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Unfortunate EV choice won’t help SAP’s Greenhouse Gas reduction commitments

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SAP's 2010 Global Greenhouse Gas Footprint

The graph above is taken from the Greenhouse Gas Footprint page of SAP’s Sustainability Report and it shows SAP’s global GHG footprint for 2010. Of particular note in this graph is that globally SAP’s 2010 carbon footprint for corporate cars is 24%. This is up from 23% in 2009 and 18% in 2008. This is obviously a problem for SAP who have publicly committed to reducing their Greenhouse Gas Emissions 51% (from their 2007 baseline) by 2020.

In an effort to help address this SAP decided to embark on a small scale Electric Vehicle (EV) project called Future Fleet. Future Fleet uses a fleet of 30 EV’s charged solely from renewable sources supplied (along with the charging infrastructure) by project partner MVV Energie.

SAP Future Fleet electric vehicle

SAP Future Fleet electric vehicle

SAP are using this project to test employee attitudes to EV’s but also to test their own EV eMobility charging and fleet management software which is being developed, and tested in tandem with the project. The software allows employees to log in and book cars for specific journeys between SAP sites in Germany, or for a day or a week at a time. The software also intelligently prioritises charging of cars based on expected upcoming journey duration, current battery state and other factors.

All good and laudable stuff. However, one major issue I have with the project is that for purely political reasons SAP chose an electric car for the project which seemed to be designed with the distinct purpose of turning drivers off EV’s. This happened because the project was part-funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and they insisted that SAP use a German-made car for the project. I have no idea of the legality of this stipulation but at first glance it would seem contrary to EU legislation.

In any case, SAP went to several large German manufacturers who were unable to provide EV’s for the project. They then found a local co. who took Suzuki car bodies (if memory serves) and installed a purely electric drive-train. This resulted in electric cars which have a number of issues:

  1. the cars’ look ugly – giving lie to the idea that EV’s are small, ugly, box-like cars
  2. the cars’ are incredibly basic inside – no electric windows, no electric mirrors, and a manual transmission (no, really!) and
  3. the cars’ energy management interface is horrible – it is an unreadable single-line LED, as opposed to the Windows-type UI now normal on commercially available EV’s and hybrids

This wouldn’t be so bad except that with SAP’s carbon emissions from corporate cars on the rise, SAP needs to be making EV’s an attractive proposition for its employees. With these cars, SAP risks turning its employees off EVs, and sabotaging its own GHG reduction commitments.

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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SAP announces two new energy management products

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I attended the International SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim recently and was surprised when in his opening keynote, Klaus Heimann introduced two new SAP energy management products.

The first is a customer portal for Utility companies which helps utility companies roll out online self-service sites for their customers. This is being made available for utility companies both as a product, and as a service!

And the second is an Enterprise Energy Management application. This is a product to help large organisations better manage their energy – and as Klaus explains in the video above, by energy, SAP is referring to all forms of energy, not just electricity. And water too. SAP hopes to sell this to utility companies, so they can offer it as a service to their larger customers.

I was intrigued by the announcements so I asked Klaus if he’d go on camera to say a few words about them. See the resulting video above and the transcription below…

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at the SAP for Utilities event in Mannheim and with me I have Klaus Heimann. Klaus you brought up in your keynote two new announcements from SAP, two very interesting announcements, can you tell me a bit more about them?

Klaus Heimann: Yes, for sure. The first one was about customer online services. That’s easily explained. 750 million households are currently receiving bills from their utilities that are actually produced by our software. And many of these consumers now are in a deregulated market increasingly getting into the smart grid. And so the number of contacts they have to the utility is increasing and the utilities are getting very concerned about the cost of their call centers, they want to switch to internet. And our offering is here that we want to develop internet self services made-to-order for each utility as they want it, that refers back to the SAP for utilities instance that our customers are running.

Tom Raftery: So this means that the utility companies have an internet portal for their customers?

