Environmental software developer Locus Technologies has earned the right to provider greenhouse gas emissions verification services by the California Air Resources Board.
Emissions Trading & Monitoring Software Study Applauds Locus
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., December 14, 2009 — In the midst of climate change discussions in Copenhagen, Locus Technologies (Locus), was recognized as one of the oldest and most comprehensive providers of greenhouse gas (GHG) software in a study just published by UtiliPoint International, Inc., a key utility and energy industry analysis and consulting firm.
The UtiliPoint study focuses on both software aimed at emission reporting and software aimed at emissions trading as well as the need for a link between the two types of software. “We are very pleased with leading industry analyst UtiliPoint’s comprehensive study of software providers for greenhouse gas management and with their recognition of Locus,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.
The Emissions Trading & Monitoring Software Study highlights Locus’ experience in the domain of Software as a Service (SaaS), not only for GHG emissions management, but also as a general leader in the complex space of environmental sustainability software, including water quality management. UtiliPoint predicts that Locus’ record of environmental software expertise will help Locus to become a top player in the emerging field of GHG data management and reporting.
eGHG, Locus’ GHG emissions monitoring software, is applauded in the UtiliPoint report. This software can create an emissions inventory that can be easily verified and reported to various emissions reporting programs in the US and internationally.
“Whether or not carbon is regulated through the Clean Air Act as announced by EPA last week, or a United States Federal cap-and-trade program is created in the near future, a comprehensive monitoring and reporting system is still needed for compliance with the Clean Air Act, various voluntary registries such as The Climate Registry or Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), and for trading with the various international programs already in place. We are already witnessing an explosive growth in carbon data, analysis, and reporting that comes on top of other environmental data streams such as water and sustainability. Locus provides one stop shopping for all enterprise environmental software needs,” added Dr. Duplan.
Water management problems capture more attention from environmental technology player Locus.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., November 23, 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental software, announced today the release of its Long Term Monitoring Optimization (LTMO) software that helps customers cut the cost of groundwater remediation projects. LTMO is built-in to EIM, Locus’ web-based application for managing sampling, analytical and geological data associated with environmental projects.
Long term monitoring of contaminated groundwater is one of the biggest costs of many environmental projects, often requiring that hundreds or more wells be sampled at regular intervals, with each sample event costing hundreds of dollars. Over time, changes in site conditions may mean the number of sampled wells or the frequency of sampling can be reduced. A number of analytical tools and approaches exist to identify redundant wells and pinpoint opportunities for sampling and monitoring reductions. MAROS (Monitoring And Remediation Optimization System) software application, developed by the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment, is one of the most popular of these tools. With the LTMO tool, Locus has incorporated many of the techniques and methodologies of MAROS, including trend analyses and the Delaunay triangulation method.
The Locus EIM LTMO tool offers several distinct advantages over MAROS and other existing stand-alone or spreadsheet-based applications that perform similar analyses. First of all, there is no need to export data in a special format to another application. All analyses are performed under the umbrella of EIM. Secondly, robust integrated Web 2.0 graphical tools and reports provide a wealth of options for examining the results of the analyses, including extensive backup data that can be supplied to regulatory agencies as needed. Finally, the results of any analysis can be saved and easily pulled up for review or modification.
“We expect the incorporation of the LTMO tool into EIM to be extremely beneficial to our large enterprise customers that have thousands of groundwater sites. Instead of the analyses being performed on the desktops of their many consultants, long-term groundwater management data resides in a single, central, web-accessible database. LTMO is a very powerful tool that significantly reduces the cost of long term stewardship of groundwater contaminated sites,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.
“The recent $11 billion bill passed to fix California’s water infrastructure includes a provision for mandatory monitoring of the state’s groundwater, which is often used during times of drought and is most vulnerable to contamination. From the onset of the new bill, Locus’ LTMO tool will be there to help industry and government to optimize groundwater monitoring programs,” added Duplan.
Contact Locus today for a demonstration of this exciting new feature and see how Locus EIM can help you reduce your long-term sampling and analytical costs.
