Vince Ward, Project Officer at the Southern Housing Group
By Vince Ward
What started out as a community-based energy project on the Isle of Wight has morphed into a bona fide social movement.
Encouraged by the work of IBM Distinguished Engineer, Andy Stanford-Clark, who created a “smart” house that monitored, managed and optimized energy use, three years ago the Village of Chale created the Chale Community Project, which seeks, among other things, to reduce home energy costs by up to 50 percent. While the project has indeed raised awareness and helped residents lower costs, it has also had a serendipitous outcome – it has brought the community together.
From the very beginning of the Chale Community Project – during planning and roll-out phases – we worked on ensuring the local community was on board. Going from door to door, the team would communicate with residents about the plan of action, encourage participation and try to boost morale. Continue Reading »
Christopher Luongo, Writer/Strategist, IBM Communications
By Christopher Luongo
More school systems across the U.S. are looking for ways to balance their commitment to providing a top-notch education with the pressure of keeping their buildings in tip-top shape. To achieve this, some schools are moving away from paper-based systems and putting all their data, from operational and maintenance information to real estate and resource data, online. Doing so, however, is creating a whole new set of issues as the schools are now left to deal with the management of “Big Data.”
Since it’s unreasonable to build brand new, energy-efficient buildings from the ground up, more school districts are looking within and starting to leverage and exploit the Big Data of building information. They’re starting to sift through critical data to make school structures more energy efficient and more cost-effective.
School districts from Portland, Oregon to Palm Beach, Florida are taking this approach. And with IBM’s help they’re finding highly profitable solutions that are helping to cut costs, save energy and enable schools to make smarter decisions on how school buildings are maintained and used. Continue Reading »
Martin Kienzle, Ph.D, Electronics Industry Leader, IBM Research
By Martin Kienzle
At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week, the hype wasn’t all about the latest smartphone or tablet launch. Exhibitors and attendees alike were abuzz about the rapidly evolving smarter home – a concept that calls for connecting not only your mobile device to the web, but your TV, fridge, washing machine, thermostat and even your carbon monoxide detector.
The analyst firm Parks Associates forecasts that more than 8 billion devices will be connected to the home network by the end of 2015. The breakthrough that’s driving this mass adoption – cloud computing. Cloud is quickly becoming the common platform to connect these disparate devices into an “Internet of Things.” Continue Reading »
Andreas Dummler, Director of Information Systems, ARBURG GmbH + Co KG
By Andreas Dümmler
As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of injection molding machines used to make plastic products, ARBURG GmbH + Co KG is essentially a manufacturer’s manufacturer. We are as committed to smarter manufacturing processes in our own plants as our clients.
One of our foremost priorities is energy efficiency. As a family-owned business, environmental responsibility is a significant part of our culture. We make use of necessary resources, but stay true to a guiding principle to use the most energy efficient production and management systems in our plants as possible. Key tactics in facility engineering and management include the use of geothermal energy, photovoltaic technology, combined heat and power plants, rain water, waste heat from production equipment, and the use of natural ventilation and extraction in our buildings.
Andy Stanford-Clark, Master Inventor and Chief Technology Officer, Smarter Energy, IBM UK & Ireland
- By Andy Stanford-Clark
- Last week you heard all about my personal mission to reduce the energy consumption in my “house that twitters” using home automation and energy monitoring technology.
Today, I’m going to talk about how we have taken the same technology applied in my home and used it to help change the lives of some residents of Chale – a small village on the south coast of the Isle of Wight.
In December 2009, Chale was selected as one of only ten communities in the UKto benefit from funding for a project to become a low-carbon community, and as a result The Chale Community Project was born. The project’s primary objective was to save energy and water in homes, resulting in reduced fuel costs. So how does the project work? Join me for a tour to find out.
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David Bartlett, Vice President, Industry Solutions, Smarter Buildings, IBM Software Group
By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications
Every time you walk into a building, think about this: it’s alive and kicking and wants to be fed.
It’s not just some static structure standing there. As Dave Bartlett, vice president of smarter buildings at IBM, sees it, a building is remarkably analogous to a living organism.
The heating and cooling system is also the building’s respiratory system, bringing in fresh air and removing carbon dioxide. It consumes enormous amounts of energy and water along with producing the associated waste.
The musculoskeletal system provides form, support, stability and movement to the building. Sensors, computer monitoring and other instrumentation make up the building’s nervous system.
By Danny Lu, business analyst, Los Angeles Unified School Districts
Heading into the second week of September, the hallways of the Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) are already buzzing with the sounds of students and teachers settling in for another school year.
