Can The Internet Save The Planet?Can The Internet Save The Planet?

BLACK ARTS
"Monetization of assets"--there's a phrase seldom associated with global warming. At its most elemental level, that's the alchemy that Web-based technology can provide the energy-monitoring and carbon-emissions sector: the transformation of presumed liabilities (greenhouse gases) into potentially tradable commodities (carbon debits and credits).

"This is the inflection point," says Bob Gohn, VP of marketing at wireless-mesh silicon vendor Ember. "The energy management area is growing rapidly, and we're seeing very significant growth as a company--we're doubling chip shipments quarter to quarter."

Spun out of an MIT research team in 2000, Ember operates in the online energy management space, making semiconductors and software for ZigBee networks, the powerful short-range wireless technology used, for example, in sensor networks for demand-response systems. Ember-powered networks are finding applications in advanced metering infrastructure, residential load-control devices to regulate energy demand, and wireless controls for building automation.

The success of companies like Ember provides a clear signal that Web-based energy management is a niche market rapidly going mainstream. "In recent years energy management has become the killer app driving deployment of sensors and control-point networks," Gohn says.

Silver Spring Networks, which makes wireless transceivers that are embedded in energy and water meters, is seeing that sort of demand. Such meters until recently were standalone devices waiting for a once-a-month reading. Now they supply hourly or even minute-by-minute energy-usage data to utilities and customers.

Utility grids, CEO Scott Lang says, "are some of the largest, most complex networks in the world"--yet they're still being read by guys with clipboards walking around in back yards. "To link them up we identified one standard: IP. The same kind of approach that makes the Internet work is going to make this work."

In a nutshell, that's how the entire Web-based energy management sector is becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of IT: by bringing the power of open standards and open networks to the problems of energy distribution, demand, and efficiency.

Given the simplicity of many of these concepts--Hey, how about linking up electrical meters?--the question is, Why has it taken this long for them to edge into the mainstream?

One answer is security. The Hollywood scenario of an attacker gaining access to power-grid control systems is a real fear for public utilities. Then there's the era of cheap fossil fuel that we've just exited. When oil was less than 30 bucks a gallon, who cared? There's also the fact that the energy-producing sectors have been relatively IT averse. Drilling, refining, and distributing petroleum and coal is messy, both physically and politically, and meshed wireless sensor networks (to cite one example) haven't been top of mind, to say the least.

Finally, there's Moore's Law. Only recently have the wireless technologies, the silicon, and the networking standards become widespread and economical enough to drive this latest phase of the Internet's evolution.

"Energy companies have been doing things in a very similar fashion for their first 100 years," says Silver Spring's Lang. "But now there's this convergence of devices that can talk and radio frequency technologies and processing power. It's going to revolutionize the system."

"It's all about giving people tools to understand what's going on and taking action," says Martin Flusberg, founder of Nexus Energy Software, a unit of Esco Technologies, which provides utilities with Web-based tools that customers and businesses can use to monitor and reduce their energy consumption.

Another Internet revolution--and this one just might help save the planet.

Illustration by Peter Hoey

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