Klaus Heimann: Yes. The interesting thing is actually we can run that portal for them. And now that’s a longer story, but it’s really a not only an IT product, it’s also an IT service that SAP is thinking about to really help reducing the cost of our customers and make their consumer, customer service more attractive. The second announcement I made is about enterprise energy management. It’s not really a utilities application, it’s actually across industry application that helps big enterprises, number one to save energy, so save kilowatt hours, number two to better give —

Tom Raftery: You were explaining to me earlier this — when are saying energy, you mean, you actually mean energy, you are not talking just electricity.

Klaus Heimann: I mean energy in any kind, actually I also mean water. So primarily I mean energy like electricity and gas, it could also be oil, it could be petrol, it could be water. So we are looking to everything, but clearly the biggest savings are in the area of electricity and gas, that’s why we focus on it. And as I said it’s a cross-industry solution that helps our big enterprises to save energy and also to do a better procurement, a better planning for energy demand and we are presenting this here at this conference, because we do believe this could become a service that our utilities customers use themselves to help their big customers to improve their energy efficiency, because if the utilities don’t do it then somebody else does it, and I think it’s an attractive business especially for retail utilities.

Tom Raftery: Fantastic. Klaus that’s been great, thanks a million.

Klaus Heimann: Thank you.

Disclosure – SAP are a GreenMonk client. They paid for me to attend, produce videos from and speak at the International SAP for Utilities event.

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Top 10 Data Center blogs

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Data center air and water flows

Out of curiosity, I decided to see if I could make a list of the top 10 data center focussed blogs. I did a bit of searching around, found around thirty blogs related to data centers (who knew they were so popular!). I went through the thirty blogs and eliminated them based on arbitrary things I made up on the spot like post frequency, off-topic posts, etc. until I came up with a list I felt was the best. Then I counted them and lo! I had exactly 10 – phew, no need to eliminate any of the good ones!

So without further ado – and in no particular order, I present you with my Top 10 Data Center blogs:

What great data center blogs have I missed?

The chances are there are superb data center blogs out there which my extensive 15 seconds of research on the topic failed to uncover. If you know of any, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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FaceBook open sources building an energy efficient data center

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FaceBook's new custom-built Prineville Data Centre

Back in 2006 I was the co-founder of a Data Centre in Cork called Cork Internet eXchange. We decided, when building it out, that we would design and build it as a hyper energy-efficient data centre. At the time, I was also heavily involved in social media, so I had the crazy idea, well, if we are building out this data centre to be extremely energy-efficient, why not open source it? So we did.

We used blogs, flickr and video to show everything from the arrival of the builders on-site to dig out the foundations, right through to the installation of customer kit and beyond. This was a first. As far as I know, no-one had done this before and to be honest, as far as I know, no-one since has replicated it. Until today.

Today, Facebook is lifting the lid on its new custom-built data centre in Prineville, Oregon.

Not only are they announcing the bringing online of their new data centre, but they are open sourcing its design, specifications and even telling people who their suppliers were, so anyone (with enough capital) can approach the same suppliers and replicate the data centre.

Facebook are calling this the OpenCompute project and they have released a fact sheet [PDF] with details on their new data center and server design.

I received a pre-briefing from Facebook yesterday where they explained the innovations which went into making their data centre so efficient and boy, have they gone to town on it.

Data centre infrastructure
On the data centre infrastructure side of things, building the facility in Prineville, Oregon (a high desert area of Oregon, 3,200 ft above sea level with mild temperatures) will mean they will be able to take advantage of a lot of free cooling. Where they can’t use free cooling, they will utilise evaporative cooling, to cool the air circulating in the data centre room. This means they won’t have any chillers on-site, which will be a significant saving in capital costs, in maintenance and in energy consumption. And in the winter, they plan to take the return warm air from the servers and use it to heat their offices!

