Suddenly the resistance to migration from villages to cities seems to have disappeared. More people are beginning to believe this as an inevitable trend of days to come. Cities are where humankind are going to be concentrated, like it or no. So, the next best thing is to see how cities can become sustainable and cater to the growing numbers. By going digital?
WorldChanging lists "the great digital underbelly" of new and retrofitted sustainable cities by Gordon Feller of Urban Age, green ICT (information and communications technologies) with its promise for increasing the energy and resource efficiency of most aspects of urban development, as one of the trends of tomorrow.
If these technologies can offset their operating and production resource impacts (estimated to use 2-3 percent of total industry energy used, but forecast to double by 2022), the world could benefit from initial increased efficiencies in the 15-25 percent range.
Many companies like IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens are believed to be positioning for implementing new ICT for sustainability in cities, demonstrating applications at the pilot project level. Cities with pilot or operating projects in green ICT include Amsterdam, San Francisco, Masdar City (United Arab Emirates), Seoul, London, Singapore, Beijing, New Delhi, Mumbai, Stockholm and Oslo.
The following are Green Smart City applications and examples of companies involved:
o traffic congestion monitoring and pricing systems: IBM, Capita Group
o water applications (leakage detection, purification): IBM, Siemens
o building applications (sense-and-respond technologies to monitor temperature, light, humidity and occupancy): Johnson Controls, Siemens, IBM
o intelligent public transportation and logistics: PwC, Samsung, Cisco
o public shared offices with telepresence (pictured above): Cisco, Hewlett-Packard
o home and office smart appliances that can tie in with smart grid energy applications: General Electric, AT&T, Whirlpool
o smart grids: General Electric, Schneider Electric, SAP, Oracle, ABB
o data centers for cities: Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco
o carbon inventories and carbon accounting: Microsoft, Oracle.
That is quite an impressive list. Have they missed out any area? Can you think of any? One doubt – where it calls for products to be put in place, actual physical ones, what are the energy implications of manufacturing these. For example, smart grids. Even sensors need to be manufactured, right. And chip manufacturing calls for a lot of water. What do you think?
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1 comment:
Couple of points worth mentioning:-
1) Will migration of people from villages to cities really help in conservation of energy ??? i do not feel so. Look at places like Mumbai, Shanghai etc ... These places are living examples of cities being overfilled with population... Rather i have a feeling that people moving on to cities will do much harm than good .... think about congestion in traffic, building of infrastructure etc ... And yes!!! Will a nation be called developed by building only cities and ignoring the rural places
2)Technology is definitely good but the point should be noted that technology helps in transforming a resource from one for to another ... Where are the resources ??? And even if there are enough resources is the transformation process effected by use of technology is energy efficient ??? there is no point in technology if it causes more ill than good....
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