GreenMonk: the blog - Page 18 of 100 - Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down

Google, Microsoft, shutter their home energy management offerings

July 4, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Last week Google announced that it was shutting down its PowerMeter application (a screenshot of which is above). A couple of days later Microsoft divulged that it was closing its PowerMeter competitor, Microsoft Hohm.

This is very disappointing because the two products were decidly disruptive and, as Google mentioned, studies show that having simple access to energy information helps consumers reduce their energy use by up to 15%. Both services cited lack of uptake as the reason for their termination.

In Microsoft’s case, there is a very good reason why this was so, it never opened up Hohm beyond the US – if you only allow 4% of the world’s population access to your application, you can’t really claim to be surprised if you don’t see significant uptake.

PowerMeter though, in its announcement said –

our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service

Why then did Google’s PowerMeter not scale, despite being open to all comers?

Simply because Google were too early to market, I suspect.

CurrentCost

Being a trailblazer meant that getting data into PowerMeter was not trivial. The only way to make it easy for data entry would have been if Google managed to sell its services to utility companies but Google had very little success with this approach. Why would utility companies allow Google access to their customer usage data? That was never a runner.

The alternative was to use a device like a CurrentCost – an in-home energy meter which had the ability to upload its data to PowerMeter. However, as I detailed in this post, there were multiple problems with the CurrentCost meters which meant they were never a reliable option for PowerMeter data entry.

Obviously, if you can’t get your data into PowerMeter, it is not going to be of much use to you.

The need for real-time energy information is obvious. It is very difficult to identify wasteful electricity practices when you receive your consumption information (i.e. your bill) up to two months after you used it.

So what now?

Well, it looks like we are back to getting this information from our utility companies. Things are changing (albeit at a glacial pace) on that front though. As I mentioned in my post on Centrica’s Smart Meter Analytics implementation, the technological barriers to rolling out a compelling home energy management have come way down.

Now if utility companies actually roll out energy management applications properly, we could see significant reductions in wasteful energy use.

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

SAP starts highlighting sustainability customer success stories

June 29, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I had a great chat with SAP’s Jeremiah Stone (Senior Director, Sustainability Solution Management) while we were at Sapphire Now in May. Craig Cmehil was good enough to video it for us, so here we are talking about SAP’s Sustainability solutions and SAP’s move to letting its customers recount their sustainability success stories.

Here is the transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hey everyone; we?re at SAPPHIRE NOW. I?m Tom Raftery, and, with me, I have Jeremiah Stone from SAP. Jeremiah, can you tell us, first of all, what?s your role at SAP?

Jeremiah Stone: Hi Tom! Thanks for having me, I?m glad to be here on GreenMonk. I?m part of the Solution Management Organization within SAP for Sustainability. So, we?re really responsible for the roadmap and investment in our products and working with our customers to understand what their needs are and making sure that we have the right products to meet those needs.

Tom Raftery: Okay. Just before we get in to the whole SAPPHIRE NOW thing and what?s been happening here, what are the, products that you guys have around sustainability?

Jeremiah Stone: We have a wide range and it?s a good question, because sustainability means all things to all people and, I think, Vinnie Mirchandani said, ?Don?t talk about religion, don?t talk about politics, and now don?t talk about sustainability, because it?s such a hot topic.?

SAP defines sustainability as products that help our customers? businesses succeed not only in the traditional sense of what we always do to the profitable business, but also how to stay in business for the long-run. So, in a world with changing resource situations with volatility around natural resources, needs to curb pollution, be able to grow a workforce, be able to have more sustainable products, we build products that help customers have better run businesses.

So very concretely, software that helps you have a safer business, identify risk and have improvements in people, not getting hurt, which is a nice way to have a longer-term business – you?re not hurting your employees, you make that a box.

So, we have product compliance solutions to help people design and take better products to the market that have less toxicity in them, for example. One of my favorite example there is Molex that makes little connectors in computers. They were able to remove halogens from those connectors so they have a less toxic product then.

In the long-run where you have an end of life because it has no use in your home and it is off gas or that sort of gas. We make products for energy and environmental resource management. So, really how to cut your energy use and emit less. We have solutions focused on sustainable workforce. How do you engage your employees that are on the top for sustainability? Then also in a long-term have the long-term workforce. That?s really the analytics layer and how do you make the decisions on the basis of your business data. So, we have products in each of these categories.

