Transcript

Hello! My name is John Krzesicki. It’s my pleasure to host the Power Systems living on the edge series. The show is where we have conversations with industry experts on their insights into mobility’s future and impact on cities and industry. As a business development manager with PSR, I can talk with our clients about how they prepare for the future. Our clients and their suppliers are going through a significant paradigm shift as they move from an entirely Internal combustion engine to alternative power. As we all know, today’s designs incorporate technology and software to be more innovative, competitive, and efficient. Our clients are looking for cutting-edge alternative power to power their equipment. Today’s topic is Solar Cars.

Today’s guest speaker is Will Jones. Will is the project manager for the University of Michigan Solar Car Team. I met Will at the International Auto Show in Detroit last month and felt this would be a great opportunity to share an insight into the program. Welcome, Will!

William Jones

Doing well; how are you very excited to be here.

John Krzesicki

Can you provide an overview of the program?

William Jones

The program was founded in 1989. So there’s been 33 years of solar racing.

We’ve collectively built a total of 17 cars. We have nine national championships in seven world podium finishes over 33 years.

We want to raise $2.5 million to design, build and race these solar-powered vehicles.

John Krzesicki

You cannot be doing this yourself. How large is your team, and what is the mix of your support?

William Jones

The team is composed of about 100 multidisciplinary students. And we’re a team of entrepreneurs, engineers, leaders, and the future.

John Krzesicki

Can you give me a team breakdown?

William Jones

So the team is about 100 people of that, about 70 engineers, and then the remaining 30 are a combination of business people, logistics, and communications.

John Krzesicki

This sounds like an exciting program. Tell me a little about yourself, your background, and why you got involved in the program.

William Jones

I’m a fourth-year engineering mechanical engineering student.

At the University of Michigan, I’m from Okemos, MI. I raced solar cars in high school.

The newest car we’re working on now will be the 4th solar car built. I’m super passionate about engineering sustainability, and I also like to race.

We have a great team that helps us build the best product possible.

John Krzesicki

So is it 100% run by the students?

William Jones

Yeah, that’s correct. Entirely run by students. We have a faculty advisor, but he’s just there to ensure no one gets hurt and doesn’t make any decisions, from designing the car to planning logistics. It’s all students.

John Krzesicki

So if I’m a supplier and want to help be a part of the program, what are some of the benefits of being a supplier or sponsor to U of MI’s solar car team?

William Jones

Yeah, absolutely. I guess, first of all, you know we are the best and brightest engineers at the University of Michigan, and based on how we’ve performed in the past, where some of the best and brightest engineers in the world.

Recruiting is always a benefit. Having that inside access to the team. But you know, beyond that, we’re pushing the boundaries of electric vehicles. You know we have nine national championships, more than any other. We’re cutting-edge technology, and we’re a winning team.

Solar car team in the United States. We have seven world podium finishes.

When our car competes, thousands of people see it in person. Millions of people see it online. It’s a cool thing to be a part of. And not only that, of course, but the marketing is tax deductible through the university, which is always a benefit.

The World Solar Challenge draws media attention from around the globe, including past coverage from the New York Times, Discovery Channel, USA Today, Huffington Post, Reuters, Wired, Los Angeles Times, and many more

.John Krzesicki

Is there a big event racing event coming up? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

William Jones

Yeah, absolutely. So we compete annually in the World Solar Challenge, an international competition in Australia.

The best teams from around the world come to Australia and race 3000 kilometers across the Australian Outback, from Darwin to Adelaide, Northern Australia to Southern Australia.

So right now, we are deep in designing our newest vehicle and working on the fundraising and planning logistics. So come October 2023, we have one of the best solar cars and teams in the world, and we’re in Australia, ready to compete for the World Championship.

And then, I guess the car will be sent in early August. The team will arrive in Australia in early September. Then it’s more testing in Australia, getting used to the Australian climate, ensuring the car arrives safely, and practicing operations. You know when the team is racing and when it needs to be a well-organized machine.

John Krzesicki

Is there also a race across America? From New York to Los Angeles? Can you talk a little bit about the across America?

William Jones

So there is the American solar challenge, an event we have competed in for years or even years. So in the summer of 2024.

Michigan has participated every year since 1990, notching six top-3 finishes. In 2017, we finished 2nd, our best finish in team history, and in 2019, we finished 3rd. Last summer, we drove our 16th solar car 3000 miles from New York City to Los Angeles, accomplishing a never-before-done feat. We are using these experiences to fuel the design of a 2023 car that will compete again among the best in the world at WSC.

John Krzesicki

Tell me more about the challenges of being a part World Championship event. For example, the number of days, the type of terrain, the climate, etc.

William Jones

As they travel 3000 km through the Outback, teams encounter scorching temperatures, high winds, and Australian wildlife.

John Krzesicki

Can you tell me more about the vehicle and some of your team’s design challenges?

William Jones

Yeah, absolutely. So solar cars at the end of the day, but the game is pretty simple. We’re trying to optimize energy by collecting the most solar power possible. We’re trying to optimize energy and consume the least energy possible at a given speed.

So what that comes down to in terms of day-to-day challenges, of course, you know, first and foremost, we design a safe and reliable vehicle that isn’t safe or reliable. You know, we’re not going to be able to compete. But then beyond that, it’s pushing the limits of technology, trying to have the lightest vehicle with the best tires, lowest rolling resistance, and the best electronic systems, most efficient electronic systems were limited in terms of solar array area to 4 meters squared.

And we have to use silicon solar cells.

There’s a lot that goes into that, not only just sourcing and finding the best cells but also encapsulating them and putting them together to power our vehicle. And you know, every electronic.

Every element down the line, we’re trying to find or build. You know, the lightest and most efficient.

And it goes the same on the mechanical side of things, and our entire body is a carbon fiber tub. Most of our suspension combines carbon fiber and aluminum, always looking at pushing the boundaries and how we can make it lighter, stiffer, and easier to manufacture.

John Krzesicki

Boy, those are some of the conversations I have with my clients. The challenge of design and lighter materials and being efficient and looking for alternative power to power their equipment or technologies is a key part of that. So yeah, definitely familiar with some of your team’s challenges.

How can we signup as a sponsor?

William Jones

Yeah, yeah. Very open. And you know, lots of sponsors. We love the cash donations. But sometimes, the in-kind donations, whether carbon fiber time and a wind tunnel and sensors to test on the vehicle, work out great for us because those things help us become faster. And for sponsors, it can be a lot easier to donate products.

You know, just pure cash, and it’s a two-way relationship, and you know, ideally, we want to benefit from our sponsor and how our sponsor benefits from us. And we’re very flexible, and whatever you know makes sense for us and, what makes sense for the sponsor, how we can benefit from this relationship.

John Krzesicki

Once you are a sponsor, what is the communication process with your members?

William Jones

Sure. Of course, we have general monthly updates that we send out not only to our sponsors but also to our alums. So that’s something that depends on the relationship with the sponsor.

Outside of cash, you know, especially for in-kind will, certain relationships will be important during certain times of the year.

For example, sponsoring might be building the tooling for our carbon fiber composite parts. They might be meeting with them weekly or potentially even daily. And meeting once every two months at the start of the year, and talking about the plan and where we’re at. But then, as we get closer. Up until that day, trying to make sure everything on our side and their side is.

During the competition, there’ll be testing as we get closer and have a vehicle running on the road, and there’ll be frequent communication sharing of, you know, photos media.

Activating those relationships on both sides, and that, of course, when a lot of the value happens is when the car is on the road in front of eyes, especially during competition. You know, there are a lot of eyes on us.

John Krzesicki

Before the event, you’re doing a lot of showing off the vehicle and stuff like that. Is that a media video? Is that something the sponsor would have access to at least use internally within their company to show how they’re supporting U of MI? Is that also part of the sponsorship?

William Jones

Yes, for example, we work with Roush, and they help us with many of our composites. You know it is a great time to work with Roush and do our carbon fiber layups. We’re taking a lot of photos. We’ll take many photos and emphasize the benefit their relationship is giving both.

John Krzesicki

So I’m asking you a question here about who’s your, who’s your competition? Who’s what’s school? What program is out there that is your biggest competitor? Do you have one?

William Jones

Yeah, absolutely. So definitely the, I guess, Red Sox or whatever you want to say, arguably the best team in the world is Delft University from the Netherlands.

They started racing in 2001, and they won.

