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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With confidence growing we continued by introducing schemes that would improve quality of life for the village. Local residents embraced the training schemes we provided on renewable technologies which not only offered new skills but opened up employment opportunities in areas previously unavailable. The schemes also benefited other parts of the island as residents could now act as ‘local green champions’ to educate other villages that were developing plans to become more sustainable.

These successful early activities encouraged the village to grab hold of the project and take it further. For example, local resident Peter Atkinson now manages a new data centre filled with computers donated from a local school that had closed. The computers are being used to train residents in core IT skills to help them use the Internet to pay bills and access online Government information. Atkinson believes that around 50 percent of the village is without Internet access in their homes, so the project has made a massive difference to people’s lives in that respect.

These activities have provided a solid foundation from which we built and expanded our sustainability project.  In addition to the aforementioned, the team has:

• Persuaded the local transport company to halve bus fares to encourage the use of public transportation for residents
• Seen a dramatic drop in rent arrears as energy monitoring has made utility bills more manageable; some residents have reported reductions of up to 50 percent
• Created an allotment area in the village, where young and old residents are brought together to reinforce a new sense of community spirit

Planning For The Future

Though we have achieved so much so far, we still have a lot of plans for the future.

For example, we are very excited to be the first village on the island working on a roll out of SMART meters that will replace electricity meters.

Additionally, we are talking to residents about launching a new electric vehicle project in the village which establishes clusters of electric vehicles (EV) to mimic a future network. If residents take part, we will offer the use of a brand new electric vehicle at a discounted rate for an 18-month trial period and install an EV charging point free of charge for each trial participant.

For us, the emphasis in all of these activities is on the community helping itself to live more sustainably. That is why we are pleased to be working with IBM to support the Business in the Community’s Start campaign called Be the Start. Start is an initiative inspired by HRH The Prince of Wales and the campaign is running throughout May with over 40 brands and organisations inspiring people to live sustainably by demonstrating how it can be rewarding and meaningful.

On 14 May IBM will bring sustainable living to life with a Chale focus on www.smartertrends.co.uk. IBM supported the installation of energy monitoring technology in the village which helped save energy and water so I’ll be hosting a Twitter chat with Andy Stanford-Clark on 14 May at 10:00AM ET to provide insights and top tips. So please come and join us by following @smartertrends or #IBMChale to find out more about the Chale Community Project.

Technorati Tags: Andy Stanford-Clark, Big Data, environmental stewardship, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Isle of Wight, smarter analytics, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, sustainability

Naveen Lamba, Global Smarter Transportation leader, IBM Global Business Services

By Naveen Lamba

Circling for a parking spot, worrying about feeding the parking meters, and ultimately wondering if you should just turn around and go home. These are familiar feelings for anyone who has ever had to find a parking spot in a hurry. Not only is it frustrating, but the time spent looking for parking also contributes to traffic congestion – some research suggests 30 percent on average – and air pollution.

Parking is an area of transportation that had seen little innovation until a just a few years ago. With today’s technology – from sensors to smarter meters to advanced analytics – cities can reinvent parking to help reduce congestion and make our cities more livable. 

Enter Streetline, a Silicon Valley start-up that provides Smart Parking solutions to cities, garages, airports, universities and other private parking providers. The company is the creator of Parker™, a free smartphone app that guides drivers to available parking spaces in real time.

The company won the 2010 IBM SmartCamp, a global entrepreneurship program that identifies early stage start-ups in the Smarter Planet industries. Through this program, Streetline had access to a global network of experts and advisors. Since then, Streetline and IBM have continued working together.

(Next week IBM will host the 2013 Global SmartCamp Finals in New York City.)  

Now, IBM and Streetline are joining together on a Smarter Parking pilot project in Birmingham, England, with Amey, an infrastructure company that works with the Birmingham City Counsel to maintain the city’s roads. 

With a population of over one million and 160,000 thousand people commuting to the city daily, Birmingham officials want to relieve the traffic congestion that is impacting the economy, local businesses, and citizens. Analytics software will help Birmingham understand its parking patterns so it can better manage congestion, improve parking efficiency and make it easier to find parking in the city’s Jewelry Quarter.

