̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - green technology

Green jobs for graduates

plc32 — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:47:24 +0000

Green industry experts gave Cambridge students a tour of careers in the environment during a two-week Green Careers Festival, including how to land a green job.

Cambridge Zero highlights ̽��ֱ�� efforts at Climate Week NYC

plc32 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 14:29:51 +0000

Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh took centre stage at the world's biggest climate event of its kind in New York to talk to global leaders of government, business and philanthropy about Cambridge’s efforts to tackle climate change.

At the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC, Professor Shuckburgh offered a glimpse of optimism and urged everyone assembled to press on with implementing the urgent efforts needed this decade to tackle climate change.

"We have all the building blocks...we just simply haven't put them together, yet," she said.

Professor Shuckburgh appeared at Climate Week's main stage for one of the key discussions on the "New frontiers of Climate Action". Joining her were:

Helen Clarkson (Corpus Christi 1993) Chief Executive Officer of the Climate Group which organises Climate Week

Kate Brandt (Selwyn 2007) Chief Sustainability Officer of Google

Judith Weise Chief People & Sustainability Officer of Siemens AG

̽��ֱ��four women discussed the innovation and investment needed to achieve net zero. In particular, Professor Shuckburgh talked about what the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is doing.

She mentioned Cambridge research on materials, batteries, photovoltaics, the Cambridge ecosystem for innovation, including Cambridge research on AI, aviation, the Centre for Landscape Regeneration and the ground-breaking work of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.

She also mentioned how Cambridge is making efforts to support a more just transition around the world with the support of the Mastercard Foundation Programme with African institutions and scholars.

"Green innovation is going to be absolutely essential to our future...[and] one of the things we've been talking a lot about in Cambridge is not just how we can ensure that we are benefiting the UK, but also how we can collaborate externally."

Climate Week NYC takes place in partnership with the United Nations General Assembly and is run in coordination with the United Nations and the City of New York. It is the largest annual climate event of its kind, bringing together some 400 events and activities across the City of New York – in person, hybrid and online.

This year it centred around the UN General Assembly, the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Ambition Summit as well as hundreds of national government, business and climate group initiatives, making it a unique opportunity for Cambridge to communicate with the world.

On Wednesday evening, just hours after the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Ambition Summit concluded at the nearby headquarters of the United Nations, Professor Shuckburgh took part in Mission Possible: Creating a Better Planetary Future, an alumni event hosted by Cambridge in America at the Morgan Library in New York.

Professor Shuckburgh was joined by Professor of Planetary Computing Anil Madhavapeddy (Pembroke) and Fiona Macklin (St John’s 2012), Senior Adviser to Groundswell, a joint initiative between Bezos Earth Fund, Global Optimism and the Systems Change Lab.

̽��ֱ��panel focused on the technological and behavioural solutions available to build a sustainable future for the whole planet and was chaired by Professor Matthew Connelly, the new Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“Our alumni network is one of Cambridge’s greatest pillars of support and with their help the ̽��ֱ�� is able to amplify its work, linking one of the world’s top research universities to peer institutions, policymakers and business leaders,” Professor Shuckburgh said.

Throughout the visit to New York, Professor Shuckburgh met with dozens of supporters, policymakers, business, industry and climate leaders in a packed schedule, with only brief moments to spare.

During a brief interlude between engagements, she managed to show up and support new initiative Climate Basecamp, which sponsored an "endangered flavors" ice cream stand at Union Square with TV screenwriter Chuck Tatham, whose hits include: Modern Family, Arrested Development and How I Met Your Mother.

While there she also shared a selfie and a chat with fellow climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.

We have all the building blocks...we just simply haven't put them together, yet

Prof Emily Shuckburgh

Facing ̽��ֱ��New Reality - Climate Week NYC Opening Ceremony

Credit: Paul Casciato/ ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Green tech startups see boost in patents and investment when partnering with government – study

fpjl2 — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:02:11 +0000

Latest research on hundreds of new green technology companies in the US shows the patenting activity of a startup climbs by over 73% on average every time they collaborate with a government agency on “cleantech” development – from next-generation solar cells to new energy storage materials.

̽��ֱ��study also found that every time a cleantech startup licensed a technology developed by a government agency, the company secured – on average – more than double the amount of financing deals when compared to similar startups: a 155% increase one year after taking out a licence.