The University of Michigan is recognized worldwide among the solar community as one of the top teams yearly. When people think of American teams, it’s generally beat Michigan.

John Krzesicki

What is your target for collecting, you know, fundraising? Do you guys have a target you like to hit in terms of money?

William Jones

So this year, the goal is $750,000 in cash.

And then there’s an additional 1.5 million in-kind donations, whether carbon fiber machining, raw materials, or transportation to and from Australia.

And that number is up a little from past World Solar Challenge races, partly due to the supply chain inflation. Everything was a little bit more expensive. I think everyone’s saying that right now, but also because we’ve recognized there are some things that you know to be the best in the world and achieve that number one spot, we need to make some investments.

Spend a little bit more money in certain areas. Some of those this year is big. We’re trying to focus on whether we struggle with designing what we generally believe could have been the best car in the world, but the manufacturing, we have challenges, make mistakes, and ends up slowing the car down.

In 2019, we spent about 1/4 of $1,000,000 on the regulations that have changed, and we’re no longer able to use the gallium arsenide space-grade cells we used in the past. But now there’s a lot bigger focus on battery technology, and that’s seen many maturities come to the batteries in the past. And the technology too, and some areas have become less expensive, for example, solar cells.

Four or five years here, where?

There are quite a few startups in the field and research labs pushing energy density limits.

John Krzesicki

Where are you on target for fundraising?

William Jones

Sure. So right now, in terms of what we have in the bank.

We’re pretty shy in terms of what we have committed.

About $350,000 in cash short of that.

John Krzesicki

Right.

William Jones

$750,000 goal.

In-kind can be a little bit harder to quantify, but we are certainly still looking for partners and just about every manufacturing aspect.

John Krzesicki

That’s good to know.

Will, you are part of an exciting program at U of MI. You have certainly shared a lot of information. To donate to the program, please check out the um solar website for additional information on how to be a part of this program.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your time, and I look forward to learning more about the U of MI solar car team and the progress as you get closer to the Solar World Championship finish line.

The way we deliver products from point A to point B is changing. This transformation is creating new partnerships, with implications affecting more than just the transportation industry.

Our team at Power Systems Research provides market intelligence to companies working in and around transportation and mobility functions.

Ford Motor Company, Argo AI, and Walmart are working together to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Miami, Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C. — Walmart’s first multi-city autonomous delivery collaboration in the U.S. The last-mile delivery service will use Ford self-driving test vehicles equipped with the Argo AI Self-Driving System to deliver Walmart orders.

The collaboration brings together a self-driving technology provider with an automotive manufacturer able to integrate that technology with vehicles at scale, plus the world’s largest retailer.

This combination builds on Walmart’s leadership in adopting emerging technologies to meet growing consumer expectations and enhance the last-mile delivery process. The multi-city service will enable Walmart customers to place groceries and other popular items online for autonomous door-to-door delivery directly to customers’ homes.

The commercial service will be available to Walmart customers within defined service areas of the three markets. It will expand over time, with initial integration testing slated to begin later this year. As consumer expectations continue to shift to next-day or same-day delivery — especially in the urban core with a higher concentration of deliveries — this collaboration will drive key learnings in how autonomous technology can enhance customer experiences while optimizing logistics and operations.

In addition to testing self-driving technology in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Palo Alto, Calif., Argo and Ford have been operating in Miami and Washington, D.C., since 2018 and in Austin since 2019, to build autonomous ride-hailing and delivery services and establish the necessary real estate footprint and commercial fleet management capabilities, including fueling, servicing, and cleaning of self-driving vehicles, to support the customer and keep fleets running. Walmart previously tested with Ford in Miami in 2018.   PSR

John Krzesicki is Business Development Manager for Power Systems Research

Transcript

Welcome to the PSR PowerTALK podcast produced by Power Systems Research.

00:06 John Krzesicki

Hello, my name is John Krzesicki.

Today it’s my pleasure to host the Power Systems “Living on the Edge” series. The show revealed conversations with industry experts and their insight into the future with intelligent technology. With over 30 years of experience supporting the manufacturing industry, I’ve seen an unbelievable change in technology.

One of today’s challenges is designing equipment used to manage power for the growing sector of greenhouses. Powering greenhouses will be today’s topic.

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce Tom Bourgeois. He’s a Deputy Director for Pace Energy and Climate Center. Tom has published several papers around in energy infrastructure and has also been involved with supporting energy organizations around, mostly the Northeast.

And today, Tom, welcome.

00:54 Tom Bourgeois

Good morning, John. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I’m looking forward to it.

00:58 John Krzesicki

Before we, we jump into our topic or our subject here, just, Tom, could you give us a little background on, of, you know, Pace Energy and what they are, who they are, and little bit about yourself.

01:09 Tom Bourgeois

Certainly. I’m the, I serve as the Deputy Director for the Pace Energy and Climate Center. We are located at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law, Pace University in White Plains, NY. And let me take a moment to say that our law school this year was named the number one Environmental law program in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. As a matter of fact, in two of the last three years, we’ve held the number one position.

We are a not-for-profit group. We’ve been in existence since 1988. We were founded by former Congressman Dick Ottinger, who chaired the House Energy Committee during the Reagan administration and, and President Carter’s term in office. And also served, he’s Dean emeritus, served as Dean at Pace University.

I also serve as the director for the US Department of Energy’s New York, New Jersey Combined Heat and Power. I’ll use the acronym CHP, Combined Heat and Power, Center. We cover New York and New Jersey. Were one of 10 centers at 8 institutions throughout the United States, funded by the Department of Energy.

Prior to that, I also worked in New York and New England doing combined heat and power. Again, on behalf of the Department of Energy.

Here I’m speaking as, in my role as the Deputy Director of the Pace Energy and Climate Center.

02:35 John Krzesicki

OK, thank you. Thank you for that background and resume. We really appreciate that.

Now today’s topic we’re going to talk about greenhouses and, actually, you know, smart greenhouses and how that, how that’s kind of changing in terms of the market.

So, Tom, could you just give us, you know, why is a greenhouse necessary? Just a real easy first question.

03:00 Tom Bourgeois

Well, the greenhouse concept, a greenhouse may be seen to be, uh, desirable. I wouldn’t say necessary, but certainly desirable for a variety of reasons, and we can get into this a little bit more later on in our conversation. But it provides fresh products, you know, locally grown food. It provides food resiliency for a particular neighborhood or a particular area. It also can provide, obviously, local income, economic development and, and jobs. So, uh, the greenhouse is an increasingly interesting area of growing, I would say, in interest around the United States.

We became more interested in this topic at Pace Energy and Climate Center after several conversations over the last year or so; and we’ve held webinars on this topic.

We spoke with the Dutch. The Dutch are real experts in this area. The Dutch have developed greenhouses Into an art form. The, the Dutch, in a country that has a smaller population than the state of New York, is the second largest exporter of food by dollar volume of sales.

I, in my conversations with Dutch experts, I saw they provided an extremely interesting graphic. They showed the land in cultivation by country; and the United States is number 1. The graph is quite large. The line is quite large, a lot of land in cultivation – number. And then the land in cultivation, for agriculture, for the Netherlands is a small, very tiny line. Then you look at the, the amount of food exports, the dollar value. And that line for the United States, again, is very large. We’re number one; but, then this little country of the Netherlands is number 2. So, as, as I was stating here, they have made smart food production, and we’ll get it into the benefits more so later, a real cornerstone, making them one of the most productive, if not the most productive, food grower in the world.

I’d like to harken back a moment, John, if I can. You and I did a podcast in this series recently and we talked about microgrids. And the reason I bring this up is that the greenhouse is, once again, an opportunity to have local power providing input for a facility. That facility provides significant benefits for the community. That facility being the greenhouse, and, once again, this is a local power opportunity, a microgrid, if you will.

So I will, again, refer to the Dutch. The Dutch have, and I’m going to use some terminology here that you may not be familiar, or your audience may not be familiar with, although your clients probably are, there are four gigawatts. That’s a huge amount of power. A hospital might use five megawatts of power, or 10 megawatts of power; which is, you know, one megawatt is one one thousandth of a gigawatt, and so four gigawatts is, is, is, four times that. Anyway, that they have power right at the greenhouse in many instances across the country. It provides the power to heat the greenhouse, and to cool the greenhouse, and power for the greenhouse for the lighting, and then extra power to the grid. The carbon is captured, sequestered, in large part, not wholly, but is captured by the plants; so it’s a near, not 100%, but a near 0 carbon environment, with the plants taking the CO2 using the CO2 to accelerate plant growth.

