Decentralizing Energy Distribution In a Green-Technology Era

Opportunities for green IT jobs should rise as the use of alternative energy sources decentralize the way electricity is distributed. Here's what Merrill Lynch cleantech analyst Steven Milunovich said this past week about the green economy:

Energy markets today are mostly centralized. While solar and wind farms may continue this trend ... decentralized energy generation and monitoring through solar panels, distributed intelligence and microgrids may prove the wave of the future. Cleantech therefore may evolve toward a horizontal, distributed industry.

Obviously, IT savvy will be needed to add intelligence to these microgrids and horizontal distribution systems.

How Dumb is the Smart Grid?

There's been much talk of the smart grid, but compared with the Internet, the electricity network is pretty dumb.

It's a point lamented by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in remarks he made last week at a Natural Resources Defense Council event in New York. Schmidt said:

Now, I’m a computer scientists; I think about the Internet. I look at the electric grid and I say, why is the electric grid the same as it was in the 1960s? Because nobody cared. Nobody tried to build the grid that was flexible, scalable, decentralized, and had decentralized control to get on and off.

Here’s an example, you guys have all of the batteries sitting in your cars? What are they doing in your garage? Why can they not add to peak load, when peak load is needed? The utilities say that the highest cost of being a utility is not average load, but peak load, which is in the afternoons. Right, plug your car in, draw the battery down, charge it up at night, straight forward. Seems obvious right? You can’t do it because the computerization of the Internet, and so forth. seems obvious, right? The grid is not organized that way.

(Video of Eric Schmidt at the Natural Resources Defense
Council event , 33 minutes.)

Tom Friedman, in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, envisions a smart grid—or energy Internet, as he calls it—drawing electricity from car batteries while parked during peak periods, leaving enough power to get the driver home at night. To do that will require a lot of smart computing power. And, that means a lot of IT savvy professionals will be needed to make the electric grid as smart as the Internet. That should only help keep IT employment levels well above the rest of the workforce.

But most of the new green jobs won't be held by IT professionals. In its recently published Green Energy 2030 proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, Google estimates its plan could create 9 million net new jobs in the electrical efficiency and renewable energy sectors alone by 2030.


Source: Google
(Click on graphic to enlarge)

Job Estimates


Source: Google
(Click on graphic to enlarge)

IBM Tapped to Enhance AEP's Smart Grid

Further proof of the key role IT will play in driving efficient use of energy came Tuesday when the Columbus, Ohio-based electric utility picked IBM to integrate its suite of customer programs to create a new energy delivery system.

According to an AEP release:

IBM will provide AEP with support services across the program, including program management, business process design, systems planning and systeminterfaces. The agreement also leverages IBM's unique capabilities inresearch, software and IT infrastructure, enabling AEP to take advantage of IBM's global investments in developing intelligent utility network solutions.

AEP's initiative, known as gridSmart, focuses on four projects:

• A pilot of advanced metering, distribution grid management, and energy efficiency technologies in South Bend, Ind., which has begun.

•Establishment of up to three model city demonstrations of some 100,000 customers each, where AEP can validate and refine its gridSMART vision.

•Completion of a five-year application portfolio roadmap that will outline how technology will transform AEP's future electricity distribution business.

•Mobilization of several innovative customer service and energyconservation initiatives, including new online energy management tools.

Trade Group Advises Obama on Advancing the Smart Grid

The Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition issued on Tuesday policy recommendations to President-elect Barack Obama and the incoming Congress that the association contends will stimulate the economy, enhance infrastructure and create green jobs.

One of the goals of the trade association of smart-grid technology providers, if realized, could create green jobs for IT professionals.

Provide electricity customers with new information, technologies and tools to control their electricity bills and increase their energy efficiency practices With electricity prices rising and consumer budgets being stretched, it is essential to provide customers with new energy saving tools, including new pricing structures and rates, as well as better information and feedback about how they use electricity. This will give them new ability to lower their electricity bills.

What's needed is not just more information and tools to let consumers make smart decisions on energy use, but technology to automate the entire process, without regular human intervention, as outlined in Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: an energy Internet.

Identifying Occupations to Benefit from Green Investments

A recent report, Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy, from the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute, identifies nearly 60 occupations that should benefit from green investments.

(Click on chart to view larger version.)

Q: Why Isn't Electricity Like Pizza?

A: Because pizza isn't delivered when no one is home.
IBM puts out this amusing, minute-45-second video that explains the smart grid.

Big Pay Cut for Some Going Green

The press is buzzing with President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed stimulus package to create 2.5 million jobs over two years. Among the jobs most often mentioned is the insulation installer, who’ll help make homes and other buildings more energy efficient. At the same time, we're inundated with stories of the potential bankruptcy of one or more of the Big 3 automakers that could results in tens of thousands of assembly workers losing their jobs.