Ultra low power wireless sensors have been implanted into the road surface of existing parking spaces in an initial 10-block area of the city. These sensors detect the presence of a vehicle and transmit the data, which is collected and analyzed in real-time. This information is then made available to both the city transport authority and drivers.

Drivers who download Streetline’s Parker app can check on parking availability via their computers or mobile devices. Drivers can also see pricing, pay for parking using their mobile phone (where available), and get guidance back to their car when they finish their activity.  A voice-guidance system and hands-free feature encourages safe operation while driving.

Combining information management and advanced analytics from IBM with data gathered from parking sensors and applications from Streetline will give a view into what parking is like in the area by analyzing factors such as hourly occupancy, occupancy by block, parking duration, and trends in a particular neighborhood or business district.

“After a great experience as a SmartCamp winner, we are delighted to be teaming up with IBM and Amey to expand our Smart Parking services into the U.K. and to deliver compelling solutions for cities and consumers,” said Zia Yusuf, CEO of Streetline. “By providing Birmingham drivers with solutions like Parker by Streetline, we’re working together as a team to help solve one of the most pressing concerns facing our cities today – parking.”

With the smarter parking solution in place,Birminghamcould better manage the supply and demand of parking, as well as help the local chamber of commerce determine the best parking and transportation mix for a local shopping district to increase foot traffic. It could be connected with payment systems, to allow drivers to access travel data, plan their journey and then upon arrival at a free space, have the convenience of cashless payment.

IBM UK Smarter Cities leader Nigel Milton, who has worked with the City of Birmingham on this project and others, says “this Smarter Parking trial, which follows close on the heels of an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant, puts Birmingham one step closer to its goal to exploit the latest advances in technology for the benefit of its citizens and to improve city services.”

All of this adds up to easier and less frustrating parking for drivers and it’s one more step to a smarter city.

Technorati Tags: anaytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, mobile applications, mobile computing, smarter parking, smarter traffic, Smarter Transportation

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The project started by installing energy-saving upgrades into 65 homes, such as loft insulation and double (and in some places triple) glazing. The houses, none of which have gas mains, were then equipped with air-source heat pumps (a heating system that uses heat from the outside air as its energy source) and solar photo-voltaic (PV) panels to provide free electricity generated from the sun.

My involvement with the project was to specify and develop a monitoring kit that could be easily installed into the homes. We provided residents in 40 homes with a monitoring system very similar to the one that I use in my home. This includes:

- Sensor and wireless transmitter to monitor how much electricity is being used across the whole house.

- Individual Appliance Monitors (IAMs) on 6 selected appliances, e.g. washing machine, tumble dryer, TV, heaters, etc.

- Sensor and wireless transmitter on the PV Export meter to measure the electricity being generated by the solar panels throughout the day.

- Energy monitor display to show residents how much electricity they’re using at any time.

- Internet Bridge which connects the energy monitor to the Internet over broadband, and sends the energy usage data, via IBM MQTT technology, to the secure cloud infrastructure where the Chale Project data is stored.

The data is presented to residents so they can take control of their home energy usage by logging in to a web portal to see energy graphs for their house and identifying where they might be able to make savings. Some members of the Chale community have been trained as Green Energy assessors and they help other residents make sense of their energy information and suggest ways to reduce their usage and save money.

The data (in anonymous form) also provides valuable insights to housing associations and academic research partners on how energy is being used by residents. This enables useful energy savings advice to be given that’s based on behavioural changes. Such advice could be geared toward savings or suggesting further energy-saving technology that could be installed.

The feedback so-far from residents participating in the Chale Project has been fantastic. Some residents have reported a dramatic reduction in their energy bills with savings of up to 50 percent. One resident reported that his winter electricity bill has gone from £50 (approx $80) per week down to £25 (approx $40). In today’s tough times with the price of energy relentlessly rising, this is a great result for the residents of Chale!

So how do we ensure that everyone on the island, and even other islands and regions, can make use of this energy-saving technology? Well that’s where the Ecoisland initiative comes in. Next week my video diary blog will reveal more about Ecoisland and the overall initiative to build a Smart Grid that will integrate the Isle of Wight’s future solar, tidal, geothermal, wind power and other carbon-reducing technologies.

