Right standard needed for green innovation

Having companies and people go green is the only way to go, however, they have to be able to follow the correct path, said panelists at NIWeek08’s panel on green innovation today.
Knowing a company has to go green and then implementing a plan is a key, but everyone has to be on the same page.
"Standardization allows people to speak the same language. When talking about a project in one country and it transfers to another country and if it does not follow a certain specification, it could be a problem,” said Daniel Kaminsky, a director at Elcom, a power measurement company based in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
“We need to standardize to understand the true benefits of green,” said Don Brown chief executive of EcoVelocity Associates, an international consulting firm that specializes in developing eco-product and service strategies.
“I agree we need a standard, but worse than not having a standard is having a standard that leads you down the wrong path,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and a professor of computer science at UCLA.
While everyone agrees there should be a standard way to accomplish any green initiatives, but is there one solution or a multitude?
“One of the biggest challenges is to share with people what the benefits to being green are,” Brown said.
“There will be a lot of answers,” said Dr. James Truchard, president, chief executive and co-founder of National Instruments. “I see lots of little answers. There are a lot of different ways to solve the problems.”
Any type of solution will not be universal. “It all depends on where you are and which part of the world you are in,” said Thirumalaichelvam Subramanian, chief technical officer at CEMS, a chiller management company based in Malaysia.
One answer Truchard talks about is fusion technology.
“We went to the moon. We should have the same effort toward fusion power,” he said. “That,” he said, “could be the home run.”
Renewable solar and wind power have potential to help cut down on burning carbon-based fuels to create energy, but as Manuel Gonzalez, with Houston-based Center Point Energy, said, you can only gain energy from those sources at certain times of the day and people need energy 24 hours a day.
“What is needed in the future is a good energy storage system to get energy when you need it most,” Gonzalez said.
“Nuclear power has a bad reputation, but that may help as an energy source,” Truchard said. “Solar and wind have limitations. There will be quit a few solutions to the problem.”

Future plans in real time

Jeff Kodosky lives in the present, but is always looking ahead.
That just goes to show how the father of National Instruments’ flagship software product LabVIEW thinks. He is always looking two or more versions ahead--at least.
“The scope has expanded from virtual instrumentation to graphical design,” Kodosky said this morning during his keynote address at NIWeek08 in Austin, Texas. “We now have an enormous amount of power on our desktops” that we need to utilize, he said. “Our machines also have powerful high performance graphics processors to take advantage of.”
But that is today, said Kodosky, who is a co-founder and business and technology fellow at NI. In the future, systems will just be different.
“The architecture of our machines will change over the next decade. The machines will be massively parallel,” he said.
Storage of huge amounts of data will also increase.
“I talk to our new hires and talk about the day when you couldn’t hold your entire music library in your shirt pocket. They just smile and indulge me. It won’t be long before we store petabytes (A petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes or 1,000 terabytes).”
“One of our major goals is to harness the huge graphical issues,” he said.
Part of the way to accomplish that is to keep pushing and utilizing multicore processing.
“One of my favorite quotes about multicore processing comes from Apple's Steven Jobs, who said, ‘nobody knows how to program those things,” well Mr. Jobs we have a room full of people that can program those things,” said Mike Santori, NI business and technology fellow during his portion of the keynote address this morning.

