In part 2 of his “Living on the Edge” series, John Krzesicki continues his discussion about edge computing with Carrie Goetz. In this podcast they delve deeper into smart cities/communities.
Transcript
Welcome to the PSR PowerTALK podcast produced by Power Systems Research.
00:05 John Krzesicki
My name is John Krzesicki.
Today it’s my pleasure to host this Power Systems’ “Living on the Edge” series smart city discussion. The show where we have conversations with industry experts on their insights into the mobility’s future and impact on cities and industries.
As a Business Development Manager with Power Systems Research, I have an opportunity to talk with our clients and how they’re preparing for the future. Our clients and their suppliers are going through a significant paradigm shift as they move entirely through paperless systems to the digital world.
As we all know, today’s designs incorporate technology, software to be more innovative, more competitive and more effective. This includes designing and manufacturing for vehicles, trucks, agricultural equipment and power generators, and many, many more.
Not only is our client delivering product, but they’re also delivering equipment that can generate a large amount of data.
My initial question to my clients are: where does the data go, who owns it, and how much data? These are all great questions, but that will be for another podcast.
Today it’s my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Carrie Goetz. Carrie is the founder of StrategITcom where she’s an IT advisor to companies who are looking to manage their data via a data center or edge data center solution.
Just recently Carrie was voted as one of the top most influential women in the technology world. Welcome Carrie.
01:34 Carrie Goetz
Thank you for having me.
01:35 John Krzesicki
So, to start out, as I mentioned earlier, I’d like to talk a little bit about the difference between an urban city and a rural city and, and now really an urban smart city versus and a rural smart community and what might be the differences between them for their communities for infrastructure? And to support the data centers in the Internet of Things coming into that community.
01:59 Carrie Goetz
There’s a couple big differences. If we think from a city perspective, in a lot of cities the power exists, the footprint exists for that to go. In rural areas it takes a little bit more planning. You have to figure out what your communications are going to be, is that going to be terrestrial? Is it going to be extra-terrestrial? Is it going to be fiber?
I think from a power perspective there’s also a huge difference in the rural communities because this is really an opportunity to shine for sustainability and renewables. It’s a lot easier to do that in a very small footprint, sitting out in a rural area, than it is trying to come up with land in the middle of a city for solar or for wind. And in a lot of the rural areas we have that adjacent land or we have that ability. Or you can put solar on the roof because it’s a smaller footprint. We’re not, we’re not running 25 megawatts for some of these rural centers, you know. They might be a compute device, they might be a rack or two, or there might even be a few racks sitting under a cell tower.
I think the other difference, from a rural perspective, is that a lot of those edge type environments are going to be closely coupled with those cell towers. And we know that 5G does not transmit as far as 4G, so we’re going to have additional tower locations for these guys to sit.
And I think some of the applications are different too. You know, we do and monitor different things in a city than we do in a rural area. So in a rural area we might be more focused on rural healthcare, precision agriculture. Certainly autonomous vehicles, apply in both worlds because, you know, we need a car to drive itself after it leaves the city limits and out in the middle of nowhere; but, and I think you know, there’s differences in the way that the drones are regulated and what those do from a crop perspective. So I think there’s some difference there, but I would say, from a power perspective, the edge is really some low hanging fruit for resiliency and for sustainability, for sure.
03:56 John Krzesicki
OK.
So what I’d like to do is, you know, kind of dive a little bit deeper into uh, into the rural community and just kind of touch on a few industries that we feel that Internet of Things and technology will definitely support, and what the benefits might look like. So let’s start out with municipalities, you know. What is the city and how do they benefit from this technology?
04:20 Carrie Goetz
So the, the biggest thing is intelligence. The more, the more you know the better off you can do.
So, for instance, if we put sensors in bus stops and we look at thermal patterns, we know how many people are at that bus stop, what time of day they’re there. We know whether there’s, you know, enough to sustain a bus having that stop three or four times versus otherwise.
We can also do things like public safety. We can listen for events like gunshots or things like that. We can tie it, tie it into fire systems.
We can even do smart metering for water and power and then, on top of that, we can add sensors to homeowners so they can do leak monitoring. If, if a leak is spotted in somebody’s house it can automatically notify the homeowner and the municipalities so they can go cut the water off and, you know, save that usage that would have been wasted. So, I think there’s, there’s a lot really from that perspective.
But then there’s also the ability to turn up Wi-Fi all over the city; so people have Wi-Fi services and some of those things.
Which, we know the digital divide is certainly worse now after COVID than it was before COVID. Because a lot of people lost their jobs and their ability to pay for cell plans, and some of those things that got them connectivity.