I’m also hosting a People for a Smarter Planet Twitter chat on 31^st October at 12:00PM ET. So join me to find out more about Ecoisland http://bit.ly/TEi8sy.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Ecoisland, energy costs, IBM, MQTT, Smarter Buildings, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet

Andy Stanford-Clark, Master Inventor and Chief Technology Officer, Smarter Energy, IBM UK & Ireland

By Andy Stanford-Clark

About four years ago, I set out on a personal mission to significantly reduce the energy use in my home. Today, I’m pleased to say that I have made some big steps towards that goal, but more importantly – my home turf – the Isle of Wight, is embarking on a journey for the whole island to become energy self-sufficient, in a project called “Ecoisland.” My efforts at home were my own personal hobby: the Ecoisland project is a much larger, collaborative effort!

Why am I writing about this now? Well, this week IBM took part in the Ecoislands Global Summit. Ecoisland is an ambitious transformation program which aims to turn the Isle of Wight (home to 140,000 citizens) into the ultimate eco-region, with a dramatically reduced carbon footprint by 2020. IBM and other companies are working with the Ecoisland project to develop innovative ways to save energy and reduce emissions and waste, while also cutting the islanders’ fuel bills – potentially by up to 50 percent. 

Energy is certainly a hot topic at the moment: climate change, rising energy prices and technology advances are all forces that have been reshaping the collective mindset of consumers, turning many of us from “passive bill-payers” to highly informed, environmentally-conscious customers who want a role in deciding how the energy for our homes is provided. 

Representing that demographic, and with fully paid-up “geek” credentials, I took energy monitoring in the home into my own hands and turned my house into a living laboratory using various home automation technologies to help me better understand our energy consumption.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have sensors monitoring many of the appliances to track how energy is being used around the home. The sensors wirelessly transmit data to a “message broker” on a low-powered (just 10 Watts!) computer server, which sends data to various display devices, and also sends updates to my phone via Twitter, notifying me when an appliance is using too much power at an unusual time of the day. You might think that this information isn’t very useful if I receive it on my phone when I’m miles away from home, but from a cool application on my phone, using a technology called MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), I can control home appliances via the internet – so if a light has been left on, I can switch it off from wherever I am in the world.

I also use a “traffic light” LED colour-changing orb as a means to encouraging my family and I to save energy – when it turns red we know that something has been left on by mistake or we are consuming an excessive amount of energy. Since monitoring our electricity usage and making some changes to our behavior patterns, our quarterly electricity bills have reduced by approximately a third.

So how does this relate to the Ecoisland initiative? Well, my home is acting as the trial lab for some of the monitoring, automation and messaging technologies being used for the project.  Next week, I will be blogging about a community project here on the Isle of Wight – The Chale Project – which is helping other people on the island save energy in their homes. If you are interested in how communities can reduce energy and save money, then check back here next week to find out more about how this can be done.

Technorati Tags: Ecoisland, efficiency, green buildings, IBM, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, sustainability

What’s the challenge with buildings today?
Buildings – from houses and flats, offices, manufacturing sites to sports facilities and retail outlets – are massive energy users. Experts estimate that commercial and residential buildings consume one third of the world’s energy. If worldwide energy-use trends continue, buildings will become the largest consumer of global energy by 2025, more than the transportation and industrial sectors combined. Massive urbanisation is driving this momentum.

Furthermore, by 2050 the world’s population is projected to be more than 9 billion, with roughly 70% of people living in urban areas, creating a significant challenge for the sustainability, energy efficiency and physical capacity levels of cities worldwide.

A city’s infrastructure is comprised of a number of systems, including roads, bridges, public transportation, sewage, water and energy utilities, as well as public and private buildings. What many people don’t realise is how much buildings contribute to this strain.

How do buildings get smarter?
Technology today can make it possible to ‘listen’ to the abundance of information emitted from buildings. By analysing this data and creating new applications to access it, we can identify and squeeze out building inefficiencies to reduce cost, improve energy usage, extend the operating life of the associated equipment and make buildings better places in which to live and work.