Tom Raftery: Awesome, and, I?ve been at a couple of Sapphires at this point. In the last couple of Sapphires there was a lot of talk from the CEO?s on downwards about sustainability. This year less so. There seems to be a shift in focus. Can you talk a bit about that?

Jeremiah Stone: Well, I think that reflects to a degree the maturity of the topic and I think it?s not necessarily a topic where they are excited about it in the sense that it is new and defining. It?s now, I think, reaching the point where and I?m excited about this, because when things get mundane and boring it usually means you make someone successful with them.

Now, it?s assumed that sustainability is going to be on the floor, it?s assumed that we?re going to be focusing on it, it?s assumed that its part of it. And you did hear about it in the keynotes, but it just blends in. Vishal Sikka talked about it today that one of our on-demand products in sustainability will be adopting in-memory technology.

So, a lot of the major technology investments that companies make around mobility, around in memory analytics, these sorts of things are part of our investment strategy and portfolio for sustainability. Now, it just becomes assumed with SAP products that we?re focusing on sustainability, which is what makes me excited as a solutions guide for that is that we don?t think if it is a separate category that we have to crow about; it now becomes part of our business.

SAP?s purpose is to help the world run better, to create enduring prosperity for people everywhere and that sustainability is just part of that purpose.

Tom Raftery: Sure and there seems to be a lot more customer sustainability events going on this month than ever before?

Jeremiah Stone: Absolutely, and that was great. I think something on the order 80% of the activities we?re doing – the forums, the customer roundtables, those are the things that were led by our customers using the products and it?s a great…

Tom Raftery: From what I was seeing, it seems to be a lot — this event, the whole SAPPHIRE NOW thing seemed to be a lot more on sustainability from the bottom-up rather than the top-down.

Jeremiah Stone: Absolutely! That?s a great way to put it and we were talking about this before. I?m excited to hear less about SAP being sustainable in our vision and a lot more about SAP?s customers embedding our technology to have more sustainable business and more sustainable products of their own.

That?s what we?re really starting to see in this you know there?s a lag when people buy the software and implement it and start to use it. I think we?re through that lag phase and it?s just great to see the momentum and the tipping point pass and people are starting to use this and then customers? getting up and being really proud about the successes they?re having and how it?s helping their business.

Tom Raftery: Awesome. Jeremiah, that?s been fantastic, thanks again.

Jeremiah Stone: Alright, thanks Tom, I appreciate it.

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Normal service has resumed once more

June 29, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I was made aware of an issue with this site yesterday afternoon.

It appears a problem with a WordPress plugin meant that if you went to the main page of this blog (i.e. http://greenmonk.net) the most recent posting you saw was dated June 2nd of this year.

If, however, you were logged into the site, as I usually am, you saw all the posts, as normal. Even the ones posted after June 2nd, so I was unaware of any issue with the site.

When I was made aware of the problem, I mentioned it on Twitter and my good friend Abesh Bhattacharjee chimed in with the likely cause of the problem.

Abesh correctly identified the plugin which was causing the issue, I deleted it and now normal service has resumed once more.

Apologies for any apparent break in transmission and thanks for bearing with me.

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Photo credit tm-tm

Top 14 IBM achievements in the last 100 years

June 27, 2011 by Tom Raftery

IBM turned 100 earlier this month – a significant achievement for any company, but for one in the constantly shifting sands that is the technology industry, it is particularly notable.

As part of the celebrations, they released the video above outlining 100 of their achievements during that time. The video is beautifully executed and it is a great IBM marketing tool. It is easy to see that the video has a strong sales message towards the end (which tbh, is a tad unnecessary) but the earlier content is definitely worthy of comment.

Some of the highlights for me were:

In 1914, 76 years before the US Disabilities Act, IBM hired its first disabled employee
In 1930 IBM receives its first patent for a traffic signal timing system
In 1932 IBM started education programs for employees and customers
In 1934 IBM introduces group life insurance (in the midst of the Great Depression)
In 1935 IBM opens the first professional training school for women
In 1941, IBM hired a legally blind employee, psychologist Dr. Michael Supa, to make its products more usable by the visually impaired and to assist in the hiring of 181 people with disabilities over the following two years
In 1942 IBM launches a disabled employee training program
In 1943 Ruth Leach Amonette is elected IBM’s first female Vice President
In 1946 IBM hires T.J. Laster, their first black sales representative, 18 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964
In 1953 IBM chairman Thomas Watson issues the company’s first Equal Opportunity Policy letter
In 1967 IBM employee Benoit Mandelbrot ask’s How long is the Coast of Britain and a new branch of mathematics (fractal geometry) is born
In 1981 IBM introduces the first IBM PC
In 2004 IBM creates the World Community Grid – a public grid computing project to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity
And in 2008-9 IBM creates the Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities programs.