Collaboration with universities and private firms are a familiar path for many startups, yet government partnerships are significantly undervalued when it comes to green technologies, say researchers.

While the role of public-private partnerships in sectors such as biotech and IT is well known, they say that – until now – there has been a lack of data on the effectiveness of these alliances in cleantech. ̽��ֱ��study is published in the journal Research Policy.

“Our findings suggest that some of the signs commonly used to track innovation and business success, such as patents and financing, increase when new cleantech companies partner with US government departments or labs,” said study co-author Laura Diaz Anadon, Professor of Climate Change Policy at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Prof Claudia Doblinger, study first author from the Technical ̽��ֱ�� of Munich, said: “Government research laboratories have a major role to play in the climate challenge but also the growth of small businesses – twin objectives at the heart of many policy discussions, such as the Green New Deal in the United States.”

̽��ֱ��researchers built a new dataset of 657 US cleantech startups and the more than 2,000 partnerships those companies established between 2008 and 2012, to gauge the different outcomes for private and public alliances.

Around 66% of the startups were less than five years old in 2008, with the remaining 34% commencing during the selected study period. ̽��ֱ��research included companies across the sustainable sector: from wind to marine power, and recycling to batteries.

In addition to the benefits seen in patenting and investment, researchers also found that alliances with some of the stronger innovation outcomes were outside of major tech hubs such as Silicon Valley – suggesting the potential for building “regional ecosystems”.

̽��ֱ��National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), for example, part of the US Department of Energy and situated in Colorado, is a “prominent example of government organisations in the US partnering with cleantech startups”, say researchers.

A major player in the development of green technologies, NREL it worked throughout the 2000s with startup companies in “thin film” such as First Solar, which in 2009 became the largest producer of Cadmium Telluride solar technology.

Researchers point out that NREL has granted more than 260 licenses since 2000, and this study shows the value of government agencies such as this have on startups in particular.

̽��ֱ��study’s authors argue that the scale, facilities, and longer-term perspective of state agencies, such as the US Department of Energy and its seventeen national laboratories, naturally complement the nimble startups that can sniff out and adapt technological developments to market opportunities at a faster rate.

“Governments can and should have longer-term perspectives when compared to the private sector, and thus play a critical role in energy innovation,” said study co-author Prof Kavita Surana, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Maryland.

“Beyond grants and supporting the early markets, it is the joint development and transfer of knowledge that government agencies are able to foster with startups that makes a difference.

“As the US Congress and civil society prepare to debate the substance of the policies like the Green New Deal, facilitating public-private partnerships could well be an important, and relatively inexpensive, part of any forward-looking policy package,” said Surana.

Doblinger says that to forge lasting partnerships with emerging businesses, government agencies should test out incentives that support collaborative projects.

“Initiatives such as investing more in technology transfer capabilities, starting entrepreneurs in residence programs, or allowing government scientists to take temporary leave to work with a private firm, could reduce information asymmetry and provide incentives to researchers,” she said.

Anadon believes that the lessons from the study are worth considering in national contexts beyond the US. “For the agencies of any government to successfully work with startups, sufficient and stable funding is vital – along with technology transfer and communication support.”

“Our findings should be taken into consideration whenever funding for public research into sustainable energy is being debated. Cleantech that comes from public-private partnerships will be essential for meeting global climate and sustainability goals,” she said.

A bold response to the world’s greatest challenge
̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is building on its existing research and launching an ambitious new environment and climate change initiative. Cambridge Zero is not just about developing greener technologies. It will harness the full power of the ̽��ֱ��’s research and policy expertise, developing solutions that work for our lives, our society and our biosphere.

Collaboration between government and startups could help meet the climate challenge while growing small businesses. Findings could inform discussions on Green New Deal or any “forward-looking policy package” say researchers.

Cleantech that comes from public-private partnerships will be essential for meeting global climate and sustainability goals

Laura Diaz Anadon

NREL

Photovoltaic array at the National Wind Technology Center near Boulder, Colorado

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Going green: why don't we all do it?

lw355 — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 09:20:54 +0000

For those of us who pay fuel bills, saving energy by insulating our homes or perhaps installing solar panels seems to make perfect sense. It saves money, therefore as rational human beings why don’t we all do it?

It’s a question that preoccupies Dr Franz Fuerst from the Department of Land Economy. “If you just follow the bottom line, you should see a lot more investment in energy efficiency purely from a profit-maximising perspective. And we should see even more if we take the costs of climate change into account. Why it’s not happening is a puzzle that keeps me awake at night,” he admits.

