Open Architecture Network

Overbury announces the launch of a new innovative web-based tool that accurately records the carbon footprinting of client fit-out and refurbishment projects.

Overbury, the office fit-out and refurbishment specialist, has teamed up with the carbon footprinting platform AMEE to create a simple and powerful tool to calculate an accurate carbon footprint. The tool works from accurate entry of data, calculation and cross referencing of information to show the carbon impact projects generate.

Carrying out a study in a rigorous manner needs large amounts of data to be collected and collated. Project managers from Overbury enter data through a secure website that records information such as the method of waste disposal of materials, the quantity and type of new materials delivered and how far they travelled to get to the site. The tool also records the mode of transport and distance workers travelled to site. The amount and types of energy used during the construction process are also taken into consideration.

Developing this tool enables Overbury’s clients to work towards reducing the carbon emissions of projects. This requires an innovative approach to the challenges sites are often faced with. An example of this is waste and the need to increase recycling rates. Overbury works in partnership with waste contractors, sub-contractors and site staff to achieve this reduction in emissions through management of waste.

Capturing such a wide range of data means that the impact of each project can be comprehensively accounted for. The complex calculations are undertaken based on detailed reference sources within the system which are easily accessed through a simple web interface. When the project is complete, project managers can download a PDF report with the total footprint alongside graphs and a breakdown of where the emissions came from.

Jamie Andrews, Market Development Manager at AMEE says:

“We are very pleased for the AMEE Platform to be used in this way. By recording the full scope of emissions for refurbishment projects, Overbury clients can be confident that everything has been accounted for. The tool makes it easy to see the effect of emissions reduction efforts in a clear and easy-to-audit way.”

The benefit of using AMEE is that all of the underlying data sources can easily by checked by going to AMEE Explorer. Liz Collett, Group Environmental Manager at Overbury says:

“Working with AMEE enabled us to deliver a tool that enables our clients to understand the carbon impact of their projects. Being able to use the AMEE engine adds traceability and rigour to our assessments which is what our clients require.”

About Overbury

Overbury operates as a main contractor alongside professional teams to manage the delivery of the construction phase of office fit-out and refurbishment. Overbury puts sustainability at the forefront of projects and works to minimise the environmental impacts. Carbon footprinting is one of the most recent initiatives that Overbury has undertaken.

About AMEE

AMEE helps companies, governments and consumers calculate their carbon footprint consistent with the best science and international standards. The AMEE API provides access to the most up-to-date carbon and environmental data. Applications and solutions that are “powered by AMEE” help ensure compliance with authoritative international standards.

AMEE now includes further support for the data and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions calculation methodologies outlined in the IPCC’s Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

The AMEE science team has quality assured and approved for release a large number of new categories to the AMEE platform which add considerably to the coverage of emissions scenarios and options available to users of AMEE. In particular, these include a number of non-combustive emissions activities such those associated with farming, waste, manufacturing and processing within the fossil fuel industry.

The new categories are as follows:

• CH4 emissions from enteric fermentation in farmed livestock
• CH4 and N2O emissions from the management of livestock manure
• CH4 emissions from rice cultivation
• N2O and CO2 emissions from soil management practices
• CH4 emissions from active and abandoned, surface and underground coal mines
• CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from oil and gas extraction, processing and transportation
• CO2 and CH4 emissions from the flaring of CH4
• Fluorine-containing compound (e.g. CF4, SF6) emissions used in the electronics industry
• CO2 emissions associated with the calcination of carbonate minerals in the glass industry
• CO2 emissions from the incidental combustion of mechanical lubricants
• CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions associated with fuel consumed by specific off-road/rail engines
• CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from road transportation based on a range of emissions control technologies
• CO2 emissions from military aircraft
• CO2 emissions from urea based additives consumed within catalytic converters
• CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from biological waste treatment
• CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from burning of municipal and industrial wastes
• CH4 emissions associated with domestic and industrial wastewater

As with the thousands of other distinct emissions activities represented within the AMEE platform, these new categories can be accessed easily by users of the AMEE API.