And, again, I bring this up because I wanted folks to, once again, think about this microgrid concept or distributed energy concept where you have power, often natural gas, you, generated power. It’s using a fossil fuel. It’s using it in a really smart way. But it’s also providing cooling, heating, power, and in this case, food. So I wanted to lay that out and also refer folks back to this whole concept of microgrid and self-contained, resilient, local power.

07:49 John Krzesicki

Yeah, you had mentioned, uh, smart city or smart technology. How does that fit into smart city environments? Say maybe it’s a, maybe a, you know, a rural community. What would that look like?

08:03 Tom Bourgeois

Well, the interesting thing about, about these technologies, and let’s meet, let’s, let me give it an overarching name. We’ll go beyond the concept of greenhouse. What it’s called, again I’m going to get into some academic talk, but it’s called controlled environmental agriculture, CEA.

And this can be a high-tech greenhouse and the high-tech greenhouse will typically be more of a, uh, suburban, ur.. or rural construct; because this will require 5, 10, 15, 20 acres. This, this will sit on a larger plot of land. But it can also be indoor farming or vertical farming. And indoor or vertical farming can, and is appropriate to more dense or urban environments. You know, this can be done, done in Detroit, you know, in Cleveland, in New York, in Newark, in Buffalo.

This is not one technology; this is a a suite. It can go from, you know, a, a dense vertical area housed within, you know, a, a downtown core. Maybe reusing an old, abandoned manufacturing building in a downtown core for vertical farming. But that has one set of requirements versus a smart, high-tech, IT intensive greenhouse, which would, you know, of the sort often deployed in the Netherlands, which would sit in a different footprint and in a different area. You know, you may have a site that can be developed in an urban area that’s of this scale; but you’re much more likely to have a site like this in suburban, exurban, or rural areas.

This idea fits many different complexes. And it can be utilized by the smart city in the dense, urban context, or it can be utilized by the smart city in the more small city, rural context.

10:13 John Krzesicki

So tell me a little bit about some of the benefits for the greenhouse.

10:16 Tom Bourgeois

I’ll start with the, the dense urban environment first. And some, these are some of the issues that, that we are really concerned with and are looking at as an organization as Pace Energy and Climate Center.

The benefits we see here are many. First of all, we work closely with a number of environmental justice, community development organizations, local, you know, development organizations. We find that there’s a, a real interest, and I won’t go so far as, well, let’s say, uh, in some cases, a crying need for fresh food.

You know, there’s the, this whole aspect of having food deserts; where wholesome, fresh, locally grown food is just not available in, in many areas. And we see this as a potential way this whole concept of controlled environmental agriculture, as being a really smart way to address a variety of problems and to reach a variety of constituencies, including those low-income, moderate-income people who are often left out. So you grow food locally, you provide high quality, fresh, wide variety of, of good substantial food to communities that typically don’t have that readily available to them. So you’re giving them a whole new benefit in terms of a good access to good, nutritious food that they didn’t have before.

We are also seeing this as ways, sensing this as an opportunity to develop local skills, local businesses, local entrepreneurs. I don’t want to get too much into it, but there’s, you know the whole area that’s growing. New York, New Jersey, many states have passed cannabis regulations and rules and, and, you know, this, this allows for, in some instances, the growth of cannabis. But we are also, also, very much looking at growth of, of fresh food; tomatoes, leafy greens, strawberries, peppers. You know, providing both produce as well as, you know, the, the cannabis opportunity is one that, that’s interesting as well.

As we go to more of the suburban area, or, you know, areas where you may be able to find the, the 10, the 15, the 20 acres. This could be used for small cities. It could be used for rural areas that really are lacking in economic development opportunities. Once again, you can provide food locally. You can provide local jobs. We feel that this is something that’s going to be ever more interesting.

Our food system, let me wander a little bit into a more general overview.

In my conversations and explorations here, you know, if you look at the food system, you’ll see these huge arrows. Our food comes up from Central America and Mexico through California and down from Canada. A lot of our food is grown outside of the United States. If we can find smart, effective ways of doing that right here in our communities, not only when we get the benefits of smart, you know, of locally grown and fresh food, but we’ll create local economic development and jobs for communities.

One more thing here I’d like to add, and it’s a bit of a shout out to my colleague. I mentioned that I’m part of the USDoE’s nationwide network of CHP centers. My colleague at Penn State University, Dr. Jim Freihaut, has been exploring this: Pennsylvania is blessed with a huge amount of natural gas resources. And I think that this is a way where we can bring the power generation, people who make power generation equipment and people utilizing and producing natural gas, we can bring, to some extent, their interests in alignment with, clearly in alignment with environmental justice and, and, and environmental organizations.

A greenhouse using combined heat and power, using natural gas, and I think that one of your questions is how would this be powered? — typically with natural gas. But again, we all do want to address climate change. This is just a super smart way to do it, and my, my colleague, Doctor Freihaut, is exploring this at Penn State. The utilization of the natural gas, rich natural gas, assets they have, you know, the power equipment industry, the natural gas industry, the food industry, bringing all these various parties together.

And again, I, I want to also stress that this doesn’t even just lower the carbon footprint. The Dutch have proven, and this is a phrase you’ve probably heard me use before, John, so pardon me, this is clearly an example of it can be done because it has been done. The Dutch have done it. I refer you to YouTube National Geographic stories on this. 90% reduction in water use. It’s so important. You know, we see droughts all over the country. We see droughts hitting California, hitting the Pacific Northwest. You can grow food this way. The Dutch have shown, they’ve demonstrated it. You know, it’s, it’s, It’s not a make-believe.

It’s been proven and in practice for years. 90% reduction in water use. 5 to 10 to 12 times the productivity. You can grow 5, 10, 15 times as much food, you know, on a, an acre of land, as you can with outdoor farming. Virtually no pesticide use.

You reduce the costs of transporting. You know we’re not sending diesel trucks up from San Diego up through California and over to, to New York.

So I wanted to touch on those benefits as well. It, it’s, it’s benefits in water use, lower pesticides, economic, local economic development. And again, John, you know I’ve talked about this before. This becomes an ecosystem. I’m going back to the Dutch because I think, more than anybody, they’ve perfected this; but they’re not alone. This really is an ecosystem.

This brings together, uh, power generation. It brings together really smart utilization of, of gas. It brings together high technology in the utilization of the, you know, how you monitor the temperatures in the greenhouse. So you have advanced controls/smart controls, you have communication, and you have AI, artificial intelligence. You have this iterative feedback of learning. And you have, you know, a broadband or advanced IT needs. And you have optimization algorithms. So, you’re bringing a whole suite or an ecosystem of activities; that include food growing, it includes broadband, it includes AI, it includes optimization algorithms. This is not one thing. This is many things coming together to accomplish a job with maximum efficiency and productivity.

17:37 John Krzesicki

You, you’re absolutely right, Tom. These are conversations we’ve had in the past and, you know, bringing this all together as a, you know definitely could be a value of to any community, whether it’s a large city or rural setting.

So, my next question is: what does the outlook look like for the greenhouses? I know, I know you’ve had some great conversations with, with, with some of your contacts, with Dutch. And so, how do you see this moving in North America or the US? What does the outlook look like?

18:09 Tom Bourgeois

We, we certainly see increasing interest.

Just the other day, in the power generation trade press, there was a notice of a very large greenhouse complex being built.

I was talking to someone about prospects for greenhouses being built in several parts of the, of the country.

I think people are beginning to recognize this opportunity.

This satisfies so many different needs. It’s, it’s the application of local power. It’s that it provides resiliency. It, it introduces resiliency; not only into, into, in the terms of power resiliency, but it introduces food resiliency. It addresses a really important social problem, and that problem is providing high quality, locally grown fresh foods of a variety of different sort, you know, a variety of different types, into urban areas that have not been afforded that opportunity. And then, of course, it meets our increasingly pressing needs for water. It, it, it produces food with, you know, 1/10 of the water requirements. It has so much less pollution from applied pesticides. It, again, provides that additional component of local jobs, community development.

We are seeing this from the holistic point of view. Ideally, we would like to partner with local community development organizations, with local community groups, with smart cities and smart communities, to explore how you can do skills training, how you can provide public/private partnerships. How you can provide interesting financial arrangements, public/private financing to catalyze, uh, wholly owned or partially community-owned, enterprises that would provide local development for local communities, local skills training and using both our renewable resources and our gas resources in an extremely smart and in an integrated way.

