Smart Living ... beyond Smart Cities (Part 3) : Smart Energy

The highest consumption rate in today’s world is of fossil fuel. The twentieth century saw a rapid 20x increase in the use of fossil. The consumption of these fossil fuels continues at a high rate which means once we have used up all of them, we need to rely on alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind and hydro power to meet our daily needs. This sounds quite scary, but yes, this is the truth. As per a research report compiled by IEA (International Energy Agency) average energy use in the last three decades grew at 10% per person per year globally.

Statistics show developing nations consume more energy compared to the developed ones while the world overall grew by 39%.

Industrial users (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction) consume about37%, Personal and commercial transportation consumes 20%, Residential consumption at 11%, commercial consumption stands at 5%, The other 27% of the world's energy is lost in energy transmission and generation…

The concept of getting more awareness in developing nation is though a bigger challenge but will catapult them to become a nation better planned when developed and refrain from being in an irreversible position where you cannot change things. 

There has been a veritable explosion in the number of electronics, appliances, and other miscellaneous devices plugged into, or permanently connected to the outlets in our homes that are consuming electricity every moment. The NRDC (Natural Resource Defense Council) conducted a study and found that 23% of power consumption in the average household (roughly about a quarter of your electricity bill), is paid for no good reason but for the idle load electricity which is consumed by various appliances like Computers, Digital equipment’s, electrical outlets and others… in sleep mode. The rush towards the new age innovation and connected devices to an extent where a home refrigerator can now play music and pop up a twitter feed on its display is consuming energy more than what it is actually meant for, Alas… the engineering, some devices actually can be designed such that the energy consumption is minimum and that’s is what we believe Smart equipment are all about…!

India, a country with a population of 1.27 billion and GDP of nearly 6 Trillion has 60%of its power generated by Coal, the electricity demand growth stands at 10% to 12% per annum. Power deficits range between 4.3% to 5.4% and a percentage electrification of 67.2% across the country.   India has an installed capacity of ~350000 MW out of which 12.75% is renewable energy generation capacity. India operated with two power exchanges IEX and PXIL. India has also grand plans on going smart in the power sector in all three areas Generation, Transmission and Distribution.

A study indicates that some power vendors are still working in the old inefficient ways and these power plants typically only turn about 30% of the energy input into usable electricity. We are losing up to 70% of the energy in the fuel at the start of the process and the end user like us in our homes and offices are leaving open the energy sucking vampires in standby mode and charges connected one end to the power plugs dangling unconnected to any device at the other, we should take conscious attempt to drain energy vampires by unplugging electronics and appliances we seldom use.

How can we leverage Technology?

Home automation technology is becoming as synonymous with sustainability as it is with convenience. Incorporating smart home technology into a new or existing structure makes it easier to reduce energy consumption. Easy monitoring of their power, heat and hot water usage helps households and workplaces get to grips with their energy consumption habits. Experience shows that it is possible to save around 20% of energy consumption simply by changing user behavior.  With the advent of Internet of Things and convergence towards Smart City initiative user comfort along with energy efficiency focuses on correct operation of building automation devices and systems. The communicating and connected devices can help us integrate energy-saving smart lighting controls, power controllers that turn appliances off automatically and programmable climate control systems.

·          The energy vampires can be eliminated by use of Smart Strip – a device that automatically detects when you have turned an item off and completely cuts power to a device so it stops drawing electricity and provides surge protection saving 23%of our power bills. 

·          19% of global electricity generation is taken for lighting. Sensors which are capable to detect motion can be great help. LEDs today are using 85% less energy than incandescent bulbs. Research shows LED efficiency is expected to double from the current 125-135 lumens per watt to 230 lumens per watt in the next few years.

·          Thermal conditions at homes or offices helped with programmable thermostats allow us to set the temperature automatically. Motion sensors in the rooms to start and stop the heating and cooling systems and decrease the amount energy consumption to an extent of 7%

·          The emergence in solar power technology and India focusing on use of 20,000 MW of solar power by 2020 is a golden opportunity to leverage this technology at homes, we already are using solar water heaters and can extend this technology at homes for our lighting and other needs too.