Other highlights include inventions of the ATM, the barcode, and DRAM; the fact that at least 3 IBM’ers have won Nobel Prizes; and IBM’s Deep Blue beating world champion chess player Gary Kasparov.

It is easy to criticise this video by saying it is nothing but a sales pitch – but the strong sales message is only really in the final two minutes of the video (from 11:14-13:15) – if you stop the video at that point, you miss nothing and get see for yourself the list of their achievements.

These are just my favourites, what are yours?

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Deeply embedding social media and gamification into utility companies

June 17, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Energy 2.0 at Visualizar11

View more presentations from Tom Raftery

I was asked by the MediaLab Prado to give an updated version of my Energy 2.0 talk at their Visualizar11 – Understanding Infrastructures event in Madrid during the week.

I took the opportunity to update the deck with some of the thoughts I presented at the International SAP for Utilities event around deeply embedding social media into utility companies.

At the Visualizar11 event I talked about how utility companies will need to use gamification and competitions to pique customers’ interest in energy savings and to keep their engagement levels high. Even more importantly, done well, this will greatly extend the Mean Time to Kitchen Drawer (MTKD – the time it takes for people to get bored with an app and metaphorically stuff it in the kitchen drawer).

I was delighted then yesterday when IBM tipped me off that they are collaborating with three US utilities (CenterPoint, Oncor and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E)) to launch the Biggest Energy Saver contest to help people better understand smart meter data.

In fact, there are two Biggest Energy Saver contests – one for customers to encourage them to reduce their energy consumption with a grand prize of an electric vehicle or a first-prize of a suite of GE smart home appliances in the Oncor and CenterPoint Energy service territories.

The second competition is for software developers to develop apps to help customers understand and use the information from their smart meters – this competition has potential prizes totalling up to $150,000. Serious money!

All of the details of the competitions have yet to be announced – but to really knock it out of the park, the customer competition should have social media and gamification throughout – using FourSquare-like principles of awarding badges for people who attain certain target reductions, having leaderboards, the ability to share your exploits on your social network(s) of choice, etc.

I’m giving the closing plenary keynote at the SAP for Utilities event in San Antonio this coming September where I’ll be going into these topics in a lot more detail so expect more on this here in the coming months.

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IBM’s Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities announcements

June 14, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Smart buildings are a topic I’m interested in and so I devote significant coverage to them on this blog. One of the reasons for that is that, for example, in the US alone, buildings are responsible for about 70% of the energy consumption and for about 40% of the greenhouse gases emitted and by 2025, buildings worldwide will become the largest consumer of global energy — more than transportation and the industrial sectors combined. Smarter buildings can help owners and operators cut energy use by as much as 40 percent and cut maintenance costs by 10 to 30 percent, according to IBM.

So why am I writing about Smarter Buildings again now?

Well, last week IBM launched its Intelligent Building Management software and refers to it as IBM’s “first advanced analytics software solution for Smarter Buildings”. To showcase its potential, IBM referenced three projects using the software:

Tulane University (as seen in the video above)
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where IBM are helping the staff better control the environment to help with the preservation of the exhibits and
IBM’s Rochester Minnesota campus where the rollout of the software saw an already energy-efficient campus further reduce its energy consumption by 8%, according to IBM

Now while making software to make buildings more energy-efficient is pretty cool, IBM have seriously taken it up a notch by unveiling a software solution to make cities smarter. Called the Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities this software is designed to help city officials to pull together data from divergent sources to help in the smoother running of cities.

IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smart Cities

This is not new software, per se. What IBM have done is taken existing relevant software from its own portfolio, combined the bits (no pun) together and laid down an analytics layer on top. This re-use of code is in itself, a nice example of Green coding!

