Jonathan Steel, Energy Aid

Guest post by
Jonathan Steel,
CEO of UK-based charity Energy Aid

Jonathan is also founder and Chairman of technology consultancy The Bathwick Group, and Chairman of Change London, a social enterprise focused on sustainability and youth unemployment.

As we enter the United Nations Year of Sustainable Energy for All, Pauline Latham OBE MP hosted the Parliamentary launch of the newest Global Energy NGO, Energy Aid, at the Houses of Parliament in London.  We were supported directly at the launch by DFID, IBM, Practical Action, Seeds for Development and The Ashden Awards.

The evening was one of the first major landmarks for Energy Aid as we continue to expand our presence in the international development field and the energy industry and strive to raise awareness of the need to ensure universal energy access. During the launch we stood among 150 of the UK’s leading business people, academics and political figures and called on them to help support us in our mission to eradicate global energy poverty.

Currently one in five of the world’s population lacks access to electricity, and nearly 3 billion people still cook over open fires. The lives of people in the world’s poorest areas including South America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa could change forever if they had access to modern energy for heating, lighting, cooking, communications and mechanical work. Access to energy is vital if we are to break the cycle of poverty for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The plight of energy-poor people was brought to life by Timothy, a farmer from Uganda who spoke about how access to energy has transformed his family’s lives. He also spoke of the opportunities that exist to help communities throughout Uganda and across Africa.

The feedback from this event and from Energy Aid’s presence at the launch of the UN Year in Abu Dhabi has brought the need for our unique collaborative approach to private sector engagement in the third sector into sharp focus. We now have a strong band of supporters from across the governmental, charity and commercial spectrum.

Now that our launch period is over, we are reaching out to corporates, other charities and political leaders and asking for their support. Providing universal energy access is one of the most important challenges of our time – but no one organisation can meet the challenge alone, and collaborative approaches are now needed.

With IBM and international development charity Practical Action as founding partners, Energy Aid plans to provide investment and resources including data, technology and skills to support charities and agencies running or planning energy projects for the disenfranchised, and we are developing a platform for private sector consortia to identify and fund new markets for energy services in many countries around the world.

Our research shows that only a fifth of projects in this space achieve their goals, and there is a lack of long-term planning and investment. We aim to address these shortfalls, combining commercial rigour, corporate expertise and finance with best-of-class NGO experience to create a charity for the 21st century that, working with existing actors, will achieve the change which is so desperately needed.

Follow @energy_aid

Technorati Tags: charity, energy, energyaid, international development, Smarter Energy, uk

To get an idea of the promise and possibility of the “smart grid,” look no further than what’s happening in the small New England state of Vermont.

With multiple energy sources and a clear focus on the environment spanning many years, Vermont continues to lead the path for other states looking to become “smarter.” Since creating the first energy efficiency utility, Vermont has positioned itself as a leader in implementing strategies that reduce energy demand. Just recently, the University of Vermont revealed the most energy efficient retrofit of any college campus – calling it a “green old building.”

Today, the state is embarking on a revolutionary plan to build the first statewide smart grid in the country, converting its electric infrastructure into a system that uses two-way communications and advanced sensors.

To help make Vermont’s smart grid a reality, IBM is collaborating with the Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) – the state’s transmission utility – to build a next-generation communications network that will connect transmission substations to utilities, and can enable intelligence to be built into the state’s smart grid. This advanced fiber communications network will span more than 1000 miles and will allow utilities to better monitor and manage the electricity network, including predicting and avoiding power outages, quickly addressing those that do occur, and improving management of the grid. The Vermont network will deliver a more than 6000 times increase in capacity for smart grid programs, and will be designed to handled the state’s needs for the next 15 to 20 years. See VELCO photos here.

This is only one of the many energy-focused projects being led out of Vermont. IBM continues to see Vermont as a leading example, demonstrating a clear focus on energy efficiency, infrastructure transformation and on-going consumer engagement.

IBM’s Vermont campus has been a model for advances in smart grid technologies for nearly a decade. The facility employs more than 5,000 sensors and meters to collect data in real time on equipment loading, usage and trends, power disturbances and other factors. That information is used for engineering analysis, monitoring power quality, load calculations, peak power management, billing, and identifying efficiency and conservation opportunities. The smart grid allows the Vermont team to use advanced data analysis and analytics to drive continuous improvement in the performance of the system.

The site’s smart grid has helped it effectively reduce energy usage by approximately 20 percent over ten years, while production capability increased.

