Talking Non-CeNSE About Sustainability In Dubai

A conference on sustainability in Dubai might sound as sensible as a Gamblers Anonymous convention in Las Vegas. But that is where I found myself last week courtesy of HP.

Unless you’ve been living on Mars – in which case you’d be at home in Dubai – you already know the city is not a very sustainable place. Air-conditioning isn’t so much a luxury as a life-support mechanism given that temperatures in the summer regularly top 40 degrees if not 50 Centigrade.

Gleaming taxis shuttle you between space-station-like hotels,  so walking is not really an option. In fact holding your breath and dashing from vehicle to building is a must to avoid the hostile atmosphere.

And to top it all, Dubai also has a snow dome. Yes, a snow dome in the desert. It doesn’t get much more unsustainable than that.

To be fair, the actual event (entitled the HP Executive Energy Conference) covered energy rather than sustainability, so I suppose Dubai makes sense from that perspective – although since its own reserves of oil have dwindled, Dubai has moved to an obsession with building.

But as I heard from a local, most of the occupants of the myriad skyscrapers are people building other skyscrapers. Draw your own conclusions on sustainability from that one.

Blending Power And Telecoms

The list of topics discussed by HP included smart meters and grids. HP along with IBM and Cisco is very excited by the chance to extend its tech reach to energy grids. In fact some insiders think that the end game for smart grids will be a blending with telecoms networks which will eventually see consumers getting internet, gas, electricity and even water from the same supplier.

HP for one was keen to point out the similarities between smart meters – the end-points for smart grids – and mobile phones. It’s all just about devices plugged into networks and we know all about that stuff, the tech companies claim.

There is only one small problem with this ambitious smart grid vision. Few companies are actually buying into it. HP admitted that a tool it released at last year’s show to help utilities to secure their shiny new smart grids is not actually selling. The reason for this is that utilities aren’t actually rolling out smart grid technology yet in any meaningful way.

The only country where this isn’t the case appears to be US where the government has made a large pile of cash available to bankroll the process (though the UK is also toying with the idea). But the clock is ticking on the fund which means utilities are scrabbling around to spend the money before it disappears. While this might be a good thing in terms of catalysing smart grid roll-outs – it could have severe repercussions for the security of these new networks. It looks like it may be a case of deploy first – and then secure later – in many cases. And that has experts rightly concerned.

Deploy Then Secure

Aside from a lack of cash, some insiders claim that it’s actually the utilities who aren’t that keen on the whole smart grid concept after all. They like the idea of making their systems more efficient for sure. And being able to get rid of staff in favour of remotely fixing network problems with a the flick of a switch is attractive to. As is being able to cut off customers who don’t pay without having to employ an expensive man in a van to do the actual switching off.  What they don’t seem to be hot on however is the two-way street which smart meters will engender. Customers will have a lot more insight into what energy they are using and how much they should be charged. Saying goodbye to those juicy estimated bills is going to be hard.

But while smart grids may not be taking off at the rate that HP and others would like, tech companies have plenty of other ideas to make up the short-fall. HP’s techies have been cooking up a concept known as CeNSE – Central Nervous System for the Earth. The idea makes a lot of sense on paper. The internet is essentially a vast network of compute power. But it’s deaf, dumb and blind says HP. What we need to go hand in hand with the internet is a vast array of sensors which can feed information into the system and make it a lot more useful.

BP Oil Disaster

The applications for this sensing technology are many and varied including tackling climate change. Some of the initial deployments are happening in the oil industry with HP helping out Shell with its exploration. One HP expert at the Dubai event even postulated that more sophisticated sensing technology could help avert natural disasters such as the recent spate of bridge collapses in the US or more recently the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

For some, this kind of vision of the future will sound about as sustainable and realistic as a snow-dome in the desert. But it’s still good to hear about these kind of ideas even if they are a bit potty. I think HP have got it right on the importance of sensors but I think their concept of the devices are wrong. Rather than billions of stand-alone sensors being deployed around the globe, it’s more likely that we’ll find smarter ways to network the sensors that are already embedded in devices such as smart meters, motion sensors and even PCs. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California have established a project to link together the accelerometers in PCs – the devices which detect if the machine is dropped and protect vital components – to help predict earthquakes for example.

HP has also got it wrong with the name CeNSE. As environmental expert Gabrielle Walker, the keynote speaker at the Dubai event, pointed out, climate change isn’t a threat to the Earth. The actual planet has endured a lot worse in its history. We are threatening the world we have created not the planet itself.

The Earth will still be around in ten thousand years but the same can’t be said for us  – or Dubai for that matter.