Similar to many other schools around the nation, LAUSD is also facing another year of budget cuts to several of its education programs and extracurricular activities. In fact, a survey from the American Association of School Administrators cites that more than 8 in 10 school districts in the U.S. are inadequately funded for the coming year. Clearly, we all must do more with less.
We chose to tackle this problem head on and find innovative ways where we could help reduce costs and keep the focus on our number one priority: the students.
As New York City public school children return to the classroom with the promise of new knowledge and a clean slate, the school buildings themselves are on a path toward intelligence.
It’s part of an innovative First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) project that will help public school buildings in the city reduce their energy consumption through analytics.
In New York City, where buildings account for 75 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions each year, it’s unreasonable to build brand-new, energy-efficient buildings from the ground up.
But what if you could use technology to sift through critical building data to make school structures more energy efficient and more cost-effective?
Members of the New York City Department of Education and the City University of New York (CUNY) asked IBM this question as they began to think about new ways to improve energy efficiency in the city’s public school buildings.
IBM’s answer was to invite them into its labs, where researchers were working on advanced analytics and statistical modeling technologies that could provide insights into the every-day operations of buildings, including energy usage. Another First-of-a-Kind project was born.
The system that was created lets facility staff track and analyze energy use, compare school buildings’ energy efficiency, forecast power needs, and run simulations on building improvements to predict the benefits of various retrofitting projects.
For example, a facilities department manager or custodian could run the tool, click on the simulation capability, and find out how much energy could be saved by replacing old, single-pane windows with double pane windows.
Also, heating energy used in one building could be compared with that of a nearby building of similar size and age. Perhaps that building serves the same number of students but consumes 20-percent less energy. To improve the less-efficient facility, facilities staff could explore retrofitting projects through computer simulations.
The CUNY project stands to benefit not only New York City’s school buildings, but also the 1.1 million students within. IBM and CUNY are training teachers on the system’s interactive features, which can help examine real energy use and translate it into tangible classroom lessons on environmental impact.
As the City University of New York is discovering, bringing greater intelligence and connectedness into a building’s operations can go a long way toward creating a truly integrated and smarter building system, while reducing energy consumption and developing energy-conscious students along the way.
And as all the FOAK projects are proving, it is the dynamic nature of this close interaction with IBM clients and the changing forces of the real world that drives innovation and brings it to market at an ever-quickening pace.
By Jim Fletcher, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect, Smarter Infrastructure, IBM
With gas once again flirting with $4 per gallon, imagine shopping for a car in a world where vehicles didn’t come with mileage ratings.
Sure, a smart driver would likely a gut feeling that the pint-sized Prius would be cheaper to fuel than the hulking Hummer for sale next to it. But without official data, or at least a Hummer driver willing to share mileage figures, it’d be tough to know for sure what it would cost to operate the two vastly different vehicles for years to come.
It sounds absurd. Yet for most buyers of houses, commercial buildings and other properties, that far-fetched scenario is pretty much the reality today. Buyers have precious little information of how much energy a given property will consume.
Yet while we’d roll our eyes at the owner of a super-sized SUV who seems surprised about high fill-up costs, who hasn’t heard a story of a person who bought a home only to discover later that it’s hugely expensive to heat and cool?
Luckily city planners, engineers and companies are recognizing that the vacuum of information about building performance is a key to boosting building efficiency, and improving real estate market information—better data helps owners and their tenants make smarter decisions.
An intriguing effort to make this sort of building performance data more transparent surfaced recently in New York City. It’s a map of the city’s five boroughs, color-coded to show the energy intensity of practically every building in the Big Apple’s dense mix of commercial, residential, and mixed-use regions.
By Ken Schwartz, Dean, Tulane School of Architecture and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects
Few places understand the concept of rebuilding as deeply as New Orleans does since Hurricane Katrina struck seven years ago this month. The tragedy generated an impressive rebuilding process in the City of New Orleans, leading to a more sustainable future environmentally, economically, and in terms of social equity. This tragedy gave New Orleans the opportunity to rebuild a more sustainable, green city. As the city began to restore itself, great attention was given to listening to the community and the environment.
Although “being green” may be a priority for many cities, they often just don’t know where to start the journey. Transportation? Water? Energy? The process can be downright daunting.
At the Tulane School of Architecture, the choice of where to begin became quite clear: the historic building that comprises our school.
Tulane estimates that the energy use of its buildings represents two-thirds of the university’s impact on its carbon emissions – even taking in account the fuel our employees and students use for commuting. As the School of Architecture contemplated a renovation and expansion of its signature building, we wanted to do so with a forward thinking approach to energy usage.
