IBM collaborates on French smart city solutions

French public transport company Veolia Transdev and IBM have announced that they are jointly developing a smarter mobility solution. The first application is being piloted in the Lyon, the second largest metropolitan area in France, as part of the city’s Optimod’Lyon project.

The collaboration brings together Veolia Transdev’s public transit industry capabilities with IBM’s expertise in big data and advanced analytics. The aim is to help cities reduce road congestion and optimise transportation infrastructure by connecting services across all of their transportation networks, including subways, trams, buses, cars and bicycle traffic and more. Optimod'Lyon will test and validate new services.

Using the solution, cities will be able to simplify the management of complicated public transit networks and make better use of existing infrastructure. The solution will also enable them to build intelligence into its existing transport infrastructure to help anticipate and plan for future transit issues. It’s one way to reduce pollution linked to road congestion, increase public transit revenue for investment in new projects to improve quality of life for citizens and reduce costs associated with the creation of new transport infrastructures.

Travellers will have access to real-time information on traffic to enable a more seamless, multi-mode transportation experience, for instance combining bicycle, vehicle and public transit. The service uses predictive analytics, which can help bypass transport problems by providing details about the location and interconnections of alternative transportation options. (There’s a video from the Optimod’Lyon project of how it might work here)

 

IBM has put a great deal of effort into its smart cities programme and this is another transport-related step along the way. Europe must be a significant market for such solutions, given the level of public transport use.

There’s certainly the capability of smart city solutions to help cities run more efficiently. That has the added impact of reducing carbon emissions, particularly through more efficient public transport. But much of the effort seems to be about the better management of resources for more and more people living and working in large conurbations. I can’t help wondering if that can be sustainable in the long term. It may be smart, but will it save the planet?

Sprint Nextel has introduced reusable ecoEnvelopes in the US for bill payments

Sprint Nextel in the US has introduced a reusable envelope for sending bills and receiving payments. The company says that it will make bill payment easier, minimise mail costs, reduce paper use and lower environmental impact.

According to the Federal Network on Sustainability, the US paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry. In just over a year, Sprint estimates the new ecoEnvelope will save just under a half a million dollars in operational costs, 447 tons of paper, 15 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water and over 2.5 million pounds of CO₂e, the equivalent of taking 244 cars off the road.

 

It seems that only around a third of Sprint customers use a paperless billing option, so this is a worthwhile sustainable strategy for the company.   

It’s interesting to compare this approach with the actions of virtually all UK communications and utilities companies (and others). Firstly, there has been intense pressure on customers to sign up to pay bills directly so that suppliers simply take the money from accounts when payment is due. There are financial rewards for agreeing to these direct debit payments. It means that fewer people send back bills with payments enclosed.

There are now also financial penalties for paper billing. So Sprint Nextel’s ecoEnvelope would work less well in the UK where there are probably fewer people who receive paper bills and even fewer who return them with payments.

The UK is probably more eco-friendly in this respect, but the downside is the cynical way that the utilities, or at least telecoms companies, have behaved. For one telecoms supplier I use, soon after a charge was introduced for paper billing the frequency of bills increased. And the companies have taken the opportunity of cheap delivery to stuff electronic bills with promotions that create wasted paper for those that do need to print them out.

Better to keep customers on-side with your green approach.

AT&T sustainability report – carbon footprint up 1.6% but energy intensity down 17%

US communications company AT&T has released its online, interactive 2011 Sustainability Report. The company’s carbon footprint is up 1.6% to 9,144,648 metric tons CO₂e, but energy intensity of data carried was down 17% to 344 kWh/Terabyte.

Low-carbon progress included:

• Solar energy production up 12% to 3183 kWh a year.

• Implementation of 4,500 energy-saving projects that resulted in $42m in annualised energy savings.

• Reaching deployment of 3,469 alternative-fuel vehicles saving 2.5 million gallons of unleaded gasoline every year.

• Logging more than 2.9 million Telepresence minutes, saving almost $13.9m in travel dollars and more than 8,261 metric tons of CO₂ emissions.

 

There’s a lot of sustainability information in this ‘report’, but mostly hard to find.