Other IBM projects include:

• Energy management outreach – IBM is working with the Vermont Technical College and HowardCenter, the largest health and human services organization in Vermont, to apply its energy management program to help the two organizations cut energy consumption by at least five percent annually.
• IBM is leading a “Smart Vermont” Initiative – This project unites large Vermont organizations to establish energy management programs and to help them make intelligent use of smart grid data. The project looks to create capabilities, awareness and education on the benefits of using the smart grid.
• University of Vermont Project – A newly named Center for Energy Transformation and Innovation on the campus (in partnership with the University and Sandia National Laboratories) will focus on issues surrounding reliability, security and the integration of renewable energy into the smart grid. In addition, IBM and university researchers, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, are using complex systems to develop models to improve power grid reliability.

IBM’s project management and networking services expertise and Vermont’s dedication to energy innovation and collaboration have set the stage for the first statewide smart grid implementation, covering all its utilities. Vermont is creating a system that is more efficient and affordable than if handled separately by each utility. Whether on a state or regional basis, this can be a model for the rest of the country to follow.

Technorati Tags: energy, janette bombardier, smart grid, vermont

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s not too late to weigh in with your opinion, however. Watch the videos and “Like” away!

People power will come to life 
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

You will never need a password again
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

Mind reading is no longer science fiction
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

The digital divide will cease to exist
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button  below the video.

Junk mail will become priority mail
Click here to view the video and vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction by clicking the “Like” button below the video.

Technorati Tags: IBM 5 in 5

Today news of a brand new global charity called Energy Aid will start spreading around the world. Given that nearly half of the world’s population lacks access to modern sources of energy, the charity has an impressive mission to provide universal energy access. This means people in the world’s poorest areas including South America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa could have their lives changed forever if they had access to energy for heating, lighting, cooking, communications and mechanical work.

With IBM and international development charity Practical Action already on board as founding partners Energy Aid plans to provide investment and resources including data, technology and skills to support charities and agencies running or planning energy projects in the target areas.

In the lead up to the global launch building a solid business case for the charity was key. A vital element of this planning was research conducted by myself and a team at the London School of Economics. We went out to visit and study organisations in India and Peru that could engage with Energy Aid in the future and make our recommendations on how Energy Aid could add value.

We analysed five case studies through site visits and interviews. The organisations were grouped into either partner organisations which illustrated how Energy Aid could contribute to existing issues, or peer organisations which illustrated how similar organisations went about achieving their objectives.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Following our research Energy Aid finalised its business model now has three key strategies: an awareness campaign launching in 2012 dedicated to raising the issue of energy access in the public conscience, an open source of data, resources, technologies and research and a fund to raise and invest money into deserving long-term game-changing projects.

We are looking forward to seeing how Energy Aid develops over the next year and hope the issue of universal energy for all continues to grow in prominence with businesses and individuals.

We are not alone. Sustainable energy is an increasingly global concern with 2012 announced as the “UN Year of Sustainable Energy for All,” with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon giving a personal commitment towards the cause, and the UN Earth Summit Rio 20 in June 2012 will focus on alleviating energy access.

Technorati Tags: charity, csr, energy, Energy & Environment, energy aid, sustainability, water

Dave Bartlett out on Cape Spear

This province  learned a painful lesson on sustainability. Since the 1600’s Newfoundland was one of the worlds most plentiful fishing grounds, but overfishing in the 80’s resulted in a large scale cod fishing ban which has still been ineffective in reconstituting the population.

It therefore seemed appropriate for our first Green Sigma panel discussion on sustainability and energy management for buildings at BOMEX 2011.  Consider these sobering projections. Buildings are projected to be the biggest energy user and contributor to global warming by the year 2025 and Newfoundland is rapidly moving to energy exploration in these coastal waters as their key new industry to replace fishing.  The need for smarter buildings is clear.

Our topic at BOMEX was ‘Excellence through Innovation: Key Learning’s from the Green Sigma Coalition.’  This coalition represents a first for smarter buildings in bringing together many companies for the good of our collective customers and to tackle the sustainability challenge. Key members from the coalition joined Michael Hayes(IBM) and myself in St. John’s for a conversation that addressed the next stage in the evolution of smarter buildings in the context of our collaborative experiences. We discussed how our companies are enabling leading edge practices in building energy, space, and operations to meet key sustainability challenges that we have faced.

