The Green notebook covers Canada's Cleantech Summit, Green:Net 2010 in San Francisco, the Dot Eco domain name that may hail from Vancouver, a new data centre that demonstrates the impact of climate change, fibre through the Northwest Passage, Ontario's Samsung deal, the GHG Protocol Initiative, and a report that has tracked the effect of the economy on green investments.

Canadian Cleantech summit in April

From April 27 to 29 Ottawa will host the first annual Canadian Cleantech Summit. This event presents an opportunity for participants to identify, discuss and determine the future direction of Canada's globally competitive stance in clean technology. The Summit will have four tracks of workshops, keynote speeches and a special plenary session to guide delegates as they explore international opportunities, urgent needs, and broad policy directions for the cleantech sector globally.

Green:Net 2010 also set for April

The second annual Green:Net 2010 conference is set for April 29 in San Francisco. The conference focuses on ways that IT can fight climate change, including the smart grid, connected cars, carbon software and energy management. The conference focuses on the entrepreneurs and investors that are now developing the latest greentech innovations. The conference will look at topics such as: what’s next for the smart grid, how utilities can use IT to get ready for the influx of electric vehicles, how the web can be used to replace atoms with bits, what do internet giants Google and Microsoft see in the energy industry, and how policy can spur all of this.

Dot Eco domain name may hail from Vancouver

By the middle of 2011 ICANN – the US non-profit that regulates domain names globally – is expected open an application process that will allow hundreds of new domain suffixes to be created. Vancouver’s Big Room Inc will be applying to run the “.eco” registry. Big Room was founded in 2007 with the specific goal of creating Dot Eco. The company has assembled an international team of investors, advisors and partners to help design a model that would be socially, environmentally and financially sustainable. Thanks to ICANN's ‘community-priority’ track, which allows community focused domains to avoid being sent to auction if they can demonstrate community support. This means that Big Room has a good chance at landing the green domain extension. Big Room’s backers include Working Enterprises and Vancouver's Renewal Partners.

New data centre demonstrates the impact of climate change

TelecityGroup has opened its new Paris data centre, Condorcet, designed to be one of the most technically advanced and energy efficient data centres in Europe. The site will provide 3,400 square metres of customer space and 6.4MW of total customer power.  It includes various green aspects, including free cooling to reduce energy consumption (apparently for the first time in France) and a white roof to reduce solar gain.  Between them the various energy saving innovations are expected to reduce CO2 emissions by 2,500 tons a year. Waste energy from the facility will be used to heat a ‘Climate Change Arboretum’ built on-site, which will recreate the climatic conditions expected to prevail in France in 2050. The French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) will use the arboretum to grow and research plants from around the world with the aim of selecting those species most adaptable to changes in the global climate.

Telecom companies want fibre through the Northwest Passage

A telecommunication group led by Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co and partnered with KhaNNet, part of Khanjee Holdings Inc, wants to lay a fibre optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage. The project, called ArcticLink, would cost an estimated $1.2 billion according to research firm TeleGeography. The cable would cut a 16,000 kilometre path across half the world, and is made possible by the melting ice cap. It would be laid in deep water from Japan to the Aleutian Islands, then traverse north through the Bering Sea. The line would need a regeneration station on the northern coast of Alaska. From there, it will wind its way through the Northwest Passage, dipping around the southern tip of Greenland and across the North Atlantic to the United Kingdom. Branches off the line would provide access to the east coast of the US, ensuring quicker transmission times between Tokyo and New York.

Samsung-led group drops $7 billion on green energy in Ontario

In one of the largest clean energy deals to date, a consortium led by Samsung C&T Corporation and Korea Electric Power Corporation signed a C$7 billion deal with the government of Ontario. The $7 billion invested by the consortium will see the building of 2,500 megawatts (MW) of clean energy using wind and solar power and the creation of an estimated 16,000 new jobs in the province. The group will work with the provincial government to build four new wind turbine and solar energy component manufacturing plants. According to the Ontario government, residents can expect to see their utility bill rise by an average of $1.60 a year - or 13 cents a month.

Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative gathers steam

GHG Protocol Initiative announced that 60 companies had started measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of their products and supply chains by testing a new global framework, part of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. The two new GHG Protocol standards – the Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard and the Scope 3 (Corporate Value Chain) Accounting and Reporting Standard – provide a methodology to account for emissions associated with individual products across their lifecycles and of corporations across their value chains. To date most companies have been focusing on their Scope 1 and 2 emissions, i.e. in-house generation and electricity use.  Scope 3 has tended to be confined to business travel.  This new standard will allow companies to look comprehensively at the impact of their corporate value chains, including outsourced activities (particularly useful in the IT industry), supplier manufacturing, and the use of the products they sell. More than 20 industry sectors from 17 countries are represented.  Participants from ICT include Autodesk, Belkin International, BT, CA, Eclipse Networks, IBM, Lenovo, and SAP.

GreenBiz.com report tracks effect of economy on green investments

A new report from GreenBiz.com shines a light on how the economy has shaped the environmental impact of business operations. The third annual State of Green Business report explores in-depth the data behind the growth of green business, to find out whether and how companies are moving the needle toward sustainability.

GreenBiz.com executive editor Joel Makower noted that green business didn't go away during this recession. In fact, business leaders are taking the environmental performance of their firms as seriously as the economic performance. In a survey of more than 2,700 members of the GreenBiz Intelligence Panel, about 80% of the respondents said that their companies would spend the same or more money on environment, health and safety as they did in the last year.

Some of the trends analyzed in the report include a steady improvement in such areas as reducing the environmental impact of information technology, increasing the amount of certified green office space, reducing paper use and increasing its recycling, and reducing the amount of water used to run the economy.

Of the 20 measures of progress assessed by the annual GreenBiz Index, six were shown to be making significant progress and three were determined to be losing ground. The remaining 11 indicators were deemed to be "treading water" — that is, holding steady or making incremental progress, insufficient to the scale of the problems that need to be addressed.

Among the other key trends noted in this year's report is the notion of "Radical transparency – the virtuous circle that develops when detailed information about companies, products and ingredients is instantly available, enabling consumers to make smarter choices, thereby moving markets toward less-harmful products.

Disposal of electronic waste was seen as a trend that is doing poorly, when measured by the amount of waste being recycled compared to the amount coming into the waste stream each year.  On the other hand, the amount of water needed to produce each dollar of gross domestic product has dropped steadily over the past decade.