Smarter buildings can be highly-instrumented and connected ‘systems of systems’, providing critical information on not only what the building consumes in terms of water and power and the waste that it produces, but also the way in which it is used in practice, for example how its population changes during the course of the day, which specific areas people are occupying, etc.

Can you provide some examples of the kind of work you are doing?
Smarter Buildings is an area where we probably have some of the best examples of ‘taking our own medicine’. IBM has achieved some very significant results. For example, we’ve deployed real-time asset monitoring technology at one of our major manufacturing sites in Rochester, Minnesota, where we had already achieved savings of 5% to 7% per annum through traditional energy-reduction activities. Many might consider that to be a great result, but we’ve gone further. By analysing the performance of equipment against a set of advanced business rules, we’ve managed to make incremental energy savings of some 15%. At the same time, reactive maintenance has decreased by 16%, the hours per work order have reduced by 34% and the total number of work order hours has decreased by 49%, for those assets being monitored by our system.

We’re rolling out the same solution to our largest UK sites during 2012, as well as being in detailed discussions with a number of household names around deploying the same technology across their property portfolios.

What role will buildings play in creating smarter cities?
We will see groups of buildings start to mimic living systems – buildings will be addressed collectively as they relate to the ecosystem or the immediate community in which they are located. Smarter communities will help address health-related or environmental sustainability issues in a city, such as carbon emissions and local energy demand.

For example, rather than just looking at air quality in a building, we can think of the respiratory system of the locality in which the building ‘breathes’ – i.e. including the associated carbon emissions and other pollutants rather than just the ‘fresh’ air intake. This will drive measures like green roofs and corridors built to connect both horizontal and vertical surfaces, as well as blurring the lines between cities and the surrounding suburbs and countryside.

A community is a microcosm of a city – if you want to make a city smarter, starting at the local community level can be the first step to building a more manageable ecosystem. Successful community-level improvements can eventually be replicated and connected at a city level.

Much like the consumer has at the residential level, are you seeing better control over energy usage at the commercial buildings level?
Yes, today we have better control over energy usage, but soon buildings will be able to ‘choose’ their sources of energy. Think of it as an ‘energy cafe’ – making energy choices will be as easy as ordering a cappuccino.

Today, most coffee bars offer us free Wi-Fi. Tomorrow’s ‘energy cafe’ will provide access to a low-carbon, community-wide distributed energy system. Rather than using one form of renewable energy, it will incorporate a number of forms. Just like customers who order which type of food and beverage they want based on cost and source (such as ‘organic’ or ‘conventional’), we’ll be able to do the same with energy sources.

Organisations will increasingly be able to dynamically choose the source of their energy at their desired price, based on incentives, time of use, etc. If they have environmental targets to meet, they might decide to source 30% of their energy from more sustainable sources like solar and wind.

http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.commentview&comment_id=280

Crucially, it’s not just a case of passively watching and listening to what citizens are saying. The social web also makes it possible to reach out in new ways. Social networks mean local government can carry out surveys – and publicise them – at relatively low cost. Insights gained in this way not only represent a significant cash saving; they can also be carried out more rapidly than traditional opinion polls, with no paper processing delays and no risk of data transcription errors.

The use of social media also opens up potential for enhanced cross-departmental collaboration within councils. Local government is a major employer: for example, Merton London Borough Council employs upwards of 5,000 people, as does Brent Council, while Birmingham City Council is the largest local authority in Europe, employing 60,000 people – the same size as a multinational company. Tapping into that resource makes sense and can unlock real value, with crowdsourcing creating synergies that would otherwise be lost.

Perhaps the most important aspect of social media, though, is the potential it has to open up public participation. Social media has a decisive role to play in motivating and empowering citizens, as well as increasing engagement with the third sector, which includes charities, voluntary groups and not-for-profit organisations.

As the Coventry project reveals, the online environment can be “sticky”, with users tending to spend longer perusing material than they might in an equivalent paper-based exercise. CovJam participants each spent an average of two and a half hours online.

CovJam underlines the extent to which social media and new technology can help to improve the agility of local authorities, with complex public consultations made far more manageable and granular than an equivalent approach based on filling in paper forms. Web-based technologies also have the potential to revolutionise routine public interactions. Research carried out by the Society of Information Technology Management in 2010 reveals the scope of potential savings. At only 27 pence, the cost of a customer service interaction on the web is nearly 11 times cheaper than a phone transaction and nearly 25 times less expensive than an equivalent face-to-face meeting.