Additional support for the IPCC methodologies is planned for the near future, including further coverage of industrial activities as well as functionality for tracking and quantifying land-use associated carbon stocks.

Tags: IPCC, CO2, CH4, N2O, emissions, transport, fugitive, agriculture
Scope: Global
Authority: Enterprise
AMEE Quality Assurance: Passed

8 FEBRUARY 2010

[PDF Version: AMEE PR 20100208]

Amadeus Capital Partners, the European technology investor, has led a $5.5m Series B financing in AMEE, a US and UK-based company that has built the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions.

Existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, also participated in the financing. The funding will be used to expand AMEE’s geographic reach and enrich its scientific platform.
AMEE’s end market, enterprise carbon management, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017, driven by increasing regulatory and consumer pressure to combat climate change.

AMEE’s engine is used by customers such as vendors of carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs needing to measure emissions.  Customers include leading business intelligence vendor SAS and the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

Currently, multiple standards and hundreds of thousands of individual emission factors must be consulted to determine the footprint of activities and products. The result is that corporations and carbon accounting practitioners must navigate a complex regulatory and scientific maze in order to calculate and verify an organization’s emissions.

AMEE has codified the major greenhouse gas standards, their computation models, and emission factors into an engine that is available to clients via a web-based API (Application Programming Interface).

AMEE’s search engine (http://explorer.amee.com) also enables discovery of greenhouse gas standards and emission factors, while tracking provenance and providing a full audit trail for carbon accounting practitioners.

Pat Burtis, Investment Manager at Amadeus Capital Partners, joins the AMEE Board of Directors and says: “AMEE has recognized a clear and present need in the carbon accounting market and moved quickly to fill that gap. AMEE’s team has a unique combination of scientific, software, and web expertise, and we’re delighted to be part of their exciting growth story.” AMEE joins Amadeus’ growing portfolio of cleantech companies, which also includes GreenRoad, Nujira, and Edgeware.

Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE, adds: “We are very excited to have Pat joining the AMEE board: Amadeus have demonstrated a deep understanding of our business and its strategic vision. AMEE addresses core needs of trust, accuracy and auditability in the emerging markets and this investment will catalyse our deployment.”
Legal advisers on the funding were Gunderson Dettmer for Amadeus, and Cooley Godward for AMEE.

For further information please contact
Chantal Ligertwood, PR for Amadeus, +44 (0)7976 229 210

ABOUT AMADEUS
Amadeus Capital Partners is one of Europe’s leading technology venture capital firms.  Since its inception in 1997, the firm has backed companies across the technology spectrum in industries that include communications and networking hardware and software, cleantech, medtech, computer hardware and software, media, and e-commerce.  Amadeus has £473m under management, with active investments in around 40 companies at any time.  Amadeus offers its investee companies more than just capital – it offers vision, imagination, experience and a network of contacts across the globe.

Global businesses built by Amadeus include Cambridge Silicon Radio Ltd, now CSR plc (LSE:CSR), the leading producer of single chip bluetooth radios for short range connections, and Solexa Ltd, the developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina, Inc. (ILMN) to create the world-leader in gene-sequencing technology.

ABOUT AMEE
AMEE helps companies, governments and consumers calculate their carbon footprint consistent with the best science and international standards. The AMEE API provides access to the most up-to-date carbon and environmental data. Applications and solutions that are “powered by AMEE” help ensure compliance with authoritative international standards.

In addition to Venture backing, AMEE is also backed by leading angel investors Toby Coppel (ex Yahoo, Allen & Co), George Coelho (Good Energies), Saul Klein (The Accelerator Group, Index Ventures), Afshin Rabbani (Princeton Consulting), and Alex Clode (Bloomberg).

ABOUT O’REILLY ALPHATECH VENTURES
O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) is a seed stage venture capital fund located in San Francisco, CA. OATV is in the business of funding disruptors, innovators and hackers of the status quo. OATV takes a cash efficient approach to seeding and growing businesses which creates a natural alignment with the entrepreneurs it funds. In addition to capital, OATV brings a depth of operational experience and industry relationships to amplify the efforts of its portfolio companies.