AT&T says the interactive format ‘empowers consumers to engage, share, and at the same time, generate a donation to a community-improving non-profit of their choice’. So it comes over as more of a PR exercise than an informative description of AT&T’s sustainability plans and progress – some of the information would be better put somewhere else. (Even as a PR exercise it seems to fall short, since, based on my experience, those using Firefox will be unable to access most of the content).

All the hard information is in the ‘Data Library’ and even then sliced up to make it more difficult to equate achievements, targets and background. Suffice to say that one company goal is to reduce electricity consumption relative to data growth by 60% by 2014 (based on 2008 levels). If I read the data correctly they’re almost there already, but overall emissions are going up.

Mobile networks could save 1.7% of global CO2 emissions by 2020

Last week the GSMA, the mobile network operators’ industry body, published its second Mobile Green Manifesto. It’s an update of the 2009 report, highlighting the initial results from the GSMA’s Mobile Energy Efficiency (MEE) benchmarking and optimisation initiative as well as progress around mobile’s enabling role.

As part of the original Green Manifesto the GSMA said that it would reduce its total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per connection by 40% by 2020 compared to 2009.

Highlights from the report (which focuses on the network aspects of the mobile phone industry) include:

• Mobile has the potential to enable emissions savings of at least 900 million tonnes CO₂e in 2020 which is 1.7% of the global 2020 GHG emissions and five times the mobile industry’s emissions.

• Total mobile network energy consumption increased only slightly from 2009 to 2010, despite considerable growth in mobile connections and traffic.

• Total energy per unit traffic declined by approximately 20% and energy per connection declined by 5% from 2009 to 2010.

• Most emissions savings enabled by mobile networks will be achieved through the use of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and dematerialisation applications, i.e. doing things via mobile phones rather than in person. Currently 26 million mobile M2M connections worldwide are enabling GHG emission savings, estimated to be about three million tones of CO₂e annually.

 

The report also uses data and analysis from the MEE Benchmarking service to calculate the energy costs and the CO₂e emissions that result from the electricity and diesel consumption of mobile networks globally. The analysis shows if all networks with above-average energy consumption were improved to the industry average, there is a potential energy cost saving for mobile operators of $1bn annually at 2010 prices – and improving to levels of the top quartile could save more than $2bn a year.

 

It’s interesting how these findings stack up with the Smart 2020 Report, which first established how ICT can be used as a tool to save CO₂ emissions, rather than just a contributor to the problem. Smart 2020 came to the conclusion that ICT could save five times the emissions that it generated, which is what this GSMA report also says (five years later).

However, the conclusion is based on different estimates. The GSMA found that the GHG emissions of the mobile telecoms network industry are approximately 70 million tonnes for 2010, less than 0.2% of the global total. The report suggests that the Smart 2020 figures for mobile network emissions are too high.

We’re still talking savings potential, though - whether ICT will actually be used to make the gains remains to be seen. In a time of slow economies, with many countries still struggling to stay out of recession, there’s not much investment in green initiatives that don’t produce a fast financial pay-back. Fortunately, most current green initiatives are quickly reflected in the business bottom line.

First Utility rolls out an energy information service to customers

As previewed a year ago, First Utility, which provides electricity and gas services to consumer and business customers, has now launched its my:energy programme, aimed at helping customers to be more energy efficient. The service is from US company Opower, which provides energy information software for the utility industry.

First Utility’s 100,000 customers have already started receiving information on how their usage compares to their neighbours, together with tips on how to reduce energy consumption. My:energy will also be available to view online. Further functionality will be added, including an alert to tell customers when their energy usage is higher than normal. In development are elements such as text message reminders to alert people to turn down their thermostats when warmer weather is coming.

 

There’s a lot of firsts here. First Utility is the only energy provider in the UK to rollout smart meters to all its customers and my:energy is also the first programme of its kind in the UK. First Utility is also Opower’s first international partner.

The benefit is that the more information people have about their energy usage the more likely it is that they will reduce it. But it’s not enough just to provide the figures – my:energy’s alerts and warnings, together with the ability to compare energy use with others, is an even better motivator. First Utility points to research that shows that energy consumption is reduced by around 5% after consumers receive information with their bills comparing their energy usage to their neighbours’. Consumption dropped still further when personalised advice is included in bills.

Opower says that its service has already created savings of $140m across 10 million households in the US. First Utility maintains that if all UK households were to adopt the technology, the potential savings are over £1.7bn and three million tonnes of carbon in just three years.