Fascinated to find the factors at play, Fuerst and his colleague Ante Busic-Sontic started supplementing their economic models with insights derived from psychology.

According to their newly developed theoretical framework, our personalities – as described by the ‘Big Five’ personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – have a major influence on our decisions about investing in energy efficiency because of the way they relate to our attitudes to risk and the environment.

To provide evidence for the theory, they analysed data from the Understanding Society survey (previously called the British Household Panel Survey), which since 2009 has surveyed some 50,000 households and 100,000 individuals every year. “It’s a rich data set that captures all possible indicators for a household, including energy efficiency decisions and attitudes as well as personality traits,” says Fuerst.

They found that personality traits matter in terms of investment decisions in energy efficiency, even when controlled for drivers such as income, gender and education, although some personality traits are more strongly associated with investment decisions than others.

“Making any investment is almost always a risky undertaking. This is particularly true for many energy efficiency investments that require upfront capital expenditure while the actual energy savings and payback periods occur at a later time, which introduces risk. But what is considered an acceptable level of risk differs widely across people and households.”

This makes attitudes toward risk an interesting factor to consider when explaining energy efficiency investment decisions. “Openness, which is generally related to lower risk aversion, has a distinct impact on investment behaviour and is our strongest trait,” he explains. “Neuroticism and Agreeableness lead people to be more risk averse, while Extraversion has a positive association with risk. Conscientiousness instead shows only a weak impact on investment behaviour through the risk channel.”

They also found sizeable differences between personality traits and environmental attitudes and the same personality traits and actual investment outcomes. “We find that with rising income, personality traits become more important as factors that determine green investment. Your personality traits don’t get a chance to manifest themselves if you lack the money to invest.”

Given policymakers’ limited success in encouraging more of us to invest in energy efficiency, understanding how personality affects these decisions could help us develop more effective policies and incentives, Fuerst believes.

“Because perceived risk and risk aversion are the two key mediating factors, there is scope for developing more bespoke financial products that are attractive if you have a very low appetite for risk.”

There is already a range of financing options available that involve transferring some or all of the investment risk from the property owner to a private or public sector third party but these are currently focused on larger organisations and businesses and have yet to be rolled out to households on a large scale. Additionally, information campaigns can help to increase the awareness among the risk averse that the ‘do nothing’ option is by no means risk-free and might in fact be the riskiest choice. “For example, via the larger exposure to future energy prices, tightening regulations or a potential drop in market value for properties with poor energy efficiency,” he says.

Environmental decisions, are affected not just by personality and attitudes to risk, but also by urban design and social conditions – factors that Professor Doug Crawford-Brown and PhD student Rosalyn Old are exploring.

“Cities are increasingly incorporating sustainability metrics in the way buildings are built, the materials and resources used by occupants, and how waste is disposed of,” Crawford-Brown explains. “But how can we ensure cities will meet these metrics and perform sustainably? One of the most important challenges is to understand how people are motivated to act sustainably, and how those motivations are stimulated by the design and operations of communities.”

To understand more about the take up and use of green technologies, Old is studying the ̽��ֱ��’s North West Cambridge (NWC) Development, an extension to the city that is currently being built. “House builders are under pressure to include green technologies in new buildings, yet the take up and use of these technologies is uncertain,” she says. “This is a good opportunity to look at what’s special about NWC, how energy and carbon can be saved in a development like this, and learn lessons that can be transferred to future sites.”

Taking a range of technologies – from solar panels and water recycling to the district heating system and electric car charging points – that are being built into NWC, Old is modelling which technologies will be most efficient according to how people behave.

Residents have yet to move into NWC, so she is surveying equivalent demographic groups in Cambridge, such as postgraduates, key workers and families, to find out about their values, norms and attitudes so that she can model how they are likely to use the green technologies on offer.

“We can look at the energy impact given certain scenarios,” she explains. “For example, if 50% of postgraduates are ‘keen greens’ and they all cycle to their departments, the model will tell us the energy impact.”

And because the model includes the ability to interrogate different scenarios, it allows project managers to calculate the carbon savings associated with encouraging certain groups to be more environmentally conscious, opening up new ways of nudging residents to be greener.