By moving from centralised UPS plants to 48V localised UPS’s serving 6 racks (around 180 Facebook servers), Facebook were able to re-design the electricity supply system, doing away with some of the conversion processes and creating a unique 480V distribution system which provides 277V directly to each server, resulting in more efficient power usage. This system reduces power losses going in the utility to server chain, from an industry average 11-17% down to Prineville’s 2%.

Finally, Facebook have significantly increased the operating temperature of the data center to 80.6F (27C) – which is the upper limit of the ASHRAE standards. They also confided that in their next data centre, currently being constructed in North Carolina, they expect to run it at 85F – this will save enormously on the costs of cooling. And they claim that the reduction in the number of parts in the data center means they go from 99.999% uptime, to 99.9999% uptime.

New Server design
Facebook also designed custom servers for their data centres. The servers contain no paint, logos, stickers bezels or front panel. They are designed to be bare bones (using 22% fewer materials than a typical 1U server) and for ease of serviceability (snap-together parts instead of screws).

The servers are 1.5U tall to allow for larger heat sinks and larger (slower turning and consequently more efficient) 60mm fans. These fans only take 2-4% of the energy of the server, compared to 10-20% for typical servers. The heat sinks are all spread at the back of the mother board so none of them will be receiving pre-heated air from another heat sink, reducing the work required of the fans.

The server power supply accepts both 277V AC power from the electrical distribution system and 44V DC from the UPS in the event of a utility power failure. These power supplies have a peak efficiency of 94.5% (compared to a more typical 90% for standard PSU’s) and they connect directly to the motherboard, simplifying the design and reducing airflow impedance.

Open Compute
Facebook relied heavily on open source in creating their site. Now, they say, they want to make sure the next generation of innovators don’t have to go through the same pain as Facebook in building out efficient data centre infrastructure. Consequently, Facebook is releasing all of the specification documentation which it gave to its suppliers for this project.

Some of the schematics and board layouts for the servers belong to the suppliers so they are not currently being published, though Facebook did say they are working with their suppliers to see if they will release them (or portions of them) but they haven’t reached agreement with the suppliers on this just yet.

Asked directly about their motivations for launching Open Compute Facebook’s Jay Park came up with this classic reply

… it would almost seem silly to do all this work and just keep it closed

Asking Facebook to unfriend coal
Greenpeace started a campaign to pressure Facebook into using more renewable energy resources due to the fact that Pacific Power, the energy supplier Facebook will be using for its Prineville data center produces almost 60% of its electricity from burning coal.

Greenpeace being Greenpeace, created a very viral campaign, using the Facebook site itself, and the usual cadre of humurous videos etc., to apply pressure on Facebook to thinking of sourcing its electricity from more renewable sources.

When we asked Facebook about this in our briefing, they did say that their data centre efforts are built around many more considerations than just the source of energy that comes into the data centre. They then went on to maintain that they are impressed by Pacific Power’s commitment to moving towards renewable sources of energy (they are targeting having 2,000MW of power from renewables by 2013). And they concluded by contending that the efficiencies they have achieved in Prineville more than offsets the use of coal which powers the site.

Conclusion
Facebook tell us this new custom data centre at Prineville has a PUE of 1.07, which is very impressive.

They have gone all out on innovating their data centre and the servers powering their hugely popular site. More than that though, they are launching the Open Compute Project giving away all the specs and vendor lists required to reproduce an equally efficient site. That is massively laudable.

It is unfortunate that their local utility has such a high gen-mix of coal in its supply to besmirch an otherwise great energy and sustainability win for Facebook. The good thing though is that as the utility adds to its portfolio of renewables, Facebook’s site will only get greener.

For more on this check out the discussions on Techmeme

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Photo credit FaceBook’s Chuck Goolsbee

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Engaging people in the energy conversation

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Green Numbers

I went along to the MashupEvent Energy 2.0 – Energy goes Digital get together in London last Thursday.

It was a good event with some interesting speakers, including Usman Haque of pachube, Ajit Jaokar from FutureText and Paul Tanner (self-confessed energy nut!).

