Trends in Energy Innovation

2 Posts tagged with the urban_planning tag

Too often the answer is “not much”.  When smart cities support wealth creation, they become a powerful economic force.  Wealth is the engine that powers community prosperity.

 

Economically healthy communities are created when residents produce net wealth.  Without excess wealth, the tax base, local money supply and velocity drop.  This causes the community economy to contract.

 

Numerous smart city initiatives around the globe have a stated purpose to support economic development, but when they omit local innovators and the business community, I wonder if the plan leaders and supporters really understand how wealth is created.  So let’s do a quick review.

 

Wealth is created when an enterprise produces excess capital from a new product or process.  Distilled into its most basic parts, there are two ingredients for wealth creation:   financial and intellectual capital.   When combined correctly, they should produce excess capital—which is wealth.

 

Let’s exclude mineral wealth from the discussion.  That’s a story focused on mineral rights and control.  Though financial and intellectual capital is required to extract it, the wealth could be accessed by many players.  The intellectual property (extraction knowledge) can be purchased from extraction companies (so it’s a commodity—though some service providers are probably more clever than others).

 

In theory, the formula for wealth creation is simple.  An innovator thinks and applies a new approach to an old problem or product (or creates a new product category that addresses an unmet need).  Once finished, the innovator can extract a price premium for the effort.  The formula is (Financial Capital (+ interest)) + (old process/product + enhancements + innovators wages) = Market Price.  When the market price exceeds input costs, wealth is created.  The wealth can be reinvested in the business or spent by the innovator.  Wealth expands the local community’s tax base.

 

Turning back to global smart city plans, why don’t more plans involve the community’s wealth creators? Regardless of the reason, success of plans that lack participation from this group is a coincidence.  If economic development is really a goal, it makes sense to include and cater to the needs of the wealth creators. 

 

I challenge readers to ensure that smart community development efforts address the needs of local wealth creators.  Moreover, don’t equate “knowledge work” with “innovation”.  Many written plans associate knowledge work with sustainable business.  They are not the same.  Some knowledge work is innovative, but many knowledge workers provide a commodity service as individual contributors.  They don’t need expensive office space in which to work.  If you’re not sure whether a business service is innovative and can provide sustainable competitive advantage, look it up on www.crowdsource.com .  Knowledge work is global.  On the other hand, many individual contributor knowledge workers could benefit from face to face serendipitous encounters with other knowledge workers—this is a case for shared office space.  Think before you build.

764 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: sustainable_events, innovation, ict, smart_grid, smart_building, sustainability, urban_planning, smart_city, matt_laherty, smart_load, cisco_energywise, renewables, smart_connected_communities

NuledsLED-closeup1-29-12.jpg

 

LED lighting is the next frontier for IT user services.  IT is uniquely suited to establish and support the tools necessary to support a rich set of dynamic user profiles and policies.  LEDs make it possible for building users to set light level, color, and intensity and conservation policies based on their needs.  Though most office space today has white light, colored LEDs make it possible to create pathways that guide visitors to their meetings and first responders to emergency event locations.  Colored lights coupled to fast response controllers also make it possible to create an immersive light experience.  Other light services include room “mood settings”.  Imagine that the conference room reserved for your next meeting was set to your preferred light intensity, color and tone the moment you enter.  Other services could include surround light—this application uses color and intensity to create an experience like surround sound but using light.  Ambx.com has solutions like this today.

 

With the advent of new high power-low energy consuming LED light fixtures combined with PoE enhancements on Ethernet access switches, it’s now possible to build commercial lighting systems with an IP/Ethernet/PoE infrastructure.  Though we’re starting to experiment in the lab, the technology is still young.  But it’s obvious to us that it will be disruptive.  Back of the envelope calculations suggest that PoE is a cost effective way to deploy LED lighting.

 

Regardless of the topology (PoE or Wireless+AC mains), user defined lighting applications built on an IP based LED lighting system, will transform building lighting practices.  Whether lighting is installed or retrofitted to LED in a traditional manner, IT will be involved to configure and maintain light services—after all, as a building user, I expect to set my light preferences via my iPhone.

 

LEDs Save Energy

According to the US DOE and building industry experts, lighting is the single largest electricity consumer in commercial buildings (40%).  Over the past several years, building equipment vendors have responded with an explosion in the number and type of LED lights manufactured and deployed.  Not only do LEDs use less energy per volume of emitted light, but they are also ideally suited for active power management solutions that shape consumption to meet user’s dynamic requirements.

 

Customers Spend Billions of Dollars a Year on Upgrades

During a talk about lighting at a Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference, Philips Lighting N.Am. Chairman, Kaj de Daas, stated that the overall size of the global lighting market is $75 billion year.  The U.S. accounts for 20 percent of the total. http://seekingalpha.com/article/101408-the-global-lighting-market-by-the-numbers-courtesy-of-philips

 

Per a report by Pike Research, the lighting controls market will double in size to $2.6 Billion/year by 2016. http://www.pikeresearch.com/newsroom/intelligent-lighting-controls-market-will-double-in-size-to-2-6-billion-by-2016  and the US fixture market is $17.5B/year.   http://www.freedoniagroup.com/Lighting-Fixtures.html

 

 

PoE LED fixtures in the Innervated Building Lab

 

Luis Suau, Don Schriner and I were in San Jose last week with Chris and Lisa Issacson of  NuLEDs to install several LED fixtures in our EnergyWise office demonstration platform.  Installation of the lights was the fastest integration ever performed in the lab.  Luis spent 5 minutes positioning a 6” square template on the ceiling of the office, tracing the outline, and then cutting the sheet rock with a utility knife.  Then he pressed in the self securing arms of the fixture and slid them into place.  Standing on a ladder, he inserted a Cat5 cable.  Within another minute he activated power on the switch port.  And we had light—with 16 million colors!

 

Before closing, in addition to the people already mentioned, I need to give a shout out to a handful of folks who have been helping the innervated building team behind the scenes:  Roger Karam, Bill McGowan, Ray Rapuano, John Parello and Peter Gits.

 

Nuleds_light_setup.png

672 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: smart_building, energy_efficiency, urban_planning, matt_laherty, cisco_energywise, smart_connected_communities, connected_realestate, cisco_cre, led, nuleds, ambx

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