Old hopes the model will help shape future phases of NWC, as well as other sustainable city sites and other sectors: “What we discover about how to shift people between different behavioural groups is important and can be used in policy work in many sectors. Even small changes in urban design can make a big difference.”

From wind turbines and solar photovoltaics to grey water recycling and electric vehicles, technology is making it ever easier for us to be green – yet many of us are not. Now, Cambridge researchers are discovering that our personalities and communities have a major impact on our environmental decisions, opening up new ways to ‘nudge’ us into saving energy and carbon.

One of the most important challenges is to understand how people are motivated to act sustainably, and how those motivations are stimulated by the design and operations of communities

Douglas Crawford-Brown

Josef Stuefer

Green light

Smart city, MAGIC city

Nudging people to make sustainable lifestyle choices is one thing, but can a city be nudged towards energy efficient investments, lower emissions and cleaner air?

Cities cope with pollution and uncomfortable temperatures by closing windows and installing units that heat, ventilate and air condition, which themselves guzzle energy and frustrate efforts to decarbonise.

A new interdisciplinary research project aims to halt this unsustainable trend by creating solutions that make cities cleaner with minimum use of energy. ̽��ֱ��key to progress, says project leader Professor Paul Linden, in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, is to start treating the city as a complete, integrated system.

“Experience over the past two decades suggests that when infrastructure investment works closely with innovative urban design across a city, there’s a shift towards low emissions and lower carbon travel through spontaneous citizen choices,” he explains.

̽��ֱ��£4.1 million Managing Air for Clean Inner Cities (MAGIC) project will link data fed from sensors monitoring a city’s air to an understanding of air flow inside and outside buildings, and innovations in natural ventilation processes. ̽��ֱ��idea is to develop an integrated suite of models to manage air quality and temperature (and, consequently, energy, carbon, health and wellbeing) – at the level of buildings, blocks and across the whole city.

To do so, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, architects and geographers from 12 university and industry organisations will be working together, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

̽��ֱ��model and associated decision support system will, for example, provide information on how traffic routes can be optimised to reduce pollution, and the cost-benefits of introducing cycling routes and green spaces. But the main value of understanding energy use and air flow, says Linden, is that a city can monitor itself continuously – it can, in effect, become its own natural air conditioner.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Low-impact hub generates electrical current from pure plant power

lw355 — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 09:00:52 +0000

A prototype “green bus shelter” that could eventually generate enough electricity to light itself, has been built by a collaboration of ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers and eco-companies.

̽��ֱ��ongoing living experiment, hosted by the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Botanic Garden and open to the visiting public, is incorporated in a distinct wooden hub, designed by architects MCMM to resemble a structure like a bus shelter. Eight vertical green wall units – created by green wall specialists, Scotscape – are housed along with four semi-transparent solar panels and two flexible solar panels provided by Polysolar.

̽��ֱ��hub has specially adapted vertical green walls that harvest electrons naturally produced as a by-product of photosynthesis and metabolic activity, and convert them into electrical current. It is the brainchild of Professor Christopher Howe and Dr Paolo Bombelli of the Department of Biochemistry. Their previous experiments resulted in a device able to power a radio using the current generated by moss.

̽��ֱ��thin-film solar panels turn light into electricity by using mainly the blue and green radiation of the solar spectrum. Plants grow behind the solar glass, ‘sharing the light’ by utilising the red spectrum radiation needed for photosynthesis, while avoiding the scorching effect of UV light. ̽��ֱ��plants generate electrical currents as a consequence of photosynthesis and metabolic activity during the day and night.

“Ideally you can have the solar panels generating during the day, and the biological system at night. To address the world’s energy needs, we need a portfolio of many different technologies, and it’s even better if these technologies can operate in synergy,” said Bombelli.

̽��ֱ��structure of the hub allows different combinations of the photovoltaic and biological systems to be tested. On the north east aspect of the hub, plants receive light directly, without being exposed to too much direct sun. On the south west orientation, a green wall panel is housed behind a semi-transparent solar panel so that the effect on the plants and their ability to generate current can be monitored. Next to that, in the same orientation, a single solar panel stands alone, and two further panels are also mounted on the roof.

“ ̽��ֱ��combination of horticulture with renewable energy production constitutes a powerful solution to food and resource shortages on an increasingly populated planet,” explained Joanna Slota-Newson from Polysolar. “We build our semi-transparent solar panels into greenhouses, producing electrical energy from the sun which can in turn be used to power irrigation pumps or artificial lighting, while offering a controlled environment to improve agricultural yields. In this collaboration with Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, the public can experience the plants’ healthy growth behind Polysolar panels.”