What I have noticed missing from the dialogues on climate change is discussion on water and water quality as it relates to carbon emissions. Oil industry, for example, consumes and contaminates huge quantities of water and newer hydro fracturing technologies indicated more is on the way. Water management is a significant part of carbon management and translates directly into tones of GHG. It is also 100+ years problem (unlike air contamination). Most of companies have no established methods for water and groundwater accounting. Some progressive oil companies have made first steps in this direction and are quantifying their (dirty) water footprint. In my recent discussion with executives from several large companies it appears nobody wants to touch this subject. Yet, this is unavoidable issue that will move into the center stage as soon as GHG bubble bursts. Here is some interesting statistics on groundwater:
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Source: 2005 United States Geological Survey (USGS)
Water is often undervalued and wasted – the OECD forecasts that 47% of world population will be living in areas of high water stress by 2030 unless new policies are introduced. Water, like climate change, is set to be a key issue for the 21st century. It is through water that the impacts of climate change are most likely to be felt, with changing patterns of precipitation and melting glaciers affecting the supply of this critical resource. At the same time population growth, urbanization and rising per capita consumption are expected to result in rapidly increasing demand for water. Businesses will be impacted positively and negatively, and will have a significant role to play in developing and implementing solutions to the water challenge. At present, however, awareness and understanding of water-related risks and opportunities is generally limited in the business and investment communities. For that reason, CDP initiated the Water Disclosure project.
Here are some other compiled facts on water from various sources:
California passed a bill to fix our water infrastructure. This is the most comprehensive water infrastructure package in the history of California. And this is an $11 billion package that will be leveraged against an additional $30 billion that will be asked by the state’s voters next November in bonds to help finance new infrastructure and water ecosystem restoration, especially in places like the delta. That is altogether a $41 billion project.
In a series of bills that cleared the Legislature in largely bipartisan votes early Wednesday after all-night sessions, California’s water supply would be guaranteed through steps such as mandatory monitoring of groundwater reserves and expanded conservation.
“Without clean, reliable water, we cannot build, we cannot farm, we cannot grow and we cannot prosper,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California.
An important part of the bill is a compromise that was reached on the issue of mandatory monitoring of the state’s groundwater supplies, which are often used during times of drought and are most vulnerable to contamination. Many Democrats wanted the monitoring, which has been optional, done by the state, if local agencies failed to do it. But some Republicans insisted the monitoring be handled locally to help allay fears among some water agencies of too much state intrusion. Under the deal, local agencies will do the monitoring.
Locus is very pleased with the outcome of this bill as it addresses groundwater monitoring and water quality management. Locus’ EIM SaaS water quality management software is market leader in this space with thousands of sites already using it to manage their groundwater quality.
If seeing is believing, then we could all benefit from more environmental software applications like the one sold by Locus Technologies. You input your data once; it visualizes the impact.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., November 2, 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental software, announced today the release of its free greenhouse gas (GHG) calculator.
By estimating the Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide emitted from stationary sources, the calculator helps companies know if they are required to meet the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB’s) mandatory GHG reporting CARB 95101 (b)(8) legislation. This handy tool is located on Locus’ website.
“Carbon management and reporting in various legal jurisdictions in the U.S. and around the world is getting complicated by the rapid introduction of new legislation. Spreadsheets or even specialty databases will not work any more. Locus’ approach of deploying a universal web-based platform where multinational companies can input carbon data once and report many times and in many different formats is exactly the concept the market needs to avoid an accounting nightmare, ” said international carbon trading expert Peter Fusaro, Chairman of New York based Global Change Associates, cofounder of the Energy Hedge Fund Center, and creator of the annual Wall Street Green Trading Summit.
“The U.S. EPA Federal Mandatory Reporting Rule and the Climate Registry’s work to harmonize emissions reporting coupled with tools like Locus’ GHG calculator and ePortal will help industry to streamline their GHG reporting requirements while getting insight into their energy consumption,” added Fusaro.
