Tag Archives: big data
Facebook Announces Real-Time Data Center Efficiency Stats
Facebook has just taken a bit of internal data center energy efficiency wizardry and made it available to the world. On Thursday, it opened access to the minute-by-minute power-use effectiveness (PUE) and water-use effectiveness (WUE) scores via dashboards for its Prineville, Ore. and Forest City, N.C. data centers, and promises to have its next super-efficient [...]
The Data Monoculture
For almost a year I have been trying to alert readers to the strong possibility that organizations charged with estimating future energy usage are consistently underestimating totals. I think the source of their error lies in miscalculating the take-up of energy in the developing world, compounded by their ignoring current latent demand and, perhaps most [...]
Why Power Utilities Love Data Analytics + Smart Grid
While power utilities like to claim that they employ data analytics, they really don’t. Utilities tend to have last-gen business intelligence (BI) reporting solutions that they call “analytics,” but that typically amount to not much more than reporting tools or descriptive analytics (primarily based on older database architectures running SQL), as opposed to the real-time and predictive software using complex [...]
Combining Data to Figure out Climate Change
I apologize once again for the usual reasons. First, for the length of time since last I posted–we’ve moved and that was more disruptive this time than the 44 other moves I’ve made as an adult. Second, for returning to direct discussion of climate change, something that is closely connected to energy consumption but so [...]
Open Energy Data: So Big, So Important
Last month, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to publicly post energy efficiency information for its building stock. The data—a maze of mind-numbing Excel tables—is hard to sort through. But it’s a critical first step to opening up energy transparency in the real estate market. As we’ve noted, benchmarking and disclosing energy [...]
ECOtality: Crunching EV Charging Big Data Numbers
Besides being the world’s single largest deployment of EV charging infrastructure in the world, the Department of Energy’s $230 million EV Project is also a huge data collection engine. Indeed, one of the key goals of the government-industry partnership is to learn everything there is to know about how plug-in vehicles interact with the grid [...]
The Data of Cleantech
Big Data is getting popular, fast. As electric utilities accelerate their smart-grid rollouts, a potentially massive market is growing at the intersection of cleantech and IT. Hardware vendors, software vendors, and utilities themselves are rapidly moving beyond the notion of their core business of distributing electric power efficiently to consumers. The trend that will shape [...]
Using Data for Cleantech Marketing
In last month’s post “How to Grow Electric Vehicle Sales”, I discussed the importance of understanding your target customers so you can successfully market your new clean tech product or service. For instance, the people who bought the early Toyota Prius – typically middle aged, upper middle class, highly educated, environmentalists – were willing to [...]
Interactive Map of Los Angeles Electricity Use
A new energy map of Los Angeles developed at UCLA lets residents find how much electricity the average customer in their neighborhood uses, see how a neighborhood’s energy use relates to its average income level and track energy use over time. The map, released by UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, is the most highly interactive map of [...]