Here are two clean energy ideas that deal with bringing power to cell towers in off-grid locations, where diesel generators are the norm. Before I present them, let’s think about the obvious drawbacks of diesel:
• Needs to be trucked in
• Can be stolen (very common problem in the developing world)
• Carries high maintenance cost of equipment
• Creates pollution (more…)
Here’s a beautiful piece on environmentalism – climate change in particular – written within the context of holiday gifts. The author, Rebecca Solnit, celebrates the gifts we received, like the Sierra Club’s success with its Beyond Coal campaign, which, she notes, “helped prevent 168 coal-powered plants from opening and retired 125 dirty coal plants.” She also points out that some of the greenest gifts look like….
“…Nothing. The mountaintops that weren’t blasted by mining corporations, the children who didn’t get asthma or mercury poisoning from coal emissions, the carbon that stayed in the Earth and never made it into the atmosphere.”
Fabulous writing, Rebecca.
As I mentioned recently, Christmas Day happens to also be the birthday of Rod Serling, creator of the iconic mid-20th Century television program “The Twilight Zone.” According to the Writer’s Almanac, “Serling believed it was the writer’s job to ‘menace the public consciousness’ and considered television and radio as a means for social criticism.”
If I had to explain this in brief, I would point to a single episode called “The Shelter.” Here are Parts One, Two, and Three. I hope you’ll take 30 minutes and check this out; you won’t be disappointed.
Our Western Civilization comes from a long line of social critics, dating back at least as far as the ancient Greek playwrights. Having said that, I’m betting that our indignation is just starting to heat up, along with the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. When we come to grips with the long-term damage to our health and the environment that is in process, we’ll see the dawning of a new age of unparalleled anger directed against the forces that will have brought us to that terrible point.
Of course, let’s remain hopeful that we can obviate the need for all the feelings of hatred and blame. We have the technologies at our fingertips right now to put our civilization on a path towards sustainability. All we need is the political will to demand that the implementation of these technologies supersedes our addiction to cheap but lethal fossil fuels.
Let’s make that happen in 2013. Happy New Year, everyone.
What is marketing? As I like to define the subject, marketing creates the environment in which profitable sales are most likely to occur. Obviously, this has dozens of ramifications, and raises dozens of different questions, including:
• What do we know about the workstyles and playstyles of certain groups of potential customers, and the unmet needs associated with those people and their activities? (more…)
A friend sent me this article on “peel and stick” solar PV, and asked what I thought. In particular, he wanted to know if it has implications for transportation.
I think the future will bring us all manner of applications for PV that we don’t have today, including:
• Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), where roofs, and even the walls and windows, are made with PV, as opposed to solar panels being installed on top of traditional construction materials. (more…)
Over the 30 years I’ve been a business consultant to the large tech companies of the world (H-P, IBM, 3M, Sony, Philips, FedEx, Agfa, Microsoft, Oracle, Litton, etc.) I’ve seen the value of selling through sales channels of various types: value-added resellers, dealers, and distributors of various types. I’ve also seen how easy it is to fail with strategies that don’t provide adequate incentive for these channel partners.
By far, the single best motivating force that I’ve utilized is demand generation. For instance, when my team and I launched Philips Electronics’ line of LCD projectors into the United States, we didn’t just hand it to their existing network of about 75 professional audio-video dealers around the country and hope for the best. (more…)
Anyone who’s ever used a reseller channel (dealers, retailers, VARs, distributors, mass merchandisers, etc.) knows that this whole approach to marketing and sales is the ultimate “double-edged sword.” The most obvious benefits include an enormous and more-or-less instant expansion of your sales force with very little overhead, and thus a huge amount of leverage in terms of reaching your target end-user customer segments. Where it would require eons for you to develop these relationships from scratch, resellers come with them neatly tucked into place.
The most obvious downside is lack of mind-share. These people don’t work for you; you cannot manage them directly, so if you don’t provide them adequate training – and, more importantly – incentive, you’re headed for certain failure. (more…)
It looks like I’ll be taking on some marketing responsibilities for my client WindStream, a start-up with a fabulous breakthrough in “microwind,” i.e., small, inexpensive, easily installed wind turbines. I certainly won’t be able to publish every aspect of the strategies I evolve for them, but I don’t think they’ll mind if I provide an example of my current thinking, so here goes:
I propose to target schools in a big way. (more…)
Frequent commenter Frank Eggers writes in response to my recent piece in which I railed on the food industry. I suggested that Big Food – or Big Anything – needs to shoulder some responsibility for the effects that its actions create on our civilization. Frank writes:
Good food is readily available; people do not need to buy junk food. If people stopped buying junk food, the manufacturers would stop making it.
Thanks for your viewpoints, Frank. I’m anything but an expert on this topic, but I don’t believe the situation is quite that cut and dried. Here are a couple of things you may want to consider: (more…)
Solar panel systems from the Japanese manufacturer Kyocera that were installed in a small French near Lyon has been up and running for exactly two decades now.
This about how long the warranty for solar panels lasts. What is remarkable about the 20-year old solar panels is that they show much less degeneration than what is expected – 8.3% reduction in performance when output levels were measured and compared to original levels. In other words, these solar panels still performed at 91.7% of their original maximum power output! (more…)
