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IBM’s Dave Bartlett on his vision for Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities

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I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities. I posted the first part of it yesterday – in today’s post, we discuss the future for Smarter Buildings and cities

Here’s a 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 IBM’s Dave Bartlett.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We talked earlier about the state-of-the-now with smart buildings and that kind of stuff, but where is all this going? Sure, right now we can see the energy information coming from buildings. What are we going to be doing with this kind of stuff in five, ten years time? Where is it all going?

Dave Bartlett: Well, that’s where it gets really exciting. I mean, we have talked about how there is opportunity today to save significant energy, but if you think about the bigger play, the smarter planet play, the smarter city play, buildings is a key building block for those plays.

I mean, every building has meters. So you can take advantage of the Smart Grid Initiatives as they become realized, not only to take advantage of different time of day based pricing, but also help the city cope with or prevent brownout conditions and make sure energy is available to the core infrastructure.

Tom Raftery: So you would have buildings participating in demand response programs automatically and shifting load and that kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: Exactly! I mean, if you are running a city, the key thing, you want to keep the traffic system up, you want to keep the hospitals up. Maybe you don’t care about running the pool pumps in the hotel pools as an impending brownout occurs, so that you can start to make tradeoffs like that.

So it turns out smarter buildings is a great building block to create the smarter city and do that with —

Another example is emergency response. Let’s say there is a building that’s on fire. If it’s connected to a smarter transportation system, the transportation can be rerouted away from that block so that the engines actually can get to the building and not be prevented from traffic from getting there as soon as they could be.

You could also automatically power off the buildings. You could possibly decrease water pressures in the surrounding areas to maximize water pressure in that area.

So it’s a combination of the smarter water system, the smarter transportation system, the smart grid system, working with a smart building system, to really increase the efficiency of your emergency response team in the city.

Tom Raftery: Okay. You mentioned another example earlier which fascinated me. It was around just taking in weather information.

Dave Bartlett: Right. So a lot of times we operate our buildings without any thought to what the weather is doing, but if a cold front is coming within the next hour or two hours, you could make decisions as to whether or not to turn the air conditioning on or turn it off in anticipation of that.

We are also implementing a lot more free air cooling, kind of getting back to the days when we used to open windows right? A big new idea [laughs]. So unbolt some of those windows.

So being able to forecast the weather, being aware of what’s happening in terms of humidity and temperature and turn off the air conditioning and start leveraging free air cooling, not just for office environments, but for manufacturing uses, for the big chilling towers, a huge opportunity to save energy.

You don’t want to be toggling these systems back and forth. If you are really tied in a close way to weather forecasting, even on an hourly basis, you can make really good decisions when to toggle between free air and the system. So just a much smarter way to run our buildings, our manufacturing plants, our offices.

Tom Raftery: So it seems like right now the state of the now in smarter buildings that we are looking inside and the state of the future is the buildings themselves will be looking outside.

Dave Bartlett: Looking outside, because the buildings will then become — each of them will become a participant in creating or building a smarter building.

I like to say, how do you get a smarter city, one smarter building at a time. So they can become the building blocks; building blocks for — actually smarter buildings can become new eco-cubes within the city. The eco-cubes can then populate to make the subsections of a city, and then the city as a whole. So it’s a little bit easier way to approach it.

Buildings are a natural connection point for the electric grid, for water, as transportation hubs, security, and video feeds. So it’s just a natural building block. So I see, we can get going today and then have all those connection points in place and all of a sudden realize a smarter city very quickly.

Tom Raftery: Awesome! Dave, thanks a million! Thanks for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

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

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Have HP’s senior executives lost interest in Sustainability?

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Bottled water at the HP Summit

I attended a HP analyst summit last week in San Francisco and I have been putting off writing down my impressions of the event because I was, frankly, very disappointed.

Writing recently about HP’s announcement of their new Energy and Sustainability Solution, I noted that HP’s new CEO L?o Apotheker’s legacy from his time at SAP, is SAP?s deep commitment to sustainability. And I went on to speculate that it looks like he is bringing his sustainability stamp to HP as well. Sadly, I set myself up for a bit of a fall!

Jeff Katzenberg speaking at the HP Summit

Jeff Katzenberg - HP Summit

The first day of the two day event was a series of talks from HP execs, starting, after the introduction, with L?o’s Keynote. After that there was a series of exec talks on Cloud, Connectivity, Digitization and Security followed by guest speaker Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks over lunch. During this he screened the trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2, which looked great!