Melissa O’Mara, representing Schneider Electric‘s Green Buildings Solutions, discussed the evolution of the Green Building marketplace from a focus sustainable materials and construction practices, toward a “super high performance” discipline that will be required in order to meet growing regulatory requirements, including the net-zero building regulations in Europe and California, for example.  This evolution requires partnering early in the design phase of both new construction and significant retrofit projects, to enable a new generation of analytics and tools that leverage data from across today’s disparate building systems to make smarter building management decisions.  A key point was made that not all LEED certified buildings perform well at commissioning or over time. LEED alone is not enough (today) to design and build the high performance buildings of the future.

Brian Dauskurdas, representing Lutron Electronics, discussed Advancements in Lighting Controls.  Lighting is approximately 30% of the load on today’s commercial buildings.  It is one of the main culprits of excessive energy in today’s existing buildings because there is no controls strategy implemented to optimize both the use of lighting energy and the productivity of the people in the space.  One of the main challenges property owners have faced with installing building wide lighting control systems is trying to optimize the existing infrastructure.  This hurdle has proved to provide an unrealistic payback to the owner unless they reside in areas with only the highest utility rates.  Advancements in lighting control technology have allowed wireless radio frequency devices to significantly decrease the cost of a building wide control system, increasing an owner’s return on investment even at the average utility rate in N. America.  By implementing wireless lighting control technology it opens up an architecture that can now optimize energy usage as well as easily communicate into a central building system.  By providing this data to a central system, it begins the process of an owner creating rules of optimization that can influence not only lighting but mechanical systems, demand response, personal controls and space utilization.

Michael Hayes, representing IBM, discussed our new offering for Intelligent Building Management that provides a platform to drive advanced analytics in order to optimize building management and energy usage.  This offering is designed to add additional insight and intelligence by integrating to systems such as those provided by Schneider and Lutron as we scale to manage large campuses, building portfolios, and smarter cities.

The founding concept of the coalition was to develop best practices, standards support, and thought leadership that allow buildings to operate more sustainably and efficiently.

Other members of the Coalition include: Johnson Controls, Ricoh, Siemens, Cisco, Eaton, HIS, Honeywell, Autodesk, and SAP.  It is exciting to be with a group of thought leaders in this space and I wanted to share our first joint presentation at BOMEX which was in fact so well received we have been asked to repeat the coalition presentation at BOMA2012 conference in June in Seattle, Washington.

Update:

Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————————-

9:00 a.m. Special Address: Economic Recovery, Urbanization and The City, by Alfonso Vegara Gómez, President, Fundación Metrópoli.

Cities have transformed themselves with such intensity. The challenge of the 21^st Century is to build a better urban environment.

“We can’t build cities in the conventional way. We would destroy the planet.” We have to use smart technologies and ideas to build cities in a sustainable way, and a way that provides jobs and economic growth.

In the future there will be super cities and mega metropolitan areas. Between Washington DC and Boston, for instance. We’ll need new transportation systems. The cities in the corridor will share talents.The same in Europe: From Lisbon to Madrid; ultimately you’ll get a huge cluster of connected cities in Europe. “This is the new scale in which you can compete.”

Some exampled of smart cities: Singapore, the new city state. They bet on a port economy. They have smart transportation. They attract talent focusing on IT, media and bio-med. In compact urban spaces they have combined expertise and creativity.

Bilbao, Spain. It integrated all of the systems. It integrated art with urban architecture. Bilbao hasn’t been successful in attracting talent. This will be a big challenge. It has to compete with other cities in a knowledge economy.

The challenge is to build a new urban development park, which will include all of the modern elements: architecture, art, communications, and improved infrastructure.

————————–

9:30 a.m. A Conversation with: Pablo Allard, Decano de Arquitectura y Arte de la UDD y Asesor Senior de Reconstrucción Urbana; Dr. Néstor Bercovich, Coordinador ECLAC, Plan Regional para la Sociedad de la Información de América Latina y el Caribe ECLAC; and Wilson Ferreira Junior., President, CPFL Energia.

Bercovich: We need to rethink the state so we can rise to the challenges of urbanization. A wide variety of stakeholders need to cooperate and innovate.

The free market has created distortions in the social fabric of cities. There’s a huge disparity in wealth and services. This needs to be addressed.

Smarter platforms are the base from which we make the systems of cities and regions work better. For instance, broadband needs to be made available widely and affordably.

Allard: Urban centers, if they’re smarter, can begin to address some of the inequities. They can be a source of economic opportunity for the people of the favelas.

