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GreenMonk news roundup 02/17/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 02/14/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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IBM’s Rich Lechner on energy, sustainability and the Smart Planet

One of the people I met at the IBM Pulse 09 event was Rich Lechner. Rich is IBM’s VP Energy & Environment. Rich gave a tremendous presentation on Sustainability and the role of IT – I posted many quotes from the presentation on Twitter and they received a lot of attention.

I asked Rich if he’d be willing to do a video with us about Energy, Sustainability and IBM’s Smart Planet vision and he very graciously agreed to.

I hope you enjoy it.

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IBM hits the Green ball out of the park!

Al Zollar on Smart Grids

I attended Pulse 2009, the IBM service management conference, in Las Vegas during the week. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t know much about service management software before going to the event so my expectations of what to expect from the conference were low! However, IBM hit the Green ball out of the park at this conference. Almost every speaker who stood up to speak mentioned smart grids, energy or efficiency and Al Zollar, GM of Tivoli Software above, even had a slide on demand response!

The turnout for the event was around 5-6000 I’m told and I have no reason to doubt it as the general sessions were thronged.

It really is tremendous to see Oracle, SAP and IBM all heavily touting their Smart Grid software solutions – it looks like the dream of the intelligent energy network and the massive efficiencies which will accrue, is not far off.

I met a ton of interesting people there and video’d a couple of them so I’ll be posting more in upcoming posts.

[Disclosure: IBM paid my travel and expenses for this trip]

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GreenMonk news roundup 02/07/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Sun’s Mark Monroe on energy efficient data centers

Sun made an announcement the other day about the opening of its new Broomfield data center.

It sounded like they had done a superb job so I asked Sun’s Director of Sustainable Computing, Mark Monroe to come on and tell us a little more about the project.

Some of the highlights of Sun’s announcement were:

  • Greater space efficiency: A scalable, modular datacenter based on the Sun Pod Architecture led to a 66 percent footprint compression, by reducing 496,000 square feet from the former StorageTek campus in Louisville, Colo. to 126,000 square feet;
  • Reduced electrical consumption: By 1 million kWh per month, enough to power 1,000 homes in Colorado;
  • Reduced raised floor datacenter space: From 165,000 square feet to less than 700 square feet of raised floor datacenter space, representing a $4M cost avoidance;
  • Greener, cleaner architecture: Including flywheel UPS that eliminates lead and chemical waste by removing the need for batteries, and a non-chemical water treatment system, saving water and reducing chemical pollution;
  • Enhanced scalability: Incorporated 7 MW of capacity that scales up to 40 percent higher without major construction;
    Innovative cooling: The world’s first and largest installation of Liebert advanced XD cooling system with dynamic cooling controls capable of supporting rack loads up to 30kW and a chiller system 24 percent more efficient than ASHRAE standards;
  • Overall excellence: Recognized with two Ace awards for Project of the Year from the Associated Contractors of Colorado, presented for excellence in design, execution, complexity and environmental application.
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Oracle’s Utilities Meter Data Management taking off

Oracle

Photo credit Not Quite a Photographr

Interesting bits of news from Oracle on the Smart Grid front in the last couple of days:

  1. Oracle recently released Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management 1.5, which includes enhancements to help accelerate advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) integrations, to ultimately lower implementation costs for utilities that are implementing smart metering programs, to detect outages more quickly, drive energy efficiency initiatives and provide more accurate billing information to customers.
  2. UtiliPoint reported that Oracle won seven out of 14 major meter data management customers in 2008 (no link, sorry as UtilitiPoint charge around $3,000 for their reports!)
  3. Modesto Irrigation District is rolling out a Smart Meter project to more than 91,270 residential and about 12,700 commercial and industrial customers using Oracle’s Meter Data Management. Tom Kimball, MID’s Assistant General Manager for Transmission and Distribution, said

    Smart meters make good economic sense for consumers and utilities alike in this time of rising electric rates. Moreover, the California Energy Commission may soon require this type of electric meter, and the Legislature is moving in the same direction

  4. And news just in today that Italy’s Acea Distribuzione selected Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management to support its Automatic Meter Management (AMM) project, covering approximately 1.6 million meters – making it one of the largest AMM deployments in Europe to date.

    The Oracle solution will help us to provide our customers with advanced options including consumption profiles as well as consumption information online – ultimately allowing the consumer to make more informed decisions about their energy use

    said Delio Svaluto Moreolo, Metering Department, Acea Distribuzione S.p.A.

We have been writing a lot on this blog about the advantages of Smart Grids, and president Obama has recently called for the rollout of 40m smart meters in the US so it is great to see the big software vendors pushing out the necessary apps to help utilities make smart grids a reality.

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GreenMonk news roundup 02/05/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Simon Wardley at the it@cork Green IT Conference

Simon Wardley is a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination in economics. Simon has always found himself dealing with complex systems, whether it’s in the behavioural patterns of ladybirds to modelling environmental risks of chemical pollution to developing novel computer systems to managing companies.

In this talk at the it@cork Green IT conference, Simon gives a superb whistlestop talk on the topics of commoditisation, utility computing, Green IT and ducks (!).