At the IBM Smarter Cities forum in Rio de Janeiro last week, I had the chance to go behind the scenes and take a first-hand look at Rio’s smart city project. My main impression is that the project represents one of the purest emerging examples of a smart city project that is simultaneously developing smart solutions on
Tag:
smart technologies
The long rumored acquisition of L+G by Toshiba has finally happened. It appears Bayard Group, the investment group that assembled the current incarnation of L+G from more than five companies, got their price ($2.3 billion) without the originally anticipated IPO, making their investors happy. Perhaps it is
It seems new smart technologies emerge by the day: smart plug-in cars, smart dishwashers, smart coffeemakers… The future will be Green, no doubt about it! For all the praises I have for the engineers and scientists that make it happen, I believe that this is the easy part of making the power grid smart. Implementation of the transformation will be the hard one.
Scale is an obvious challenge. Developed countries’ power grids have been built all along the 20th century, requiring titanic levels of investments. Upgrades, retrofits and greenfield additions will require a comparable level of efforts. And time. Lots of it. For utilities, short term means 5 years. For my generation of impatient go-getters, used to have everything a click away, grasping this relation to time is a challenge.