All good stuff, but consumer behaviour will not be changed significantly until we have smart grids with dynamic pricing, providing real and instant benefits from changing energy use.

IBM ‘hot water cooling’ saves 40% of supercomputer emissions

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) and IBM have announced the world's first commercially available hot-water cooled supercomputer. The hot-water cooling technology invented by IBM allows the system to be built 10 times more compact and substantially improve its peak performance while consuming 40% less energy than a comparable air-cooled machine.

Up to 50% of an average air-cooled data centre's carbon footprint is caused by powering the necessary cooling systems. IBM has addressed the problem with a concept of hot-water cooling, which does away with air cooling systems. IBM's technology directly cools active components in the system such as processors and memory modules with coolant temperatures that can reach as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, or 45 degrees Celsius.

The new LRZ "SuperMUC" system also allows energy to be captured and reused to heat the buildings during the winter on the sprawling Leibniz Supercomputing Centre campus, saving of one million Euros a year.

The SuperMUC system is Europe's fastest computer, according to the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. It has a peak performance equivalent to the work of more than 110,000 personal computers. Or three billion people using a pocket calculator would have to perform one million operations per second each to reach equivalent performance.

The supercomputer will be used to drive a wide spectrum of research, from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devising quieter airplanes and unearthing new insights in geophysics, including the understanding of earthquakes.

 

Two things grabbed my attention about this new whizz-bang computer. Firstly, a comment by Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Chairman of the Board, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, “This year all the electricity consumed by state-funded institutions across Germany are required to purchase 100% sustainable energy. SuperMUC will help us keep our commitment, while giving the scientific community a best-in-class system to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before.”

So government policy on reduced emissions does work and this development shows it can lead to innovation and partnerships between the public and private sectors. (The LRZ is the computer centre for Munich's universities and for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities). If only the UK government would learn the lesson.

Secondly, the waste heat is used in buildings during the winter, a more holistic approach to data centre energy use and adding significantly to the financial benefit. It seems odd that data centres in general waste so much energy in keeping things cool, when the heat could be used productively elsewhere, saving emissions and money. Maybe one day …

(Picture credit: IBM)

Using Google docs achieves 75% energy savings

Last year Google estimated that Gmail is up to 80 times more energy-efficient than running traditional in-house email service. Now the company has calculated that a typical organisation can achieve energy savings of 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps as a whole – documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications.

 

 

Google points to three main energy impacts from the use of a Google apps:

• A typical organisation has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand. Because servers draw nearly the same amount of energy regardless of how busy they are, this results in a large waste of energy. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are used, so fewer are needed. The net result is a 70-90% reduction in the direct energy used.

• In addition, almost every unit of energy that a server consumes ends up as heat, causing air-conditioning systems to work harder than they otherwise would. In many situations each watt of direct power consumption needs 1.5 additional watts of cooling. But Google’s data centres need just 0.13 watts of cooling for each watt of direct power. The company estimates that overall, using Google apps will see energy costs for server cooling decrease by 70–90%.

• But these savings are not free. Using cloud-based services results in some additional energy consumption from the use of Google servers and an increase in traffic on the Internet. The analysis suggests a net increase of 2–3% in energy consumption for office computing migrating to the cloud.

Google quotes research from the Carbon Disclosure Project that found that by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1bn in revenues in the US and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020. UK companies would save £1.2bn and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2.

Google also points to the experience of the US General Services Administration (GSA), which recently switched 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government. The GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%, saving 93% of the energy costs - $285,000 annually.

 

There’s more detail in the white paper (see the link above), but Google’s findings do further substantiate the carbon emissions benefits of using cloud computing. (Microsoft conducted a similar exercise that found that, for large deployments, the company’s cloud solutions can reduce energy use and carbon emissions by more than 30% for large deployments and 90% for small deployments).

But these are the major, on-line resource companies that have a lot to gain from making their data centres as efficient as possible. Not all IT services providers will have such efficient facilities, so the cloud/non-cloud benefit will not always be so stark. If reduced emissions is the reason for adopting cloud services, then it’s always worth checking.

Integrating renewable energy is becoming a higher priority for smart grids

According to a report from cleantech research firm Pike Research, while smart grids are seen as important for the growth in renewable energy generation, to date investment in integrating the two has been more talk than action. But Pike believes this will change over the next few years. Worldwide revenue from smart grid renewables integration will reach almost $4bn in 2012 and climb to $13bn by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%.

