Portugal plans to have the first “city with a brain” up and running by 2015. This city will be completely filled with sensors monitoring everything, including energy use. The technology will supposedly allow individual buildings to regulate energy use based on occupancy rates and temperature. Also factoring into the equation of how each building uses energy will be data from solar and wind power generators and other city systems that’s will be fed into a central “nervous system” that can change what type of energy is used to generate the energy needed in real time.
Another article that discusses this new city with a brain mentions that the undertaking will be very expensive on the front end, especially installing all of the sensors and such. However, the article goes on to mention that the actual cost to install the sensors will be offset by using more efficient building techniques. Although the article does not specifically mention how long this payback period will take. This is a very exciting initiative and I know that there are many other examples of cities that leverage IT to this extent being planned around the world. Considering all the positive features of these new cities, it will be interesting to see how long it takes the “average person” to consider living in a “city with a brain” especially considering all of the privacy issues that will inevitably result.
As Chris mentions as the end of his post, this definitely re-raises some of the privacy issues we discussed in class. The article linked at the end here discussed privacy with a somewhat older technology, traffic monitoring cameras. I think this is somewhat similar to energy usage because they are not supposed to be constantly used, but only monitored when there is an accident or when there is extremely high energy use. However, what is in place to ensure that appropriate use of these monitoring tools are ensured and not abused? Do we need to monitor the monitoring going on in situations like these?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nhregister.com/articles/2010/08/21/shoreline/aa1_branford_trafficcam082110.txt
We absolutely need to monitor the monitors with independent audits, as been shown time and time again, people with power to invade privacy invariably do so. However, in cities and major intersections having cameras that can be rewound to view crimes and accidents is just too valuable not to (terrorism, crime deterrent, savings on court disputes, to name a few).
ReplyDeleteMy first reaction is that this is awesome. I agree that the privacy elements are huge but I don't think they're insurmountable. As technology advances, things like traffic and security cameras will become more prevalent whether we like it or not. Harnessing their power to improve efficiencies will result in huge energy and water savings and there is the potential for citizen conveniences like streetlights which sense walkers late at night. As this type of monitoring technology becomes more common, I am assuming/hoping that privacy protections will evolve with them, such as requiring subpoenas for any personally identifiable data. Fingers crossed that I'm not being naive ...
ReplyDeleteWe don't have to wait until 2015 for buildings to regulate their energy use.
ReplyDeleteBefore coming to BU, I worked for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. We built a "green" building that opened in 2008 and one of the coolest things about it (I thought) is that we have a computer on the roof, a "weather station," if you will, that monitors the environment both inside and outside the building. From that data, the computer is able to open and close windows throughout the building and skylights on the roof to control the temperature.
Of course there is plenty of room for advancement, but there are plenty of buildings with brains already out there.
Interesting. I worked over the summer with someone from Portugal, who was always complaining about how far behind the times the US infrastructure was technologically. I guess this is part of what he was talking about.
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