ABOUT UNION SQUARE VENTURES
Union Square Ventures (USV) is an early stage venture capital fund located in New York City. USV focuses on IT-enabled services in media, marketing, financial services, and other verticals. USV looks to back passionate, experienced entrepreneurs who are focused on creating highly scalable services and significant value propositions for their end users.  The USV portfolio includes Etsy, Twitter, Indeed and Zynga.

AMEE has been named one of the UK’s “20 fastest-growing clean-and-cool companies” for 2010 in a competition initiated by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.

Winners were selected from a list of 150 applicants and will be part of a showcase tour to Silicon Valley scheduled for later this month.

Congratulations to all the winners who include a stellar list of cleantech pioneers covering fields as diverse as wave power and low-impact building solutions.

The full list of winners:

• AMEE – Leading aggregator of carbon data and standards for accurate carbon computation
• Aquamarine Power – “Oyster” wave power generator
• Artemis Intelligent Power
• Breathing Buildings (previously E-Stack Ltd)
• Diverse Energy
• DIY Kyoto
• Evince Technology
• EVO Electric
• HydroVenturi Limited – Revolutionary idea for increasing power output from low-head hydro
• Integrated Environmental Solutions
• Intelligent Energy
• Isentropic Limited
• Juice Technology
• Metalysis -  Eco-friendly, low-waste deposition of metal powders
• Microsharp Corporation
• ModCell – Sustainable, straw-bale houses
• Nexeon
• Oxford Catalysts Group
• PassivSystems – Learning technology that reduces home energy use
• Xeros – Uses nylon polymers to ‘wash’ garments with 90% less water use

AMEE, the carbon data aggregation platform, has implemented a ’standards spider’ to monitor key pages of standards bodies’ web sites for changes.  The spider allows the AMEE Science team to increase the rate at which updates to carbon computation methodologies are brought to market.

As an example, the spider detected changes last week to the UK government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change methodologies which affect all companies reporting under the UK’s CRC initiative.  The AMEE Science team was able to update the AMEE platform with the changes within 24 hours.

Standards bodies wishing to be included in the program (or those wishing to nominate a standard to be included) can submit URLs to the spider by emailing the AMEE Science Team: data -at- amee.com.

The new set of fuel-specific emissions factors to be used in conjunction with the UK Government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) initiative was published by the Department of Energy & Climate Change on January 22nd. The new data has been updated in AMEE and contains updated conversion factors for CO2 emissions per unit quantity of fuel used with respect to the previous Draft Consultation documentation, as well as six new fuels.  This updated dataset is consistent with the conversion factors for fuel published by DEFRA last year (with the exception of the value for petroleum coke which shows a difference of ~12%).

The most recent CRC data is now incorporated, meaning that all of the emissions factors required for CRC compliance are available through the AMEE API.

Tags: CRC, fuel, energy, electricity, business, UK, stationary combustion

Scope: UK

Authority: Enterprise

AMEE quality assurance: Passed

For more information and technical details see here.

AMEE Explorer – the new, user-friendly way to discover data in AMEE, is now in public beta.

AMEE Explorer helps users rapidly find GHG and carbon footprinting data and methodologies:

• Full-text search: Energy, GHG and carbon footprint data, content and documentation
• Searchable metadata: tags, provenance and authority
  
• Embeded graphics and visualizations
• Automatic code generation for any AMEE DataItem

AMEE Explorer will eventually replace the current science documentation, the AMEE Wiki.  Take a look and help us ensure it meets your needs: use the black ‘Feedback’ button to report bugs or suggest ideas.

In this article, we’ll go through a typical visit to AMEE Explorer, looking up information about the US E-grid by searching AMEE. You may like to try going through the example in another tab in your browser as you read this article.