·          There is an emergence of Ultra Efficient heat pump systems, for example a fuel-fired, multi-function residential heat pump that can reduce primary energy consumption by 30% while a low-cost gas heat pump is designed to reduce heating costs by 30% to 45% compared to conventional gas furnaces and boilers.  Oak Ridge National Laboratory and General Electric are developing a new type of clothes dryer that uses a heat pump cycle to generate hot air needed for drying.

·          The real smart technology focusing on energy consumption is the invention of Smart refrigerator, a revolutionary new type of refrigerator that uses magnets to create cold, instead of vapor compression technology with water-based cooling fluid which is 70% more energy efficient.

·          While we are very much using our common sense today to open the windows and use the sunlight instead of drawing heavy curtains to them and light up the home, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pella Windows are working on new highly insulated windows that use sensors and microprocessors to automatically adjust shading based on the amount of available sunlight and the time of day to ensure proper lighting and comfort, saving consumers energy and money.

·         Another mechanism that is driven thru the emerging technology is a system could use the GPS function of a smartphone to automatically put a home in away mode when a person leaves a property. Some companies collect and analyse energy usage data, whether it's two-way power meters or smart thermostats, to tailor heating and cooling settings to specific buildings, on the other hand Cloud-based services can lower energy bills further. Utilities, for example, can reduce power usage during peak times through smart thermostats.

 Technology indeed provides us means and ways to become smart in leveraging the same and the key is sustenance at least cost and being smart at saving our reserves for the future generations adding to it a saving on our power bills to not less than 50%, we’ll also push towards a more sustainable, convenient living situation.

It’s all about making smart energy choices in a smart city opting to live in a smart home filled with smart equipment’s and be a smart human making smart choices. Connect with me on rajesh.mohandas@gmail.com to discuss in length about Smart cities and IoT.

Smart Living ... Beyond Smart Cities (Part 2) : Food Wastage

Food production – from field to fork – requires large amounts of energy and affects the environment in a variety of way. This blog under my Smart Living beyond Smart Cities focuses on things like innovative solutions for smart food and smarter food production, solutions to reduce food wastage in the world.

Let me bring entire focus on the Food waste or food loss category in this blog post. Food wastage is defined as the food that is discarded or lost or uneaten. The causes of food waste or loss are numerous, and occur at the stages of production, processing, retailing and consumption.

According to the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers Loss and wastage occurs at all stages of the food supply chain or value chain. In low-income countries, most loss occurs during production, while in developed countries much food – about 100 kilograms per person per year – is wasted at the consumption stage.

Despite millions of Indians going to bed on a hungry stomach, the country is letting food worth a whopping Rs.44,000 crore go waste each year due to lack of adequate storage infrastructure, fruits and vegetables alone was estimated at Rs.13,300 crore.

The journey of 1000 miles begins with one step; let’s begin this first step at home. Imagine technology helping us understand what we should and what we should not consume depending on our ability to consume. The secret of getting things ahead is getting started; the secret of getting started is breaking complex tasks into small manageable ones and then start with the first one. In the farm to fork value chain lets go reverse way and figure out what our home and accessories in our home can help towards overcoming food wastage.

Here are few pointers to up on to leverage smart eating in our daily life….

