IBM’s Green Sigma Coalition Lines Up Industry Leaders

June 23, 2009

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IBM has announced the formation of the Green Sigma Coalition at its Green and Beyond Summit for Industry leaders in San Francisco, to provide smart solutions for energy, water, waste and greenhouse gas management. Partnering with key leaders in metering, monitoring, automation, data communications and software, charter members of the industry alliance are Johnson Controls, Honeywell Building Solutions, ABB, Eaton, ESS, Cisco, Siemens Building Technologies Division and Schneider Electric.

The coalition members will work with IBM to integrate their products and services with IBM’s Green Sigma solution, which applies Lean Six Sigma principles and practices to energy, water, waste and GHG emissions throughout a company’s operations. The solution combines real-time metering and monitoring with advanced analytics and dashboards that allow clients to make better decisions about energy and water usage, waste and GHG emissions to improve efficiency, lower costs and reduce environmental impact.

IBM, together with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), also announced plans at the green summit to build a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer that will directly repurpose excess heat for the university buildings. The system, called Aquasar, is expected to cut energy consumption by 40 percent and carbon emissions by up to 85 percent compared to a similar system using today’s cooling technologies.

IBM also announced at the conference that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is using IBM software to help reduce pollution in the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

The SFPUC, which treats an average of 80-90 million gallons of wastewater per day during dry weather and up to 370 million gallons of combined wastewater and storm runoff per day during the rainy season, is using the IBM software to develop smarter management of the city’s 1,000 miles of sewer system and three treatment facilities.

In the last year, the IBM Maximo Asset Management software has improved SFPUC’s ratio of preventive to corrective maintenance by approximately 11 percent. The commission’s Wastewater Enterprise also is using ArcGIS geographic information software from IBM Business Partner ESRI to locate and measure assets spatially.

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