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Posted by
David Bartlett in
Recently, I traveled to Newfoundland, Canada, my first visit to this beautiful province. Newfoundland is on the eastern most reaches of North America and from Cape Spear, where I am standing, you can truly be the first to watch the sunrise from the continent.
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.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- business analytics
- Education
- Government Services
- new intelligence
- optimization
- Smart Grids
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Food
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Industries
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- sustainability
Rio De Janeiro is a bustling metropolis in a booming country–and, increasingly, an example of how government and business leaders can cooperate to make cities work better. Join the live blog today for a second day of coverage of speeches, panels and hallway discussions.
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.
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Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Energy use in data centers accounts for 2% of electricity consumption in the United States and 1.2% worldwide, according to a new report by Stanford University professor Jonathan Koomey. While that’s a relatively small slice of overall energy usage, it’s a lot of megawatts. So the pressure is on to come up with ways to make data centers less energy hungry.
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.
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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
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
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.
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By Robert Atkinson
President
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
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
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by Andy Bochman, author of the Smart Grid Security Blog and an Energy Security Lead for IBM’s Rational division.
Next month, I’ll be meeting with key industry experts to discuss Security metrics at the EnerSec Smart Grid Security Summit in San Diego. We’ll covering the challenges with, and business benefits of measuring utilities’ smart grid with the right metrics, including organizational security maturity. This got me thinking about consumers and behavioral economics and what we value as important. Is it convenience, social acceptance, security, privacy, price? Continue Reading »
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Every tech company attempts to sell potential customers on the promise that its products and services will deliver a superior return on the customer’s investment dollars. That’s not a particularly difficult task when you’re talking about traditional IT investments, which seek to improve the efficiency and productivity of the IT function itself. But it’s harder when the purpose of the investment is to boost the performance of an entire business, including placing a value on the benefits received by the customers’ customers. Such is the challenge facing IBM when it hawks its Smarter Planet solutions.
A year ago, IBM’s leaders commissioned the IBM Center for Applied Insights, an internal research group, to come up with a way of presenting the whole array of gains from Smarter Planet projects by focusing on vertical industries. The group created a new methodology for gathering and analyzing pertinent information and placing dollar values both on the components of a project and on the entire effort. The initiative, called “ROI for Smart,” has resulted in series of reports analyzing the returns for specific projects in eight industries. Steve Rogers, the director of the Center, says that unlike other approaches in the tech industry, “this is not about measuring the ROI of IBM’s products and services; it’s measuring the ROI of pursuing a Smarter Planet path and achieving higher levels of business competency.”
As a reporter covering the enterprise technology industry for two decades, I was deeply skeptical whenever tech vendors claimed that they had come up with their own assessments of the value they could create for customers. I still am. But I’m also impressed with the results that Rogers and his team have come up with.
You can decide for yourself if their analysis is credible by reading the reports:
Healthcare: Capturing Value from Patient Centered Care.
Retail: The Value of Smarter Merchandising.
Electronics: The Road to Customer Intimacy.
Banking: The Value of Credit Risk Management.
Transportation: The Value of Customer Centric Sales & Services.
Government: The Value of Smarter Social Services.
Telecom: Smarter Communications Through Analytics.
Chemicals and Petroleum: The Value of Smarter Oil and Gas Fields.
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This is the third in a series of three essays about the potential payoff from applying Smarter Planet thinking to businesses. The first two essays can be found here and here.
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by Joseph Santamaria, Chief Information Officer for United Illuminating, a diversified energy delivery company serving a total of 690,000 electric and natural gas utility customers in 66 communities across Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Demand for electricity is forecast to grow by 33% in the next 20 years, with nearly 100% growth in Asia. According to Lux Research, there will be nine times the smart grid data in 2020 that there is today. IBM has been active in the smart grid space long before the term was coined and continues to show strong momentum worldwide, including emerging markets like Korea and Brazil – and the growing area of securing the grid. While energy providers look for ways keep up with this demand, we are also very cognizant of the implications that a more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent grid can have on security. On the path to a smarter planet, it has become an imperative to build security in at the foundation of these smart grids.
Today IBM announced that they are working with United Illuminating to proactively do this. United Illuminating serves a total of 690,000 electric and natural gas utility customers in 66 communities across Connecticut and Massachusetts in the US. Right now, we are in the process of upgrading our meter grid to advanced meters to improve customer experience and operational efficiencies. Clearly the impact that these new meters is having on our customers is very beneficial, however , these upgrades also could pose some security risks that needed to be mitigated.
For help in doing this, United Illuminating turned to IBM’s security expertise. By using IBM’s WebSphere DataPower appliance, we’ve been able to gain greater authentication, authorization, and accounting/auditing capabilities for our smart meters that have dramatically reduced our exposure. As a result, we have been able to secure 50,000 of our advanced meters, with the goal of supporting a total of 80,000 by the end of 2011. And in the near future, all of our 350,000 electric meters will be covered by Data Power security features.
While we continue to observe the world around us becoming smarter, there is a need to keep pace and infuse digital intelligence into industries, infrastructures, processes and cities. Organizations that proactively embrace security and ensure it is designed into the foundation of their smart grid infrastructures will be those that benefit most from today’s smarter planet.
If you are interested in hearing more about this topic and news, IBM is hosting a Twitter Session at 3:30pm-4:30pm ET later today (Wednesday, July 13) with participants from both IBM and UIL. This will be an opportunity for you to tweet questions and receive responses instantly. If you are interested, please follow hashtag #IBMSG.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Some of the early conversions to smart grid technologies in the United States prompted backlashes from consumers. Utility customers in California and Texas, for instance, complained that the meters weren’t accurate and their monthly bills were soaring. These situations gave smart metering a bad name. But a large-scale rollout of smart meters s on Europe’s island of Malta that’s being managed by IBM hasn’t sparked the same kind of reaction.
Why not? Jean-Christophe Samin, project manager for IBM’s smart grid deployment for electricity and water in Malta, says the engagement teaches two important lessons:
1) Communities shouldn’t do smart metering in a vacuum. It should be part of a comprehensive makeover of how their utilities manage their businesses–the entire information chain from meter to billing system. “Smart metering needs to go hand in hand with the larger transformation,” Samin says.
2) It’s important to start small with a pilot version of the system. You work the problems out without major disruptions to the utilities or consumers. “This is a fundamental step before launching the massive rollout,” he says.
