Right standard needed for green innovation

Having companies and people go green is the only way to go, however, they have to be able to follow the correct path, said panelists at NIWeek08’s panel on green innovation today.
Knowing a company has to go green and then implementing a plan is a key, but everyone has to be on the same page.
"Standardization allows people to speak the same language. When talking about a project in one country and it transfers to another country and if it does not follow a certain specification, it could be a problem,” said Daniel Kaminsky, a director at Elcom, a power measurement company based in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
“We need to standardize to understand the true benefits of green,” said Don Brown chief executive of EcoVelocity Associates, an international consulting firm that specializes in developing eco-product and service strategies.
“I agree we need a standard, but worse than not having a standard is having a standard that leads you down the wrong path,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and a professor of computer science at UCLA.
While everyone agrees there should be a standard way to accomplish any green initiatives, but is there one solution or a multitude?
“One of the biggest challenges is to share with people what the benefits to being green are,” Brown said.
“There will be a lot of answers,” said Dr. James Truchard, president, chief executive and co-founder of National Instruments. “I see lots of little answers. There are a lot of different ways to solve the problems.”
Any type of solution will not be universal. “It all depends on where you are and which part of the world you are in,” said Thirumalaichelvam Subramanian, chief technical officer at CEMS, a chiller management company based in Malaysia.
One answer Truchard talks about is fusion technology.
“We went to the moon. We should have the same effort toward fusion power,” he said. “That,” he said, “could be the home run.”
Renewable solar and wind power have potential to help cut down on burning carbon-based fuels to create energy, but as Manuel Gonzalez, with Houston-based Center Point Energy, said, you can only gain energy from those sources at certain times of the day and people need energy 24 hours a day.
“What is needed in the future is a good energy storage system to get energy when you need it most,” Gonzalez said.
“Nuclear power has a bad reputation, but that may help as an energy source,” Truchard said. “Solar and wind have limitations. There will be quit a few solutions to the problem.”