Zoom into Smart Planet – Power
Among all the smart systems, the most concerned aspect, I’ll have to say, might be Energy in terms of power. Without it, not other systems might be workable. However, for decades it was something the average person did not think much about until it went out. And it was all people thought about until it came back.
Climate change, rising energy prices and technology advances are all forces that have been reshaping the collective mindset of consumers, turning many from ‘passive ratepayers’ to highly informed, environmentally conscious customers who want a role in using power.
ABC company is helping utilities add a layer of digital intelligence to their grids. These smart grids use sensors, meters, digital controls and analytic tools to automate, monitor and control the two-way flow of energy across operations – from power plant to plug. A power company can optimize grid performance, prevent outages, restore outages faster and allow consumers to manage energy usage right down to the individual networked appliance. All these are known as ‘Smart Grid project’
For most of the last century, our electrical grids were a symbol of progress. The inexpensive, abundant power they brought changed the way the world worked -filling homes, streets, businesses, towns and cities with energy.
But today’s electrical grids reflect a time when energy was cheap, their impact on the natural environment wasn’t a priority and consumers weren’t even part of the equation. Back then, the power system could be centralized, closely managed and supplied by a relatively small number of large power plants. It was designed to distribute power in one direction only – not to manage a dynamic global network of energy supply and demand.
As a result of inefficiencies in this system, the world’s creation and distribution of electric power is now incredibly wasteful. With little or no intelligence to balance loads or monitor power flows, enough electricity is lost annually to power India, Germany and Canada for an entire year. If the U.S. grid alone were just 5% more efficient, it would be like permanently eliminating the fuel and greenhouse gas emissions from 53 million cars. Billions of dollars are wasted generating energy that never reaches a single light bulb.
Besides the technology ABC has implemented, it also informed a coalition of innovative utility companies in 2007 to accelerate the use of smart grid technologies and move the industry forward through its most challenging transformation. The Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition wants to change the way power is generated, distributed and used by adding digital intelligence to the current systems to reduces outages and faults, manage demand, and integrate renewable energy sources such as wind and power.
The Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition’s first collaborative effort was the creation of a Smart Grid maturity model, which has been used by over 60 utilities from around the world to assess where they are and plan their own smart grid program. It was recently donated to Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute for use by the industry. Other collaborations are focused on the impact of the smart grid on climate change, consumer perspectives, standards and interoperability and possible future regulatory models.
And now, with the emergence of the technologies that make smart grids possible, companies can provide their customers with the information and control they need to actually change their behavior patterns and reduce usage and cost.
Smart grid projects are already helping consumers save 10% on their bills and are reducing peak demand by 15%. Imagine the potential savings when this is scaled to include companies, government agencies and universities. And imagine the economic stimulus that an investment in smarter grids could provide in the world’s current crisis.
ABC scientists and industry experts are working on smart energy solutions around the world. They are working with utility companies globally to accelerate the adoption of smart grids to help make them more reliable and give customers better usage information. They are working on seven of the world’s tem largest automated meter management projects. They are even exploring how to turn millions of future electric vehicles into a distributed storage system, so excess power can be harnessed and returned to the system.
The electrical grids can be a symbol of progress again – if people imbue the entire system with intelligence. And they can.
Background of Smart Planet Initiative
It is commonly recognized that the modern society is a society of information.
And by information, we mean that various data is produced by trillions of digital devices connected through the Internet. And all this information – from the flow of markets to the pulse of societies – can be turned into knowledge because we now have the computational power and advanced analytics to make sense of it. With this knowledge we can reduce costs, cut waste, and improve the efficiency, productivity and quality of everything from companies to cities.
Through a few studies in different fields, people realize that data by itself is not useful. In fact, it can be overwhelming – unless you can extract value from it. And in the listed examples below, the forward-thinking leaders are realizing near-term ROI by using the right tools to extract the data value.
In a study of 439 cities, for those that employ transportation congestion solutions – including ramp metering, signal coordination and incident management – travel delays were reduced on average by more than 700,000 hours annually and nearly $15 million was saved by each.
A yearlong study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that consumers within smart meter systems saved 10% on their power bills and cut their power usage by 15% during peak hours.
Leading retailers have cut supply chain costs by up to 30%, reducing inventory levels by up to 25% and increasing sales by up to 10%. They did so by analyzing customer buying behaviors, aligning merchandising assortments with demand, and building end-to-end visibility across their entire supply chains.
Banks and other financial services organizations around the world are achieving new levels of risk control, efficiency and customer service. Microfinancer Grameen Koota’s optimized loan tracking and processing has helped increase its customer base from 70,000 to 325,000, while enabling it to predict cash requirements, better allocate resources and broaden access to capital.
All the above examples are proving that smarter systems are being implemented and are creating value in every major industry, across every region in both the developed and developing worlds. This idea is not a metaphor, or a vision, or a proposal – it is a rapidly emerging reality.
First, the world is becoming instrumented. Imagine, if you can, a billion transistors of every human being. We are almost there. Sensors are being embedded everywhere: in cars, appliances, cameras, roads, pipelines… even in medicine and livestock.
Second, our world is becoming interconnected. Soon, there will be two billion people on the Internet – but systems and objects can now ‘speak’ to each other, as well. Think of a trillion connected and intelligent things, and the oceans of data they produce.
Third, all of those instrumented and interconnected things are becoming intelligent. They are being linked to powerful new backend systems that can process all that data, and to advanced analytics capable of turning it into real insight, in real time.
With so much technology and the networking available at such low cost, what wouldn’t people enhance? What wouldn’t people connect? What information wouldn’t people mine for insight? What service wouldn’t people provide a customer, a citizen, a student or a patient?
The answer is, people will do all these things – because they can. This inspired the ABC Company and they began a global conversation about how the planet is becoming smarter. Because all the things are solvable on a smarter planet
The definition of ‘smarter’ is that intelligence is being infused into the systems and processes that make the world work – into things no one would recognize as computers: cars, appliances, roadways, power grids, clothes, even natural systems such as agriculture and waterways.
The modern companies, cities and even worlds are complex systems – indeed, systems of systems- that require new things of people as leaders, as workers and as citizens – new responsibilities to protect personal information and privacy, and to secure critical infrastructures; global standards, not just technological ones, across all dimensions and at all the interfaces of these complex systems; new skills and fields of expertise; new ways of working and thinking. A smarter planet will require a profound shift in management and governance toward far more collaborative approaches.
Smart systems are transforming energy grids, supply chains and water management, as well as helping confirm the authenticity of pharmaceuticals and the security of currency exchanges.
There is a tremendous mandate for positive change in the world. And the ABC company has the resources to do this!