I just blogged about IBM’s Water Smart Grid, and my readers pointed out there is an existing solution from Microsoft with OSIsoft as a partner.
The below video has details.
Environmental Sustainability IT Software by OSIsoft
The above picture is CEO of OSIsoft Pat Kenndy, and here is a case study that discusses some of his views.
OSIsoft
Cleaner Air, Cleaner Water
At age 64, J. Patrick Kennedy still plays a great game of tennis. But, as he’s the first to admit, it’s not the same game of tennis he played almost half a century ago in high school.
“I find that as I get older, the game is less about pure force and more about placement,” says Kennedy. “It’s about conserving your energy and directing the ball right where you want it to go.”
Kennedy might just as well be talking about the environmental sustainability. That’s another interest of Kennedy’s—a professional interest this time, given that Kennedy is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of OSIsoft, the San Leandro, California-based maker of the PI System: a real-time performance management infrastructure that measures and records the activity of equipment, products, and processes throughout a company.
Although Kennedy and OSIsoft didn’t set out to become major players in the global effort for environmental sustainability, that’s the way it’s turned out. OSIsoft’s software products help companies worldwide to address this pressing global issue. Many companies know only their aggregated energy or water consumption and their carbon emissions—long after the fact. OSIsoft provides companies with timely information about exactly where and how energy is being consumed and emissions generated. This information is made available to those who can act on it in a timely way, and see the result. Companies use this data to identify work practices and faults that result in resource loss, address those inefficiencies and, thus, reduce greenhouse gas production while lowering their resource consumption.
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Another of OSIsoft’s customers is the Halifax Regional Water Commission (HRWC), the first regulated water, wastewater, and storm water utility in Canada. HRWC is a fully-metered utility that provides drinking water to about 325,000 residents of Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) through a 1,300km (more than 1,000 miles) pipe network.
The PI System enables HRWC to collect, analyze, and disseminate data from more than 120 meters across its treatment and distribution facilities. With this information, it can then determine the period of a leak, the amount of leakage, and narrow the location to a specific district-metered area. Consequently, the PI System has been a key contributor to HRWC’s daily reduction in leakage of almost 9 million gallons of potable water. This reduction translates to a savings of more than U.S.$550,000 per year.
And, you can use OSISoft in the data center, Microsoft does.
OSIsoft software is also helping to address energy consumption in an area that affects virtually every large company and every person with an e-mail address or access to the Internet: the data center. Data centers may account for between 1.2 and 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States—and, if counted as its own industry, would be the fastest-growing electrical energy consumer in the U.S. and one of the top five in terms of energy use. Microsoft, which is rapidly expanding its datacenter operations to support its Microsoft Live and related service offerings, is one of the growing number of companies using OSIsoft software to help conserve data center energy consumption.