In the future the rate of population growth will go down, and that will make it possible for personal income to come up. Latin American cities will get wealthier and offer new opportunities. “We will have a population that demands a better quality of life.”

“Favelas are full of small entrepreneurs who will make the most of the opportunities that are offered to them.” Little by little, they’ll reach the middle class.

But we need smarter systems in the cities to make this possible.

The context:

Pablo Allard, dean of architecture and art, Desarrollo University, Chile, talks about why he’s “addicted to smarter cities.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

———————-

10:30 a.m. Special Address: Smart Investments in Cities: Managing for the Long-Term, by Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank.

The quality of life in cities and the city ecosystem constitute key factor in innovation going forward. Traditionally we saw that innovation was is driven by three pillars: big private companies, government subsidies and universities. But that’s the old paradigm. Now there are additional factors: cities, NGOs and society.

If we can make cities more efficient we can increase their creative output. A smart city doesn’t just need to be efficient. It needs to have quality of life and creativity. “A city is an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity.”

Technological progress will increase in the coming years. Mobile computing is going to be an important factor. Broadband access is increasing greatly. We need to deploy sensors, and large scale databases.

All of this makes information about what’s going on in the city and how it’s working widely available to everybody.

“The city is becoming a new thing.”

In Latin America and Brazil, cities are a bigger factor than they are in other areas of the world. We have 34 cities in Brazil with 45% of the population, and Rio and Sao Paulo have 25% of the GDP of the country. “We need to reinforce the mid-tier cities and prevent them from falling into the same traps as the mega cities, with their traffic and pollution problems.”

We’re at a critical moment in Brazil. We must have a high level of performance and competitiveness. Our public services must be more efficient and more creative.

————————

11:00 a.m. A Conversation with: James W. Breyer, partner, Accel Partners, Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank, and Marcelo Haddad, executive director, Rio Negócios. Discussion leader: Marcus Regueira, founding partner, FIR Capital.

Breyer: I’m interested in investing in Brazil. We think through the cultural attributes of great entrepreneurs. Is there a common characteristic?

“The people we like to back have passion, think about long term impact and think about building high impact team from the beginning.”

We’ve seen many of these characteristics in Brazil. We see entrepreneurs building strong teams of co-founders. Every location is a little different. In Silicon Valley today we’re finding very young breakthrough technologists. When I first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I took him out to dinner and I offered him a glass of wine, but he said he was not yet 21. He’d have a Sprite.

Brazil will be one of our three most important countries for investments in the coming years.

Coutinho: In Brazil, we need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship. The Brazilian capital markets are still a step behind. “We need to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurship by young people. That’s vital to creating smarter cities.”

Regueira; What we need for venture capital to take off in Brazil is a quarter of a billion dollar exit.

Breyer: The city and country have to minimize the difficulties for young people to get going. One thing we have lost in the US is the idea of allowing small businesses to thrive without uncertainty and significant regulatory overhang.

You need a partnership between great entrepreneurs, people who come in early to help them scale the company—without losing the entrepreneurial spirit, and also partnerships with large and important companies.

“The first trillion dollar valuation company could come from Brazil.”

Here’s the video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

————————–

11:30 a.m. Special Address: How to Build a Smarter City, by Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and strategy—and next CEO.

“Brazil is a country full of natural resources. We think of information as the world’s next important national resource.”

We’re heard a lot about why people should build smarter cities. My focus today is on how.

So how does a city actually get started? Over the last year or so, we’ve reviewed thousands of Smart City initiatives. We’ve identified three common steps that are taken in successful projects.

–By instrumenting different city systems, the city can leverage data as a strategic tool to understand the performance of those systems, and be in a position to managing them better–responding to changes in those systems more rapidly and effectively.

–Once a city has developed that solid foundation, they can start to think about integrating key processes within and across systems.  You can take the data and use it across departments and functions.

–Cities can start to optimize their systems and transform service delivery. Analytics become key here. “You can start to re-imagine the art of the possible.” It’s not just about using analytics to examine the past, but to predict the future.

Value goes up with each of these three steps.

We have also identified key leadership skills for Smarter cities.

–The complexity of cities requires us to understand the city as a system-of-systems and manage it accordingly.

–“We need to build a culture of analytics versus gut-check decision making.”

–Managing and coordinating across city systems will require all city leaders to collaborate with one another, with local business leaders, and other influencers in new ways.

I hope that we’ve been able to provide some guiding principles here that we’ve learned from hundreds of Smarter City engagements, and that have opened our eyes as to what it takes for cities to be successful.