The talks were good – for me, one of the more interesting learnings was how pachube is being used to crowd-source rediation readings from hacked Geiger counters in Japan! Seriously awesome stuff, and a real case of people using the pachube platform for purposes never dreamed of when it was first created, I suspect.

When the floor was opened for questions and discussion, some interesting topics were raised. When the question was asked from the podium, one brave member of the audience confessed to being from a utility (British Gas) and she went on to raise an interesting point – she said it was hard to motivate people to to make any changes. British Gas, she said, have offered people free insulation, which would potentially save them hundreds of pounds, and they don’t take up the offer.

This is not the first time I have heard these kinds of stories. Why is that?

Toyota Prius dashboard driving info

Toyota Prius dashboard driving info

There are a few reasons for this, as far as I can see:

  1. When you are getting electricity bills like the one above, you have no idea what your actual consumption is like day-to day, minute-to-minute. I bought a Toyota Prius a number of years ago and it totally changed the way I drive because of how well the consumption information is fed back to me on the dashboard – the same is not true for the Honda Insight, as I discovered when Honda lent me one to trial, so not alone is it important to give people information on their consumption, it is also vital to present it in an easily digestible way.
  2. People don’t trust their utility companies – traditionally utility companies only communicate with their customers (who they often refer to as ratepayers!) when they are sending a bill or when a bill is overdue. This form of communication is not particularly conducive to establishing a good relationship. The basis for any good relationship and thereby trust is communication. Utility companies need to radically step up their customer communications, but not in a way that is spammy. They need to engage with their customers on all channels (if my preferred method of communication is Twitter, I want them to engage with me there, if my Dad’s preference is phone – talking to a person, not an IVR, then that’s where they need to talk to him). This is going to be a hard lesson for many utilities to learn but they fail to learn it at their own peril and
  3. Energy is too cheap! Possibly fixing 1 and 2 will persuade people to become more energy efficient, but I suspect, the real driver for energy efficiency will only come along when energy becomes more expensive. Only when the cost of energy really starts too impact on people’s lives, will they start to pay attention. Luckily, that’s the direction energy prices have been going for some time now!

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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HP publishes paper on enabling next-generation cities

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City life

Ha!

No sooner do I criticise HP for being shy about their work on Sustainability than I start to receive all these great links to stuff HP is doing in this space – result!

Overnight I received news that HP has opened a new research facility to advance sustainable data center technologies (more on which in a subsequent post) and I was sent a link to a really interesting paper HP published called Sustainable IT Ecosystems: Enabling Next-Generation Cities [PDF].

Having talked to the IBM people who are bringing their Smarter Cities product offering to market later this year, and having also talked to Living PlanIT‘s CEO Steve Lewis a bunch of times, I can see that the whole making cities more efficient market is set to explode – and at city scale, it will be a big market!

The HP paper describes an approach for building next-generation cities – which, while we already have plenty of cities, with the growing trend towards urbanisation, more and more will need to be built. Currently about 3.3 billion people (around half the world’s population) live in cities. The UN estimates this will increase to nearly 5 billion (by then 60% of the world’s population) by 2030.

The sustainable IT ecosystem introduced in this paper is based on five principles which are fleshed out in considerable detail in the paper:

  1. Ecosystem-scale life-cycle design;
  2. Scalable and configurable infrastructure building blocks;
  3. Pervasive sensing;
  4. Data analytics and visualization; and
  5. Autonomous control

The paper uses two case studies – one an urban water distribution for a city of 1.5 million people spread over 1500km2 and the other is for the efficient generation and distribution of power for an Arizona city with a population of 48,000 with an average electrical demand of 12MW. While these case studies themselves are quite interesting, they would have been far moreso if they were actual cities, as opposed to notional ones.

