Cities generate the vast bulk of the world’s CO2 emissions, and they account for 60 percent of all water allocated for domestic human use. As urbanization levels increase, how do city leaders ensure continuing water and energy supplies – while also promoting environmental sustainability? If you ask me, a good place to start is by making sure local utilities, government agencies, businesses and citizens alike are looking at the same information when making decisions about collective and individual energy use.
Fifteen years ago Peterborough was made one of four UK Environment Cities by The Department of the Environment and is set to become one of a cluster of IBM “Smarter Cities” being developed around the world. Peterborough’s growth targets to transform the city are ambitious and connecting the city systems is central to increasing quality of life for the proposed extra 20,000 jobs, 25,000 homes and 40,000 people that will be in the city by 2021 compared to 2001.
A new collaboration between the Peterborough City Council, Opportunity Peterobrough, Royal Haskoning, Green Ventures and IBM will help the city visualize energy, water, transport and waste systems to produce a real-time, integrated view of the city’s environmental performance. And citizens will be able to log on to the web portal to make more ecologically-minded decisions about their resource usage.
Today I am beginning the installation of a solar energy system for my house. The aspect that is different in this system is how I will pay for it. I have thought about solar energy for a long time, however I have never had the appetite to invest the huge up-front cost of the system. When my electricity bill reached a new all-time high this past July here in Los Angeles, I decided to do a little research. With one search of Google using the search terms “solar lease California”, I simply called the first two companies that showed in the search results. I thought that leasing would provide a more attractive financial proposition than purchasing.
After a couple of phone calls to these two companies, I discovered an even more enticing program. I could simply have one of these companies install the system on my house and pay them for the power it generates. I wouldn’t pay for, lease, maintain, nor own the system. They would effectively become another electricity supplier that just happened to reside on my roof. The cash outlay was $1000 to pay for the permits and installation basics. Beyond that I will only pay for the electricity it generates. The cost per unit will be half of what the traditional electric company charges, the price is locked in for eighteen years with them maintaining the equipment, and any extra energy that the system generates that I don’t use, goes back into the grid and I get a refund on my traditional bill. This is a completely turn-key program that I didn’t need to do a thing to participate, including securing the permits, etc. This program sounds pretty good!
So, today the crew began the installation. It will take a few days to get done and then I will be part of a greener community of people around the world! Be sure to talk to the solar energy provider in your area to see if they will offer a similar program.
Now, I need to to convert my cars to hydrogen and them I will truly be the Smarter Consumer!
Please let us know what you’re doing to be a smarter consumer!
Adam Christensen and Susanne Dirks talked with me about a question being posed by Dana Blankenhorn.
Dana asks an interesting question: are IBM’s “smarter traffic” ideas an homage to Moses or Jacobs?
He immediately answers his own question with the statement:
“Looking at IBM’s highly-advertised ideas on smarter traffic, much of it is built on the idea Robert Moses called flow.”
To answer simply, IBM’s work in this area is not “built” on Moses’ notions. Our work on helping cities build smarter transportation systems is built on three simple observations on some aspects of how society and technology are changing. Readers of this blog will know them as instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence. The people and systems of the world are becoming increasingly able to be more aware, of many more things, in many more places, much faster, and to analyse and derive timely insight and action from that. That’s it.
We use these observations to build things to help achieve people’s goals. If those goals are Moses-like, or Jacobs-like, that’s fine. The community that sets them is the judge of what they are or should be.
That isn’t to say we don’t have a strong point of view, though, because we do. Our approach is about leveraging technology for the sake of a city’s citizens. We don’t advocate tolls. Or not advocate them. We don’t advocate city centre cameras. Or not advocate them. We do advocate, say, holistic multi-modal solutions for transport, leveraging technology where and when applicable (this is where my son says, Dad, you sound like Dilbert). We want progress through making the overall systems smarter. And that approach has many facets, completely dependent on the community, city or nation in question.
In the end, Dana’s answers his own question with exactly the right answer:
The smartest city will find ways to support both. People and goods have to get around. But they also need destinations. Getting off the freeway and into the crowd is the challenge.
I believe – and many of the people I work with believe – that the Moses vs. Jacob is a false dichotomy. It isn’t about one or the other. The world has moved beyond that – our problems are too complex and interconnected.
7:01
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Florenz auf dem Weg zu einer “smarter city”.
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Business Decision Optimization. Evidence-Based Management. The Realtime, Predictive Enterprise.
On April 14, IBM launched Business Analytics & Optimization Services, a major expansion of its consulting organization that embraces all of these fronts. The move not only signals how the smarter planet vision is transforming into new value for IBM clients, but how that worldview will help individual organizations actually become more intelligent.
Business analytics may sound like an abstraction – (analytics simply means the science of analysis) – but it reflects a very tangible reality at the heart of Smarter Planet: because we can increasingly sense and gather information with unprecedented scale and precision, entire new spheres of knowledge and insight are within reach. We can measure and monitor just about anything, from the complex interactions in natural systems like Galway Bay to the ebb and flow of power over an intelligent electric grid.
As the new paper from IBM’s Institute of Business Value, Business Analytics & Optimization for the Intelligent Enterprise, notes:
The information explosion has permanently changed the way we experience the world: everything – and everyone – is leaving digital tracks. Intelligence is increasingly embedded in objects.
What company wouldn’t want to operate with the kind of highly instrumented, interconnected and realtime intelligence that business analytics promises? While that may seem like a rhetorical question, the study IBM conducted as part of the launch of the new analytics service found that nearly eight in ten business leaders were making decisions based on gut and instinct. Business analytics is meant to change that.