How much pay would the average autoworker lose if he or she became an insulation installer? A lot. The insulation installer earns about 75% of what an autoworker makes.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, based on May 2007 figures, the mean salary of an assembler at a motor-vehicle manufacturer was $20.28 an hour or $42,190 a year. For an insulation installer: $15.04 an hour or $31,280 annually. But the gap between the two occupations is likely greater, considering that the autoworkers whose jobs are threatened work in unionized shops, where the salaries are about $28 an hour, according to an analysis conducted by Jonathan Cohn, published on The New Republic's website.

Of course, most of these new installers won’t be former autoworkers. Still, what these numbers show is that some green occupations will not offer salaries anywhere near as high of those paid by old-line manufacturers. But that’s not news, is it? And, the government projects growth in insulation installation jobs by 2016 but not those on America's assembly lines.

Here's what the BLS said about employment growth for insulation workers in the 2008-2009 edition of its Occupation Outlook Handbook, published before the need for a new stimulus package was imagined:

Employment of insulation workers is expected to increase 8 percent during the 2006-16 decade, about as fast as the average for all occupations. Demand for insulation workers will be spurred by the continuing need for energy efficient buildings and power plant construction, both of which will generate work in existing structures and new construction.

BLS wasn't optimistic about assembly line workers (it didn't provide specific numbers on autoworkers):

Employment of assemblers and fabricators is expected to decline slowly by 4% between 2006 and 2016. Within the manufacturing sector, employment of assemblers and fabricators will be determined largely by the growth or decline in the production of certain manufactured goods.

Just Turn 'Em Off

Nearly three of 10 servers in a typical data center aren't in active production, but they still consume electricity.
That figure comes from Uptime Institute founder and executive director Kenneth Brill.

"They need to be turned off, removed from the racks and disposed of. Unfortunately, efficiency is not cool. Unless senior executives demand the ability to uninstall hardware, the tendency will be to leave the old stuff installed."

When I spoke with Brill earlier this year, he encouraged that other devices be turned off when not used, such as desktop PCs when workers go home at night.

"There are 160 work hours in a month, but in actual hours, there are almost three times that, 24 hours times 30. By turning equipment off when it's not needed, you can reduce power consumption by that enormous ratio.

"We need to become more energy-conscious, and we can do it either for a green reason or for profitability. A single server costing around $2,500 consumes almost $750 in electricity per year. ... That's a lot of money to have something running when it's not doing anything."

The Default Work Environment: Telecommuting

Most business managers don't like to supervise telecommuters. They should get over it for the sake of the environment.

One way to reduce the carbon footprint of business as well as corporate expenses is to get as many workers as possible to telecommute. Just look at Sun Microsystems, where more than half of its 19,000 employees telecommute at least part time as part of its Open Work program. Here's what I wrote in my CIO Insight Editor's Note a few months back:

Having fewer employees working in offices provides real savings to employers. Sun didn’t have to find office space for 7,215 workers in 2006 because of its telecommuting program, saving the company nearly $68 million that year.

Companies that promote telecommuting aid the environment, too. Sun reckons its telecommuting and related programs eliminate nearly 30,000 metric tons of green house gas emissions a year—the equivalent of permanently removing 6,700 cars from the road each year.

Businesses must do more to lessen global warming, so companies should make telecommuting the default work environment, when feasible, and not the exception.

And, don't you think telecommuting will make workers happy?

Global Warming and IT Jobs: A Lose-Win Proposition

Though the deteriorating climate spells bad news for earth, and for all of us, global warming could benefit IT professionals looking for work in the not-too-distant future. That's because government and business will greatly step up the pace of creating systems and networks to more efficiently manage the distribution and use of energy.

It's what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman describes as the energy Internet in his current bestseller Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution And How it Can Renew America. And, it will be built. Mother Nature won't give us any choice but to act.

“‘Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.’” Friedman quotes EcoTech International CEO Rob Watson. “And because of that, says Rob, you cannot spin Mother Nature. You cannot bribe Mother Nature. You cannot sweet talk her and you cannot ignore her. She’s going to do with the climate whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. And Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats a thousand.”

With such a batting average, IT pros are set to join Team Mother Nature. But they can't rely just on their tech skills. They must become domain experts. And that domain is the environment.

“The professionals who can effectively understand two or three—or sometimes 10—different core technologies and put them together in an integrated view are going to be the winners in this new marketplace,” Michael Valocchi, global leader for energy and utilities at IBM Global Business Services, recently told me.

It's happening already. A Minnesota company just posted the following job: Senior Developer/Architect to create a new suite of smart grid applications on a Web 2.0 platform. Just check the job boards, and you'll see similar postings.