Let’s imagine you’re interested in seeing what information AMEE has regarding the carbon emissions of the various electricity generating regions of the United States. You visit the site and search for “e-grid“.  The page that comes up in the first link includes documentation, the path for the relevant category in the AMEE API (/business/energy/us/subregion/), an AMEE ‘authority’ level, a provenance URL, and some tags. You can click on ‘Authority’ to see what AMEE means by that term – the approximate ‘trustedness’ of a data-set according to the AMEE Science Team’s analysis. It also includes an embedded graph of the regions’ emissions, live-generated from the AMEE data, and a map.

You’ll see a link to ’sign in to see item definitions’, and if you sign in with your My AMEE account you’ll be able to see how the inputs and outputs for the algorithm for this category are defined. This information will be useful to those developing carbon emissions calculators or other energy-related applications using AMEE.

Below the item definitions table, you’ll see a list of the regions you can use to ‘drill-down’ and see more information about the AMEE data items. Choose one, and you’ll see the details for that data item – you’ll need to sign-in if you haven’t already.

You’ll also notice links to Ruby and Java code generators for that page. If you’re developing an application to use the AMEE API, this is where you’ll find example code showing how to code against the AMEE API for a variety of languages. We’ve only done Ruby and Java so far: please use the feedback button to let us know which other languages you’d find helpful.

Try searching it for topics which interest you. For more information, read the Introduction to AMEE Explorer, check out the documentation for the AMEE core categories such as transport or look over the Greenhouse Gas Protocol data stored in AMEE.

As you may know, search engines take some time (and lots of searches) to tune effectively.  So if you don’t see a result you were expecting, click the “Feedback” tab and tell us what you searched on and what came back instead.  We continue to tune Explorer’s search algorithms and your feedback will be helpful in accelerating that process.

Please contact AMEE today for more information

10:10, the initiative for a 10% reduction of carbon emissions during 2010, have today launched an online tool that allows companies to compute their carbon footprint to measure progress in meeting their goal.

10:10’s carbon reporting tool
is powered by AMEE.

Eugenie Harvey, Director of 10:10, comments:

“Over 2000 businesses have signed up to reduce their emissions with 10:10 so far. As soon as we launched the campaign, we knew we had to find a way to let these companies report their 2009 and 2010 data to verify the reductions that they are working so hard to acheive. Our partnership with AMEE is perfect because it means that users can sign into our website and report their emissions, but we haven’t had to do all the research into how to build a reliable carbon calculator ourselves.”

Gavin Starks, AMEE CEO, said, “This is exactly how we want to see AMEE’s web services used. We’re delighted to be able to help 10:10 offer a tool to participants that is based on accurate, updated carbon accounting methodologies.”

AMEE contains data and calculating methodologies from numerous sources including the IPCC, the US Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Information Administration and the UK government agency DEFRA, as well as the World Resources Institute (WRI) Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Adherence to the calculating methodologies and established data standards specified in these sources means that AMEE provides support to greenhouse gas emissions reporting protocols such as the Global Reporting Initiative.

In addition to allowing businesses to enter the data that determines their actual emissions, the 10:10 tool includes an innovative projections feature that allows hypothetical data to be entered and compared against projections of turnover increases (screenshot above). This begins to solve a tricky problem for businesses who want to grow their revenues whilst reducing the carbon intensity of their operations. More on this soon.

To sign your business up to 10:10 and start using the tool, visit the business section of the 10:10 site.

10:10 projection tool screenshot

Today, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) announced the winners of the year-long Big Green Challenge to find successful approaches to reducing carbon emissions at a community-level.

Winners

• The Green Valleys, Brecon
• Isle of Eigg, Green island
• Household Energy Service, Ludlow

Runner up:

• Low Carbon West Oxford

The three winners each received £300,000 for showing the most promise in reducing carbon emissions from their communities. The runner up received £100k.

The Island of Eigg of the Scottish coast has cut its emissions by 32% over the year of the competition through a combination of clean energy investments and increases in household insulation.

To measure the carbon reductions made by each of the ten finalists over the 12 months of the project, NESTA used AMEE’s carbon footprinting platform to power its web-based carbon footprinting tool and analytics.

