Eco jam sparks green thinking
In a world facing unprecedented demands on scarce resources, consumers and businesses will have to revolutionise the way they use, monitor, and manage information.This was one of the key messages emerging from IBM's Eco Efficiency Web jam last week, which saw thousands of business leaders and industry experts from around the world exchanging ideas around efficiency and sustainability.
Clifford Foster, IBM's CTO for sub-Saharan Africa, says the eco jam fits in with the group's Smart Planet agenda, which involves identifying scarce resources and finding a way to better manage them. “Smart Planet is about making better use of the resources we have available, for the benefit of the environment, people, and organisations' competitiveness.”
According to Foster, the jamming concept allows for the gathering of as many viewpoints as possible, so contributors can pool their knowledge through themed discussions, in a drive to encourage collaboration in tackling the world's eco challenges.
Foster says the main goal is to stimulate discussions between people who have never connected before.
”Think of it as forums or wikis on steroids, with people sharing ideas to generate new lines of thought.”
According to Foster, a total of 925 client companies from 45 countries participated in the Web-based brainstorming event, with more than 2 000 posts on six key themes, including renewable energy, sustainable technologies, regulation, and green infrastructure.
“While we're seeing an unprecedented demand on water and energy supply, at the same time, there's an interesting trend in technology, which puts us in a better position to manage this demand,” notes Foster.
“One is instrumentation – by putting sensors on everything, we can detect, for example, water leakages, or contamination, or where water is being used in factories and houses, in real-time. If we connect this information to services such as disaster management and healthcare, we can make intelligent decisions, preventing problems before they happen.”
Connected intelligence
By connecting various streams of information together, says Foster, organisations and consumers can move towards predicting events, making smarter decisions, and ultimately doing things differently. Working more efficiently will also see a reduced impact on the environment.
“If we want to tackle the mega problems, such as non-renewable energies and the Smart Planet agenda, these solutions touch on so many organisations and interested parties that you need everybody to want to play,” explains Foster. He uses smart shipping as an example, with the numerous groups involved – from the manufacturer of the goods, to the customer, to the freight and shipping companies, to government from a revenue perspective.
“To solve the big problems, we need to look at things from an info-sharing perspective. In many cases a lot of the information needed to make more proactive decisions resides in a metaphorical island. Until you get companies to share information and look for trends and complementary solutions, we're not going to be able to mine data for the insight needed to do things differently,” he argues.
Foster cites a case in China, where IBM implemented a smart metering system at Dong Energy, consisting of sensors on the entire energy network to detect outages in real-time. “With the way the energy network is configured, you can then re-route energy around the faulty area, and substantially reduce outages in networks,” he explains.
“Energy outages impact everybody – they impact production, an organisation's productivity, and people's lives, and cost money.” Foster adds that smart metering in houses and businesses is an effective way of reducing this impact, as it costs a lot more to fix a problem than to manage it.
“From a consumer perspective, imagine a house where you can see the power usage on single dashboard, which tells you what the energy consumption is at different times of the day, and which appliances are actually consuming energy. Then you can make more intelligent decisions about when you switch appliances on or off. It's pretty important to people to have better understanding of how to better use available energy.”
Changing focus
Foster says the discussion he was driving during the jam was how to change the perception of the green agenda from one that just focuses on the environment, to something that makes good business sense.
“If you use less energy, your goods cost less, which means higher profitability. At the same time, using less energy not only costs less, but allows you to store energy for off-peak times, which makes more energy available to citizens at a decent price. So there's a positive impact for people and business.”
Going forward, Foster anticipates a holistic approach to resource management. “I foresee sustainability being baked into the metrics and executive agenda at all organisations, as a way to measure themselves, and the people running the business unit. This will happen more and more as government starts putting in regulations.”
From a technology side, Foster says effective monitoring of information will have a profound effect on the amount of energy houses and businesses save. “Every single appliance and device is going to be smart and aware enough to measure its own energy consumption, and communicate that data so it can start up or shut down when required.”
He adds that SA is well situated to take advantage of this development. “Prepaid energy meters are a well-established energy device in the country, and the next generation of these will not just be about switching off when you run out of credit, but actually being able to decide whether you switch off at certain times of the day, or switch off automatically.
“If you take that technology into businesses, we'll see a profound reduction in energy demand, apart from the actual devices using less energy.”
He adds that the recession has served as an important catalyst for change. “In a period of excess, everything is cheap, and people don't really think about how they use resources. But the age of excess is over. The facts are that the demand on resources we have is outstripping supply, and have to use it more efficiently.“
From an African perspective, says Foster, there are a different set of challenges focusing attention on resources. “Eskom does not have enough energy to meet demand, and it's forcing us to think about things differently. Innovations are born in areas where we have these kinds of challenges, and Africa is a breeding ground for these kinds of innovations.”