This does not mean that governments should slash all paperbased services in favour of digital – such a move risks creating a digital divide and excluding those without access to the internet. By offering more digital channels, however, service can be improved and the public feels it has even more options.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, smarter city, Smarter Planet, social business

 
Engaging
It promotes citizen involvement and builds a new sense of
ownership with scope for collaboration in every aspect of city life.

Transparent
It lifts the bonnet on how the city works – processes are visible,
dialogue is open, feedback is swift.

Nimble
It delivers services in real time with an enhanced ability to adjust
to citizens’ fast-changing needs.

Secure
It respects privacy, protects data and leverages technology to
enhance the physical security of citizens.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

Discovery techniques based on social media are already helping local authorities to shape the future and to define exactly what a smarter city should look like. Coventry in the UK’s West Midlands is a case in point.

CovJam is a collaborative online venture staged by Coventry City Council and IBM. It used social media as part of a unique three-day brainstorming exercise to identify ways to make Coventry a smarter city.

IBM’s “jam” technology is a proven technique for drawing on the wisdom of crowds, capturing ideas in a way that isn’t possible using traditional forms of consultation. CovJam generated more than 2,000 posts, with 82 per cent of re-registered participants, including residents, public-sector organisations and companies, taking part.

Following the event, IBM used corporate brand and reputation analysis to organise the unstructured information, identify patterns and to help the city council to prioritise key topics and viewpoints. For the council, CovJam provided new ideas; for local people and businesses, it provided an easily accessible opportunity for people to become active citizens.

As well as providing a channel for capturing and analysing realtime information, social media provides a critical feedback mechanism, with citizens able to report on everything from road closures to broken water mains. Commuters can also provide feedback after an incident or event is reported, using the social web including Twitter, blogs and forums.

Social media also has a unique capacity to capture the mood of the moment and to spur powerful, impromptu actions. That can have both a positive and negative impact: social media may have been used by some rioters to organise criminal activity during the disturbances that took place in English cities during the summer of 2011. Yet the same social media helped to galvanise the unprecedented community response that followed.  An account on Twitter – @riotcleanup – attracted more than 70,000 followers in a matter of hours, with residents turning out to help in the clean-up operation across the country.

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Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all report membership in the hundreds of millions. Google+, the social media network launched by the search engine giant early in 2011, saw 25 million people sign up in its first four weeks. Foursquare popularised geolocation in social media, and now photographs, tweets and status updates can be tagged with your location. Our appetite for social media is changing the way we communicate and offers new ways to interact with our cities.

Over a billion people worldwide log on to social networking sites. British internet users on PCs clocked up a total of 169 million hours on Facebook alone in April 2011, according to research by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. Mobile users of Facebook, meanwhile, spend more than five and a half hours on the site each month. Clearly, social media is not a fad. Instant communication over social networks – and the presumption of instant feedback – now underpins just about every aspect of our lives. This includes our relationships with local and city governments. The spectacular growth of social media has also increased expectations about transparency and the right to participate in the policy-making process. Used properly, social media represents new value for local authorities, especially when coupled with the right technology, such as a secure private cloud. Leading cities in the UK, US and beyond are already tapping into this hunger for public engagement, with social media playing a part in everything from town planning to combating traffic jams.

Download the Social media and the city new paper

The rise of social media is undeniable, with over 800 million Facebook users worldwide and 140 million tweets sent every day, social media can no longer be dismissed as a trend or generational phenomenon. It is therefore vital for cities and the communities they represent to not only monitor these social channels, but to also actively participate in them. Social media represents a unique opportunity for local councils to offer innovative new services and communicate with their citizens. This webinar will bring together experts from local governments, digital agencies, and technology providers to address the key challenges facing councils in implementing such a programme.

Please click here to register to this free webinar

http://marketforce.eu.com/Conferences/SocialMediaEnabledCities12/

Technorati Tags: IBM, predictive analytics, Smarter Cities, smarter city, Smarter Planet