̽��ֱ��green wall panels in the hub are made from a synthetic material containing pockets, each holding a litre of soil and several plants. ̽��ֱ��pockets are fitted with a lining of carbon fibre on the back, which acts as an anode to receive electrons from the metabolism of plants and bacteria in the soil, and a carbon/catalyst plate on the front which acts as a cathode.

When a plant photosynthesises, energy from the sun is used to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds that the plant needs to grow. Some of the compounds – such as carbohydrates, proteins and lipids – are leached into the soil where they are broken down by bacteria, which in turn release by-products, including electrons, as part of the process.

Electrons have a negative charge so, when they are generated, protons (with a positive charge) are also created. When the anode and cathode are connected to each other by a wire acting as an external circuit, the negative charges migrate between those two electrodes. Simultaneously, the positive charges migrate from the anodic region to the cathode through a wet system, in this case the soil. ̽��ֱ��cathode contains a catalyst that enables the electrons, protons and atmospheric oxygen to recombine to form water, thus completing the circuit and permitting an electrical current to be generated in the external circuit.

̽��ֱ��P2P hub therefore generates electrical current from the combination of biological and physical elements. Each element of the hub is monitored separately, and members of the public can track the findings in real time, at a dedicated website and on a computer embedded in the hub itself.

Margherita Cesca, Senior Architect and Director of MCMM Architettura, the hub’s designer, is pleased that it has garnered so much interest. “This prototype is intended to inspire the imagination, and encourage people to consider what could be achieved with these pioneering technologies. ̽��ֱ��challenging design incorporates and showcases green wall and solar panels as well as glass, creating an interesting element which sits beautifully within Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Botanic Garden,” she said.

Bombelli added: “ ̽��ֱ��long-term aim of the P2P solar hub research is to develop a range of self-powered sustainable buildings for multi-purpose use all over the world, from bus stops to refugee shelters.”

̽��ֱ��P2P project was supported by a Partnership Development Award grant from the ̽��ֱ��’s EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account.

P2P is an outreach activity developed under the umbrella of the BPV (BioPhotoVoltaic) project working in collaboration with green technology companies including MCMM, Polysolar and Scotscape. ̽��ֱ��BPV project includes scientists from the Departments of Biochemistry, Plant Sciences, Physics and Chemistry at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, together with the ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cape Town.

Green wall technology and semi-transparent solar panels have been combined to generate electrical current from a renewable source of energy both day and night.

This prototype is intended to inspire the imagination, and encourage people to consider what could be achieved with these pioneering technologies

Margherita Cesca, MCMM Architettura

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Putting a price on our future

lw355 — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 15:47:26 +0000

How can businesses value and manage their dependencies and impacts on the natural world? How can banks be encouraged to make clean energy investments? As sustainability moves up the agenda, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL) is linking Cambridge academics with international businesses to help their leaders make responsible decisions for the long-term.

“Companies are starting to think about the ecological impact of their activities across their supply chain,” said Dr Bhaskar Vira, ̽��ֱ�� Senior Lecturer in the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Geography. “We’re trying to put a real economic value on natural resources.” Production of many mass market consumables, from beer to chocolate, takes advantage of many natural resources that aren’t currently factored into operational costs.

“A global food manufacturer, for example, wants to be aware of all the ingredients that have gone into one of its flagship confectionary products, and the way in which they’ve been grown and sourced,” said Vira. “Throughout that supply chain there may be impacts on the environment that aren’t currently factored into the price of the product.” Similarly, an agribusiness giant depends on tomatoes supplied by farmers in California – a water-scarce region. Working with CPSL, we’re are asking whether there is something this company can do to encourage farmers to be more water efficient in their working practices.”

“If a company was asked to pay for the groundwater used in its factories, how much would it cost? Water use might be 10% of the overall operating budget, and that’s the kind of figure a company might start to take seriously. At the moment they don’t need to pay this cost, but if a government starts to regulate in the future they might need to. Similarly, if the government of California starts to regulate farming practices and the cost of tomatoes suddenly shoots up, certain companies need to factor this into their long-term business planning. It makes good strategic sense to anticipate some of these future changes.”