So citywide Wi-Fi really is an enabler for everybody to be able to use that wireless technology and be connected in all different parts of the city and the community.
So you know, when you ask people, “what did you do for your smart city?” So people, that’s the first thing they say. “Well, we turned up Wi-Fi everywhere.” But once that connectivity is there, what you can do, what you can monitor, which you can maintain goes a lot farther.
Even smart light, lighting. So, from an LED perspective, they’ve shown that cities that turn up smart lighting with LED save about 61% on their overall electric bill just on lighting alone; which is a pretty phenomenal figure.
So, I think, and then, of course, you know the more you have out there, the more people are going to want. So, you know, we want to know that the lights turn on when there’s traffic on the street or moving on the street, but we save the lighting when it’s not, and those kind of things.
06:24 John Krzesicki
OK, no, those are very good points.
So, so do you, definitely sensoring autonomous is, uh, definitely, you know, going to be an impact to the municipalities and how they, you know, prepare for that.
In the rural community you, you’ve got a hospital system or a healthcare system. What are some of the benefits for, for hospitals?
06:44 Carrie Goetz
Well I think it’s a great equalizer, there’s, it’s, it’s really difficult to get some of the medical specialties into rural health care and being able to have that connectivity where you can attach to other health systems or other folks is a good part. But on the opposite side of that, from the patient side, being able to have health care when you’re in the middle of Montana, in the middle of nowhere.
There’s devices now that’ll do an EKG on your phone, and you can transmit that to your doctor and figure out if you’re healthy or not. And I think we’re going to see a lot more consumer-based healthcare driven out to those rural areas to be able to sustain that health care.
You know, think of Montana in the middle of winter. It’s hard to get a doctor out there. It’s hard to get through a doctor, right? So, that definitely is part of it.
Teleradiology telemedicine is a big part, you know, we’ve all had the doc-in-the-box experience, I think, through COVID and trying to get health care. Whether that’s rural or in a city, I think that’s just going to continue to grow; but, from a rural perspective, for some of this healthcare, I think it’s just amazing to be able to bring in a specialist without having to bring them in on site. And so, some of these hospitals that have really struggled, because they haven’t had some of that quality and level of care, now have that as an option.
08:00 John Krzesicki
Well, good points, very good points.
You know, and also, when you talk about a rural community, the uh, it’s usually found, you know, surrounded by some other industry. In most cases it’s surrounded by farms or ag. Can we talk about, a little bit about how this benefits the farmer in that community?
08:18 Carrie Goetz
Yes, so precision agriculture is absolutely a huge industry and I think people realize it. But there are drones that will fly over your field and based on the color of green it knows where to zap and kill a weed as opposed to whatever your crop is. There are sensors that go in the soil that will measure all of the nutrients that you need in the soil. And then with an AI engine that’s run over the top, they’ll tell you “Well, if you water today, it’s going to deplete your, your nitrates”, for instance, and so you want to keep those in the soil; so, maybe you water tomorrow. Maybe you just water the, the west side of your field and not the east side of your field. Because all of these sensors can say where things are going and, and really look at the quality of what’s going in there.
Same thing if it’s, you know, not a crop related one; but, for instance, maybe we’re talking cattle or some type of live animal. We can track where they go. We can see what their food stores are. We can see how much they weigh. We can look at their movements. All of those things are really important decision making things for a farmer. And then when you throw the AI engines, like I said, over the top. It really becomes more of an intelligent farming experience than the way we used to do farming; which is knowledge passed down from one generation to the next and really trying to sort out what happens if there’s massive rain, for instance, or not enough rain, and so we can make better decisions about that. And that gets better yields.
09:45 John Krzesicki
Sure, sure.
So, you know, let’s, let’s flip to another industry, especially in a rural area. There typically is always, there, there is a K through 12 or even, you know, maybe a small college or community college located in that rural area. Tell us a little bit about what you know; what, what education is doing and how can, you know, this benefit the education and environment.
10:07 Carrie Goetz
Well, you know, in a lot of those rural environments they have the same problem in education that you have in health care. It’s hard to get teachers there. It’s hard to get that classroom experience. And we certainly learned this during COVID when a lot of those rural areas, you know, they had no connectivity or they had very little connectivity. And I think in the rural area, this is a, an area that all of that connectivity from a digital divide perspective certainly helps.
But it also means that we can bring in really cool science experiments. We can bring in a lot more STEM education. We can bring in a lot of these specialties, at a much younger age, for the K through 12.
And even moving on to college, it allows some of these rural community colleges to participate in some of the bigger experiments with quantum computing, or physics, or things that aren’t available from a cost perspective to that rural community, then certainly in some of the historically underserved colleges and universities.
