be “satellite developments” that are less expensive and emit less greenhouse gasses than other fields because they do not require new production platforms. An innovative Norwegian computational tool called “Slug Capturing 2” is now enabling the design of longer pipelines that will allow many more fields to be developed as satellites.

Out of sight from land and from the air, the Norwegian shelf is covered by a spider’s web of pipelines through which production fluids flow from the wells tapping the reservoirs.

This system carrying oil, water and gas in the same pipeline is called multiphase transport.

Research scientists in Norway have now developed a simulation model designed to meet one of the biggest challenges created by this form of pipeline transport—the formation of slugs. These limit the distance at which a satellite field can be developed from its host facility and require that major safety margins are built into the design of multiphase facilities.

Reducing CO₂ emissions

Multiphase technology came into being at SINTEF and the Norwegian Institute for Energy Research (IFE) almost 40 years ago. This technology makes it possible to transport unprocessed oil and gas straight from a field’s production wells to platforms located on neighboring fields or directly to land.

Multiphase transport is the key factor that has enabled fully integrated production facilities to be installed on the seabed. It allows oil and gas to be recovered offshore without the high levels of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions that the construction of new

By Julia Ponzini, SAP Customer Marketing 

It was at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21), when history was made as nearly the entire world signed the landmark Paris Climate Agreement to counter climate change. Since that 2015 agreement, COP21 has been the most significant business-focused event driving sustainable development and advancing the “green economy.”

Renewable energy leader Kaiserwetter Energy Asset Management of Germany was driven by the COP21 agreement and has since revolutionized investment in zero-emission energy. They accomplished this by utilizing SAP technology to create an IoT Platform, capable of early failure detection within wind turbines, inter alia. 

How Data is Driving Renewable Energy

Established in 2012, Kaiserwetter serves investors, financing banks, and governments within the renewable energy field – offering specialized data analytics as part of their investment process throughout the entire investment lifecycle.

Generating easily understood and actionable intelligence for its customers, Kaiserwetter uses IoT for harnessing, aggregating and structuring continuous, decentralized and diverse data from a wide-range of renewable energy assets and third sources, such as meteorological or electricity market related data. It is the company’s mission to pave the way for investing more heavily in renewable energy and accelerate emission-free power generation worldwide.

With the ambitious goal of catalyzing investment in renewable energy, Kaiserwetter knew investors needed to take their ventures to a global scale. Investing in renewable energy comes with risk, but what if there was no risk?

“One of the most important questions of our clients, such as investors or financing banks, used to be how are we going to minimize the investment risk?,” said Hanno Schoklitsch, CEO and founder of Kaiserwetter. “Our answer is ɅRISTOTELES with its unique IoT and Data Intelligence capabilities.”

What is ɅRISTOTELES?

With climate change being an ongoing issue, Kaiserwetter knew it needed to continue to advance