CPSL has drawn together a group of companies in the food, agriculture, and extractive industries, into a project called ‘Right Values for Externalities’, whose goal is to reflect the external costs incurred in product lifecycles on their balance sheets. “We created teams of one economist and one ecologist to work on case studies with companies, using company data to understand what its impact might be,” said Vira, who provided scientific guidance for this project, co-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council as part of the Valuing Nature Network (www.valuing-nature.net). ̽��ֱ��work has resulted in the creation of practical guidance for companies wishing to undertake an evaluation of external impacts associated with their activities, and to understand how these risks can be anticipated and prioritised in their decision-making.

̽��ֱ��project is one of many convened by CPSL, whose Director Polly Courtice said “we’re facing a perfect storm of having to provide food, energy and water for a population that’s growing from seven billion to nine billion, and the pressures this puts on society. CPSL is having a continuous series of conversations with businesses to work out how to respond to these challenges.

“We are driven by how we can help to promote change, and avert environmental and social crises that are much nearer to the present day than we used to think,” said Courtice. Vira added, “We want to use our case studies as examples of what other businesses should be thinking about. CPSL plays a key role in this as a trusted intermediary between the ̽��ֱ�� and businesses –that trust is developed through long term relationships.”

At a different level of engagement, Professor Danny Ralph, Academic Director of the Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School, is involved in a CPSL project aimed at finding ways to unlock greater mainstream investment in clean energy. “ ̽��ֱ��Banking Environment Initiative is a means of tackling key sustainability issues,” he said. CPSL drew together six banks and six energy companies, and linked them with the Centre for Risk Studies, and with Dr Chi Kong Chyong and Dr David Reiner in the Judge’s Energy Policy Research Group, to investigate valuation models for clean energy investments.

“Banks want to invest in companies they believe will cope in the future. But green technologies are expensive, and energy companies making these investments are unlikely to recoup their costs. Should an institutional investor choose a company that appears to be very forward-looking in its R&D and is moving towards green technologies, but isn’t very ‘capital efficient’, over a more focused one?” asked Ralph. “A long-term investor needs to ask which companies are positioning themselves so they can adapt their basic products to a world we can’t even predict.”

Using a methodology called real options analysis, the Cambridge team showed the importance of building in a degree of flexibility, to account for decision-making around uncertain future market conditions. “In a standard banking valuation, a company would diversify its risks,” explained Ralph. “But climate change, for example, is affecting the whole world. You can’t diversify something we’re all going to face together. What we’ve done is highlight that investors need to stop thinking about diversification in terms of a portfolio where the risks are unrelated. This changes the nature of the uncertainty around investment risk.”

“Danny’s work is helping to drive a conversation in the industry about valuation methods, and is having a big impact on the thinking of these banks,” said Dr Jake Reynolds, CPSL’s Director of Business Platforms. “If we really want to effect change, we have to find a way to align sustainability with business models, and that means banks discussing this with their clients. This project has provided a brilliant platform for that - these conversations about clean energy were just not happening before.”

“We are working with people dealing with real problems that our research community may have a great deal to contribute to,” said Courtice. “We try to act as a bridge between the knowledge base in the ̽��ֱ�� and that in the business community, and create opportunities for them to interact. We’re looking for areas of mutual interest and we’re maintaining the engagement long enough for the issues to emerge.”

CPSL’s Executive Education programmes raise awareness of issues from climate change to resource scarcity to transport. Around 6,000 business leaders have now completed a programme, and on leaving have become part of CPSL’s global Sustainability Network.

A key focus of CPSL’s work now is to bring this network into closer contact with the ̽��ֱ��’s research. A series of business platforms have been set up, bringing together senior practitioners with shared interests in particular business problems from climate change and natural capital depletion, to responsible investment and product innovation. ̽��ֱ��aim is to help practitioners identify what needs to change, and to take practical action to achieve this with their peers.

“Leaders come on our Executive Education programmes and then ask what they can do to change their organisations,” said Reynolds. “They realise that even if they became the world’s most sustainable company that wouldn’t solve the problem because their peers may not be with them, or their suppliers, or their clients, or government policy might be tilting business the other way. So they start thinking about their industry and the wider influence it has over the economy. Many come to the conclusion that they have to work together on these big problems rather than go it alone.”

Helping big businesses consider their impact on the environment is leading to a re-evaluation of activities to combine profitability with sustainability.