“Offering industry a free GHG estimator is a part of Locus’ broader strategy to provide a suite of cloud-based carbon management tools in our ePortal where customers input GHG and other sustainability information once and report it many times to meet various requirements,” explained Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.
“Locus’ GHG calculator is useful for quickly estimating reporting eligibility and requirements. Organizations will realize cost-savings by organizing their GHG and other sustainability data with Locus’ ePortal software; they can retain historical information in Locus’ central database on the web and use that information for planning and budgeting,” added Duplan.
In addition, the Final Mandatory Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Rule, recently announced by the EPA, imposed a requirement that will require all facilities that emit 25,000 Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (mtCO2e) per year to report GHG emissions data to EPA annually. To estimate CO2e for Federal EPA requirements, EPA has provided an equivalency calculator at their website, which is accessible from Locus’ website.
Although California ARB and Federal EPA have similar 25,000 ton reporting requirements, the calculation requirements are different. EPA considered several factors when developing the reporting threshold, including the form of the threshold and emissions-based thresholds used in other GHG emissions programs such as California’s 95101 (b)(8) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) 1605b program. EPA’s 25,000 metric ton CO2e threshold will cover many of the types of facilities and suppliers typically regulated under the Clean Air Act (CAA), while appropriately balancing emission coverage and burden.
Locus’ GHG estimating calculator was developed in collaboration with Ecotek (www.ecotek.com), a Los Angeles based consulting firm specializing in air emission reduction solutions. Ecotek is a Climate Action Leader with the California Climate Action Registry and a founding member of The Climate Registry.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 28, 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental software, announced today that it has joined The Climate Registry and The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to report its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and GRI Performance Indicators and to assist its clients with doing the same. The Climate Registry is a nonprofit organization established to support organizations in calculating and publicly reporting GHG emissions in a common, accurate and transparent manner consistent across industry sectors and geographical borders. The Global Reporting Initiative has pioneered the development of the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting framework and is committed to its continuous improvement and application worldwide. This framework sets out the principles and indicators that organizations can use to measure and report their economic, environmental, and social performance.
“Locus Technologies has demonstrated exemplary environmental leadership by taking the critical first step toward analyzing its impact on the environment” said Doug Scott, Chair of The Climate Registry and Chair of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. “In order to manage and reduce emissions, it is important to calculate and verify emissions data accurately. By measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions according to the most rigorous and comprehensive standards, Locus is holding itself to the highest level of accountability and responsibility.”
Registry Members calculate and verify their GHG emissions according to The Climate Registry’s protocols, which are based on and consistent with international standards such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and WRI/WBCSD. By calculating, reporting and verifying their GHG emissions, Members serve as international role models for environmental responsibility and commitment. Because they have experience in managing their emissions, they also serve as valuable resources in developing future policies.
The GRI Guidelines are the world’s most widely-used sustainability reporting framework. The common framework enables like-for-like comparison to be made between companies, and for change to be effected from within a company. GRI’s mission is to create conditions for the transparent and reliable exchange of sustainability information through the development and continuous improvement of the GRI Sustainability Reporting Framework. The GRI vision is that disclosure on economic, environmental, and social performance is as commonplace and comparable as financial reporting, and as important to organizational success.
“Locus is very happy to join these organizations that are leading initiatives to standardize reporting of GHG and Sustainability Indicators for the benefit of the planet and business community. For the last several years Locus has been developing web-based software that incorporates guidance documents from these organizations to help its clients with reporting needs in various jurisdictions around the world. Locus’ goal is to provide its clients with Software as a Service (SaaS) tools where clients need to input GHG and Sustainability information only once and report it many times in accordance with various geographies and standards. This is particularly important because many regions around the world still don’t have a clear set of enterprise GHG reporting standards. With passage of the Federal Greenhouse Gases Rule on 22 September 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will, for the first time, require large emitters to begin reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) data under a new reporting system. This new program covers approximately 85 percent of the U.S. GHG emissions and applies to roughly 10,000 facilities. The owners of these facilities need to be ready to organize and report their data in the most efficient way. Furthermore, by organizing their GHG and Sustainability data in a system like Locus’, companies will not only be able to lower the reporting costs and organize their data better, but also use the very same data to improve their operational efficiency across their organization in a way that could self-fund these important initiatives,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.