And, once again, I’d like to point out that I think this provides a way to harmonize interests. Again, it harmonizes interests between power equipment producers and, and gas, natural gas. If done smart, if done in a highly, you know, high productivity way, if done with carbon capture and carbon reuse, this is including renewables, and perhaps, in the future, including a renewable fuel source for the power gen equipment, you know, hydrogen — which some of the, the power equipment industry is, is, you know, looking at 100% hydrogen fueled equipment. We’ve had some webinars on that topic as well.

There are examples in, in, in, you know, in effect right now of combined heat and power using reciprocating engines running on 100% hydrogen in Germany and in the UAE.

John, this, this, I think, brings together interests across many different groups.

It’s a smart way to use our remaining gas resources for the, you know, to provide food, to provide power, to provide resiliency. All of these things in one broad ecosystem.

As we’ve stated before, and we, we stated this with microgrids, because we’re talking about an ecosystem, a system that often includes several users. It incorporates many different technologies that could incorporate storage, and broadband, and IT, and AI, and power gen equipment. And also, you know, hot water and chilled water piping. It’s, it, it’s a really is an ecosystem. It is one that really needs to flourish.

We need to strategically look at our current market frameworks and our regulatory systems. So, I urge people to consider, you know, this, this is something that requires a restructuring, in some ways, of how we think; because it is a multi-technology ecosystem.

You and I talked about how important it is to reward outcomes and not reward technologies. As much as, you know, we want to see the acceleration of particular, you know, totally renewable technologies. Oftentimes, say states and cities looked at, you know, they reward a PV panel, they reward a, a battery. That’s great; but more comprehensively, you know, if we think about rewarding an outcome; how much carbon was reduced, how much, you know, water usage, how much criteria pollutants? If you think about it in this more holistic way, and I know I’m speaking to, you know, smart cities and I’m speaking to a kind of a broader audience, including, you know, people in the power gen industry, how do we reward an outcome is, I think, how we should be thinking about this, whether we’re a city, whether a state, whether, whether we’re the federal government. Because in order for this to really flourish, the kinds of systems and the rewards need to be based on, on, on outcomes, measured outcomes, rather than, you know, payment for a particular piece of technology.

So I, I did want to put that out there. The importance of, uh, the need to create new market frameworks and the need to look at city, state and federal regulations and incentives and how they can help facilitate this smart ecosystem of the future.

24:15 John Krzesicki

Yeah, we did, uh, just to summarize, we did have that conversation and it was definitely eye opening to me and way, in a different way of thinking about of how we can use the outcome to make the ecosystem to be more innovative. Like you said earlier, how do we take advantage of the technologies, the different, you know, methodologies, the different energy sources. And how do we become creative to, to get that final outcome? Because in the end, that’s the importance… is the final outcome and how that impacts that community, that city, that environment.

24:46 Tom Bourgeois

One final point. I want to mention this because the greenhouse is an example. Zero carbon technologies, I’m again talking about my own state, get rewarded, you know wind, and solar, and then in other states as well. A greenhouse may be providing the same service. You know, if, if you’re using natural gas, but if, you know, 70%, 75% of the carbon is being captured, you are effectively achieving the same result; and that’s why I’m trying to make this concrete about what I’m saying. You know, perhaps we ought to be thinking about rewarding systems that achieve the same result that we want.

With that I will conclude, but I wanted to give a concrete example as to what our thinking is here and why we think it’s so important to, to reward outcomes.

25:36 John Krzesicki

Well, I totally agree with you, Tom. Totally agree with you.

So, this concludes our conversation today.

Tom, again, thank you for your time. I really appreciate your time and insight and knowledge in the greenhouse industry and technology and where it’s going and looking forward to, you know, more conversations.

25:52 Tom Bourgeois

Thank you very much, John. This has been a great opportunity for us. Take care.

25:55 John Krzesicki

All right. Thank you.

25:56

To read a transcript of this podcast, visit the PSR website at powersys.com and click on the podcast archive.

Thank you for joining the PSR PowerTALK podcast. This podcast will be available on demand. Search for “PSR PowerTALK” in your podcast app or Google “Power Systems Research” to sign up today.

Transcript

Welcome to the PSR PowerTALK podcast produced by Power Systems Research.

00:06 John Krzesicki

Hello, my name is John Krzesicki. Today it’s my pleasure to host the Power Systems “Living on the Edge” series. The show we have conversation with industry experts on their insight into the future of intelligent technology.

With over 30 years of experience supporting the manufacturing industry, I’ve seen an unbelievable change in technology. One of today’s challenges is designing equipment used to manage power for the upcoming wave of data.

Today’s conversation will be centered around microgrids.

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Tom Bourgeois. Tom is the Deputy Director for Pace Energy and Climate Center. Tom has published several papers around energy infrastructure and is involved with supporting several energy organizations.

Welcome Tom, I’m glad you could join us today. If you can give us a little insight on who Pace Energy is and, kind of, a little bit of a background on, for yourself, that would be great.

00:58 John Bourgeois

Well John, first of all, thank you very much for this opportunity. I’m pleased to have a chance to talk about the work that we do and some of the exciting areas that I think that society is moving in and that we are, are taking part in.

I’m the Deputy Director of the Pace Energy and Climate Center. We’re at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Our program was named number one environmental law school in the country by U.S. News and World Report this year and in 2019, two of the last three years.

We were formed more than 30 years ago by former Congressman Dick Ottinger, who chaired the House Energy Committee during the Carter Presidency and, and President Reagan. We’re very much involved in regulatory issues, in effective design of energy efficiency, clean energy systems, distributed energy resources.

I also serve as the Director for the US Department of Energy’s New York-New Jersey Combined Heat and Power — CHP, Combined Heat and Power Center.

I will be speaking today solely in my role as the Deputy Director of Pace; but for many years we’ve also been involved in the US Department of Energy’s Combined Heat and Power, CHP, work and today, run the New York and New Jersey Center.

02:18 John Krzesicki

Well, thank you Tom. Pretty impressive background and resume.

So, if you could start off the some of the questions I have, can you just help me with defining what is a microgrid?

02:29 John Bourgeois

A microgrid is a self-contained energy system. Typically, though not always, but typically it works interconnected with the utility grid, or, let’s call it the macro grid. A microgrid provides electric power and heating and cooling hot water to a particular geographic area, such as a college campus, perhaps a large multi-family complex, an industrial park, a neighborhood, or a military installation. Microgrids are a way to provide an isolated, independently operating, energy system for a block, uh, a neighborhood, a large development.

03:14 John Krzesicki

So, jumping into some of the additional questions. What would be some of the benefits of a microgrid or microgrid community, if, if I can give that, use that term.

03:24 John Bourgeois

Sure, well, let me explore a little bit more about what a microgrid is and, and that way I think it would help to, to amplify this.

Microgrids incorporate a variety of, of different, what we call, distributed energy technologies. That is, rather than a central power plant supplying power and independent boilers or furnaces providing heating and hot water, the microgrid typically provides power within this particular geographic footprint and, oftentimes, uses this combined heat and power application, where power is generated in the excess, or waste heat from that power is then utilized, in a very efficient manner, to provide heating, hot water, and cooling or air conditioning for that site.

So, the microgrid configuration, oftentimes, will include a variety of, of clean distributed energy forms. It can be a very smart way of using our country’s natural gas resources, reciprocating engines or gas combustion turbines providing electric power, and, along with that, the efficient production of heat. But it also, and increasingly does, incorporate battery storage or thermal energy storage, and it also incorporates renewable energy, solar energy in particular, and even EV charging stations. So, this microgrid can provide the full complement of distributed energy resources, including the technologies that would be used, like EVs to electrify and reduce the environmental footprint of our transportation system, as well as renewable energy, designed to decarbonize our power system.

05:23 John Krzesicki

Very good, that’s great information. That gives me a little better handle on, you know, microgrids. A little bit about the, you know, the advantages, the benefits for microgrids.

So, tell me a little bit about the challenges.

05:35 John Bourgeois

There are several challenges for microgrids.

And let me first state that that microgrids are in existence. Once again, this is not a case of, uh, something that doesn’t exist. It’s a case of “it can be done, because it has been done”. We have done this and we’re doing it more and more.