If we really want to effect change, we have to find a way to align sustainability with business models

Jake Reynolds

Ryan Hyde on flickr

Tha'll do

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Resolution ready to shine down under

tdk25 — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 05:00:03 +0000

After months of planning, design, building and testing, Britain’s only entry into the World Solar Challenge – a 3,000km solar-powered race across Australia – is heading out to the other side of the world.

Created by students at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the car, which has been named “Resolution” by its creators, will be transported to Australia on Tuesday. Once there, it will undergo intense examination and further testing before the Darwin to Adelaide race begins on 6 October.

No British team has ever won the competition in its 26-year history. A victory this time would be a triumph of enterprise and ingenuity against the odds. Unlike the most successful of their competitors, who receive funding to build their cars up front, the Cambridge team have to raise the money themselves from scratch. They also have to fit the construction around exams and holiday jobs which, in some cases, are funding their own trips to Australia to compete.

Despite the challenge, however, the team are confident that Resolution’s radically different design has given them a chance. ̽��ֱ��car, which runs on roughly the same power as a hairdryer, overcomes the traditional trade-off between maximising its power and still having an aerodynamic design by separating the two.

Solar panels are attached to aft-tracking plates across its body, and programmed to follow the movement of the sun across the sky. In most solar cars, the panels are fixed to the vehicle’s surface, which compromises its shape. ̽��ֱ��use of mobile panels has enabled the team to make Resolution far more aerodynamic than the traditional “table-top” design of most of their competitors.

̽��ֱ��result is a vehicle that can move at an astonishing rate. In tests, the car has exceeded 70 miles per hour with a predicted top speed of 87 miles per hour. That bodes well for a competition where the fastest average speed ever recorded by a winner was just under 63mph.

“Put simply, our car looks like nothing else in the competition, and that might just give us the edge we need,” Keno Mario-Ghae, team manager for Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Eco-Racing, based at the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Engineering, said.

“There is still work to do, but we’re at the stage where the devil is in the detail. We’re looking at getting little things to run a bit more smoothly, or with a bit less power. We reckon that we can still squeeze out about 200 watts more in power consumption with a bit of effort.”

̽��ֱ��main reason for sending the car to Australia now – weeks before the race itself begins – is the intense preparation period that it will have to pass through on arrival. ̽��ֱ��car first goes into quarantine, possibly for just five days, but potentially for much longer.

Once released, the vehicle enters a new period of testing. Safety plans have to be submitted, driver turnaround times perfected, and the car undergoes test drives at different speeds. In particular, the team will need to assess how its systems are coping with the heat. Temperatures on the route could reach into the high 30s, which will be gruelling not just for the car, but the student drivers, who will be undertaking four hour stints inside the cramped cockpit.

“It’s basically like Formula One,” Mario-Ghae observed. “Everything we submit gets reviewed and checked to make sure that it complies with the rules. ̽��ֱ��systems are assessed one by one. Even the drivers have to be weighed in.”

̽��ֱ��cost of building the car comes to almost £500,000, but at no stage during it construction period has the team possessed anything resembling that amount of money. Instead, they have had to put it together using corporate sponsorship, donations, a “Name-On-Car” scheme, and crowdfunding through the website Kickstarter.

̽��ֱ��net result is that, unlike many of their competitors, there are few spare components. That will make for a tense race because, although the car can potentially reach speeds that will challenge for a place on the winners’ podium, it could also fail if its key parts stop working.

“ ̽��ֱ��margins are tight and and for us something failing could take us from challenging for a winning position to being absolutely nowhere,” Mario-Ghae said. “You just have to pray that everything will work. ̽��ֱ��race is going to be a massive effort, but if we can get everything right, we genuinely believe that we can win. We’re doing everything that we can to make this happen.”

Further information about Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Eco-Racing, and how you can support the British team, can be found at https://www.cuer.co.uk/

For more information about this story, please contact Tom Kirk, Tel: 01223 332300, thomas.kirk@admin.cam.ac.uk

Built by undergraduates working for their exams, with funds raised by the students themselves, Cambridge’s solar car is the only British entry into the World Solar Challenge. Despite the odds, however, its radical design could still secure victory.

Put simply, our car looks like nothing else in the competition, and that might just give us the edge we need.

Keno Mario-Ghae

Solar car

Nick Saffell.

Resolution during a test drive in Cambridge.

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