The paper reaches the following conclusion:

The ability to integrate IT into physical infrastructures provides a unique opportunity to improve the design and management of these infrastructures. This paper provides a framework for creating sustainable IT ecosystems: infrastructures wherein information technology is leveraged to achieve sustainability through need-based management of supply-side and demand-side resources. Future work will seek to apply and demonstrate the proposed framework to a diverse array of urban infrastructures

This kind of research is incredibly important if we are to try to live within our means on this planet – something at which we fundamentally failed to do to-date.

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Photo credit Medhi

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Friday Green Numbers round-up for March 25th 2011

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Green Numbers

And here is a round-up of this week’s Green numbers…

  1. Infographic of the Day: Do Americans Pay Too Little for Gas?

    Even with prices at the pump hovering around $3.50, that’s a fraction of the prices in other rich countries

    Every year without fail, as the days get longer and warmer, gas prices begin to shoot up. Throw in intense turmoil in the Middle East, and the annual price skyrocket and accompanying fretting began even earlier this year. But while gas prices have risen to more than $3 a gallon in the United States, remember that gas here is still cheaper than many places–especially developed nations–around the world.

    This infographic from Flowing Data shows where–according to gas price tables on Wikipedia–people are paying more… read on

  2. China battery plant poisons more than 100 villagers

    Lead emissions from a battery plant in eastern China have poisoned more than 100 villagers, including 35 children, state news agency Xinhua reported on Friday, the latest in a string of heavy metal pollution cases in the country.

    A total of 139 villagers in a village near Taizhou city in coastal Zhejiang province have been found to have elevated lead levels in their blood, Xinhua cited the provincial health department as saying in a statement.

    Three of the adults had lead in their blood more than… read on

  3. Philips AmbientLED 12.5 Watts LED Lightbulb (Product Review)

    The Philips AmbientLED 12.5-watt A19 LED lightbulb (quite a name!) is probably the favorite LED bulb that I’ve tried so far. It beats the competition when it comes to light output (800 lumens vs. 450-590 lumens for the other LEDs that I’ve tried), the design of the bulb is very innovative, and light quality is excellent.

    Read on for my full review and more technical specs on the Philips AmbientLED…. read on

  4. Obama administration announces massive coal mining expansion

    Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced yesterday an enormous expansion in coal mining that threatens to increase U.S. climate pollution by an amount equivalent to more than half of what the United States currently emits in a year. A statement from Wild Earth Guardians, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife put the announcement in perspective:

    When burned, the coal threatens to release more than 3.9 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, equal to the annual emissions from 300 coal-fired power plants, further cementing the United States as a leading contributor to…. read on

  5. The triumph of coal marketing

    Do you have an opinion about nuclear power? About the relative safety of one form of power over another? How did you come to this opinion?

    For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced… read on

  6. King Crabs Invade Antarctica for First Time in 40 Million Years

    King crabs haven’t historically caroused in Antarctic waters — it’s simply been too cold for the famed crustaceans. But warming waters have allowed crusading crabs to march further south than they have in millions of years. Which is bad news for the diverse sea life currently thriving in the underwater habitats around the Antarctic peninsula: Seeing as how they’ve been living in a crab-less environment for 40 million years, scientists now fear that Antarctic animals like brittle sea stars, mussels, and sponges will be sitting ducks for the marauding king crabs… read on

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Photo credit house of bamboo

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HP’s shrinking wallflower attitude may not be Sustainable!

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HP CEO L?o Apotheker addressing the HP Summit

So I wrote a post the other day entitled Have HP?s senior executives lost interest in Sustainability? after attending a HP event in San Francisco. It was a little unfair because I concentrated on the lack of mentions of Sustainability by senior management on the first day of the event while leaving out the fact that I had interesting discussions with people involved in sustainability initiatives within HP the following day.