So, the microgrid concept has been used in hospitals, and military is using it much more so. There’s a lot of applications for military bases that wish to be self-sufficient during any sort of critical infrastructure or power emergency. The same with a hospital. Hospitals have an absolute need for power. Many businesses; IT data processing has an absolute need for power. And then there are other applications where it would be very desirable; like multi-family complexes, public housing, to, to have a, a source of power to keep vulnerable populations in place during emergency situations.

Now getting back to the challenges. Microgrids have developed first in areas where you have one large property owner. So, let’s say, a military complex that includes all sorts of different operations on a base that includes housing, that includes offices, that includes, maybe, some sort of production or repair facilities. Or, for another example, let’s consider a university. There’s, there’s many instances on universities. The university would include dorms, that would include laboratories, it would include research, it would include, you know, data centers and classrooms. Hospitals are another great application. The hospital is often a very large complex spanning, you know, a city block or more. In these instances, and the reason why I’m building out, it, it’s likely to happen here first is: you have a single property, with a single owner. There may be multiple buildings, there may be multiple types of operation; but, it’s all under the control of a single owner.

The challenges arise at the point where you are trying to generate and sell power to multiple entities. So, for example, let’s say you have a, a microgrid. Let’s say it’s at a hospital but it wants to sell power across the street to the shopping center; or wants to sell power up the hill to a gas station or a pharmacy. In that case, you’re crossing roads, you are involving several unaffiliated business owners, and this brings in challenges from a variety of perspectives.

Challenge number one is it often runs contrary to utility franchise rights. Utilities often have an exclusive franchise to serve the customers in an area. So once you get beyond the, you know, the confines of the hospital and all of its facilities, or the university campus and all of its facilities and you start, you know, selling power or, or providing hot water, cooling, or, or heat up and down the street, you may run into franchise. utility franchise issues.

There’s also a host of other issues; code, siting, permitting. You know running the electrical conduit, running the pipes, providing hot water, or providing chilled water, for, whether it be heating hot water or cooling. And, and, other challenges, such as the, the challenges involved in getting multiple different customers.

Again, let’s go back to that example I said. Suppose you had a hospital, a big hospital that was an anchor in the downtown area, and you had nearby customers who also wanted that power or that resiliency. Let’s say they included a gas station. Let’s say they included a, a shopping center. Let’s say a pharmacy. You then have several different businesses and you have to put together a legal and financial arrangement that shares responsibility across those various users. So, I think you can see that it becomes a bit more complex as it grows out.

10:04 John Krzesicki

Those are definitely interesting challenges and I really haven’t thought of it that way. I think that, that brings a lot of value to just having this conversation and to, you know, to the people who are listening.

10:15 John Bourgeois

Now, despite the challenges, these, these arrangements are definitely growing an interest around the country. And, in our part, let me speak to my area then, which I know best the Northeast, New York, New Jersey, New England. We had a, uh, a huge increase in interest in microgrids that occurred after a couple of severe storms. There was a, uh, late fall storm that hit Connecticut and knocked power out. This was in 2011 and it knocked power out for a large part of the state for, in some cases, for several weeks. A late fall snowstorm, you know, heavy wet snows bringing down tree branches, knocking down power lines.

That led the Connecticut Legislature to create what I believe was the country’s first microgrid pilot program. That was immediately followed in the Northeast the next year, in 2012, by Superstorm Sandy. Superstorm Sandy, of course, leveled large parts of New York, New Jersey and went up into New England and even as far as Maine. Particularly hard hit was, was New York; where large parts of the city were out of power for some time.

A major hospital, Langone Hospital, NYU Langone, made national news when they lost power and, you know, on national news you saw people being carried 17 floors down, you know, by hand in their beds; critical care patients. And so, hospitals and other critical facilities said we can’t afford to let something like this happen again. We want a combined heat and power. We want a resilient microgrid. You know, we want to ensure 24/7 power.

In New Jersey, for example, New Jersey, following Hurricane Sandy, used 200,000,000 of their HUD relief money. Housing and Urban development provided sandy relief money. And the state of New Jersey created a very innovative, what they called an energy resiliency bank, ERB. And that bank, subsequently, was used to fund several hospital microgrid projects, as well as projects at wastewater treatment plants were, obviously, very important sources of resilient power.

That’s kind of the context of, you know, why microgrids (are) initially gained prominence in, in the public dialogue.

The same has happened in Texas. Severe storms that hit Texas a couple years ago There was a large Texas hospital center which was able to run isolated from the grid.

When Sandy hit Long Island, there was a center that included a hospital and a nursing home on Long Island that ran almost two weeks where the surrounding area had no power.

So, this has precipitated in the interest among citizens, among policymakers and among cities, city officials, city and state officials, to look into the development ,for specific areas, of, of microgrids and the resiliency benefits that they that they can provide to a community.

13:33 John Krzesicki

OK great, great. Again great, great information.

So, what does the future look like for microgrids? Especially, as you had mentioned earlier in the conversation, about EVs and technology requiring, you know, more power, more energy, more data, more information. What do you see the future look like for the microgrid communities as we move forward here?

13:57 John Bourgeois

I think that there’s a pretty bright future for, for microgrids. We will continuously see an interest in microgrids driven by storms. As we see storms, as we see the need for more resilient power. There will be a continued need.

But there are other drivers as well. The microgrid is a really smart way of using a variety of different technologies.

First of all, they, oftentimes, utilize combined heat and power or cogeneration, kind of at the center of the project, along with the renewables and the storage. Combined heat and power, the United States is blessed with great natural gas resources, and combined heat and power is the smartest way to use our natural gas resource.

Gas, natural gas, in power generation may be anywhere from 35 to 40% efficient. 40s, certainly, at the high end. You generate power far away from the site and then you have all the losses in transmission and distribution. When you’re generating power at your site, you have no losses in the T&D system because it’s right there. Furthermore, though, because the gas system is so much more resilient than the electric system, the electric system is subject to, you know, wires coming down and winds and snow and ice. The gas system is far more resilient. That’s just an empirical fact. Gas outages are far less, far, far less likely to occur.

But beyond that, it also incorporates the microgrid; incorporates communications, IT, broadband, advanced controls, and smart optimization algorithms. So it allows these various systems, that are often desired and in utilization or increasing utilization by communities and smart communities, it packages these together in an ecosystem that allows for a reduced carbon pollution, it allows for lower energy costs, it allows for reduced macro utility distribution costs, and it just provides a really good ecosystem for building out your renewables.

You know, one way to do renewables is on a rooftop, you know, one rooftop at a time. That may not be the most efficient way to do it. Not everybody has a good south face. Many buildings are tree shaded. The buildings I think of in New York City, again, the northeast, going back to my particular area, you know, you’ve got very tall buildings where, with very high power density and PV on those buildings, is just absolutely insufficient.

But the microgrid may be a really smart way of integrating renewable resources along with extremely efficient, high efficiency, environmentally superior utilization of natural gas and including, including things like EV charging to reduce our transportation environmental footprint. So, I, I see the, the future as being pretty bright.

I see there definitely needs to be changes in the regulatory environment. And let me go back to what we do. This, this is where our, our center fits in. We’ve always worked on the edge of the regulatory and the market frameworks that help accelerate clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Energy systems are, you know, this is not a free market economy. You know, it’s, it’s not like, you know, setting up a restaurant; anybody can do it anywhere they want with the right resources. It’s not even like creating a new software product; you create a software product, you sell it in the market, it works or it doesn’t work.

When you’re providing power and cooling and heating, you know, there, it’s a regulated utility. You’re regulated by, you know, you have local regulation, you have a state, public utility commission regulating you. That you have the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. So, John, this is an area that needs a lot of attention by cities, by businesses, by policymakers, to create the right regulatory framework, as well as the right market rules.

So, for example, once again we tend to stovepipe, or to kind of create in isolation, various incentives. So, you know, you have many, many states, if you put solar on your rooftop, you get an incentive. You know, if you put, if you have wind, you get an incentive. These are kind of 1 by 1 stovepiped and, and not generalized.

The microgrid, I think, calls for, and once again, this is where our center and centers like us and advocates for this fit in, the microgrid can provide kind of an overarching package, or like I said, an ecosystem, where if you’re paying, rather than paying individual technologies, you can pay a system for its reductions in, in carbon emissions. Pay a system for its reduction in criteria pollutants.