In the afternoon there were talks on HP Services, Go To Market and HP Labs followed by a brief break and then back for a Q&A with L?o and the rest of the execs.

I waited the entire day and the first mention of the word Sustainability was by Prith Banarjee, director of HP Labs in the final session where he made a brief reference to it. The funny thing was that that was when Prith became most passionate and enthusiastic!

Earlier in the day, in the talk on digitization, Vyomesh Joshi (aka VJ) did mention that 200bn pages are going digital annually but he then ruined it by talking about one HP printing station which is printing 80m pages a month (that’s a lot of dead trees!) but worse was when he went on to gleefully talk about how many “gallons of ink” that requires. And, in fairness to her, Ann Livermore did mention energy efficiency when discussing servers and data centers but it was a very brief mention, when so much more could have been said. However, the fact that during a full day of senior executive presentations, from one of the largest technology companies in the world, only one exec made any passing reference to sustainability was, to me a huge let down.

HP do have some good sustainability stories to tell – for instance, the fact that over the last five years HP managed to reduce the energy its products need to operate by 50%. Also, there is the previously mentioned HP Energy and Sustainability Management solution and then there is HP’s recycling efforts when it comes to its ink jet cartridges (HP recently announced that it has made more than 1 billion ink cartridges from recycled plastic) – the fact that ink cartridges are themselves totally unsustainable, is a whole other discussion.

HP TouchPad

HP TouchPad

HP are in a funny position. They are ostensibly a printing company and now with the acquisition of Palm, they are set to become a devices company too (Smartphones and Tablets using Web OS). Neither of these businesses is particularly environmentally friendly and yet HP’s founders spoke of [PDF] HP’s commitment to the environment as far back as 1957 in HP’s first statement of corporate objectives, The HP Way.

I’m not sure why HP executives shied away from talking about sustainability at the HP Summit but for anyone attending the event, the lack of any mention of Sustainability was a surprise. Does it demonstrate a lack of commitment from HP executives to Sustainability, or does it signal that HP are abandoning their previous role as good corporate citizens? I don’t think either of those is the reason why but until I start to hear HP’s senior management talking about sustainability, I will have my doubts as to how seriously they now view it.

By the way, the photo at the top of this article was the table of bottled water at the Environment, Energy and Sustainability session on day two of the Summit!

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Photo credits Tom Raftery

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IBM’s Dave Bartlett talking today’s Smarter Buildings

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I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities.

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. I am here with Dave Bartlett. We are at IBM’s Pulse 2011 event.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We are talking about smarter buildings at the event quite a lot. It seems to be one of the focuses that IBM is looking at very strongly.

Is it all science fiction or is this kind of stuff that we can do today, or are we talking a year or two years? What’s the kind of time scale that we are looking at for this kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: No, it’s today, a very present possibility. When we stepped back and looked at what’s happened in the last decade, there has just been a rapid acceleration and proliferation of smart sensors. Every appliance going into buildings now has smart technology into it. So they are all emitting all these digital feeds. So that’s where the Building Whisperer comes in. There is all this data. If someone just really listens to it end-to-end, it’s amazing the opportunity we have today just to integrate into those systems and save energy.

Tom Raftery: Sure. But these buildings are emitting data, but I mean, how long is it going to take to actually get something out there that will be able to integrate all these feeds and present it to somebody?

Dave Bartlett: Okay. So when you look at it, they are emitting a lot of data from different equipment types. So there is different protocols to deal with, different networks to deal with. It’s a lot of data. That’s a second thing.

Third, it really does need an IT focus in addition to the building management skills, and that’s what IBM does so well. I was able to find technology that exists today off the shelf in IBM to really do the monitoring connection to the equipment, to do the data warehousing, to do the analytics, to build the dashboard, that technology all exists today. So it’s just a matter of connecting it and connecting it turns out is not a big deal.

Tom Raftery: So we can do it today. You are going to market with products for building managers to run buildings and global facilities?

Dave Bartlett: Absolutely! In fact, when I presented it to our Chairman, he said, well, this is great, take it market, but I want to start within IBM, which I thought was some great leadership.

So just within the past year we have implemented it, not only in our headquarters building, but in one of our biggest energy using sites, and it has already exceeded the base case in terms of savings and given 200% return on the investment.