——————-

Noon: A Conversation with: Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, chairman of Gerdau, Gerdau Steel, and a private sector leader in Brazil’s economic development; and Kenneth Schwartz, dean, School of Architecture, Tulane University. Discussion Leader: Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, and the next CEO.

Schwartz: Tulane was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We had to shut it down for months.  Now we’re back and the city of New Orleans is back. We’re both building more sustainably and smarter.

We’re using the school of architecture and technology from IBM to see if we can achieve significant carbon use. We’ll take what we learn to other buildings on the campus.

Instrumentation was relatively easy. Integration was harder. We had to get our school, IT and facilities to work together.

“We think of buildings as the building blocks of cities.” You can experiment in buildings and a university campus and then model solutions that you can use city wide.

Gerdau: We started a movement to build the economy of Brazil based on using management technologies.

The public sector is inefficient.

“What decides a country’s wealth today is its management competency.”

Cities have to be build and rebuilt by seeing them as an integrated unit. Technology is important for gathering information, but it’s not enough.

You need to do management with efficient technology. But it only works when your have good governance aligned with strategy.

Political will is perhaps the biggest challenge. I like to talk to government leaders. I feel there’s lack of policy. We have to transform cities. It requires the kind of strategic thinking I don’t see now.

We have to get our communities involved so they see this is the way forward. Maybe it’s in our education. Time is being wasted. How can we harness all of this?

“We have to change culture.”

————————–

12:15 p.m. Key Observations from Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO.

We operate in 170 countries and every political system. All societies are going through a transition. The same goes with companies. You can be optimistic or see it as concerning. How do some do it better than others?

Your have to re-prioritize. You have to take things that were done one way in the past and come up with new approaches.

Mayor Paes of Rio surrounded himself with professional managers. “Good management is the key to getting things done.”

——————

Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Banavar: There’s an impression that more disasters are happening. Part of it is that because of modern communications, we know more about what’s happening. But it’s true for floods, perhaps caused by global warming. There are also man-made disasters, such as nuclear disasters. These kinds of massive events require a long term planning, preparedness and response system.

Factoid: $265 billion total global economic losses due to natural disasters in the first half of 2011.

We can do a lot to prevent these kinds of losses.

We’ll look at four types of events: natural disasters, terrorism, industrial accidents and large-scale events like protests and riots, but also the World Cup and the Olympics.

The density of communities in coastal communities has  been increasing, and those populations are the most vulnerable

Four stages for managing disasters: Mitigation, such as building codes; short-term preparedness, responding to warnings; response with full situational awareness of what’s happening; recovery and long term rehabilitation.

——————-

Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Second installment

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Osorio: We have two major challenges in Rio. We have a history of natural disasters mainly caused by heavy rains and flooding and mudslides, and we have a history of dealing with large scale events.

We were very poorly prepared to face natural disasters.

Every five or six years on average we have a major natural event, but we have flooding every year. We have had two big events in the past two years. It seems to be a pattern. It could be global warming.

In the past we’d say it’s god’s will. We just reacted.

The city decided to approach the situation head on. We felt it was our obligation to meet the challenge in a different way.

They mayor who is 42 started his political life as deputy mayor in part of the city. He was in charge of the region when it had a disaster about 14 years ago.

When he became mayor, he was the emergency response plans and felt it wasn’t enough. Early 2009. He ordered a study.

We had a major disaster–incredible rain. More than 70 people died here. We used the plan to some extent, but not enough

We decided to have an emergency response center but later decided to make a city operations center to handle a wide variety of situations.

We had an organization with many fiefdoms, but, in order to respond to disasters, you have to cooperate. They mayor made people work together.

So we have become much more agile.

We’re facing big events coming to Rio, including the World Cup and Olympics. They’re a big challenge for us. They’re big and complex events. The operation center is a major tool to enable our preparations and response.

This year, we had the Rock in Rio festival with 700,000 people. The last edition was 2001 and was a total disaster. Nobody could move in the area. But this year the operational part worked well. We reacted very quickly, and the operations center was instrumental. We think we’ll be ready for what’s coming.

———————–

Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 3

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Allard: In Chile we had the large earthquake and tsunami, and it was also widely dispersed. We had more than 700 kilometers of land affected. The disaster affected the three main metro areas in Chile and many smaller cities. Five major highways were broken. Many buildings fell—even some built in the past few years. More than 500 people died. 370,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

The neighboring communities had to come and help the ones that were affected.