“We hope that Locus will pave the way for many other companies from the US and other regions of the world to recognize the importance of GRI and GHG reporting. Embedding the GRI guidance in ePortal applications through a multi-stakeholder process will help industry to faster adopt a set of standards for sustainability disclosure,” added Dr. Duplan.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 14, 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental software, announced today that it has expanded its flagship product EIM to include a module for nuclear facilities information management and reporting.
Nearly all of the activities associated with water and soil protection at nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, including the assessment of site characteristics, the ongoing monitoring of site conditions, and the remediation of adverse environmental impacts, involve the collection and/or analysis of data. The tools and systems used to manage and store this information must satisfy strict security and QA/QC requirements to ensure that only the appropriate people can access the data, and that the quality of the data adheres to the highest Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) standards. It is also critical that these applications allow engineers and scientists to do their work in a cost-effective way, allowing them to focus less of their time on finding the data they need and formatting various outputs, and more on the evaluation and analysis of these data.
The new EIM module was specifically designed for managing subsurface and other data at nuclear facilities, including commercial reactor sites, research labs, and nuclear materials production and storage complexes. The system provides an unmatched level of data security and enforces an extensive set of QC/QC requirements on all uploaded data. At the same time it provides a variety of easy-to-use options to upload, validate, flag, examine, map, plot, download, and report data. The system has the capability to store such radioanalytical parameters as uncertainty, uncertainty type (Standard, Combined Standard, and Expanded), and required method uncertainty. It also has the capability to convert weight to activity concentrations, calculate sums of ratios, and evaluate action limits that pertain to either single or groups of parameters. The system helps reporting entities enforce data quality in accordance with the NRC or other standards such as NQA-1, and ANSI/ISO/ASQ Q 9001:2000, and validate incoming analytical data.
“Locus has been present at Department of Energy (DOE) facilities such as Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) that deal with radioactive data for some time. With the highly expected return of the nuclear industry for commercial use and decommissioning of older generation power plants and weapons complexes, we felt that the market needs an off-the-shelf tool to manage radioactive data that are subject to a different set of regulatory guidance documents from those managed under regular chemistry data under the US EPA and other guidance documents. The new radioanalytical functionality introduced through this release provides any nuclear facility that has a need for data management and reporting—and almost all have—to meet these needs using Locus’ EIM,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. Locus worked with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in developing the needed functionality. As part of a demonstration of the system’s flexibility and expandability to EPRI earlier this year, various statistical (sign, fraction limit, and normal distribution tests) and graphical (regression-correlation, regression with error bars, box, and rank trend plots) outputs were added to EIM’s already impressive list of analytical tools. “We are very excited to introduce this tool at the upcoming EPRI Groundwater Protection Workshop (in collaboration with NEI) to be held in Charleston, SC from September 15 to 16, 2009,” added Dr. Duplan.
EIM, Locus’ Environmental Information Management tool, is the world’s largest commercial on-demand environmental data management system. EIM completely replaces existing stand-alone data systems and reporting tools to provide a comprehensive integrated solution to one of the environmental industries’ most vexing problems – the centralization and management of complex data pertaining to contaminated water, groundwater, soil, and/or air. EIM provides for the complete electronic processing of analytical data, beginning with the upload of electronic data deliverables from labs, and terminating in state-mandated regulatory exports and reporting. EIM is deployed through Software as a Service (SaaS) model which eliminates most of the difficulties associated with the adoption of a new technology, while offering the opportunity for more rapid customization to meet the ever changing needs of its user population. The system currently stores over 120 million records for over 35,000 sites worldwide.
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Locus Technologies provides cloud-based environmental software and mobile solutions for EHS, sustainability management, GHG reporting, water quality management, risk management, and analytical, geologic, and ecologic environmental data management.