Tom Raftery: Wow! I mean, what’s the kind of global marketplace for this kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: I mean, there are lots of different estimates, but there has been a study done by a Climate Group called SMART 2020 that said, if we do exactly what we are doing, apply existing communication and IT technology to the space, that we could save hundreds of billions of dollars in energy between now and the year 2020.

Tom Raftery: Okay. Dave, that’s great! Thanks a million for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

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

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I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home

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HP's Energy and Sustainability Management

Above is a screenshot of one of the slides from HP’s webinar announcing their new Energy and Sustainability Management solution.

What is most interesting about it for me is that, front and center there is a focus on Facilities and Buildings. We have already seen that IBM has identified Smarter Buildings as one of the major planks of its Smarter Planet program, now with HP chasing this sector as well, we are likely to see some major improvements in global building stock’s energy efficiency in the coming years.

It is nice to see HP re-discovering its interest in sustainability especially, since former CEO Mark Hurd eviscerated any programs related to sustainability in HP during his tenure. As my colleague James noted, the real legacy L?o Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, left SAP (where he was formerly CEO) is SAP’s deep commitment to sustainability. It looks like he is bringing his sustainability stamp to HP as well, but I digress.

As I noted in the post about IBM:

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions ? and then there is the market size to consider ? every building on the planet potentially.

Though there is one qualification to that – I suspect in the cases of both HP and IBM, when they refer to Smarter Buildings, they are primarily referring to commercial real estate, not residential buildings. This is understandable, given that the commercial market is a far easier one to address – a single contract can be for hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate, whereas the residential sector, by definition, is far more fragmented. However, according to the IPCC, the residential sector is responsible for 1,500MtC of carbon emissions compared to 1,000MtC for commercial buildings.

How do we square this circle?

Well, one player addressing precisely this market is Living PlanIT. In their model city in Portugal, they are creating residential buildings which are net energy positive! They are also creating a platform for the development of sustainable urban technologies and licensing them so they can be used globally. I spoke recently to Living PlanIT’s CEO recently about their plans and will be writing that up in a separate post.

However, the takeaway is that, while the commercial market is a hugely important one to address, it really is the low hanging fruit in terms of the global built environment’s energy footprint. We need to be actively chasing the residential space, at least as vigorously as the commercial one.

I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home. When we all have one of those, then we’ll have made some real progress.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Friday Green Numbers round-up for March 11th 2011

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Green Numbers

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

  1. Progress Energy investing approximately $520 million dollars in smart grid technologies

    IBM today announced that it has been selected by Progress Energy as the lead systems integrator for the utility’s smart grid program. Together the companies will transform Progress Energy’s networks by improving power efficiency, increasing power quality and reliability, and enhancing capabilities for renewable energy, energy storage systems and plug-in electric vehicles.

    Progress Energy is investing approximately $520 million dollars in smart grid technologies through its two utilities that serve approximately 3.1 million customers in the Carolinas and Florida. The total investment includes $200 million from a read on …

  2. FIRST Green ‘e-Watt Saver’ 7W LED Lightbulb (Product Review)

    For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is a non-profit founded by inventor Dean Kamen over 20 years ago. It aims to inspire young people to learn about science, technology, engineering and math through challenging robotics competitions. To raise funds, they sell FIRST branded energy-saving LED lightbulbs (better than chocolate!). I had the chance to get my hands on one, so here’s my review read on …

  3. Can a Whole City Go Zero Waste?

    We’ve already seen how pay-as-you-throw trash metering can cut landfill waste in half, and we’ve witnessed whole cities make composting mandatory. So there’s little doubt that much, much more can be done by most cities to cut waste, and keep precious resources out of landfill. That’s why an announcement from my hometown that it will completely eliminate waste to landfill within three years is particularly exciting. But is it enough? read on …

  4. Carbon emissions from every public building in England and Wales

    The carbon emissions of every public building in England and Wales have been released, thanks to an FoI request by the Centre for Sustainable Energy. See what the data says about the read on …

  5. When Earth’s Human Population Was 18,500!

    Scientists have calculated that for a period lasting one million years and beginning 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably between 18,500 to 26,000 individuals capable of breeding (and no more than 26,000). This made them an endangered species with a smaller population than today?s species such as gorillas which number 25,000 breeding individuals and chimpanzees (21,000).