There’s a huge amount that needs to be done to integrate renwables, not least the new transmission lines needed to connect large-scale wind and solar farms, but the biggest buzz, according to Pike, is about smart grid technologies at the distribution level. A broad set of technology tools will be required, including advanced energy storage at the transmission, distribution, and residential levels, dynamic pricing demand response, virtual power plants, microgrids and smart wind and solar technologies.

The leading technology in terms of smart grid renewables integration in 2012 is microgrids, which will capture more than $3bn, or 81% of the total. Remote microgrids will represent more than 90% of this total, a reflection of the challenges of integrating distributed solar and wind in regions of the world where a reliable utility power grid is lacking. 

By region, the Asia/Pacific shows the most market activity in smart grid renewables integration, with revenues up by over $1bn in 2012 to almost $5bn in 2018. Second is North America, with revenue increasing from $974m in 2012 to almost $4bn by 2018.

“The success record of smart grid renewables integration to date is a mixed bag,” says senior analyst Peter Asmus. “European countries are boldly ploughing forward while many US utilities exhibit ‘electrotrophobia’ – the fear of change linked to greater reliance upon intermittent renewable energy resources. That will change as many utilities launch comprehensive programs and place significant investments in the ability of the smart grid to lower the costs of integrating renewable generation at the transmission, distribution, and residential levels.”

 

It’s always been my view that the main benefit of smart grids is to handle renewable energy, so it’s a surprise that more has not been done already. On the supply smart grids need to manage renewable energy from a variety of sources – from huge wind farms or domestic solar panels – as well as having the means to manage user demand to best match the renewable energy flow. Everything else is nice to have, but it must be questionable whether the cost would be worth it.

So it’s heartening to learn from Pike that renewables are getting particular focus. I haven’t read the report, but I do wonder what the focus was previously.

HP has announced a ‘Net-Zero Energy’ data centre architecture

HP has released details of an architecture for a data centre that requires no net energy from traditional power grids.

It’s based on research from HP labs that shows how the architecture, combined with holistic energy-management techniques, enables organisations to cut total power usage by 30%, as well as dependence on grid power and costs by more than 80%.

The HP Net-Zero Energy Data Center architecture integrates energy and cooling supply from local renewable sources with the scheduling of IT workloads based on resource availability and performance requirements.

So, for example, noncritical, delay-tolerant workloads could be scheduled during daylight hours to coincide with solar energy generation, reducing reliance on non-renewable resources. As a result, organisations can lower overall data-centre costs, enabling more customers to take advantage of IT services.

Based on this research, HP aims to provide businesses and societies around the world with the potential to operate data centres using local renewable resources, removing dependencies such as location, energy supply and costs.

According to Cullen Bash, interim director at HP Labs Sustainable Ecosystems Research Group, “Information technology has the power to be an equaliser across societies globally, but the cost of IT services, and by extension the cost of energy, is prohibitive and inhibits widespread adoption. The HP Net-Zero Energy Data Centre not only aims to minimise the environmental impact of computing, but also has a goal of reducing energy costs associated with data-centre operations to extend the reach of IT accessibility globally.”

 

I don’t think there is anything particularly innovative here. What HP Labs has done is pull together various aspects of reducing data centre energy use into one holistic whole. Perhaps the most interesting part is the demand-side management, i.e. matching the requirements of the workload against the available energy. That would be a challenge for most data centre managers who generally work on the basis that all work is critical. (For many online businesses it is).

But looking at data centre energy from an holistic perspective, as HP has done here, is important and does seem to have been overlooked in the last year or two. The focus now seems to switch between different methods of reducing power – free cooling has received most attention recently. But the use of local renewable energy or even using the waste data centre heat for other purposes, such as domestic heating or industrial use, can also reduce emissions and save costs.

There are a lot more options available if data centre managers can look internally - to better manage workloads - and also outside the data centre walls for opportunities to reduce or regain power costs.

UK government invests £25m in smart city demonstration

The UK Technology Strategy Board, which has the remit of boosting UK growth and productivity through technology innovation, is investing up to £25m in a large-scale demonstration of future cities. The ideas is that the project will show the additional value that can be created by integrating city systems.