One of those I talked to at the event, Deb Lyons, was concerned enough by my piece that she went to the trouble of emailing me some of HP’s more impressive Green initiatives:

  1. HP published a fascinating paper [PDF] to quantify the carbon savings associated with switching from analog to digital printing and came up with a savings of somewhere between 114-251 MMtCO2 eq per annum (MMt CO2 is million metric tonnes of CO2) – similar to the savings which would be achieved by a broad implementation of lighting automation or extensive implementation of telecommuting!
  2. When printing is absolutely necessary, HP have comprehensive paper conservation and sourcing policies which include “a goal that 40 percent or more of the HP branded paper sold will be Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified or have more than 30 percent post-consumer waste content by the end of 2011”, an Eco Printing Assessment for customers and a reduction of paper shipped “in the box”
  3. While HP has yet to release its 2010 CSR report, its 2009 one is online and, in fairness, it is one of the better CSR reports produced by a tech co. (though it has a long way to go to catch-up to SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report, which was released this morning!).
  4. I referenced the fact in my previous post that HP is becoming a devices company (between desktops, laptops, and more recently tablets and smartphones) so it is heartening to see HP have comprehensive policies around sourcing conflict minerals in Africa
  5. and finally, HP announced the other day that it had exceeded its target of reducing the energy footprint of its products by 40% by the end of 2011 and now HP products are 50% more energy efficient than they were five years ago. The release from HP went on to assert that “if all makes and models of printers, notebook and desktop PCs, displays and servers shipped in 2005 were recycled and replaced with new HP energy-efficient models, customers could save approximately $10.4 billion in energy costs, and avoid more than 40 million metric tons of CO2 emissions within a year” – a pretty impressive numbers!

Another release Deb pointed out to me was an announcement that HP are helping Shell extract oil and gas more efficiently from the ground – personally I believe that any technology which helps increase the amount of fossil fuels we burn should be criminalised, not praised, but that’s just me!

So, leaving aside the oil and gas announcement, HP’s green credentials do appear to be completely genuine, laudable even.

Kudos to HP for these and their other Green initiatives – however, I still believe it was a mistake for their executives not to have them as a theme running through their talks. I understand the HP thinking that “Sustainability is part of our DNA, so much so that we take it for granted that it is built-in to everything we do” – I’m paraphrasing liberally. But, the issue is that if your executives are not talking about sustainability, your stakeholders may not be as convinced about your commitment to sustainability. If Sustainability was left out of the talks because there was a lot of content to be worked in which had to be prioritised, just how far down the list of HP’s priorities does Sustainability lie? From talking to HP, I know it is not far down at all, but listening to their executives, you would not get that impression.

HP has a messaging problem around Sustainability. It isn’t that they don’t do Sustainability, it is just that they seem to be shy about talking about it. With the rise and rise of Ethical Consumerism, this shrinking wallflower attitude may not be Sustainable!

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Smart Grids for Europe white paper presented by SAP to EU Energy Commissioner

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12036 NM Smart Grids for Europe En

SAP recently presented a white paper entitled Smart Grids for Europe – Benefits, Challenges and Best Practices to EU commissioner G?nter Oettinger.

The paper makes the case that there are few (i.e. no) ICT transformations that are as promising as Smart Grids in meeting Europe’s urgent energy challenges. The paper also makes a compelling case for Europe to leverage its continental scale and develop a single market Smart Grid. In such a market, on cloudy days, excess electricity generated from wind and wave energy in Ireland and Spain, could be sold into the German market if solar farms, for example were under-producing! Wind is a notoriously variable supplier, but given a large enough grid, it becomes quite stable (the wind is always blowing somewhere!).

The paper identifies the challenges facing the European energy sector currently –

  • Growing demand and rising prices
  • Ageing infrastructure – the electric utility infrastructure in most of Europe is between 60 and 80 years old
  • Climate change and sustainability – 20% reduction in GHG by 2020
  • Energy efficiency – the EU has a 20% energy efficiency target
  • Energy market liberalisation – both generators and consumers now have the right to transact business across internal EU borders
  • Security of supply – reduction of imports and esp fossil fuels

The paper went on to outline the advantages to Europe of smart grids – benefits for both the consumer (residential as well as industrial) and for the retailers and generators. Further benefits come from helping Europe meet its GHG reduction targets by facilitating greater penetration of renewables onto the grid and from making Europe more competitive in world Smart Grid markets.