• SmartPlate™ is equipped with advanced object recognition and weight sensors which enable it to automatically identify, weigh and analyze your food intake while capturing a complete picture of all your eating habits.
• Connect SmartPlate™ to any wireless device and instantly track your meals with no manual data entry. “Portion Patrol” instantly warns you when you over-serve, helping you stay on track and achieve your goals.
• HAPIfork: This electronic fork, which exhibited at the 2013 CES, aims to help you slow your eating, which aids in digestion and helps weight control. When you’re eating too fast, the fork vibrates and lights up to remind you to slow down. By uploading the data via USB or Bluetooth to the HAPI app or website, you can track how long you take to eat, your bite intervals and bites per minute.
• Meld stove knob: Never again ruin a meal from over- or under-cooking: You can know exactly how hot you’re cooking with this Bluetooth-connected stove knob that you attach to your stove and corresponding thermometer clip that attaches to any of your existing cookware. The app automatically adjusts the stove temperature to the recipe’s needs.
• Neo Smart Jar: Having trouble keeping track of what’s in your pantry? This smart container, made by SKE labs (a 2015 CES exhibitor), does it all: monitors stock levels of its contents, keeps track of “use by” dates and also indicates when it needs to be washed
• Vessyl: Track the number of calories and nutritional content of everything you drink with this smart beverage container capable of analyzing liquids at the molecular level
• iSommelier promises to soften up the tannins mature wine that normally requires years of cellaring through aerating your wine with highly concentrated purified oxygen.
• Egg Minder will keep count of your eggs - up to 14 - letting you know (using LED lights and the companion app) which ones are the oldest and which ones might be going bad.
• Smart Fridge: Ideally, we'd prefer a smart fridge that orders our food online for us based on our stock levels but, until then, we'll have to make do with this Wi-Fi connected cooler from Samsung and LG that comes packing an 8-inch LCD display. That display offers up a plethora of connectivity options including smartphone mirroring, smart TV playback, memos, calendars and internet radio. It also keeps your food chilled. Imagine how a smart fridge could help reduce food waste without stooping to public shame. What if your fridge could monitor its own contents, and ping you while you’re at the store to remind you that you still have yogurt and don’t need to buy more.
• Packaging technologies can help, too. Marks & Spencer and Tesco, two major retail chains in the UK, are testing ethylene-absorbing strips in their produce packaging.

Technologies like these can make big reductions in food waste all along the chain, from the farm (to distributor to retailer) to your fork. While the contents above are compilations on what people at individual level can do to overcome food wastage my next blog will focus on moving beyond individuals and eye at retail chains, food storage warehouses and smart transportation of food items to ensure wastage is minimal.

Even when food is prepared according to plan, there tends to be excess of food sometimes, due to many unforeseen reasons CSR initiative and many NGOs in India have already kicked off awareness campaigns with countable few apps and toll free helpline numbers to collect leftover excess food and serve the hunger.

Smart Cities should incorporate in their planning with key focus in this area in terms of creating more Toll free Excess Food Helplines, Apps, Awareness Campaigns, Collection Cycle Time, Food storage facilities to ensure quality. On the other hand the citizen chapter should ensure people launching weddings, parties, and events where there is potential opportunity for excess left over should proactively inform or update the time, date and place on a app that can route the information to the agencies to complete the process addressing the quality and cycle time concerns upfront.

Thanks to Internet of Things and Connected World we are living in which will help us going beyond normal into Smart Living in a Smart city being a Smart person making Smart choices…

You may wish to write to me at rajesh.mohandas@gmail.com to discuss in length the implementation technologies and solution architecture blueprints with application platforms that are used in this area.

Smart Living... beyond smart cities (Part 1) : The Smart Cycle

Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. This demand of space and time killing the nature in the name of development has led to many adverse impacts.  India may be lagging behind China on several economic indicators but when it comes to environmental degradation, the country has definitely outsmarted its giant neighbor.

Of the world’s top 20 polluted cities, 13 are in India. Air pollution slashes life expectancy by 3.2 years for the 660 million Indians who live in cities. The Ganga and Yamuna are ranked among the world’s 10 most polluted rivers. A three-year analysis of the water quality in 290 rivers by the Central Pollution Control Board said about66% of the stretches monitored had high organic pollution. It means 8,400 km of these rivers are badly polluted and not fit for supporting aquatic life. India’s cities are in crisis. They are clogged with traffic, choked with pollution, blighted by concrete flyovers, overcrowded, suffer from power and water shortages, are prone to flooding and can at times be almost unbearable to live in.

