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Posts Tagged ‘smart water grids’

Rolling out a smart water grid

Posted in green tech, smart grid, water, water tech, tagged , , , , on February 1, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Flickr via Pink Sherbet Photography

In my latest Green State column in Grist, I write about the need to roll out a smart water grid as drought and water shortages take their toll:

The other day I came home to find a colorful flyer on my front door proclaiming, “Your meter just got smarter.”

While I was out and about in Berkeley, a worker from my utility, PG&E, slipped in the side gate and gave my old gas and electric meter a digital upgrade. So-called smart meters allow the two-way transmission of electricity data and will eventually let me monitor and alter my energy consumption in near real-time. I’ll be able to fire up an app on my iPhone and see, for instance, a spike in watts because my son has left the lights on in his room and a laptop plugged in.

Now I only learn of my electricity use when I get my monthly utility bill, long after all that carbon has escaped into the atmosphere. The situation is even worse when it comes to water consumption; my bill and details of my water use arrive every other month.

“When you tell people what total bucket of water they used in the past 60 days, the barn door is open and the animals are long gone,” says Richard Harris, water conservation manager for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, my local water agency.

EBMUD is currently testing smart water meters in 30 households and plans to expand the pilot program to 4,000 homes and businesses later this year.

“It’ll give us better knowledge of where our water is going,” says Harris. “We also thought if we’re going to ask people to use water more efficiently, especially when we’re coming out of a drought and have imposed water restrictions, customers need to have an idea of what their current use is.”

EBMUD’s smart meters take readings every hour and participants in the pilot program will be able to go online to check their consumption and set up an email alert if their water use rises above a certain level. The agency also plans to offer a social networking feature to allow people to compare their water consumption with other households in the area. Nothing like a little peer pressure to get you to turn off the tap.

Given that many states expect to face water shortages in the coming years, one would think we’d be seeing a roll out of smart water meters akin to the national effort being made to smarten up the power grid.

The payoff could be enormous. Water agencies and consumers would be able to detect leaking pipes and toilets in real-time and fix the problem before the water literally goes down the drain.

You can read the rest of the column here.

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The next wave: IBM’s smart water grids

Posted in green computing, green grid, green tech, IBM, water tech, tagged , , , on March 13, 2009| 1 Comment »

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photo: IBM

IBM on Friday unveiled a series of  “smart water” services to deploy sensor networks and data-crunching software to help environmental officials better manage an increasingly scarce commodity.

“What we got back from people who monitor water systems is that they had a huge amount of data, that they were often entering the data by hand, and that they didn’t have time to analyze the data,” says Sharon Nunes, vice president for Big Green Innovations at IBM. “What we’re trying to to do is build more intelligence into their water systems.”

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: Sensors are scattered throughout a water district’s infrastructure – from reservoirs to the pipes that deliver H20 to homes – and gather information on water quality, leakage and other conditions. IBM (IBM) software analyzes that data and organizes it on a computer dashboard so water managers can at a glance detect problems and balance supply and demand.

A demonstration of the IBM technology and its reach is underway in Ireland’s Galway Bay. Working with Marine Institute Ireland, IBM’s SmartBay project has equipped several hundred buoys like the one in the photo above with sensors that are networked through wireless links. The sensors measure such things as water temperature, salinity and oxygen content. Nunes said some sensors measure wave height to determine the best locales for wave energy production while another experimental intelligent sensor detects phosphates and then essentially does a science experiment in a box to determine whether the data is of sufficient quality to beam back to the home base.

The project also uses fishermen as “nodes on the network,” allowing them to text-message reports of floating debris on the bay. SmartBay crunches that data and sends back a map showing the likely position of flotsam over the next 24 hours so boats can avoid collisions.

Nunes says all this data – presented on a computer dashboard – allows the Galway harbor master to get a quick snapshot of the the bay’s health and potential navigation hazards so decisions can be made quickly – like whether to close the beaches because of a spike in pollution.

She estimates the potential market for smart water technology to be between $15 billion and $20 billion. The $64,000 question, though, is whether IBM’s likely customers – cash-strapped municipalities and state and local governments – can afford to get smart.

The answer, Nunes says, is that federal stimulus package money is available for water projects while other countries like China have set aside cash – $53 billion in China’s case – for water quality projects.

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The real smart water

Posted in climate change, energy, environment, green grid, green tech, IBM, smart grid, water tech, tagged , , , , on February 6, 2009| 2 Comments »

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The ecobiz buzz these days is all about greening the grid, what with tens of billions of dollars in the stimulus bill for transforming the electricity system into a digitalized, interactive version of the Internet. Just on Wednesday, the European island nation of Malta announced a $91 million deal with IBM to not only create a smart power grid but to smarten up its water system as well.

Water, in fact, is likely to emerge in coming years as big an opportunity as electricity for tech companies. Just as climate change is driving efforts to add intelligence to the power grid to more efficiently manage electricity usage and new sources of renewable energy, a warming world is making water an even scarcer resource.

“How do you look at the ecosystem of water and make it a smart grid?” asks Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM’s Venture Capital Group.  “It really makes a lot of sense if you think about it. It’s a scarce commodity, just like electrons —  it’s more scarce, in fact. It needs to be kept secure, it needs to be kept safe, it very often is abundant except when you need it a certain time and in a certain place.”

Clark’s job is to find companies – startups usually – with technology IBM (IBM) can tap for business units like its Global Energy & Utilities Industry. These days that means companies that develop sensor networks and other technologies that can be deployed across smart grids as part of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative to essentially create a physical version of the Internet for the natural and man-made worlds – water systems, transportation, agriculture.

That, of course, would generate untold terabytes of data that would need to be crunched, mined and analyzed, spurring demand for the type of software and Big Iron computing that is IBM’s forté.

“We look at taking otherwise less-smart systems and essentially instrument them with these sensors and make them intelligent,” Clark told Green Wombat at IBM’s San Francisco offices. “Every one of these smart grids are based on some collection, in some cases millions, of smart sensors that are sensing some characteristic. IBM looks at it and says this is an information management problem. How do we take the information from all these devices and sensors and bring it together in a way to make sense out of it, business sense out of it.”

Take water. In California, for instance, a three-year drought has put water districts under pressure to cut their customers’ consumption while conserving every drop possible. Many districts still rely on dispatching workers in trucks to check on water quality and water levels and check for pipeline leaks and breaks.

IBM is designing systems to automate that process by placing small sensors in reservoirs and along pipelines right up to homes and businesses. “These sensors are wireless and form a mesh network,” Clark says. “This one talks to this one that bridges to this one that bridges to another and every so often there is an access point that is able to gather up all the information.”

Big Blue analyzes that data and displays it on a computer dashboard that allows water managers to monitor their systems and head off problems like leaks or contamination. For example, General Electric (GE), Clark says, makes a sensor the size of a half-dollar that can detect multiple environmental conditions.

IBM has pilot projects underway with some water districts but faces a business challenge: Those public agencies typically are underfunded and don’t have millions of dollars on hand to roll out smart water systems. Money is usually not so much of a problem for Big Agriculture and Clark says IBM’s early customers are corporate farming giants like Archer Daniels Midland (an ADM spokesman points out that the company is a crop processor, not a farmer) that want sensor networks to better manage everything from irrigation systems to soil conditions.

Clark expects that after energy, water will be next up on the legislative agenda. IBM, along with other tech giants, appears to have the ear of the Obama administration. IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano joined the CEOs of Google (GOOG), Applied Materials (AMAT) and other tech companies last week in a meeting with President Barack Obama about investment in green technology.

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