Cities will be invited to bid for funding to carry out a feasibility study and develop their demonstrator project proposal. Up to 20 grants of £50k will be available with 100% funding dependent on a publicly available report of the study.

Cities can subsequently submit a proposal for the large-scale project. To achieve the scale required to effectively test the value of integrating city systems, the plan is to fund a single demonstrator project. A total of £24m is available, but a condition of the 100% public funding is that the results of the project are made publicly available and are widely disseminated.

The purpose of the investment by the Technology Strategy Board, which was established by the Government in 2007 and is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), is to enable businesses to test new solutions for smart cities. It will allow UK cities to explore approaches to improving the local economy and quality of life, whilst reducing the environmental footprint and increasing resilience to environmental change.

The competition for funding is now open – there are full details here.

 

Well it’s a pleasant surprise to see that the government is actually investing in smart city proposals. Given the lack of investment for growth and the backtracking on most green initiatives, neither would seem a priority – perhaps the fact that it covers both is the reason it exists at all.

This is an area where the private sector is way ahead, because ICT companies can see the business potential. For example, in March, Birmingham City Council was awarded a Smarter Cities Challenge grant from IBM. This is a competitive grant programme in which IBM is awarding a total of $50m worth of technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide between 2011 and 2013. And just three weeks ago Intel announced the creation of an Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities research, based in London.

None the less, with all the findings being made public and £25m going into one extensive project, the Technology Strategy Board’s competition should help to raise awareness and stimulate interest further.

Certero becomes the biggest PC power management supplier to the NHS

Warrington-based software specialist Certero claims to be the biggest PC power management solution supplier to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) thanks to a clutch of new contract wins.

Since January Certero has signed deals to supply its PowerStudio power management product to more than twelve NHS organisations. Contract wins have included Guy’s and St Thomas Foundation Trust in London, Aintree Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in Liverpool, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, and Doncaster & Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

 

Two surprises here. Firstly, that such public sector organisations - subject to budget cuts and in the middle of a recession - have only just got round to installing PC power management software. The amount of money they’ve been wasting, and unnecessary emissions they’ve been generating, for the last five years or so doesn’t bear thinking about. Certero maintains that PowerStudio offers a payback period of 4-6 months with more than 30% energy cost savings, and other suppliers make similar claims, so why have all these hospitals waited so long?

The second surprise is that, although I wrote an in-depth report on PC power management software not so long ago, Certero is a new supplier to me. There are a large number of companies in this market, with a few major players and many smaller competitors, so Certero has done well to corner so much of the NHS opportunity.

In the long run, though, the PC power management software market is doomed, as competition erodes prices at the same time as the functionality becomes incorporated in other PC management solutions. Not good news for the specialist suppliers, but Certero is one of the companies with other strings to its bow – its main business focus is broader software asset management.

There are many business benefits from product lifecycle assessment – Deloitte

Organisations have traditionally looked to create value by focusing on internal processes - things like labour costs, manufacturing and logistics. But according to a white paper from Deloitte, companies can create even greater value by looking at resource use in their product life cycle across the entire value chain.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) may not be easy and can be a data-intensive process, but it gives an in-depth understanding of a product’s environmental impact, from product development through to disposal. It can reveal resource use and associated wastes, such as inefficient consumption of energy, water or raw materials, representing real costs to suppliers.

According to the white paper, while LCA has long been used to quantify environmental impacts, it can also support broader business objectives including:

• Enhance brand value for competitive differentiation
• Improve product and process design decisions
• Inform procurement strategies and supplier engagement activities
• Identify cost-savings opportunities throughout the value chain
• Meet sustainability communications needs (i.e. product labelling, stakeholder outreach)
• Achieve compliance

The paper looks at several value-creating business objectives, and shows how the LCA methodology can help companies achieve these goals.

 

It’s an interesting paper because it raises the prospect of using lifecycle assessment as a primary means to identify process and business inefficiencies. It puts what was a means of environmental impact at the heart of a company efficiency assessment, which has to be a good thing. If we can get sustainability or environmental tools like LCA at the heart of business then it will significantly raise awareness across organisations as a whole.

Cool lasers could reduce Internet energy demand by 90%

A guest post from Stephen Sweeney, Professor of Physics, Head of Photonics and EPSRC Leadership Fellow at the University of Surrey.