Smart cities call for smart solutions in an age when carbon emissions and respect for the environment have come to the fore. And very often it is the low-energy, simpler forms of technology that can provide the answers. Writing in 1973, the philosopher and social commentator Ivan Illich stated the following:

 “Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories… Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well… In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule [the car] enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.”

Much modern urban planning is car-centric. But where is the need for the car if work, school or healthcare facilities are close by. Less need for ugly flyovers or six lane highways that rip up communities in their path. Getting from A to B would not require a race against the clock on the highway that cuts through a series of localities that are never to be visited, never to be regarded as anything but an inconvenience to be passed through en route to big-mac nirvana, multiplex overload or shopping-mall hedonism. The main factor that keeps cycling rates low in many cities is that most people are not comfortable sharing space in streets with fast-moving cars and trucks. Most modern cities are designed for cars. Thus, an intelligent city planner while planning a smart city should assume that cycling, walking and public transport would be the main forms of transport while trying to figure out how to accommodate inefficient, polluting and dangerous modes like private car use.

A humanistic, people-friendly city is first and foremost an accessible city, where mobility is possible for all. Traffic congestion represents a major economic problem because of the many working hours lost each day from sitting in traffic jams and soaring petrol costs. So what’s the solution? The good old bicycle! A growing number of cities around the world are eager to become bicycle cities, as part of a wider strategy to raise their green profile. The key to enabling high levels of cycling is having the right infrastructure, including cycle paths and bicycle parking, but also a number of communication campaigns to promote cycling, educate children and target groups who do not normally cycle.

Currently, 31% of India’s population lives in cities; these cities also generate 63% of the nation’s economic activity. These numbers are rapidly increasing, with almost half of India’s population projected to live in its cities by 2030. Smart Cities focus on the most pressing needs and on the greatest opportunities to improve quality of life for residents today and in the future. With this in mind, planners would create so-called separated cycle facilities “a combination of cycle tracks at the sidewalk level and/or protected bike lanes in the roadways”, Infrastructure, however, is not just about bike lanes associated with that in a smart city there will be opportunity to leverage technology to enable many facets of cycling.

•  There is already a lot of advancement in the area of Cycle Locks that are connected to your hand held devices that inform you of any possible tampering. Using Bluetooth Low-Energy, Wi-Fi, and an accelerometer, the lock pairs itself with a smartphone to be contextually aware
• Innovation in the Cycle industry has brought in various ways to track your wellness, the cyclist now is able to know the distance driving, calories burnt, heart rate, pulse and few other key statistics, also the cycles are smart enough to store your data on cloud and monitor the improvement in health parameters. There are advanced studies that show how this data help the medical and Para medical faculties in helping one overcome lifestyle disorders of diabetes and blood pressure
• Another classic innovation is the Copenhagen Wheel that allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, road conditions in real-time. Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you.
• Smart pedal and smart chain / belt are two other innovations that leverage the IoT and facilitate bicycle rides for longer distances. If one has to travel from home to office say 20Kms the modern cycle leveraging the technology has made it in par if not as fast as a car to cover the distance of 20Kms at the rate of 60Kmph. So you can reach the destination in 20mins overcoming all traffic
•  Smart Cycles are great energy savers, the capacitors and auto charge elements of the bicycle are generating energy that can be used back home for daily chores, heating, lighting and many other day to day activities.

 What is required by the planners today is to ensure when Smart Cities are built there should be enough infrastructure for Cycling and Pedestrians and this alone will contribute help improve the living conditions, directly impacting fuel costs and wellness of the person on cycle.

Lets build a smart planet with smart people choosing smart lifestyle supported by smart technology and smart governance... 

Connect with me on LinkedIn or mail me rajesh.mohandas@gmail.com  to discuss smart opportunities :-)