NI: Finding a way to measure green

Green is the word if you talk to National Instruments.
“The key to green engineering is understanding the very complex issues we see around the globe,” said NI President, Chief Executive and co-founder Dr. James Truchard, sporting a green shirt during this morning’s keynote address at NIWeek08 in Austin, Texas. “The second part is fixing it. We can measure, acquire, analyze, and present and then fix it in terms of design and deploy. We can find out what the problem is and then solve it by the design process.”
“Fundamentally,” Truchard said, “we see this as an opportunity to make a difference in the work you are doing.”
“You are working at creating a new idea on how we can be more energy efficient; how we can be more environmentally sensitive reducing pollution all the way from wind mills to steel mills.”
Truchard wanted to reiterate how important the green movement is becoming.
“There is a definite emphasis on this area. It is important and you are coming up with some interesting products in the process,” he said.
This morning wasn’t all about green engineering. The company also focused on more of its key growth areas like wireless, embedded and multicore processing.
“We want to do for embedded what the PC did for the desktop,” Truchard said. “In other words we want to create a framework where software can be reused and applications can be shared in a community with ever growing momentum.”
"We seen multicore (processing) being a major step forward. We will be introducing even better capability making our analysis algorithms multicore aware so we can once again improve the efficiency of multicore as well as what LabVIEW does with a fundamental parallel approach," he said. "We see a supercomputer on every desktop. These are the next generation of computers with very powerful processing capabilities to solve the hardest problems on the planet."
NI is also making a bigger leap into the wireless market. While they have been in the area, the company is now pushing big research and development dollars into wireless.
“Wireless is everywhere and it is the biggest expense in our R&D area these days,” said Tim Dehne, NI senior vice president of R&D.
“We are introducing WiFi data acquisition products that will allow you to do your job in a better way,” Truchard said.

Communication skills advance project capabilities

When it comes to being agile and nimble in the automation industry, everyone has to be able to speak the same language, said today’s keynote speaker at the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit in Chicago.
To be reactive to the marketplace, you have to be able to communicate with your suppliers, said Eric Cosman, engineering solutions IT consultant for Dow Chemical Co.
“We found at Dow we had our own language and when you work closely with suppliers you have to speak the same language,” Cosman said. “When you come into a situation (with a supplier) speaking ‘Dowspeak’ then there is a problem. You have to be able to speak the same language.”
Cosman said about 10 years ago Dow decided to adopt an industry standard for language and that has helped them when dealing with people and companies outside his organization.
In short, that communication level allows a company to remain agile. “You have to move quickly in the industry,” Cosman said.
Cosman talked about a scenario where Dow and Siemens worked together on a project and one of the keys to the entire project was communication.
“Work closely with suppliers and you can feed your needs and goals back to them and they can deliver even better products,” he said. “It truly ends up being a win-win situation.”
Afterall, companies are changing all the time with all the mergers and acquisitions occurring.
“We are in the midst of a huge transformation in our business,” Cosman said. “It is a very dynamic business climate.”

Siemens sticks to plan

It is all about having a plan and sticking to it.
From “The Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic to Siemens Chief Executive for Industrial Automation Systems Industry sector, Ralf-Michael Franke, they all have a plan to move forward.
In Rancic’s case, it was about having one major goal and quite a few smaller goals to meet along the way during his run up the ladder on the first year of the television show “The Apprentice” with Donald Trump, Rancic said during his keynote address today at the 2008 Siemens Automation Summit in Chicago. Rancic ended up winning and becoming Trump’s right hand man for a year.
Franke said during his keynote Siemens has a plan to make sure the company is moving forward not for the next quarter, but for the next 10 years or so in the complex automation environment.
“We cannot avoid complexity in the future,” Franke said. “We have to learn how to manage it.”
Part of that complexity is about reducing time to market. Franke sees cutting down on engineering time as a benefit to reducing time to market. After all, the faster you can get product to customers, the higher your chance of profitability.
“We have to go more and more toward the digital world and also the virtual world,” he said. “Engineers have to think this way in the future.”
Siemens also relies upon what it calls megatrends to be a guiding force for their future.
They see three megatrends as areas to focus their business: Urbanization, demographics and climate change, said Dennis Sadlowski, chief executive of Siemens Energy and Automation during his keynote this morning.
Urbanization is interesting as last year was the first year in a long time that people were moving back into cities. Their projection is by 2015, there will be 350 million people living in mega cities all over the world.
Demographics is simple. People are living longer as life expectancy has jumped to just over 80 years of age.
Climate change is also a megatrend and there is definitely a higher concentration of CO2 on Earth, Sadlowski said.
He added the company is jumping on those trends and positioning the company to help out and take advantage of the situation. “Energy is one of the hottest topics across the world today,” Sadlowski said. “There will be a 40% increase in worldwide energy demand in the next 25 years. Siemens is well positioned in the energy sector and making investments in alternative energy programs.”
“The one that is first to react to the market is the one that will make more money,” Franke said.
It’s all about having a plan.

