C-Lock Takes Emissions Monitoring Software to Poland
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C-Lock Technology Inc., says it’s got a better breed of software to measure, analyze and report greenhouse gas emissions, and they’ve gone to Poland to prove it.
C-Lock announced Thursday that it has a $12.5 million deal to deploy its GreenCert software in a pilot project at 14 coal-fired power plants in Poland. The deal is with Crowley-Shindler Management LLC, a unit of The Crowley Group, which develops Internet networks and transportation infrastructure in Eastern Europe.
Jim Bitonti, president of C-Lock, a subsidiary of “cleaner coal” refining company Evergreen Energy Inc., bills its GreenCert software as “a real-time, information management capability that can go from a component level drill-down, all the way through up to the enterprise.”
In other words, he said, it can take data from smokestack monitoring equipment and similar sources, analyze it and store it for presentation to regulators like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or auditors for the European Union Emission Trading System, the world’s largest carbon-trading platform.
GreenCert, which is built on infrastructure software from IBM, is already being tested at agricultural and coal-fired power plants in the United States and Canada, though Bitonti wouldn’t give more information about those projects.
C-Lock isn’t the only company looking to make money on what’s expected to become a huge business of helping companies track and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
In November, Sterling, Va.-based Clear Standards, which has developed software to help businesses calculate their carbon footprint throughout their operations and find energy-efficiency projects to deploy to cut emissions, raised $4 million for a Series A funding (see Clear Standards Bags $4M for Carbon Management).
Earlier that month, San Francisco-based Planet Metrics said it had raised $2.3 million in Series A for its carbon management and visualization software (see Planet Metrics Launches Carbon Modeling, Raises $2.3M). Canada-based Carbonetworks also raised its Series A earlier this year, snagging $5 million.
Given the potential market for helping companies reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, such bets could be well-placed.
New Carbon Finance, a subsidiary of research firm New Energy Finance, projected in February that the world’s carbon-trading markets — led by the European Union’s carbon cap-and-trade program in place since 2005 — would top $100 billion by the end of 2008.
In North America, regional cap-and-trade efforts now underway include The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is made up of 10 northeastern states; the Western Climate Initiative under development by seven western states and four Canadian provinces; and private, voluntary programs such as the Chicago Climate Exchange and American Carbon Registry (see RGGI Generates $38.58M in Carbon Permit Sale, U.S. Congress Reconsiders Credits While Carbon Auctions Launches and American Carbon Wants Your Business).
If the U.S. does put a cap-and-trade program in place, as President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to do, it could boost the world’s carbon markets to $3 trillion by 2020, New Carbon Finance reported.
But Bitonti said those markets won’t be able to work without accurate and reliable data on greenhouse gas emissions to back them up. That problem has arisen in the European Union, where one of the largest auditors for its carbon-trading program was recently suspended by the United Nations for alleged irregularities.
And the scope of the information management challenge is daunting, he said. Scientists with the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado said in April that a monitoring system to ensure regions are meeting their greenhouse gas emission reduction goals would have to be 10 times the size of monitoring in place today.
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