So, we see a particularly attractive future because we see a move towards renewables, we see a definite move towards EVs. The President and the Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, have seen fit to, in the infrastructure bill, dedicate a lot of money to upgrade of the grid, the electric grid. The microgrid certainly supports that by working alongside the so-called existing utility macro grid. It, it both supports it by reducing stresses on that macro grid and by providing increased reliability.

So, there is money coming to do this. Broadband helps facilitate this. Again, back to what I was saying before, the microgrid really relies on advanced controls, communications, facilitated by broadband, facilitated by smart IT, and optimization algorithms.

What it lacks today to really flourish is the right kind of a regulatory environment and the right kind of a market framework which identifies positive benefits. The benefit of resiliency, the benefit of providing grid support for the utility, the benefit of providing reliability for critical infrastructure, so that the hospital can keep running, so that, you know, the, the, the senior multi-family complex or the nursing home is kept running and you don’t have to move patients during a storm.

So, recognition of those benefits, new incentive systems that measure and quantify and pay for those benefits in a smarter way than we do today, I think, is what is going to help. And I’ve, I’ve neglected, although I shouldn’t, because there’s a huge and growing market for electric vehicles, and charging stations, and all the required assets that make the EV revolution occur, that too can be incorporated, in part, in this whole ecosystem.

21:32 John Krzesicki

Well, I certainly learned a lot today. I mean, this is, this is definitely a, you know, a great education on the microgrid; what the benefits are, what the challenges are, and, and where it’s going. I agree with 100%. I mean, our clients are having these conversations every day about, you know, what does the future look like? What does the forecast look like for this environment as we move into the smart city or intelligent city environment.

So, today this concludes our podcast.

Tom, thank you again for your time. I really appreciate, again, you’ve taken the time and effort and insight to provide, provide us in the microgrid technology.

22:08 John Bourgeois

Thank you very much, John, much appreciated.

22:10 John Krzesicki

All right, have a great day.

22:12 John Krzesicki

Bye now.

22:13

To read a transcript of this podcast, visit the website at powersys.com and click on the podcast archive.

Thank you for joining the PSR PowerTALK podcast. This podcast will be available on demand. Search for “PSR PowerTALK” in your podcast app or Google “Power Systems Research” to sign up today.

John Krzesicki Business Development Manager

×

John Krzesicki brings over 25 years of experience in software sales, implementation consulting, and marketing to Power Systems Research. He has a broad software background spanning from Product Lifecycle Management, Simulation Modeling, 3D Printing, to Business Intelligence. The corporate cultures he’s worked within are equally as diverse from small start‐up companies like BL 3Dimension, to large companies like SAS, and to companies like VSA and RuleStream —where he helped grow the company from a small start‐up to a medium sized company that was eventually acquired by Siemens. Mr. Krzesicki has a Master’s and Bachelor of Science Degrees in Industrial Management from Central Michigan University.

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

To read a transcript of this podcast, visit the PSR website at powersys.com and click on the podcast archive.

Thank you for joining the PSR PowerTALK podcast. This podcast will be available on demand. Search for “PSR PowerTALK” in your podcast app or Google “Power Systems Research” to sign up today.

Today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a small country. This certainly sounds alarming, but the reality is a little more complex.

Our clients design and build generators installed for data centers, factories, distribution centers, commercial buildings, office buildings, grocery stores, and banks for emergency backup, peak shaving, or continuous power.  Bitcoin miners utilize data centers for housing and managing their data (server) farms.  

Bitcoin is a digital currency powered by many computers worldwide working to maintain the Bitcoin blockchain, a public database of all transactions on the network ever made. Bitcoin miners compete to officially record and verify the transaction and earn bitcoin as a reward. These transactions are verified by solving complex cryptographic and mathematical problems for which Bitcoin miners use a lot of power. The computers that record and verify Bitcoin transactions consume power at a level similar to some countries.  The exact amount of energy used by a Bitcoin transaction can vary based on demand.

Cryptocurrency Mining Farm

The environmental impact of the Bitcoin network depends on power consumption, the kind of energy powering the network, and the electronic waste it generates. The four main factors in how much electricity a Bitcoin miner uses are; hardware computing power, network hash rate, mining difficulty, and thermal regulation for the hardware.  Together, they use more electricity than many countries. The more powerful computers may also require more power off the electricity grid, making the entire mining network a giant energy hog.

The cryptocurrency equipment required for Bitcoin mining cannot be recycled for different applications. Some mining equipment components also include aluminum, copper, iron, and rare earth metals. These generate massive amounts of electronic waste in the form of computer hardware. Some researchers believe that less than ideal recycling and waste collection in countries that have large mining operations could create a risk of toxic metals polluting the soil, water, and air in those countries.

With upgrades to the cryptocurrency landscape, including the addition of more efficient currencies and upgrades to existing networks, it may be possible to find the best of both worlds at some point in the future, with energy-efficient cryptocurrencies powered by renewable electricity.

For today, however, mining bitcoin has a high environmental and energy cost; as our clients migrate into the complex world of IoT, they’ll need to consider the challenges of managing the cryptocurrency market.  PSR

John Krzesicki is Business Development Manager at Power Systems Research

John Krzesicki Business Development Manager

×

John Krzesicki brings over 25 years of experience in software sales, implementation consulting, and marketing to Power Systems Research. He has a broad software background spanning from Product Lifecycle Management, Simulation Modeling, 3D Printing, to Business Intelligence. The corporate cultures he’s worked within are equally as diverse from small start‐up companies like BL 3Dimension, to large companies like SAS, and to companies like VSA and RuleStream —where he helped grow the company from a small start‐up to a medium sized company that was eventually acquired by Siemens. Mr. Krzesicki has a Master’s and Bachelor of Science Degrees in Industrial Management from Central Michigan University.

John Krzesicki talks with Carrie Goetz about the trends in edge computing, a movement that shifts data processing from the cloud to local data centers closer to the applications.

Transcript

Welcome to the PSR PowerTALK podcast, produced by Power Systems Research.

00:06 John Krzesicki

Hello, my name is John Krzesicki with Power Systems Research. I’m a business development manager for the US and with me today I have Carrie Goetz who is a fractional CTO for multiple companies. She’s been in the business for many years. She was also voted as being one of the most influential women in the tech industry in 2020.

Today we’re going to talk about the Internet of Things and its impact on smart city, smart community, and industry and love to get her viewpoint on where she sees the market going.

So, Carrie, thanks for joining us and let’s start the conversation of, you know, what are you, what do you see in the next few years and what are some of your visions with smart city and some of the IoT technology?

00:54 Carrie Goetz

Well, hey John, thanks for having me to start.

So IoT to me is, first off, I hate the acronym. I’m the first to tell everybody I hate the acronym because it says absolutely nothing, and you can make it say anything that you want. But I think that when we talk about the Internet of Things, we have barely scratched the surface of where that’s going to go and…

There’s this guy named Parkinson, he had two laws for the computing industry. One was for storage and the other was for bandwidth and pretty much both of them say if you put it out there, they’re going to fill ‘em up. And I think we’re kind of at that point with IoT. Where, as more and more technology comes alive through the, you know, that’s automated by sensors and artificial intelligence and machine to machine learning, that we have no idea where all this can go.

I mean, we’re barely scratching the surface, and this could be all kinds of things. So, you’re seeing these sensors for smart water meters and smart power meters, and, you know, that gets coupled with leak detection in somebody house. And then from, you know, a smart city perspective we can use it for security and finding adverse events like gunshots. And, you know, having that control where the cameras zoom in and follow the noise. And precision agriculture and how we’re raising crops, figuring out the best water amount to put in the soil, that won’t deplete certain nutrients, and, you know, the best day to make that water happen. And maybe it’s not the same for the whole field. Maybe part of the field works differently than other parts of the field, and so it really allows us to get granular with some of the things we’ve been doing.

From an industry perspective and automation, I think, you know, robotics and what’s happening with industry 4.0 is great.

I think it’s a great way for rural healthcare and people in the middle of nowhere to get access to healthcare. You know there’s a, there’s a little device now, I’m sure you’ve seen the commercial, you can stick it on your iPhone and give yourself a medical grade EKG on the spot sitting at your desk.

So, you know, I think a lot of these technologies, you know, we, we just scratched the surface of where we can go with this stuff.

03:05 John Krzesicki

So, uh, again, there’s just, there’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of information floating uhm, and every day we’re hearing about new technology invading our cities and our communities. So, so, you know, one question is, you know, where, where does all this data go? How does, how is it managed?