Siemens launches traveling technology fair

Siemens launched its U.S. tour last night of an impressive traveling expo.
Just about 300 people joined at Chicago's Navy Pier for the official unveiling of exiderdome.
Siemens’ exiderdome is essentially a traveling technology expo and learning laboratory. It is built on a barge for the first part of its nine-city tour. It will ship out Friday and head for Detroit. The 10,000 square-foot, two-story building carries energy and automation technology.
"The United States is by far the largest coountry for us to do business and we have a long history in Chicago,” said Heinrich Hiesinger, chief executive of Siemens Industry Sector, which is responsible for around $50 billion in revenue.
One of the ideas behind the traveling expo is to get out and touch customers.
“We cannot serve the customers of the world by staying home,” Hiesinger said.
Exiderdome has Siemens technology on display and gives examples of how the technology works.
"We sell productivity and exiderdome tells this story,” said Dennis Sadlowski, president and chief executive of Siemens Energy & Automation. "Productivity allows our customers to link the virtual world of design and development to real world production.”
Exiderdome’s nine-city, 10-month tour of U.S. manufacturing centers this year will go to Detroit 7-15 August, Boston 20-24 October, New York 1-7 November, Charlotte 8-12 December. Next year it will go to Orlando, Denver, Los Angeles and Houston.

The skinny on dippers in a reservoir

A little story moved over the wires the other day where a man and a woman were caught skinny dipping in a Portland, Ore., reservoir. That reservoir is a main source of water for the city and officials nearly dumped millions of gallons of water and closed the facility. All because two people decided to swim with no clothes on.
The only reason why they didn’t drain the millions of gallons of water was because the two dippers were swimming in a section of the reservoir not in use at the time. Had that section been in use, water bureau officials said they would have had to dump millions of gallons of water from that pool and possibly shut off the reservoir.
Yikes.
Maybe I am a nut, but in the drought-stricken Southeast or in areas like Nevada or Arizona, I would hope water officials there would have the good sense not to even entertain the thought of dumping millions of gallons of water just because two people decided to frolic sans trunks.
While thinking about it, water gets treated at the reservoir or further downstream. You mean to say, with all the wildlife using and living in the water, officials think humans foul the water that much.
Luckily, the only thing that happened was the two now face trespassing charges. City officials didn’t waste the water and hopefully, they won’t the next time Jack and Jill decide to go for a dip.

Wireless working in a refinery

Wireless is the rage in the industry these days, there is no doubt about it. But when Alan Autenrieth, team leader at ConocoPhillips asked how many people in the audience of well over 200 at the Honeywell Users Group Americas Symposium 2008 in Phoenix, Ariz., were using wireless, only about 20 stood up.
When he asked a few more questions only one or two were left standing. Does that mean there is slow adoption or a great sales opportunity? Only time will tell.
“Wireless is a new tool in our toolbox,” Autenrieth said.
Autenrieth talked about his company’s wireless solution installed at its Sweeny Refinery.
Some of the main questions he said a user should ask is about security, how you can make the system fault tolerant, bandwidth, a portfolio of sensing devices, and are you able to share data across multiple platforms.
“You don’t want to be limited in bandwidth,” Autenrieth said. “Bandwidth flexibility is very important.”
Another key element to look at is being able to reuse a solution over again. “One area to avoid is re engineering the same wireless solution every time,” he said.
After discussing tips on what to look for in a wireless solution, he went into the economics behind wireless and the disparity between wiring a solution and using wireless.
Autenrieth said the wireless deployment at the Sweeny Refinery was a success, but at the end of the day he just said the solution “needs to be secure and reliable.”