The tool captured data for

• domestic, commercial, and community buildings
• vehicles
• public transport
• flights

utilising the latest carbon calculation methods as stored and updated in AMEE’s platform.

Please contact AMEE today for more information

AMEE announces the launch of a new service providing emissions calculations for any UK rail travel.

Users of the AMEE API now have the ability to calculate the distance between any two train stations in the United Kingdom according to the actual routes with which they are served.

This makes it easier for train-based journeys to be specified and the extent of rail travel to be quantified.

Over 2800 stations are suppported, including all of those associated with the mainline rail network as well as the London Underground. AMEE provides a wide selection of train emissions factors which can be used in conjunction with the rail network distance calculator making accurate emissions calculations available for a broad spectrum of scenarios.

Tags: transport, travel, CO2

Scope: UK

Authority: Enterprise

AMEE quality assurance: Passed

Using the data

Emissions calculations are made by specifying two stations (or locations – the service will perform a ‘fuzzy’ match) and the type of train used. Users can choose between several generic train types (e.g. ‘national’, ‘local’, ‘underground’) or 16 specific types of diesel and electric trains currently in operation in the UK.

AMEE contains data on the energy/fuel consumption and seating capacities for each of these train types and so per passenger emissions estimates can be further refined by optionally specifying train occupancy for each given journey.

AMEE has incorporated the most recent update from the GHG Protocol to emissions factors for the US subregions and 155 other regional and national zones. The GHG Protocol data includes updates from the US Energy Information Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.  Also included for the first time from the GHGP are factors for nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4). More detail.

Tags: GHGP, electricity

Scope: USA, international

Authority: Enterprise

AMEE quality process: Passed

Using the data

The data comprise carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane emission factors for 139 separate countries, 16 other regions (including continent-wide values) and 26 US subregions. These values will be used by a large number of categories within AMEE for calculating carbon dioxide from electricity use in everything from toasters to electric cars.

This latest update to AMEE’s transport data is from the GHG Protocol and includes contributions from UK DEFRA, US EPA and the UN IPCC.  It includes new models from the EPA for US vehicles’ carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane emissions as well as several other regions.  It also expands the AMEE dataverse by adding models for biomass fuels. More detail.

Tags:    transport, Defra, EPA, IPCC, CO2, N2O, methane

Scope:   USA, RoW

Authority:   Enterprise

AMEE quality assurance:   Passed

Using the data

These new data are applicable to a wide variety of vehicles from ferries to heavy duty articulated trucks. Emissions can be calculated from fuel usage or distance travelled and take into account the number of passengers included in the calculation. Freight data on road, rail, air and sea can also be calculated for a given distance and load mass.

Special observations

During the exploration of this new GHG Protocol data discrepancies were discovered in the methane and nitrous oxide emissions in the GHG Protocol shipping data. Certain data were found to be orders of magnitude out from the expected values and similar values published by DECC/DEFRA. These have been corrected in AMEE as part of its quality assurance (QA) process and we have communicated our findings to the GHG protocol team.

We will be performing essential maintenance on the AMEE live platform on Tuesday, December 15th 2009, between 06:00 and 07:00 GMT/UTC. During this period live.amee.com may be unavailable for a short time.

Overview

AMEE now offers algorithms that model energy use for US appliances, based on data representing typical annual energy consumption for each make and model of appliance as provided by Energy Star.  Energy Star is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy which issues energy efficiency ratings for most US household appliances allowing manufacturers to gain a recognized standard for energy efficiency. More detail.

Tags: Energy Star, appliances

Scope: USA

Authority: Enterprise

AMEE quality process: Passed

Using the data

This new data covers a wide range of household appliances from fridges to laptops, with hundreds of appliance models in each category. The data set includes 14 separate categories and over 5,600 data items. The data provides an average value of kWh per year for each appliance model, which is then converted to carbon dioxide emissions using AMEE’s country- and region-specific emission factors.

We will be performing essential maintenance on the AMEE live platform on Tuesday, December 8th 2009, between 06:00 and 07:00 UTC. During this period live.amee.com may be unavailable for a short time.