    Researchers have proposed a number of explanations , such as read on …

  6. $44m Energy Efficiency savings whets AT&T’s appetite for more

    When John Schinter joined AT&T in 2009 as the company’s first energy director, he was charged with revamping the way AT&T manages energy consumption and developing programs to reduce use.
    In 2010, the telecommunications giant implemented a whopping 4,200 projects aimed at improving energy efficiency, AT&T announced today. The effort has generated $44 million in annualized energy savings, setting the stage for an even more aggressive read on …

  7. February Arctic Sea Ice Ties For Record Low As Global Snow Cover Remains High

    New data coming out of the National Snow and Ice Data Center reveals two things which may at first seem contradictory at first but aren’t: The extent of Arctic sea ice in February tied for a record low, while at the same time snow cover for January and February in the Northern Hemisphere remained extensive, ranking in the top six extents on record.

    Resolving the apparent but erroneous contradiction first, in the NSIDC’s words:
    Both linked to a strong negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation. A strongly negative AO favors outbreaks of read on …

  8. ABB wins $50 million solar order in Italy

    ABB has won a $50 million order from Phenix Renewables to deliver a 24 megawatt (MW) photovoltaic (PV) solar power plant in Lazio, central Italy.

    Once connected to the grid, the Phenix solar plant will supply up to 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity a year, avoiding the generation of over 25,000 tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the annual emission of over 10,000 European cars.

    ABB will be responsible for the read on …

  9. IBM Names First 24 Recipients Of Smarter Cities Challenge Grants

    IBM today selected 24 cities worldwide to receive IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants. The grants provide the cities with access to IBM’s top experts to analyze and recommend ways they can become even better place in which to live, work and play.

    The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program in which IBM is awarding a total of $50 million worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide over the next three years. Teams of specially selected IBM experts will provide city leaders with read on …

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Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

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Ad Infinitum’s Insite helping companies save energy

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Servers

Continuing my series of chats with companies in the data center energy management space, I spoke recently to Philip Petersen, CEO of UK-based ad infinitum.

Their product, called InSite, like that of most of the others in this space I have spoken to, is a server based product, front-ended by a browser.

InSite pulls the data directly from devices (like power strips, distribution board meters, temperature and humidity sensors) and stores them in a PostgreSQL database. Having an SQL database makes it that much easier to integrate with other systems for pulling in data, and also for sharing information. This is handy when InSite is connected to a Building Management System (BMS), it allows organisations to see what proportion of a building’s power is going to the keep the Data Center running, for example. And because InSite can poll servers directly, it can be used to calculate the cost of running server-based applications (such as Exchange, Notes, SQL Server, SAP, etc.).

I asked Philip about automation and he said that while InSite has an inbuilt Automation Engine, it hasn’t been deployed because “no client that we have spoken to has wanted to do that yet”. Demand for automation will come, he said but right now companies are looking for more basic stuff – they often just want to see what’s actually going on, so that they can decide on the best way to respond.

InSIte’s target customers are your typical medium too large organisations (ones likely to have significant IT infrastructures) as well as co-lo operators. Unlike some of the other companies in this space though, Ad infinitum were able to share some significant customer wins – Tiscali’s UK Business Services, Equinix and Cisco’s UK Engineering labs.

In fact, Cisco have published a Case Study on the Cisco.com website referencing this solution [PDF] and how Cisco were able to achieve a 30% reduction in IT equipment power consumption and a 50% drop in their cooling costs!

It’s hard to argue with a significant customer win like that!

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Photo credit JohnSeb

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IBM Pulse and Smarter Buildings/Smarter Cities

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Mike Rhodin, IBM SVP, talking Smarter Cities at IBM Pulse

I attended IBM’s Pulse conference last week and the big surprise for me was the amount of attention being paid to Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities. With 600+ sessions over six parallel tracks it is only to be expected that there be some Smarter Building content but at this event Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities were mentioned in most of the keynotes. The Smarter Buildings market has obviously been identified by IBM as one to chase.

IBM also timed two related press releases to coincide with the event – in the first IBM talk about how they worked with McMaster University to improve the energy supply and use in its 60 campus-wide buildings and a university hospital. In the second announcement IBM released the names of several cities it is working with on Smarter Cities initiatives (Washington D.C., Wilmington, N.C. and Waterloo, Ontario).