First response, lasted 33 days. It was coordinated by the emergency ministry.

Reconstruction is expected to take four years.

I worked on the reconstruction.

We opened a voluntary record for families that had suffered damage. This helped us relocate them. They received vouchers.

We arranged for houses to be rebuilt by private companies. These projects were subsidized.

Six months after the catastrophe we had 60,000 emergency houses built, where people could stay while their permanent houses were built.

It was a huge management challenge. We had to track people’s identity and map it to their location and what was being done for them.

We invited companies to present different kind of building systems. We had a fair where the families could go and chose the type of house.

We had voting by the people to chose the best designs. The winners started quickly.

But we also wanted to use the rebuilding to create smart options. We studied the risks in locations by the coast.

For places that were especially vulnerable, we designed the houses to be resilient to quakes and tsunamis.

By this September we had more than 60,000 houses built and more than 200,000 under construction. We expect to have all the houses built in February 2014.

Lessons:

–Be prepared for the worst case scenario.

–Manage the expectations of the people after the disaster.

–Communicate complexity and time frame.

–Reinforce local capacity and leadership.

Here’s Allard talking about why he’s a “smarter cities addict.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————-

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 4

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department.

Escudero: We created an emergency response system in 2006 that turned into a crime fighting system as well.

Here’s a look at Madrid’s emergency management system:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

A couple of IBM scientists think they’ve found a smart way to do that. Kota Murali and Roger Schmidt are the brains behind the Holistic Green Data Center–an integrated package of technologies designed to bring solar energy to data centers, avoid energy-sapping DC-to-AC power conversions and use water for cooling by running it directly under the microprocessors in server computers.

Each of the pieces by itself could create significant energy savings. Taken together, they offer the potential of transforming the way data centers are designed in sunny locations and greatly expanding the availability and lowering the cost of computing in developing countries in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.

The seed of the idea was planted nearly two years ago when Schmidt, an IBM Fellow and the company’s chief engineer for data center energy efficiency, gave a lecture about water-cooled computer systems in Bangalore, India, where IBM has a large workforce. In the audience was Murali, the lead scientist for nanotechnology in IBM India. Murali made the connections: India has abundant solar energy. Solar energy produces direct current, which was is required to run computers. And a new generation of computers was on the way that would be cooled super-effectively by water–greatly reducing the need for traditional air conditioning. He approached Schmidt after his lecture and they began a collaboration that by the end of the this year is expected to result in a small IBM data center in Bangalore running the solar-and-water system as a test bed. “This creates a highly efficient system,” says Murali.

The potential savings are impressive. By avoiding conversion from AC to DC, they figure they’ll shave 10% off of energy consumption. In Bangalore, where the sun shines an average of 330 days per year, they expect to save 20% in energy costs by using solar as the primary energy source rather than relying on an electricity grid.

There’s another benefit that’s not obvious to people in mature economies. In many emerging markets, electrical grids are undependable or non-existent. Companies are forced to rely way too much on expensive diesel generators. That makes it difficult and expensive to deploy a lot of computers, especially in the concentrated way they’re used in data centers. But, with this holistic approach, a bank, a telecommunications company or a government agency could contemplate setting up a data center that doesn’t need the grid.

For Kota, who grew up in India but got his PhD at MIT in the United States, this approach to running data centers has an immense appeal. “As a scientist, it’s satisfying because you’re reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions,” he says. “As somebody who’s interested in social impact, it will be great to see these systems transform the lives of people who don’t have much electrical power and computing power. It can change life.”

If this experiment works as planned, IBM plans on offering the technology to clients.

Technorati Tags: IBM

by Lars Christian Christensen, Vice President of Plant Siting and Forecasting, Vestas Technology R&D

The moment of truth surrounding the Earth’s never-ending need for sustainable energy and resources is here.  With the world’s energy consumption expected to increase at least 36 percent from 2008 to 2035, it’s clear our global dependency on energy and natural resources is not slowing down. Now’s the time to fully tap into sustainable resources including wind power to their greatest ability.

How can this be accomplished?  By using new analytics technologies to make more informed decisions about where we install wind turbines.

Wind farms and the turbines that power them offer a promise of unlimited energy. At 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, wind energy is one of the lowest priced renewable energy technologies available today.

Countries around the world are signing up for this promise by recognizing wind farm benefits, setting aggressive goals and records, and generating demand for new technology that can speed up the delivery and placement of wind farms.

