Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. We're here at IBM's Pulse 2011 conference and with me I have IBM's Dave Bartlett. Dave, you've become known as the building whisperer. We talked earlier about the kind of the state of the now with smart buildings and that kind of stuff, but where is all this going? I mean, sure, right now we can see the energy information coming from buildings. What are we going to be doing with this kind of stuff in 5, 10 years' time? Where's it all going? Well, that's where it gets really exciting. I mean, we've talked about how there's an opportunity today to save a significant energy, but if you think about the bigger plays, the smarter planet play, the smarter city play, and buildings is a key building block for those plays. I mean, every building has meters, so you can take advantage of the smart grid initiatives as they become realized, not only to take advantage of different time of day based pricing, but also help the city cope with or prevent brownout conditions and make sure energy is available to the core infrastructure. So you'd have buildings participating in demand response programs automatically and, you know, shifting load and that kind of stuff? Exactly. I mean, if you're running a city, the key thing, you want to keep the traffic system up. You want to keep the hospitals up. Maybe you don't care about running the pool pumps in the hotel pools as an impending brownout occurs so that you can start to make tradeoffs like that. So it turns out a smarter building is a great building block to create the smarter city and do that with. Another example is emergency response. Let's say there's a building that's on fire. If it's connected to a smarter transportation system, the transportation could be rerouted away from that block so that the engines actually can get to the building and not be prevented from traffic from getting there as soon as they could be.
2:01You could also automatically power off the buildings. You could possibly decrease water pressures in the surrounding areas to maximize water pressure in that area. So it's a combination of, you know, the smarter water system, the smarter transportation system, the smart grid system, working with a smart building system to really increase the efficiency of your emergency response team in the city. Okay, and you mentioned another example earlier which fascinated me. It was around just taking in weather information. Right, so, you know, a lot of times we operate our buildings without any thought to what the weather's doing. But if a cold front is coming within the next hour or two hours, it could make decisions as to whether or not to turn the air conditioning on or turn it off in anticipation of that. But we're also implementing a lot more free air cooling, you know, kind of getting back to the days when we used to open windows, right? A bit new idea. Yeah, so on both some of those windows and so being able to forecast the weather, being aware of what's happening in terms of humidity and temperature to turn off the air conditioning and start leveraging free air cooling, not just for office environments, but for manufacturing uses, the big chilling towers, a huge opportunity to save energy. You don't want to be toggling these systems back and forth. If you're really tied in a close way to weather forecasting, even on an hourly basis, you can make really good decisions when to toggle between free air and the system. So, just a much smarter way to run our buildings, our manufacturing plants, our offices. So, it seems like right now, the state of the now in smarter buildings is that we're looking inside and the state of the future is the buildings themselves will be looking outside. Looking outside, because the buildings will then become, you know, each of them will become a participant in creating or building a smarter building. I like to say, you know, how do you get a smarter city? One smarter building at a time. So, they can become the building block.
4:01Building blocks for, actually, smarter buildings can become new eco-cubes within a city. Eco-cubes can then populate to make, you know, the subsections of a city and then the city as a whole. So, it's a little bit easier way to approach it. Buildings are a natural connection point for the electric grid, for water, as transportation hubs, as security and video feeds. So, it's just a natural building block. So, I see, you know, we can get going today and then have all those connection points in place and all of a sudden realize a smarter city very quickly. Awesome. Dave, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you.