This release is the result of many months of work. Here are some highlights:

• Rich permissions model supporting our data portability and private data tree initiatives (more on this next year).
• Support for train route calculation.
• Performance & stability enhancements (esp. for large Data Categories).
• Plus many other back-end engineering improvements.

The release version is 2.7.

New Offering Will Make Measuring and Reporting on Home Worker’s Carbon Footprint Easier for Organisations

Cambridge, England – December 2, 2009 – AlertMe, the award-winning home energy management service, and AMEE, the world’s energy meter, today announced the launch of a new service to track the energy and carbon usage of home workers. The carbon tracker enables companies to monitor and report on their home workers’ energy usage and carbon footprint in order to meet their carbon reduction commitments.

With growing regulation of carbon emissions reporting, including the introduction of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) in April 2010, companies are today manually gathering data and compiling reports on their enterprise carbon footprint. The manual nature of this work is prone to error, time consuming and often causes logistical and coordination bottlenecks. In addition, where companies have part of their workforce working from home they face the difficult task of measuring the carbon emitted by their employees for the time spent working at home.

The introduction of the carbon tracker by AlertMe and AMEE represents an innovative solution to these problems. With the new service, home workers will set up an AlertMe Energy Kit to monitor and report on their home energy usage. This information will be sent to AMEE to calculate the equivalent carbon footprint. That data will then be fed back to the company in a format that is easy to understand and track, and which combines with the rest of the company’s carbon footprint information. Carbon data can be viewed live, per-home or collectively, and can be stored and reported in any format to meet with standard reporting frameworks, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and CRC, or provide visual graphs to represent the organisation’s carbon usage over time.

With the AlertMe Energy kit, home workers can monitor and control their home’s energy use by accessing the AlertMe dashboard through any internet connection. This information empowers them to manage and monitor energy consumption, reduce their carbon footprint and save on electricity bills. With the addition of SmartPlugs, the consumption of individual appliances in the home (such as a computer for work use), can be easily tracked.

“With the growing popularity of home-working, the ability to monitor and report on home-workers’ carbon footprint is crucial. The carbon tracker will allow companies to fully understand their organisational carbon footprint, be transparent in their sustainability and auditing programmes and will provide invaluable information on the impact of home-working on the environment, said Pilgrim Beart, founder and CEO, AlertMe, “And most importantly this solution is simple for homeworkers to use removing the manual processes which have held this area back in the past.”

AMEE’s platform aggregates and keeps carbon and environmental data up-to-date, ensuring that companies get accurate, timely information.

Accurate measurement is the first step to efficiency and reduction – and cost savings. AMEE provides the intelligence to deliver customised recommendations to help home-workers become more efficient and reduce their footprint. AMEE’s clients include DECC and Energy Savings Trust, and AMEE embodies the Government recommendations for home energy assessments and energy efficiency.

Gavin Starks, founder and CEO, AMEE stated “We’re excited to be working with AlertMe on the carbon tracker which fits with AMEE’s aim of measuring carbon emissions on a global basis and using new technologies to increase transparency and accuracy. Home-working, particularly technology-enabled, is going through a new wave of growth. We’re pleased to be helping businesses understand the impact on the environment, as they continue to seek ways to identify sustainability best practices.”

Companies that would like to be a part of this new initiative should email homeworkers@alertme.com to register their interest and receive further information.

About AMEE
AMEE helps companies, governments and consumers calculate their carbon footprint and model energy consumption. The AMEE API provides access to the most up-to-date carbon and environmental data. Applications and solutions are “Powered by AMEE” to ensure compliance with authoritative international standards.

About AlertMe
Founded in 2006 and based in Cambridge, UK, AlertMe was established by successful serial entrepreneurs. As a provider of smart energy saving systems for homes, the company’s online service – AlertMe – enables consumers to take control of their energy consumption and drive it down, extending the reach of the Smart Grid and AMI networks right into the home. The company is venture backed by Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET Venture Partners and VantagePoint Venture Partners. Visit the AlertMe website.

If you would like more information, please contact AMEE today.