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions – and then there is the market size to consider – every building on the planet potentially.

Buildings are complex animals and they are not exactly dumb today – so how do we go about making them smarter? Most buildings have many disparate data sources (lights, heating, aircon, running equipment, doors, lifts, etc.). Where the likes of IBM can help is in pulling all this information together into a single window, and allowing building managers to view the information in context. IBM then layers its analytics on top of the information to show trends in energy use, highlight problems, as well as helping forecast and optimise energy consumption.

Similarly, but on an even bigger scale, IBM is helping cities manage their systems. Everything from traffic congestion and lighting optimisation, right the way through to water use optimisation and first responder call outs can be managed electronically right now. Again these systems have lots of disparate data – but it is in consolidating this data that IBM excels. Right now they are working with cities on individual projects around things like water use and traffic but look out for announcements soon from IBM on a product for the management of entire cities. That’ll be one to get really excited about!

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Friday Green Numbers round-up for Feb 25th 2011

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Green Numbers

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

  1. After 50 Years, Nuclear Power is Still Not Viable without Subsidies, New Report Finds

    Since its inception more than 50 years ago, the U.S. nuclear power industry has been propped up by a generous array of government subsidies that have supported its development and operations. Despite that support, the industry is still not economically viable, according to a report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report, ?Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable Without Subsidies,? found that more than 30 subsidies have supported every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to long-term waste storage. Added together, these subsidies often have exceeded the average market price of the power produced.

    ?Despite the fact that the nuclear power industry has benefited from decades of government support, the technology is still uneconomic, so the industry is demanding a lot more from taxpayers to build new reactors,? said Ellen Vancko, manager of UCS?s Nuclear Energy and Climate Change Project. ?The cost of this technology continues to …

  2. UN reveals $1.3trn green strategy

    A new sustainable strategy by the United Nations proposes to invest 2pc of wealth generated by the global economy, or some $1.3trn annually, in 10 key sectors.

    The new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report that was released yesterday, when more than 100 environment ministers met in Nairobi, underlines a sustainable public policy and investment path that will not only launch the transition towards a low-carbon, resource-efficient green economy, but will also …

  3. Wind generation is not increasing wholesale electricity prices in Ireland

    The growing levels of wind generation on the Irish electricity network is not increasing wholesale electricity prices, a new study published by EirGrid and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) suggests.

    The report by grid operator EirGrid and the SEAI, employs detailed modelling tools to examine the wholesale prices in the Irish electricity system in 2011, which has a total annual value of an estimated ?2bn.

    The analysis revealed that wind generation lowers wholesale prices by …

  4. 7 Fear Factors That Move Solar Stocks

    Solar companies have seen their stocks head up over the past two months as they?ve been reporting killer sales and profits for 2010 and remain bullish about 2011. Shares of key players, such as SunPower, Suntech Power, First Solar and Trina Solar, all have seen their shares rise about 30 percent or more since the beginning of the year.

    But no stocks can keep climbing forever, and news events that …

  5. OnChip Power, aiming a shrink ray at bulky transformer ‘bricks,’ raises $1.8 million from Venrock

    I am fairly sure that if you manage to raise $1.8 million for your start-up while enrolled in a business school course called “Entrepreneurial Finance,” you are almost guaranteed an A.
    Last week, MIT Sloan student and OnChip Power CEO Vanessa Green was signing the papers on her company’s first round of funding: $1.8 million from Venrock and Arunas Chesonis, chairman of PAETEC Holding and an MIT alumnus.

    OnChip is commercializing new power electronics technology developed at …

  6. Transphorm Unveils Efficient Power Module, $38M From Kleiner, Google Ventures

    Here comes the biggest cleantech startup launch since Bloom Energy: Acompany called Transphorm has emerged from stealth on Wednesday afternoon at Google Venture?s headquarters, touting an energy-efficient power conversion module for power-hungry devices from servers to electric car batteries to solar panels, and an enviable $38 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Foundation Capital, and Lux Capital.

    Founded in 2007, Transphorm is looking to make power conversion more energy-efficient and reduce the …

  7. Harvard Study Reveals Coal Energy To Be One of the Most Expensive Forms of Power

    Advocates of coal power argue that it is among the cheapest sources of energy in the United States and allows for lower-cost power. But a new Harvard study found that whatever money is saved in operation costs is completely negated by the cost coal plants inadvertently pass on to the American public: $345 billion.

