Sentilla Blog

BNP Media put on the Green Intelligent Buildings conference in Arlington, VA this spring. I was there, and gave a talk on what sustainability means to green buildings. Utlimately the message was this: There are 3 steps to maintaining a sustainable building -- measure, analyze, and act. While most think they can measure once and expect the result months later to be the same, the collective view was that people are the most disruptive force to a green building. Continually measuring, analyzing, and acting is what differentiates an audit from sustainability. There were a number of sophisticated companies there, and it was great to learn the different ways that they keep buildings running efficiently. Tridium was quite impressive -- they are wrestling the large Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric of the world and attacking the SMB market (and, it appears, winning).

2010 is one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons with 19 named storms so far. On the West coast, September 27, 2010 saw Los Angeles break an all time high-temperature record at 113F—possibly more but the official thermometer broke!

As outside temperatures went up, heat seeped into buildings, forcing air conditioners to turn on and add additional demand onto the electricity grid.

With the Carbon Reduction Commitment (now CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme) turned into a flat tax and delayed by a year, many are questioning whether carbon regulation is real.  Last year, Mike Manos described a doomsday "CO2K" scenario similar to Y2K.  Now that some time has passed, governments have changed, and we've interviewed data center operations about the impact of carbon regulation, I'm weighing in on the issue.  Let's put it this way -- unless carbon tax is about FIVE TIMES the cost of electricity, there's no financial motivation to change behavior.  That means CO2K is more likely to be like Y2K -- essentially a lot of hype but ultimately a bust. Check out the video blog below, or at Data Centre Solutions.