This really brings them into that level playing field; so they can be adopted by a larger college. Or they can even pull some of those universities together so the students have the larger experiments without having to foot the bill to bring all of that on campus; which is difficult, you know, it’s, it’s very competitive, from a grant perspective, and anytime that one can piggyback off another one, I think that’s just really a great example of where technology can bring it.
11:30 John Krzesicki
OK. Again all great points and, you know, good insight.
So, always, see, you know, your community can have, you know, some types of businesses and, you know, supporting that community and how do those businesses benefit from, you know, the edge or having connectivity, you know, in supporting that community.
11:49 Carrie Goetz
Well, this is where, I think, there’s really opportunity to shine, both rural and in the city itself. Because, you know, there’s the, the data centers and the co-lo data centers are very pocketed, and they’re in certain communities around the US, but, kind of, nowhere else. And cloud repatriation people bringing their loads back out of the cloud; because our cloud bill has gotten too high, is a big deal.
But how do you bring that back if you don’t know… if you don’t have a co-lo that’s located on site, or if your data center is really, really out of date, or you don’t have a data center because you did a cloud first mentality when you started your business? So, this is a way to bring small loads back and do a lot of that processing that never needs to hit the cloud back on site.
So, for instance, take retail. If I go shop at a grocery store and I go to pay the bill with a credit card, the credit card company could care less what all I bought. They want to know that the transaction happened, the date and time of the transaction, and how much it was. The local grocer needs to know the minutiae of what I bought so they can re-order for inventory. And if that rolls up to a larger grocery store chain, they just need to know the totals. They don’t need to know that I bought it. They just need to know that 22 things of mayo went out of this store, and that’s what they need from logistics perspective, to send that amount back.
And so being able to have these communications and this intelligence and process things where they need to be processed is huge; because while we have made great strides in bandwidth is in this country, bandwidth is not everywhere that it needs to be. And so, whatever we can process locally and keep local, I think, really is an opportunity there; from a sustainability standpoint, from where is my data, from a resiliency standpoint. All of those things really are improved by the edge. And so, for commercial enterprises, whether it’s industry 4.0 sitting out in the middle of nowhere or in the middle of a city, I think all of these commercial enterprises really stand to benefit just from the intelligence that comes in and being able to process that locally; so, the intelligence that they’re trying to gather doesn’t also gather a really large cloud bill.
14:02 John Krzesicki
So let me just, I’m going to pick a particular industry within the business industry and it definitely affects both the rule and the, and definitely the urban landscape. And I’m, the business is going to be, you know, your warehouse that’s shipping and receiving product and your fleet company. What is your vision of fleet management and how does that look like, in, just at a high level?
14:27 Carrie Goetz
Well, I think we have to know where our trucks go; but the biggest thing is we, or whatever it’s doing the delivery, whether it’s a drone or an autonomous vehicle or whatever, we have to know where all of these things go.
But we also have to be smarter about how they get there. And I think there are some companies that have done a really, really great job, logistically, being able to get things there in the same day or within a couple days. And, of course, that obviously depends on your ZIP code and, and traffic getting there; but I think being able to pull that logistics in, and that intelligence behind that logistics, allows us to be much smarter about how we move and how we maneuver.
Because people don’t all place orders at 8:00 o’clock in the morning, right? They place orders all throughout the day. And so if you’re doing just-in-time delivery or something like that, you have to figure out how you’re going to get all of that.
And I think this is very much an evolving industry. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to where we’re going to be. But I certainly see that as, as one that is definitely up and coming.
15:28 John Krzesicki
OK. OK. Great, again, great, great insight.
So, so Carrie, uh, this is going to kind of conclude our conversation on our podcast today. I do appreciate your time.
Do you have anything else you’d like to share or anything you want to touch on?
15:43 Carrie Goetz
Yeah, I think, from an edge perspective, both power and how you monetize the edge is still kind of evolving. We’ve been talking about edge for a long time and people just aren’t seeing it; but it’s happening. It’s just, you know, the difference is somebody might need a couple rack units at the edge as opposed to a co-lo where somebody needs a 10,000 square foot data hall. And so, I think we’re just sort of at the infancy in this industry and what it can do. But I certainly believe that it’s a growing industry, and even Gartner says that 75% of all data is going to be processed at the edge by 2025. And if you get out a calendar that’s not too far off.
16:23 John Krzesicki
We do plan on having other series that we’ll talk about more depth, for example fleet management and where we see it going in other industries, like manufacturing 4.0, as we continue to publish and broadcast our podcast.
Thanks again, Carrie. Thanks again for your time and for your insight. And we look forward to future broadcasting the Power Systems’ “Living on the Edge” series.
Have a wonderful day.
16:48
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