    These hidden expenses are not borne by miners or utilities, but come from the detrimental side affects of coal burning, like health problems in mining communities and pollution around coal plants. The study is the first to look at the entire cost of coal, from extraction to combustion …

  8. Oil surges nears $120 a barrel on Libya and Middle East fears

    Oil prices soared to almost $120 a barrel on Thursday amid fears that the unrest in Libya and Bahrain could spread to other oil-rich countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.

    Brent crude leapt $8.54 to $119.79 a barrel, the highest price since August 2008, and later traded at $113.93 a barrel. It closed at…

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Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Green bits and bytes for Feb 24th 2011

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Green bits & bytes

.

Some of the Green announcements which passed by my desk this week:

  1. Digital Lumens, maker of Intelligent LED Lighting Systems, today announced that its Midbay fixture is the only ?Recognized Winner? in the Industrial Category of the Next Generation Luminaires competition. The competition is jointly organized by the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), as part of a broad initiative to advance solid-state lighting technology and adoption.
  2. Symphony Environmental Technologies, a maker of degradeable plastics has announced [PDF] the signing of a 25 year distribution agreement for its products throughout the US. According to their announcement, “The core of Symphony?s business is a suite of chemical formulations called d2w, which turn plastic at the end of its service-life into a material with a completely different molecular structure. At that stage it is no longer a plastic and can be safely bioassimilated in the open environment in the same way as a leaf”
  3. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a new report detailing the full range of subsidies that have benefited the commercial nuclear power industry in the United States over the last 50 years. The report found that subsidies for the entire nuclear fuel cycle — from uranium mining to long-term waste storage — have often exceeded the average market price of the power produced. In other words, if the government had purchased power on the open market and given it away for free, it would have been less costly than subsidizing nuclear power plant construction and operation.
  4. The International Aluminium Institute has launched a new Website, Aluminium for Future Generations to highlight the recycling advantages of aluminium products. The site provides data on recycling rates and energy and emissions savings; measures that are central to the aluminium industry’s sustainability strategy of reducing the environmental impact of its facilities, increasing the use of aluminium in energy saving applications and maximising the recycling of products at the end of their useful life.
  5. Environmental Business Journal, a business research publication that provides strategic business intelligence for the environmental industry, announced the winners of its 2010 Business Achievement awards. One of those awarded was Locus Technologies, who were awarded an IT Companies Business Achievement award for ” for growth in revenue, client base, and product introductions”

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RF Code and their wireless environmental sensors coming to Europe

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RF Code PDU Tag

To go along with the data center energy efficiency posts I have been writing in the last few weeks, I talked to RF Code earlier this week to find out what they have been up to recently. RF Code make wireless sensing devices which are proving quite popular lately in data centers.

I was speaking to Chad Riseling, RF Code’s VP of Worldwide Sales and he told me that a large portion of their 2010 growth came from their wireless environmental monitoring solutions. RF Code has wireless tags to monitor humidity, temperature, leak detection, PDU and CDU power usage (for certain vendors, as yet), (rack) door status and dry contact status.

The wireless sensors which RF Code sell, are roughly the size of a box of matches, they run off a battery which is rated to last around three years (and which starts alerting you about low battery status three months before the battery is depleted) and they have a range of mountings, including a peel and stick option, to facilitate easy deployment almost anywhere in a data center.

If you are wondering why a wireless solution is such a big deal, well think about the wireless internet network in your own home and how that has changed how you browse the net. Now you can access it anywhere in your home. Similarly, wireless sensors in a data center don’t need any extra cables to be rolled out for deployment and so can be installed quickly and relatively ubiquitously.

According to Chad, in a small 3,000 square foot data center, you could have up to 10,000 sensors being read by 3-4 readers and the data is handed off to the software stack, called Sensor Manager. Sensor manager can be used to track the data, or if companies have already invested in BMS or service management software, the data can be integrated with that.

One nice touch that RF Code have is that, in an homage to the Puppy Dog sales technique, they sell Starter Packs which contain sensors, readers and management software (enough to get you going, in other words) for as little as $2,995. If you are happy with the starter pack, you can simply buy more tags, readers, etc. to build out your solution.

Yesterday RF Code announced that they are launching a European Channel Program to grow beyond their current, predominantly US-based, market. Cool.

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Photo copyright RF Code