It sure seems like a lot of the green rhetoric we hear these days is barking up the wrong tree. Nobody should be against ways to improve and preserve the environment, but so many of the proposals we hear about are based more on sounds bites than on substance. We don’t know the cost of oil in five years, we don’t know which renewable power generation will emerge, and we surely don’t know if or when man-made carbon emissions are going to make islands start disappearing.

Here’s what I do know: The U.S. Department of Energy has committed to funnel $80 billion of funding into making the Federal Government more energy efficient. President Obama issued Executive Order 13514 requiring U.S. Government procurements to include sustainability plans. The number one area invested in by venture capitalists over the past 12 months? You guessed it – energy EFFICIENCY. And, according to the brains at Forrester Research, Sustainability stands to be a $355 billion business.

However, accounting for all of that energy, water, and waste can be more complex than figuring out how to solve the world’s financial dilemma. Think about your own house. Could you guess your energy bill for this month within a dollar? Ten dollars? Imagine trying to figure out energy, water, and waste on THREE levels – direct production, indirect production, and consumption – across whole companies or nations. Generating and managing all of that data is a serious challenge.

The way I see it, we need four technologies working together to solve the problem of Sustainability Management. First of all, I don’t care how many people or systems you throw at the problem, there’s no way to track energy, water, and waste on a large scale without wireless sensing. We’ve got to be able to automatically link to buildings, energy grids, recycling trucks – pretty much anything that affects one of the three areas of Sustainability Management. No more than 40% of all of that data can come from software systems the way we use them today.

Savi Technology is barking up the right tree by reaching toward its vision of creating a Network of Things, and I think this wirelessly connected state can achieve another 20-25% of the data we need for sustainability. Next is Power Tagging – in which Lockheed Martin is investing in order to make sensor networks both more affordable and smarter by remotely monitoring which plugs are used, how much power they consume and transmit that info back over existing power lines to be collected at substations. And when you combine those two technologies with Adaptive Artificial Intelligence, we’ll be able to estimate the carbon intensity of activities that are too tough to measure now. Estimating the unmeasurable can get us perhaps another 10-15% of the picture.

If we combine the right technologies the process of finding and eliminating wasteful consumption and verifying that consumption for regulatory purposes seems scientifically to be about 70-80?% achievable using a bottoms-up approach. Not good enough for an aircraft engineer, but much, MUCH better than the 30 to 40% solutions that companies are using right now. Combine that with Atmospheric CO2 Monitoring – which can find carbon emissions directly at their source as they happen – and we can not only manage the Sustainability of governments and companies fairly effectively, but we can even double check how well we’re doing from space.

All of these technologies exist now – and Savi is right in the middle. It makes financial and scientific sense for us to start using the technology we have for Sustainability Management space right now.

Tags: Environment, RFID, Sustainability, wireless tracking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Savi Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.