Getting a handle on the rubric of sustainability

As I've written before, I have become very active in the area of energy and environmental optimization - aka sustainability. I've been collaborating with several individuals, VCs and tech firms in Silicon Valley, working to define and lead sustainability efforts.

My interest in sustainability is multi-faceted, reflecting my own diverse range of interests:

• As an Environmentalist: Developing solutions to our energy and resource needs that does not adversely affect the future of the planet and of my children is of paramount importance.
• As a Technophile: The hardware/software developments behind sustainability are some of the most technically interesting and socially relevant developments going on today.
• As a Businessman: As an entrepreneur, I recognize the enormous business opportunity offered by sustainability development and implementation. Eco-efficiency and creating low carbon-products is already a multi-billion dollar industry and will only continue to grow and expand.
• As a SaaS Application Designer: It is clear to me, that software to monitor, manage and monetize energy and resource use, whether at the consumer/individual level or at the corporate level will be provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The design of these applications - everything from signup to functionality to billing to support to visual branding to reporting - all aspects of the entire customer life cycle, will be critical to success.
• As a User Experience Designer: As someone with a keen interest in how to design user experiences that both motivate and facilitate user performance, sustainability presents an exciting challenge. Sustainability solutions that require user interaction including carbon accounting, tracking and capital investments, will be applied only in so far as they are meaningful, intuitive to use, and synergize with existing conceptual models and business processes.

While there are certainly more perspectives I can list, suffice it to say that I have many motivations driving me to take a lead in the field of sustainability.

The Rubric of Sustainability

One of the challenges when discussing sustainability, has been to find a concise way to describe and organize the diversity of services and the potential $$s that fall under the rubric of sustainability.

I've come up with a simple framework for classifying various sustainability efforts and services - a kind of Sustainability System of Record:

1. Production - Technologies devoted to creating carbon-neutral energy or reducing greenhouse gas emissions and waste production.
2. Distribution - Technologies devoted to distributing energy and resources efficiently from production source to consumption source.
3. Optimization - A broad category describing the initiatives an orgainzation or individual takes to optimize the energy and resources consumed and expended.
4. Output - The results of applying the optimization efforts.

Below I have an off-the-top-of-my-head list of what kinds of products and services fall into each category. I will be expanding and refining this list further in the next few blog posts. In addition to classifying more of the market services, I also want to try to add in estimates for investment dollars, companies involved, and even identify where there is a need for software solutions and user experience design.

As you can see, this is really just a quick first pass, but I am hoping through reader comments and feedback to be able to refine this into a useful resource.