03:24 Carrie Goetz

Yeah, so that’s a big one. So, there’s, there’s different places you can push data, right? So, some of, some data doesn’t need to be stored. If you, a good example, if you go to the grocery store and you buy 400 items. The credit card company that you charge that to doesn’t care what 400 items you bought. All they care about is that a transaction happened, here’s the approval code, here’s the card you’re using, that’s all that gets pushed.

But if you think about it from the grocery store perspective, they want all of that information. They want to know everything that you bought. They, you know, down to the granular. Not just for inventory, but sort of trends for the store. So, they’ll trend that. They’ll use your ZIP code to figure out the buying trends of people in those zip codes and, you know, different things to restock or maybe new products to bring on.

So, all of those are examples of that data being kind of all over the place, right? The corporate entity, if it’s a multi-site grocery store, probably just wants the result sets. They don’t need to know what time of day you bought or other things that might give information to other insights. And so, all of those are places for data to go, so it can either be stored at the grocery store, right, or at an enterprise level in the city, for a smart city, or the city controls the data center.

It can also be at the edge. And at the edge that can be a smaller data center, say, you know, sub, sub one megawatt or somewhere in that range. Or it can be the larger enterprise space that we talked about, or the cloud, and that can be the public cloud, being AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, any of the other IBM platforms. And that could be where you’re using somebody else’s hardware, you’re just doing software licensing. And normally what’s going, what you’re going to find is it’s going to be some combination of those. There’s no one size fits all. But we do know that moving into the cloud is very, you know, pretty much nothing other than spinning up your instance.

Moving around in the cloud and moving data out of the cloud is expensive. So, if you try to figure out, from an application perspective, what data are we gathering, what are we going to do with it, and where does it need to live, then that starts helping feed your decision about where that data is going to be.

Because, you know, these sensors put off continuous data. And it might be that you don’t need to know that the temperature was 78 degrees every second throughout the day. You might want to know the average temperature, so that’s two very different amounts of data. And so those are the kind of things, and the decisions that I think are going to drive, you know, how much is going to be at the edge and how much is it going to be at a bigger data center.

And at the edge it might just be an all-inclusive device, like a little hive cell, or it might be, you know, one or two cabinets out there. It might be a self-sustaining data center with immersion technology. Sitting out there that, you know, people are writing data to. It can be any combination of things. So, I guess edge just really defines the location of the data being closer to the application and users that are going to use it. And I think we’re going to see just large combinations of all of the above moving forward.

06:32 John Krzesicki

So, give me just a little more of a, you know, yeah, I certainly understand what the cloud is, but can you kind of just give me a little more definition around edge, edge computing and why is that important?

06:44 Carrie Goetz

So, I think a great example is content delivery networks. All these streaming providers, you know, there’s, it would be impossible for everybody to stream the latest, best, Netflix movie, for instance. If we all jumped on the same Netflix server, there’s not enough compute to make that happen. There’s not enough bandwidth in that pipe to go in there to make that happen. We would all get that little spinning wheel continuously and, you know, our frustration levels would increase. And so what happens is they take copies of that movie and they spread it all over the place. And that’s why you see, like on Netflix, you’ll see trending movies or trending this or that because they’re keeping up with that themselves and they’re figuring out what they need to push out to all of these other places.

So, it’s like, it’s like Santa’s helpers. I guess it’s probably the best way to put that, right? You’ve got the main, main dude in the North Pole and he’s got all these helpers that are running around listening to all these little kids. And so, it’s very close to the same kind of theory, right? As, as we have this data all over the place we want to process what we need to at that location and then you know the rest goes somewhere else.

Police cameras are a great example of that, right? You know, you want to know when that policeman has had an interaction; but there’s a lot of data that’s captured during the day that means nothing. So why do we want to send all of that to the cloud when we can process that locally and send the result sets to the cloud? Because now it becomes a very financial decision as opposed to a convenience decision.

08:08 John Krzesicki

So you touched down a little bit about smart cities. What other industries do you see moving towards the edge and this type of infrastructure?

08:16 Carrie Goetz

So, I think rural healthcare is a big example. Industry 4.0 is, you know, and what’s going on with industry and robotics and, and how we, the amount of information that we want to capture for every single manufacturing line, it’s, it’s pretty insane.

I think that education is kind of ripe for this, even if we do, you know, smaller groups of schools, maybe. Doing some of the edge compute there.

I think bridging the digital divide is, is a good one.

I think that smart cities and smart communities, smart transportation are all part of this.

Drone deliveries are certainly something that’s going to use edge compute. I mean, you know, like I said, we’re just touching the iceberg. If you could order a pizza and have a drone show up at your front door with that pizza, that’d be pretty cool.

And, you know, the Jetsons when we were growing up. But a lot of these young kids probably don’t remember that show. But, you know, you had the the maid that was really smart. You had meals instantly delivered. You had all this kind of stuff. You know, that was in the Jetsons house and they were not, not too far off from some of those things coming true.

Autonomous vehicles are a good example, and probably one of the ones that I think drive. Between content delivery networks and autonomous vehicles and, and fleet management. Those definitely are, are big drivers too. I think especially for a lot of the areas where there is no connectivity, and, you know, no signal, right?

09:45 John Krzesicki

Yeah, you just, you just touched down a couple points I thought were interesting; in terms of a, you know, a lot of data, a lot of connectivity, rural areas.

Now we also understand this is going to be a stress on power. What is, what is your vision on how to support all this data of the data centers, the edge and what do you see kind of happening in the future?

10:07 Carrie Goetz

Well, I think that edge data centers have a really cool advantage when it comes to power; because it’s a lot easier to do something at a small scale than it is a giant scale, right? So we’re not building 50 MW data centers at the Edge we’re building sub one MW, which is relatively easy to power off of solar, renewable natural gas or, you know, one of those other wind farms, some of those alternative methods; because solar and wind take a lot of land, and if we’re trying to do this at a smaller scale, it’s easier.

You know, you can put the solar panels on the roof of a smaller data center. You can use submersion cooling to make sure that the power demands are lower because, you know, the heat projection is happening through liquid as opposed to air, which you know brings down the power requirements.

So, a lot of those things happen that I think are really cool and we have to realize that a) the grid is taxed and a lot of places where these data centers go there’s not enough power to support that data center sitting in the middle of nowhere.

So, if I’m a farmer and I’m working on my precision agriculture snd I’ve got, you know, sensors all over the fields, and, and I’ve got data gathering requirements and I’m trying to sort out how to run my farm through all of this technology, I’ve got to have something that’s going to process that for me. And I think that’s where these edge, either facilities or even compute devices, really are going to come into play and be able to support that.

But from a power perspective, really driving down the need to where we’re not adding in things that draw power unnecessarily, that we’re being the best stewards of power that we can. And I think the edge gives us all of those opportunities. Again, because it’s a smaller footprint and I think it’s easier to “lather, rinse, and repeat” and do some innovation at that smaller scale and, you know, make those to be tried and true methods.

12:00 John Krzesicki

OK. Great, great. Thanks for the insight.

As we move along with the series, or, this is the first series of hopefully many, but we’re going to take a take an opportunity to address smart cities. We’re also going to have some conversation around agriculture, smart, smart manufacturing, smart healthcare as we roll up these, these podcasts.

Now the, you know, to, to finish off this podcast, you had mentioned the digital divide. I thought that was really interesting. Can you give us what’s your viewpoint of the digital divide and how edge computing could help or could actually close the gap?

12:38 Carrie Goetz

Yeah, so the digital divide I think is massive and people don’t realize. And it’s not just rural areas, right? There’s certainly rural areas where they’re dead signals. We, we’ve all driven through those, you know, when the phone doesn’t work, “Oh no, got one bar, I’ll have to call you back”. That’s the digital divide and not just there, but even places where there may be Internet, but it’s insufficient to support things like streaming and actual Internet use. So, people having true broadband connections.

And I think COVID really brought to light how big the digital divide is, and it certainly made it worse; because a lot of people lost their Internet plans, you know. If they’re not working, they can’t pay for their Internet plans. So, what used to be one in 10 households, now they estimate to be closer to one in four households in the US is living in a digital divide, which is pretty crazy. And that’s people that don’t have access to reliable broadband.

And I think too we sort of highlighted how the over-subscription model of a lot of these providers is woefully negligent when everybody all of a sudden works at home.