Over the next 12 months IBM intends to offer specific Operations Center modules for public safety, water, and transportation with tools to make it easier to connect IBM?s analytical engines with existing embedded systems:

Public Safety – this module has realtime analytics can work with CCTV systems to help reduce crime and protect first responders, for example
Transportation – this module will be able to offer realtime travel information on things like congestion, enabling travellers to route around problem areas. It also allows transportation officials to closely monitor congestion probabilities and offers options to minimise disruption and
Water – up to 60% of a city’s water is lost due to leaky pipes. You know this is a serious issue when you see cities like rain-drenched Dublin reporting water shortages. The water module gives realtime analytics around water allowing problems to be quickly identified and resolved ? or even predicted and prevented

However, I suspect that the biggest issue selling city-wide software solutions will be in identifying the buyer (and/or the data owner!). A lot of the information IBM is trying to incorporate into the Intelligent Operations Center will need to come from various data silos and political fiefdoms within city government.

Having said that, if anyone can make this market, it’s probably IBM.

Centrica’s Smart Meter Analytics application could make energy management compelling

June 9, 2011 by Tom Raftery

As I have mentioned here previously, Smart Meters are going to bring a flood of data to utility companies which will need to be properly managed and which can be a source of intelligence for the utility, if they mine it well.

At the recent SAP Sapphire Now conference, UK Energy retailer Centrica showcased their Smart Meter Analytics application running on SAP’s HANA. HANA is SAP’s in-memory computing solution (In-memory computing moves data off traditional storage on servers and into RAM, providing a performance boost over having to read the data off disks).

Centrica are the largest single instance utility on an SAP system with 18 million residential accounts for and one million business accounts. Right now they are billing residential accounts every three months and they are managing 75 million meter reads per annum.

With the move to smart meters, Centrica will take electricity reads every 30 minutes and gas reads once per day. This means a shift from 75 million meter reads per annum to 120 billion meter reads a year. 120 billion – that’s billion with a b. That’s a phenomenal amount of data to have to deal with. Doing any kind of traditional analytics on a data set that large would very quickly get totally bogged down. One of the interesting things about HANA however is that the performance scales linearly with the hardware. If it’s starting to slow a bit with 120 billion meter reads, throw a couple of extra terabytes of ram and servers at it and hey presto you are back in business, or so the theory goes!

In the demo above, Centrica are using the analytics to examine their customer segmentation. They can look at the energy profile of similar businesses in a specific area and where there are anomalies, they can work with those businesses to help them cut their energy consumption until it is more in line with their peers. Increasing pressures to be energy-efficient and to reduce carbon footprints are being looked on by Centrica as an opportunity to open an energy services business, going to customers to help them to become more energy-efficient. The Smart Meter Analytics application is going to be crucial for this new practice within Centrica.

Centrica's Energy Efficiency Scorecard

In the residential market the Smart Meter Analytics app presents householders with an Energy Efficiency Scorecard. This facilitates charting actual usage patterns against the various tariffs Centrica offers to find the optimal rate plan. The score card also allows home-owners to compare their energy efficiency with similar households in the same area.

This is an impressive use of Smart Meter analytics and it presents hugely useful information but to avoid a short MTKD (Mean Time To Kitchen Drawer – the time it takes for people to get bored with this app and metaphorically stuff it in the kitchen drawer), the scorecard has to keep homeowners engaged. There are several ways of doing this. One of main ones would be to bring in some gamification – make a game of it. The Scorecard could set energy reduction targets for people to meet in the next set period, allot points or awards for achieving reduction targets, build social media in for sharing achievements and put up a leaderboard to add some real competition to the game.

Energy management applications to-date have suffered from the fact that they were working with estimated data a lot of the time, from lack of a significant networked dataset and from a lack of a usable analytics engine. Large energy retailers, like Centrica, have the opportunity now to change that and to make energy management in the home compelling. Let’s hope they make it so.

Disclosure – SAP paid my travel and expenses to attend Sapphire Now.

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If Utilities don’t step up their customer communications, they risk their considerable smart grid investments

June 6, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Smart grids don’t come cheap.

They are typically projects costing in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars (or Euro’s, or pounds or whatever your currency of choice). Just think, the most fundamental piece of the smart grid, the smart meter, alone costs in the order of $100. When you factor in the costs of installation, etc., you are looking at over $200 per smart meter. Therefore if you have in the order of one million customers it’s going to cost you around $200m just for the smart meter rollout.

Given that they are so costly to implement, you’d think utility companies would do everything possible to protect these projects from failure – not so, according to the latest smart grid research from Oracle.