Speed and power have always been the main drivers for the Internet, making it a platform for modern life for consumers, businesses and for economies as a whole. But machines that continually work harder and faster on a global scale also demand exponential increases in energy. The Internet is a vast maw for power.

In the US, Environmental Protection Agency data suggests that Internet usage - and all the servers and networks involved - will require more energy than 18 million average American households. Projected demand for 2014 is greater than Australia's total electricity consumption.

One part of the problem is the number of chips produced and their need for power, but the bigger issue is heat. Chips may be smaller, but they are typically clustered into much larger arrays, each generating waste heat. This means around 40% of energy use in a data centre goes on air conditioning. The current scale of data centres and server farms with hundreds of thousands of square feet of hungry arrays of chips means operations with the energy needs of small cities.

Novel ways are being found to cool servers. Google has built server farms on the Baltic Sea in order to be able to pump ice-cold water around its building, doing the cooling job for them and saving on some bills. It's a solution with only limited potential for most parts of the world. What has been needed is a way to reduce the energy demand at the source - a process which involves more light than heat.

Strained quantum well lasers are traditionally used to beam pulses of light which transfer data at extreme speeds. They are not just used in the optical fibres of the Internet but in most modern technologies, such as mobile phones, CD and DVD players, and supermarket checkouts. However, lasers are often temperature sensitive and control of temperature is needed for them to work effectively - it's this control which requires energy. The electronics involved constitute 80% of the energy needed by the servers, in addition to the air conditioning required due to all the waste heat being dumped into rooms.

Our work at the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute has involved going back to basics, examining the properties of the crystal layer used for the laser and removing its dependence on temperature. When an electric current is put into the crystal, rather than producing light most ends up as heat and this self-heating causes the performance to degrade, requiring external control. To overcome this, we introduced another element into the crystal to change its behaviour. The crystal is based on a semiconductor alloy, just 5 nanometers thick where all of the light is produced. By altering the material at an atomic level - replacing around 10% of the arsenic or phosphorous atoms with bismuth atoms - the whole chain of unnecessary heat and energy is capped at the source.

The simple nature of the change means that no alterations are needed in the production process, which takes place in reactors, with no need for another stage or reactor chamber. Most importantly, the new approach is expected to mean a 5-10 fold reduction in energy demand relating to the Internet. The technology exists in working form and is currently being developed and trialled as part of the European Union funded BIANCHO project. Surrey University is in partnership with UK company CIP Technologies, a photonics developer and manufacturer based in Ipswich, along with several leading European academic partners. The aim is for commercial trialling of the lasers from 2013 onwards.

Siemens has developed a model to test smart grid projects and standards

Siemens has developed an architectural model for configuring smart grid projects. The Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM), can be used for the visualisation, validation and configuration of projects and also for standardisation within smart grids.

The foundation of the SGAM architecture model is the smart grid level that spans the domains of the power generation and conversion as well as the zones of power system management. Interoperability is depicted by the five superimposed model layers; Component, Communication, Information, Function and Business. The model makes it possible to display and compare different approaches to smart grid solutions so that differences and commonalities between various paradigms, roadmaps, and points of view can be detected.

 

Aspects of interoperability have been taken into account as well as issues of availability, information security and energy efficiency. The developers designed migration scenarios for an existing installed base and also allowed for the fact that development of a power system into a comprehensive smart grid is an evolutionary process. That’s why the outcome was not so much a blueprint of a smart grid architecture but rather a method for the validation of smart grid elements’ interactions.

There has already been experience with the practical application of the model in the areas of standardisation, pilot projects and industry. As far as standardisation functions are concerned, the cross-domain smart grid Demand Response function was mapped to the layers of the model and tested to see if it’s supported by existing information and communications standards. Recommendations for extending the scope of the standards were derived from the results.

 

Implementing a smart grid is a complex process, often with extended discussion and consultation on what it’s supposed to do and how before any decisions are taken, let alone money spent. That’s certainly the case in the UK, partly due to a more complex market structure, but it’s going to be an issue everywhere, particularly in Europe.

A smart grid means different things to different parties, all with vested interests, so bringing views together is a challenge. The Siemens model seems to be a way of short-circuiting at least some of those discussions by identifying potential issues and conflicts at an early stage. And time is an issue.