New SAP co-CEO 'runs simple' to Davos in Mercedes hydrogen car The World Economic Forum is pinning a sustainability badge on its 2020 conference, which, according to one estimate, will produce 18,090 metric tonnes of CO2 in private air travel alone. But Christian Klein, co-CEO of enterprise application behemoth SAP, will not be contributing this year, something the German software maker …
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Didn't expect that I'd ever jump in in defence of SAP. But I cannot agree with linking SAP and its sustainability efforts (regardless of its in/effectiveness) to its customer base. If their customer chose a different system, there'd probably be no change at all in carbon circulation.
If you want to assess SAP's sustainability effort related to their customers, you'd rather find out if SAP products help their customers becoming more sustainable. (I'd be surprised if they did, but that's not the point.)
It's good that he is promoting hydrogen powered vehicles.
Yes, current steam reformation production methods aren't great from a CO2 perspective but electrolysis costs are coming down all the time and offer the advantage that excess wind and solar electricity generation can be used by H2 filling stations to replenish their main tanks.
> And what about storage?
At filling stations, high-pressure tanks around 100bar would be a reasonable trade-off between capacity and cost. (Including cost of pressurising if Hyrdrogen is split from water on site - which is the only sensible way forward - tankering is a no go, cost wise.)
In vehicles, 'solid' storage in foam structures is advancing rapidly. For example, there are Hydrogen powered drones where the H2 is stored in aluminium honeycomb structures with flight times comparable to that of batteries. (Which demonstrates that the energy to weight ratio is reasonably practical, or at least no worse than that of a battery.)
or at least no worse than that of a battery.
Batteries have shit energy densities when compared with LPG or liquid fuels. These will not be replaced on a large scale by anthing that doesn't have comparable energy density.
Your electrolysis filling station is similarly whacko: all current examples are just there for the handouts. Machines may run on hydrogen but storage and transportation will be in another form.
The production, storage and distribution of hydrogen is incredibly energy intensive (as it is for petrol and diesel). This makes for very low "well-to-wheel" efficiency. If, as you suggest, local electrolysis could be used instead, that might change but safety concerns remain. However, BEVs and static battery energy storage seem to be winning, mainly because the Chinese have chosen this route.
However, I kind of look forward to a world where treatment for the stress, anxiety, depression and occasional unbridled rage that SAP deployments produce in IT administrators, appllication developers, IT execs and IT's finance department partners is priced into SAP products as a discount.
> It's also unnerving that SAP apparently haven't heard of this thing called "teleconferencing".
But then, instead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) it would have to be called the World Teleconferencing Forum.
Oh look, there's already an icon for it. How foresighted of The Register.
Indeed. And if these customers didn't use SAP then they would still be creating exactly the same amount of pollution, but just using a different ERP. I'm struggling to see how you can be looking to hold SAP accountable for their customers industry issues.
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