And so, not just in the US, but if you get outside US the digital divide is pretty massive. There’s entire countries that have maybe 4 Internet cafes sitting in cities that you go to and nothing outside of the main populace of a city.

And so being able to bring this, I mean, I know we’ve gotten to the point, I think, with Internet and information that this is really kind of a human right. You know, you should, everybody should have access to be able to learn new things and everybody should have access to be able to schedule critical appointments and those deals.

And so I think edge, as we start building out the edge, that gives us this huge opportunity, because all of those edge data centers are going to be connected back to the Internet. And all of these edge devices are going to be connected back and as we start opening these up, which I think is absolutely going to happen, then we start healing some of this digital divide and people have access that didn’t have access before.

Microsoft is doing a big push right now putting containerized data centers out in the middle of nowhere with satellite communications going back.

I mean there’s a, there’s a lot of ways for the bits to get from point A to point B; but certainly this digital divide is massive. I think that it changes the way people work. I think it changes the way that people go to school and learn and just the quality of life across the board. And my favorite part of tech has always been tech for good.

And tech always figures out a way to solve its own problems; although sometimes I think we solve other industries problems before we solve our own. But, certainly having that digital divide to people just having access to those resources is going to be huge. And we saw this in COVID we saw what happened when, you know, churches were having to turn up Wi-Fi in their parking lot; because there was communities that didn’t have Internet, but all these kids were expected to learn on the Internet. And so all of those, I think it was kind of a really good shake-up as far as bringing attention to the fact that not everybody has those pretty basic services.

15:55 John Krzesicki

Thank you for the insight, Carrie. That was a great overview of the digital divide.

So, that’s going to conclude our podcast for today; but I would just want to send out a reminder that we are going to be addressing, again, smart cities, industry 4.0, smart ag, and some other industries as we continue with the podcast series.

Carrie, again, thank you for your time. I really appreciate your insight; and, and have a great rest of your day.

16:21 Carrie Goetz

Yeah, thanks John. Have a good one.

16:22

To read a transcript of this podcast, visit the PSR website at powersys.com and click on the podcast archive.

Thank you for joining the PSR PowerTALK podcast. This podcast will be available on demand. Search for “PSR PowerTALK” in your podcast app or Google “Power Systems Research” to sign up today.

Cities, nationally and globally, are embarking on innovative efforts to harness the benefits of rapidly emerging technologies to improve citizens’ quality of life, increase operational efficiency, and enhance economic vitality and sustainability.

These efforts often involve changing the nature of data storage and transfer, primarily by moving these steps from data storage “clouds” to local data centers closer to the  application.

Since Power Systems Research began tracking global equipment manufacturers in 1976, its analysts have been aware of new technologies and electrification trends such as these which can affect future markets. Today, we’re closely following these changes in data transfer and storage.

We’re especially interested in the two essential metrics of data handling change—volume and processing time— because the structure of data networks also is changing. In many cases, it’s not practical to send vast amounts of data to the cloud to be processed and then wait for the results. Now, it’s often necessary to have smaller data centers located near the activity, at the edge of the action, if you will.

Edge data centers also feature many micropower grids, not a small number of wide-spread grids that could disrupt large areas and hundreds of thousands of individuals if they fail.

There are growing advantages and applications for edge data centers.

Communities mainly benefit from their high-tech economy, as companies incorporate many of these new capabilities. The residents of these communities can take advantage of new technology and the talented workforce that expects its city to benefit from technology effectively.

A so-called smart city leverages advances in sensors, devices controllers, and instruments that are connected to the internet and other systems – essentially the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies – to produce data that can be analyzed to inform decisions, improve services and optimize operations.

Advances in analytics and machine learning can support the city in moving from reactive to proactive actions and eventually to predictive processes.  Potentially, this approach could produce a bright future for large urban cities.  So, what about rural communities? 

When connectivity helps rural communities thrive, it produces multiple benefits for residents, businesses, states, and the nation as a whole.

Business. Businesses can access new, previously untapped markets—finding new customers or designing new products to meet the needs of emerging customer segments. Companies can provide flexibility for employees who may want to live in rural communities and telework, at the same time they tap into a broader talent pool and improve retention rates.

With access to new sources of talent, businesses can gain new perspectives, innovations, and ideas. Agribusiness players, for example, can easier access people who grew up on farms and understand the business needs of farmers.

Finally, connectivity can enable new ways of working and increase access to technologies that streamline operations, increase efficiencies, and create more overall productivity. These improvements could transform businesses and even whole industries.

States. States could be better positioned to serve the needs of their people, gaining insights into unique community requirements and matching delivery of critical programs and funding to people. Continuous access to network infrastructure can improve interoperability and interconnectivity between rural and urban areas, better connecting regions across states.

Rural residents can stay virtually and physically connected with nearby urban hubs and suburban towns that offer unavailable opportunities at home, reducing flights from rural areas. Rural and urban interoperability can create opportunities for “smart regions” that share best practices and collaborate on common issues. Also, states can close gaps in critical areas of development for distressed pockets of the state along several dimensions (such as workforce development, health care, and education), producing a higher-skilled labor force that can work with complex technology to drive innovation and growth ultimately.

The nation. Improving quality of life and employment options may help reduce poverty rates and associated epidemics. By better engaging communities and residents, the federal government can improve its feedback loop, helping it to improve customer service and better match federal programs to people’s needs.

These communication channels could also help give people living in rural areas a greater voice in government. Finally, the concept of intelligent rural communities could drive benefits for the entire nation, increase efficiencies in industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, education, and health care to stimulate the economy and improve the gross domestic product.

In short, helping rural America helps the nation and enhancing connectivity could help millions of  Americans thrive and pave the way for rural communities to prosper.   PSR

John Krzesicki is Business Development Manager for Power Systems Research

It’s often said that there’s nothing new under the sun, only new ways of doing old things. That may be especially true in how we handle data.

Ever since Power Systems Research began tracking global production of engines and powertrains in 1976, its analysts have been alert to new trends surrounding power and data movement.

Today, as three essential metrics in data handling change— cloud costs, volume and processing time—, the structure of data networks also is changing. In many cases, it’s not practical to send vast amounts of data to the cloud to be processed and then wait for the results. Now, it’s often necessary to have smaller data centers located near the activity, at the edge of the action, if you will.

Consider automated vehicles. In a traffic situation with a high volume of automated vehicles transmitting data for processing, it’s necessary to have instantaneous response times for each vehicle’s data. Further, as that data is “use” data, there is no need for it to move to the cloud and move out of the cloud adding to the cloud bill.  Many companies are repatratiating their data from the cloud due to these costs alone.

Expanding further on the high volume of automated vehicles transmitting data at the same time, consider hundreds of automated vehicles moving on a roadway simultaneously within the same small area: what happens if many of them want to switch lanes or change speeds at exactly the same time? It’s necessary to have virtually simultaneous responses for requests from all these vehicles. That’s a problem that will severely test cloud computing; a pragmatic solution to this type of challenge requires many data centers near the roadways to handle the high volume of requests instantaneously. 

Edge data centers also feature the concept of many microgrids, not a small number of wide-spread grids where a failure could disrupt large areas and hundreds of thousands of individuals.  Adding to the case for increased use of microgrids are the aspects of sustainability and environmental stewardship that are only growing in importance and often easier to accomplish in smaller footprints.

There are growing advantages and applications for edge data centers.

These Edge data centers have specific needs that are like large data centers but at a smaller scale. Think power. Think cooling. Think storage. Think transmission. Think security.  Edge data centers offer a resiliency boost as they also provide geographic diversity and a lowering of risks related to local power outages. 

The concept of edge computing is not new, but the need for this approach is growing every day. The idea of edge computing comes from the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) developed in the 1990s to deliver heavy volumes of data for website and video applications from edge servers located close to users.

In the 2000s, applications were added to these data centers, thus creating essential commercial edge computing services.

As trends point towards a greater penetration and adoption of technologies requiring edge data centers, Power Systems Research analysts continue to maintain a close focus on the products and equipment that will be impacted by these trends. 

We realize the way technologies are deployed in the field will ultimately impact future demand within the powered equipment markets as OEMs and various supply chain companies navigate the path forward.  There are bound to be changes and detours along the way, but it is certainly helpful to step back and observe the roadmap that appears to be in front of us and anticipate the changes ahead. PSR

John Krzesicki is Business Development Manager for Power Systems Research