Skip to main content

Smart power

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, Feb 23, 2009)

For most of the last century, the world’s electrical grids stood as an engineering marvel of the modern age and a global symbol of progress. The cheap, 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 grids are now incredibly wasteful. With little or no intelligence to balance loads or monitor power flows, they lose enough electricity annually to power India, Germany and Canada combined for an entire year.

Take for example, 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 every day generating energy that never reaches a single light bulb.

Fortunately, our energy can be made smart. It can be managed like the complex global system it is.

We can now instrument everything from the meter in the home to the turbines in the plants to the network itself. In fact, the intelligent utility system actually looks a lot more like the Internet than like a traditional grid. It can be linked to thousands of power sources – including climate-friendly ones like wind and solar. All of this instrumentation generates new data, which advanced analytics can turn into insight, so that better decisions can be made in real time, i.e. decisions by individuals and businesses on how they can consume differently, decisions by utility companies on how they can better manage loads, and decisions by governments and societies on how to preserve our environment. The whole system can become more efficient, reliable, adaptive...smart.

Smart grid projects are already helping consumers save 10% on their bills and reduce peak demand by 15%. Imagine the potential savings when this is scaled to include companies, government agencies and universities.

IBM scientists and industry experts are working on smart energy solutions like these around the world. We’re working with utility companies globally to accelerate the adoption of smart grids to help make them more reliable and give customers better usage of information. We’re working on seven of the world’s 10 largest automated meter management projects. We’re 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.

Our electrical grids can be a symbol of progress again — if we imbue the entire system with intelligence. And the good thing is — we can.
-------------------------------

Reynaldo C. Lugtu Jr. teaches management and marketing courses in the MBA Program of De La Salle Professional Schools. He is Country Manager, Utilities and Communications Sector of IBM Philippines. He may be e-mailed at rlugtu2002@yahoo.com, or visit his blog at http://rlugtu.blogspot.com.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can outsourcing be stopped?

((Published in the BusinessMirror under the Mirror Image column, Nov 11, 2008) Now that President-elect Barack Obama will be inaugurated on January 20, 2009, many are holding their breath, especially the business-process outsourcing companies in India, the Philippines and others, as to how he can turn around the outsourcing of jobs from the United States. In debates and on the road, Obama repeatedly said that if elected, he would discourage companies from “shipping jobs overseas” by taking away tax breaks, or by giving benefit to those corporations that keep jobs domestically. “We can keep giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, or we can give tax benefits to companies that invest right here in New Hampshire,” Senator Obama said at a joint appearance with Sen. Hillary Clinton in Unity, New Hampshire. According to CIO magazine, economists and legal advisers contacted about those comments said they are unaware of any specific tax breaks aimed at offshoring or outsourcing ...

Facebook addiction

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight Column, January 10, 2011) I was recently invited by a Communications Arts class of De La Salle University to talk about the ill effects of Facebook among the youth. “Ill effects among the youth?”, I asked. I have studied the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of Facebook in the workplace. We always see its good side because most of us are active users. But the dark side in the work place is apparently the decline of productivity based on a number of studies. But understanding the ill effects among the youth struck me because I have two teenage daughters who spend hours in the veritable social network site; and I oftentimes ask them to stop and instead concentrate on studying. So this topic interested me as I wanted to understand its potential ill effects to my kids. Surveying Facebook users To put some credence in the talk, I asked the student organizers and my daughter to help me to conduct an exploratory study through a...

Can outsourcing be stopped, really?

(Published in Business Mirror under the Free Enterprise column, January 11, 2012) IN 2008, I wrote an article in BusinessMirror titled “Can outsourcing be stopped?” where I mentioned Barack Obama’s repeated spiel in his campaigns that, if elected, he would discourage companies from “shipping jobs overseas” by taking away tax breaks, or by giving benefit to those corporations that keep jobs domestically. From then on, the US government did not have a clear policy on outsourcing; thus, the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines and elsewhere like India still experienced spectacular double-digit growth, helping spur the economies of the two countries. But just last week, President Obama jumpstarted an effort to urge US business leaders to keep jobs at home instead of outsourcing them overseas as he rolled out a new election-year theme aimed at courting middle-class voters. This has been the long-standing campaign of the US government against outsourcing, which was...