The current state of Smart Grid deployments in Europe is, however, at best, early stage. The existing efforts are largely national with little coordination among them.

The white paper recommends developing an EU legislative Framework for Smart Grids – complete with proposed milestones. It further recommends incentives for investments in Smart Grids, common European standards for Smart Grids, ensuring privacy, security and trust in Smart Grids and consumer awareness campaigns, amongst other suggestions.

This paper is well worth a read, whether you are EU-based or not, if you have any interest in our future energy roadmap.

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IBM Partner companies discuss Smarter Buildings and collaboration

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I had a chat with some of IBM’s partners – Eaton‘s Dave Davidson and Tridium‘s Marc Petock, at IBM Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings, and Smarter Cities today and the requirement for collaboration to achieve their possibilities. Unfortunately I messed up the setup of the camera cutting off my head from most of the chat – but on the other hand, that’s probably a good thing!

And here’s the transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at IBM’s Pulse 2011 Conference and with me I have two IBM partners; Marc Petock from Tridium and Dave Davidson from Eaton Corporation.

Now, guys, we have been talking a lot at this event about smarter buildings. Why are you guys involved in smarter buildings? Another kind of theme that has come up at the event has been around collaboration. Why is that important? Dave, I will ask you first.

Dave Davidson: Absolutely! Thanks for inviting me. Smarter building design, deployment, development, and implementation, requires a collaborative effort among many of the different disciplines to actually make a building perform as necessary. So you have the design engineering. You have the controls equipment. You have the monitoring equipment. You have the commissioning of the building and specification equipment and just implementing the whole facility. That needs to be a collaborative effort among many different companies to make this occur.

It’s too big of an effort for any one company to do it all alone. So that’s why we have a collaborative effort.

Tom Raftery: What part of that are Eaton involved in?

Dave Davidson: Eaton’s collaborative effort is around the energy engineering and design and development of the high performance green building and also providing the equipment to power the building.

Tom Raftery: And Marc, Tridium, what are Tridium involved in?

Marc Petock: Tridium is involved in making the technology that links all the different systems and the disparate pieces of equipment in a building to connect and talk to one another. So that they can collaborate with each other and all the different systems within that building, from HVAC, to lighting, to digital signage, to irrigation, to truly make all the systems run as one functional family.

Tom Raftery: So somebody managing the facility can see information from all these systems in one pane?

Marc Petock: In one pane, absolutely, anytime, anywhere, from a PDA, to a centralized command and control center, to individual sites whenever they want to. So they can actually go in and look at the HVAC system and see how the security system is affecting the HVAC system based on occupancy for example.

Tom Raftery: Okay. How far are we from being able to control devices using these kind of panes from reacting to alerts from a screen?

Marc Petock: We are not far at all. You can do it today. We are here today to be able to do that. With cooperation amongst — as my colleague Dave said here, it is a collaborative effort. People like Eaton, Tridium, Johnson, Honeywell, IBM, we are all making sure that this happens and that technology and those systems exist today.

Tom Raftery: And Dave, I mean, how big is this? What kind of market are we talking about? Is this like one or two buildings that might need it, or is it multiple orders of magnitude of that, or what kind of scale are we talking about for this?

Dave Davidson: I think when you ask about how big it is, I think what we have to consider is, it is the built environment. So existing buildings today can absolutely be improved if you have a plan of attack. So you have to create the energy plan.

So I would say that almost all of the built environment has the opportunity to become a smarter building, reduce energy consumption, reduce greenhouse gases, increase operating profit, and increase the comfortability of actually working in that building. So the size of the marketplace is all existing buildings.

Tom Raftery: That’s a big market.

Dave Davidson: Very big.

Tom Raftery: Okay, gentlemen, thanks a million for coming on the show!

Marc & Dave: Thank you for having us!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

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