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Summit Plugs the Power of Technology in Reaching Peak Energy Efficiency
A packed room of executives, entrepreneurs and energy aficionados gathered Wednesday to talk about one part of the U.S. economy that isn’t just flourishing, but booming: energy efficiency.
A lineup of speakers from companies such as Google, Intel and Cisco talked about strategies to maximize efficiency in the two-day Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency that will finish Thursday. The event was hosted by UCSB’s Institute for Energy Efficiency.
One of the speakers Wednesday afternoon was Rod Tucker, a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who talked about ways to consume less energy while moving data between network devices.
“Transport of data on the Internet isn’t free and it does come at a cost,” he said.
Tucker showed a graph that illustrated that more carbon actually would be produced by transmitting 1,000 gigabytes of information through the Internet than by physically placing the hard drives on an airplane traveling 3,000 miles.
Another speaker seen at Wednesday’s summit was Cisco Systems’ Gary Epps, who works as a distinguished engineer for the company. Epps was instrumental in designing the company’s popular router, and is actively involved in designing what he called “the plumbing of the Internet.”
Making that plumbing more energy efficient and designing software to make it smarter is key. Epps said he has a TiVo at home, which, by design, has a disk drive that spins at all times, whether he’s watching it or not. Designing software to turn parts off when not in use will separate new technology from its older counterparts, he said.
“That kind of revelation is what this industry is all about,” he said.
Demand for that energy is sure to grow exponentially in the future. According to data from Epps, more than half a zettabyte of data will cross the global network in 2012, most of it in the form of video.
One zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terrabytes, he explained, a “staggering” amount of data. “That’s the biggest number I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.
But all of that data has tremendous implications to productivity, he said, including the ability to teleconference, which has cut costs for Cisco on domestic travel by 75 percent.
Another speaker, Igor Mezic, who leads the building and design solutions group at the institute, talked about how buildings consume nearly 70 percent of electricity in the United States and pump out nearly half of the country’s carbon emissions.
Utilizing unused space on top of industrial buildings instead of land to hold solar panels was a highpoint of a discussion by Jack Sahl, director of environment and resource sustainability at Southern California Edison.
The lineup of speakers is even more admirable considering that the Institute for Energy Efficiency began only in January of last year.
The institute works to leverage talent from multiple departments at the university, including engineering and economics, as well as faculty who have experience with public policy and entrepreneurship, and has already gained national attention. In April, the program was awarded a $19 million grant as a part of President Obama’s stimulus package. The money will go toward employing more than 40 researchers, a director and an assistant, and supplement faculty already at the institute and its partner institutions over a period of five years.
It classifies itself as an “interdisciplinary research institute,” and draws from a pool of 75 faculty.
“We’re bringing together all of these multidisciplinary voices,” said Daniel Colbert, the program’s executive director. The program has six groups that focus on improving efficiency in lighting, production and storage, buildings and design, computing, electronics and photonics, and economics and policy.
“We need these types of technologies environmentally, but they’re also incredibly good investments,” he said, adding that they pay off quickly by increased productivity.
The conference will continue Thursday. Those unable to attend the conference can check out a live Webcast from the summit’s Town Hall Meeting for a panel discussion on policy and technology, which will be broadcast live here at 11 a.m.
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Comments
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» on 05.20.09 @ 07:49 PM
Funny. All these fancy computers powered by electricity produced by powerplants burning coal.
Without coal and natural gas fired powerplants the internet would shut down.
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» on 05.21.09 @ 02:01 AM
The US talks and talks - imitating some planning of sorts. Meantime in the Middle East and Mainland China, the Canadians are signing contracts under our noses. ADVICE: Start looking for news on ‘Energy Daily’ e-news letters.
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» on 05.21.09 @ 06:52 AM
This is what we have forced our best and brightest to waste their time discussing? Energy efficiency? Surely the mental energy could be applied to solving some real problems. Like how to educate people about the true cause of Global warming, which is being temporarily closer to the sun. (Has happened three times before the industrial age)
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» on 05.21.09 @ 06:58 AM
All of the energy efficiency we can manage in The US will quickly be offset by cap and trade which merely forces manufacturers to pollute other more manufacturer-friendly countries who have some sense. Our loss. Then the influx of immigrants and increased population quickly offsets any gains made by energy conservation. The only answers are - produce more energy in the US, stop crippling clean coal and nuclear, natural gas and oil, stop wasting time dreaming that energy efficiency and alternate energy can keep up with constantly and rapidly increasing demand.
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» on 05.21.09 @ 09:12 AM
Dave, talk is cheap. We have polarized the energy discussion so badly that nothing will ever get done until people are literally dying in the streets. Nowhere in any of these discussions, which amount to scavenging what we already produce, is talk about new production. I agree 100% with SCE about utilizing the square miles of roof tops for solar PV, but this is augmentation to real production and will not help us during cloudy weather conditions. The coal and oil we burn today is simply mining solar power stored as hydrocarbons which took millions of years to produce and we are burning it at an ever increasing rate. If we do not exploit nuclear and geothermal as a steady state source of high energy output we will be in a world of hurt in about 50 years. Meanwhile we are burning our hydrocarbon stocks at stationary plants when it should be used exclusively for transportation. This isn’t that difficult to figure out, but politics and the new religion of global warming keep getting in the way. That will be the story until like I said people are dying.
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» on 05.21.09 @ 11:38 AM
Thank you for an inspiring news story.
Modern western society can easily conserve 25-50% of the energy we now use.
Incentivizing owners of homes and commercial buildings to reduce their consumption without diminishing our quality of life may help create new jobs and industries. It may also help reduce global warming.
Certainly, it’s a positive step for Dr. Bower and UCSB to host this valuable conference.
Hopefully, the first of many.
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