The German Association of Energy and Utilities recently reported the country set a new record during the first half of 2011 with 20.8 percent of the country’s power production coming from renewable resources like wind. Also, New Zealand adopted an aggressive energy strategy this year calling for 90 percent of its electricity to be generated by renewable resources such as wind.

The American Wind Association reported if the United States can increase its wind energy capacity to 20 percent by 2030, the country can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7,600 tons of CO2, reduce water consumption in the electric sector by four trillion gallons, and reduce consumer demand for natural gas by 12 percent.

A key challenge to efficient wind energy is finding the ideal location to place turbines so they produce enough electricity to keep electricity costs low.

Vestas Wind Systems is overcoming this challenge with new IBM big data analytics software and an IBM Supercomputer that model massive amounts of data such as weather conditions, moon and tidal phases, geospatial and sensor data, satellite images, deforestation maps, and weather modeling research to predict the best place to install each wind turbine.

Analysis that used to take weeks can now be done in under an hour.

We’re using this information to show clients how much energy our turbines will produce and what their return on investment will be before they are installed.

We predict by 2020 as much as 10 percent of the world’s electricity consumption will come from wind technologies, and analytics is helping us speed up this timeline and enter new markets to capitalize on growing demand for wind energy.

This week IBM is hosting its annual Information on Demand Conference and Business Analytics Forum in Las Vegas. Vestas Technology’s Lars Christian Christensen is among several thousand attendees who are learning how to unlock the potential of big data and analytics.  Check out more about the conference here: www.ibm.com/press/IOD2011

Technorati Tags: Analytics, energy, iod, Smarter Energy, vestas technology, wind

Source: Agência Brasil

Brazil has a tremendous amount of positive momentum these days. It’s fast emerging as one of the world’s important economies and has a huge wealth of oil, minerals, water, timber and agricultural land. Yet in this world of looming resource constraints, Brazil’s leaders are acutely conscious of the need to make the most of their abundance–while addressing the negative impacts on the environment.

IBM Research – Brazil, which was established last year as the company’s first research lab in the Southern Hemisphere, has aligned its research agenda with Brazil’s national priorities. It’s focusing on natural resources management, complex human systems such as the  World Cup and Olympics events coming up in Brazil, low-complexity microelectronics of the type used in appliances and cars, and quality improvements in services–another area where Brazil is intent on expanding.

Natural resources management is the subject of the IBM Research – Brazil Colloquium, where IBM researchers and scientists from other organizations will speak about the potential and challenges they face. The colloquium is part of an IBM Centennial program designed to convene thought leaders – including leading researchers and scientists, academics, leaders of industries, public policy makers and key IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the world.

The Brazil colloquium is not only intended to foster knowledge and collaboration. “We want to be provocative,” says Fabio Gandour, the Chief Scientist at the Brazil lab, who is in charge of organizing the event.

Well, not too provocative. But Gandour does aim to raise potentially controversial questions before Brazilian government, academic and business leaders. A session on genomics and agriculture will urge farmers to seriously consider the consequences of genetically-modified seeds before planting.  Speakers will urge education leaders to aggressively expand university programs in computational chemistry, biology and physics. Another session, on coupled human and natural systems, an emergent field of inquiry called CHANS,  will caution about the potentially negative consequences on humans of massive industrial or agricultural changes.

Gandour gives an example: Widespread conversion of woodlands to farming has chased a Brazilian relative of the cockatoo from the countryside into cities, where the birds perch on television antennas and the like. It’s great for bird watchers, but the problem is that the birds can be carriers of bacteria that is potentially deadly to humans. The lesson: Be conscious of the unintended consequences of your actions and figure out how to deal with them.

While the provocations should make for lively question-and-answer sessions and conversations during breaks, the heart and soul of the colloquium will be about the potential for science to help make the world work better.

That’s where Ulisses Mello comes in. He’s the program director of the Smarter Natural Resources area in the Brazil lab, and will be one of the key speakers at the colloquium. A specialist in computational geosciences, he worked in research for Petrobras, Brazil’s largest oil company, before he joined IBM in 1994. Mello is on a mission: to help overhaul the world’s natural resource-based industries. “We want to use technology to transform what is traditionally not a knowledge-based industry into one that will manage natural resources to have a better social and economic impact–not only for Brazil but globally,” he says.