The report from Oracle surveyed 150 North American C-level utility executives about their vision and priorities for smart grids over the next ten years. The findings are both interesting and disturbing.

It is interesting but not too surprising for example, that when asked to select their top two smart grid priorities over the next 10 years, they chose improving service reliability (45%) and implementing smart metering (41%) at the top of the list.

What is worrying though is that while 71% of utilities say securing customer buy-in is key to successful smart grid roll-outs, only 43% say they are educating their customers on the value proposition of smart grids. This is hugely problematic because, as I have written about previously, customer push-back can go a long way to de-railing smart grid projects.

And those who are educating their customers, how are they doing it?

Well, from the report, to communicate with their customers 76% of utilities use postal communications, and 72% use their own website. Only 20% use social media (and who knows how well those 20% are using their social media channels).

Tellingly, the report also mentions that only 38% of utility customers take advantage of energy conservation programs when they are made available. There are a number of reasons for this:

the savings from these programs often require work on the part of the customer for no immediately visible benefit
the savings are typically small (or put another way, energy is still too cheap) and
Because of the extremely poor job utility companies have done on communications to-date, their customers don’t trust them, or their motivations. There is no quick fix for this. It will take time and a significant improvement in how utility companies converse with their customers before they start to be trusted

I have written lots of times over the years about the need for utilities to improve their communications.

Utilities have a lot of work to do rolling out their smart grids – but if they don’t step up their customer communications, they risk their considerable smart grid investments.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Cloud Computing’s Green Potential – my talk at the Green Economy conference

June 2, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Cloud Computing’s Green Credentials on Prezi

The good people in Business and Leadership invited me to speak at their Green Economy 2011 conference on the topic of “Cloud Computing’s Green Credentials”

The event was in Dublin and was attended by around 200 people from all walks of business. Fellow speakers were Yvo de Boer from KPMG, Dick Budden from the Carbon Disclosure Project and Dr. Willfried Wienholt from Siemens who talked about Sustainable Cities.

In my own talk, I said that intuitively, you might expect Cloud Computing to be more energy efficient, and in fact some Cloud Computing providers are making claims that Cloud Computing is “potentially” Green and energy efficient. However, seeing as Cloud Computing providers are not publishing any data around Cloud Computing’s energy consumption, then it is impossible to say just how energy efficient Cloud Computing is.

An exercise I tried out was – I asked everyone in the room to put up their hands if their company had deployed apps to the cloud – a good few hands went up. Then I said, keep your hands up if you know what the energy utilisation of those apps was before they went up – you can see where I’m going with this. Unfortunately, no hands stayed up at this point. The final instruction I was going to put to them was to keep your hands up if you know the energy utilisation of your app now that it is deployed in the Cloud. If you don’t have that information (and no-one does because Cloud Providers are not supplying it) then you can’t say that Cloud Computing is energy efficient.

Sure, you can say that you deployed your CRM to the cloud for example, and you decommissioned the servers which were handling your CRM internally – so you are saving energy there. But those energy savings are simply outsourced to your Cloud CRM provider and you have no idea how much energy they are burning to provide you with your CRM solution.

As for whether or not Cloud Computing is Green, or not – this is a different question entirely. I gave the examples of FaceBook and Microsoft, for example. FaceBook have a massively energy efficient data center in Prineville Oregan. It’s PUE is 1.07 which is near the theoretical maximum (of 1.0) but it is powered by Pacific Corp 63% of whose electricity is generated by burning coal – very definitely not Green. Similarly for Microsoft’s Dublin data center – again a very respectably PUE of 1.2, but it is powered off the Irish electricity grid, 87.5% of which comes from fossil fuels – again, not Green.

On the other hand, Google have gone to extraordinary lengths, investing over $400m in renewable energy and signing 20 year power purchase agreements with renewable energy providers – so you have to suspect that their Cloud Computing platform is Green, as well as energy efficient (but again, until they start producing data to back such claims up, it remains a suspicion!).

I concluded on Flip Kromer‘s great quote:

EC2 means anyone with a $10 bill can rent a 10-machine cluster with 1TB of distributed storage for 8 hours

This is a superb example of Jevons Paradox whereby Cloud Computing leads to increased computer resource utilisation, not reduced – which is also, not very Green!

The organisers put some of my talk up on YouTube – this may help get some context around the slides above –

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