Smarter Planet Part 2

About four weeks I talked about how IBM wants to redesign cities to make them much more practical for consumption of energy.  This week I am going to discuss some of the other ideas that IBM is actively trying to implement to help make energy more efficient and sustainable.  One of the coolest things I saw was a smart meter that allowed you to actively tack your energy usage and provide two feedback (between the company and you and the plug to the meter).  Having a running count would allow you to change your daily usage and see tangible results.  Something else that I found interesting was the way in which they plan to use analytics to create more efficient oil and natural gas fields.  This may seem trivial, but to put this into perspective, PA oil wells in the early 1900s were not properly tapped and resulted in the loss of millions of barrels of oil.  This could very well be the case now when we look back to our time today.  More efficient harvesting of oil and natural gas could be something to help us declare initial energy independence and have us ultimately find another solution.  The one last thing that piqued my interest was their thoughts on sustainability.  They essentially polled a bunch of different executives to see why they wanted sustainability.  The most prevalent answer with over 60% of the vote was that it helps separate us from our competitors.  This leads me to believe that this will be a market solution, as more and more businesses become sustainable to match their competitors.   Those who don’t will have a big black mark for many consumers who become more and more conscious of what impacts their buying habits are.  IBM’s smart solutions lead me to believe that we can fix most of our problems with efficiency and logic as an alternative to simply trying to do many of these things cold turkey.