As a result of two massive oil discoveries in the ocean off the Atlantic coast of Brazil recently, an oil rush is on. Petrobras has pledged to invest $224 billion in exploration, well drilling and oil extraction over the next five years. Yet due to the the extreme depth of the water and the makeup of the rocks in the area of the findings, discovery and extraction will be risky and, potentially, very expensive.

Mello and his research team are working on new imaging and analysis techniques that will help oil companies find new resources more efficiently and manage them more productively and sustainably. He believes that these approaches could make it possible for the oil outfits to remove up to 70% of the oil from the new fields–compared to a global industry average of just 30%. One promising technique, called full-wave inversion, produces clearer images of underground reservoirs. Also, computer models that analyze the gradual transformation of the earth’s geology over millions of hears help oil companies determine whether a find contains oil, gas or water. This kind of analysis, conducted with supercomputers, is vitally important because of the cost of drilling a new well in deep ocean can be frightfully expensive–up to $250 million per  well in some places–and, in some scenarios, only 10% of wells strike oil.

As a  Brazilian, Mello is highly motivated to help the country become more economically productive, improve the quality of life and do it in a way that’s sustainable. On the colloquium: “This is the beginning of a dialogue with the Brazilian scientific community,” he says. “We’ll be part of the ecosystem. We’re here to stay. That’s the message.”

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM

Robert Atkinson, president of the non-partisan public policy think-tank ITIF, today moderated a panel of experts on emerging technologies in the fields of health care, transportation and energy at IBM’s Frontiers of IT Capitol Hill briefing.

Here’s the Washington Post’s Post Tech blog curtain-raiser on the event.

Recently considerable attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data”—large scale data sets that businesses are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power.  As a McKinsey Global Institute study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States.  To take one example, the authors estimate that better use of big data in health care could generate an additional $300 billion in long-term value, with approximately two-thirds of that coming from a direct reduction in national health care expenditures.

The use of Big Data should not be confined to just the private sector; data offers incredible new opportunities to the public sector as well.  Policymakers have the opportunity to use Big Data to improve government in areas such as public safety, public health, public utilities and public transportation.  ITIF has discussed many of these opportunities before.

Consider the following:

• Electric power utilities can use data analytics and smart meters to better manage resources and avoid blackouts,
• Food inspectors can use data to better track meat and produce safety from farm to fork ,
• Public health officials can use health data to detect infectious disease outbreaks,
• Regulators can track pharmaceutical and medical device safety and effectiveness through better data analytics,
• Police departments can use data analytics to target crime hotspots and prevent crime waves,
• Public utilities can use sensors to collect data on water and sewer usage to detect leaks and reduce water consumption,
• First responders can use sensors, GPS, cameras and better communication systems to let police and fire fighters better protect citizens when responding to emergencies, and
• State departments of transportation can use data to reduce traffic, more efficiently deploy resources, and implement congestion pricing systems

Better use of data can help government agencies, from city agencies to federal bureaucracies, operate more efficiently, create more transparency, and make more informed decisions.  And government can use cloud computing to more efficiently develop online systems that provide anytime, anywhere access to information. However, government officials should do more to spur uses of data. Taking advantage of these opportunities will require federal government leadership, such as the Department of Commerce creating a data policy office to spur data innovation and overcome obstacles to adoption, all the while protecting privacy.  And going forward, government agencies will increasingly have to deal with issues such as data security and identity management, so these issues do  not become impediments to successful utilization of data analytics. Local governments can help pioneer the use of data as well.  For example, the city of Boston city sponsored the development of a mobile app “Street Bump” to automatically determine where potholes are based on data collected using citizen’s smart phones equipped with GPS and accelerometers. Tools like these are helping create “smart cities” and build a world that is alive with information.

Although there have been many successes in this area, much more can be done.  For example, in homeland security, law enforcement must deal with a changing threat landscape.  While corporations and individuals can increasingly use better technology to communicate and store data security, criminals can also use these same tools.  As a result, law enforcement is increasingly confronting the “Going Dark” problem where they have less access to investigative data, not because of a lack of legal authority, but because of technological hurdles.  Yet while law enforcement may have a reduced ability to intercept some types of communication, they now have many more sources of data, such as transactional data, to use to detect threats.  As ITIF discussed at an event in 2010 following the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, the intelligence community still needs to develop better analytical tools to “connect the dots” and allow intelligence officers to do a better job. Similarly in many other sectors, Big Data offers government opportunities to reinvent how to operate effectively.

Overall, more investment in data infrastructure and analytics will enable government to better provide and efficiently deliver values and services to its citizens.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Robert Atkinson