How Dell is helping build our sustainable future off the grid, on the grid and at the edge of computing.
By Laura Thomas, chief blogger at Dell
When I think of “going off the grid” my mind first goes to a cabin deep in the woods where someone has chosen to have very little contact with others. But, with advances in home-based batteries that can store electricity and serve as backup generators, my vision probably needs an update.
In many areas around the world, being off the grid is not a choice, water is becoming scarce and e-waste is piling up. They may be disparate topics, but they impact all of our futures, so Dell is making connections to address them.
Connecting Students to Learning
In remote regions, some schools cannot keep the lights on and power classroom equipment simultaneously. Research shows that access to technology and devices in the classroom has a highly positive effect on student learning, but lack of reliable, affordable electricity has been one of the biggest barriers to providing technology access to students.
At Dell, we want to help find innovative ways of expanding access to technology-enabled learning environments such as solar-powered Learning Labs. These low-cost, energy-efficient mobile classrooms are developed from a converted shipping container. The Lab uses virtualized, cloud-based computing technology to keep each workstation powered with just three to ten watts of energy, as compared with 150 watts for traditional PC workstations and is able to pull the energy it needs from solar panels.
Solar energy can power a classroom, but access to clean water is also important for the young minds that will lead us into the future. And when it takes approximately 1,000 gallons per person per day to produce the average American diet alone, conservation of that water is vital.
Connecting Citizen Scientists
“People just don’t have good information on water,” Pecan Street Inc CEO Brewster McCracken said at a recent event on Dell’s main campus. His group is working to change that by creating the world’s largest research data base on energy use, but then the challenge he said is “how do you get all that data and convert it into useful information, delivered in an easy, mobile format?”
Pecan Street’s network of “citizen scientists” who have a low-watt sensor installed in their circuit panel, or data pulled from the cloud through their utility, are already contributing to first-of-its-kind energy use research.
When Pecan Street started their project they were in uncharted territory, but turned to Dell technology to create their initial homegrown SQL database. Two years ago, Dell joined the industry advisory council of Pecan Street to help them expand their work in energy big data and build on the Dell Smart Grid Data Management Solution.
“By this time next year, our University Municipal Water Consortium will be managing more customer water use data each month than all Texas water utilities combined,” McCraken noted. “And we will be doing it all on Dell systems!”
Connecting Organizations
Working with other groups is vital to all of these efforts.
“There are 20 million organizations around the world working to improve our planet, but they aren’t working together and sometimes even compete against each other,” retired NASA astronaut Ron Garan said at a recent event at Dell’s headquarters. He discussed how the big data those millions of social good organizations hold around the edges of our connected world could be put to a greater use.
Garan has gone farther off the grid than the average person with 2,842 orbits of Earth and 178 days in space. The serial entrepreneur started Manna Energy Foundation to focus on the development and implementation of technologies and the resulting social enterprise to power clean energy, water and telecoms.
“We need to transform our mindset to so that data sharing is viewed as a good thing. It’s the only way we’ll solve the problems,” he stressed. “Each organization has a piece of the puzzle.”
A new generation of tools from Dell Software can integrate that data from various sources, organize it in a way that makes it useful and then analyze it for better understanding.
Connecting Computing at the Edge
Bringing information together also means moving computing to the edges of the grid for faster processing where it’s needed most. McCracken spoke about how it has led Pecan Street to an understanding of not only water usage, but also things like the optimum direction for solar panels to face.
By building gateways that allow sensors to parse the data closer to where it is collected, partnering with customers on solutions in our Internet of Things lab, and participating in the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) that sets standards for connecting a multitude of household gadgets and appliances, Dell puts technology and expertise to work where it can do the most good for people and the planet.
Our Dell 2020 Legacy of Good Plan brings the rest of our sustainability strategy into focus and sets the trajectory for how these and other connections will become an accelerator for successful and sustainable outcomes for our future.
