Computing Research for Sustainability (2012) / Chapter Skim
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1 Roles and Opportunities for Information Technology in Meeting Sustainability Challenges
1 Roles and Opportunities for Information Technology in Meeting Sustainability Challenges
Pages 13-50
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From page 13... ...
One important consequence is that advances in computing are critical enablers of change for addressing the growing sustainability challenges facing the United States and the world. A key finding of this report is that information technology (IT)
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Although much focus in sustainability has been on mitigating climate change, with efforts aimed at managing the carbon dioxide cycle and increasing sustainable energy sources, the committee recognizes that there are numerous additional sustainability challenges that could be assisted by advances in comput ing and information technology and computing3 research. The committee's focus is on addressing medium- and long-term challenges in a way that has significant and ideally, measurable, impact.
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explores how IT can address sustainability challenges at scale. A 2009 article by Carla Gomes, "Computation Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society" in The Bridge 39(4)
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Solutions to sustainability challenges typically involve finding near-optimal trade-offs among competing goals, typically under high degrees of uncertainty in both the systems and the goals. In addition to noting the crosscutting nature of many sustainability challenges, it is important to recognize the emergent qualities that typify the sorts of systems being discussed here.
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Chapter 2 describes methods and approaches in discussing the questions, How do fundamental research questions and approaches in computing intersect with sustainability challenges, and how can problem solving and research methodologies in computing research and IT innovation be brought to bear on sustainability? In particular, the committee views one important goal of computer science in sustainability as informing, supporting, facilitating, and sometimes automating decision making -- decision making that leads to actions that will have significant impacts on achieving sustainability objectives.
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. The Climate Group's SMART 2020 report examined the use of information and communication technology in built infrastructure in several key areas, including smart buildings, smart logistics, and smart electric grids.
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Smart electric grids use IT tools throughout the power networks to enable optimization. (Potential smart grid applications are described in greater detail in the section "Toward a Smarter Electric Grid," below.)
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The range of challenges itself poses a problem: how best to assess the relative importance of various sustainability activities with an eye toward significant impact. Nonetheless, in virtually every activity related to meeting sustainability challenges, a critical role is required of data, information, and computation.
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Information dashboards accessible to key decision makers are an example of how IT can be used to collect, analyze, curate, and informatively present critical information quickly to those who need it most. For example, if the financial incentives for energy utilities shift from an emphasis on delivering more power more cheaply to an emphasis on improving the GHG emissions efficiency of a given level of service, new information will be needed.
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This third example poses crosscutting sustainability challenges, especially when considering a broad view of sustainability that encompasses economic 15W. Willett, P
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Toward a Smarter Electric Grid Being able to meet the planet's energy needs in a sustainable fashion is fundamentally interwoven with foundational transformations in the design, deployment, and operation of the world's electric grids. The problem is large and complicated, and the committee's framing in this discussion is for descriptive purposes, and is not meant to be complete, to be prescriptive, or to conflict deliberately with other approaches to characterizing the problem.16 With regard to the electric grid, most analyses of potential paths to stabilizing GHG concentrations involve three interrelated advances: deep efficiency gains, electrifying the demand, and decarbonizing the supply.17 As a prime example, the United States currently consumes roughly 100 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu)
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national energy flow is wasted in the generation, transportation, and conversion of this electrical energy, and of that delivered into residential and commercial buildings and industrial processes, much is wasted through inefficient or ineffective usage. Moreover, reducing the GHG emissions associated with transportation and industrial processes, which are currently dominated
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Although multiple approaches to transforming electric grids fit within the term "smart grid," the fundamental change in the future will likely be to treat the key components together, as an interrelated system. Whereas other disciplines will contribute primarily to the advance of the physical components comprising the elements of the energy supply chain, IT is expected to govern how these elements behave and how the complex system as a whole functions -- that is, what properties it exhibits.
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IT cannot provide generation, but it can enable more effective use of generation facilities to meet increased demand, facilitate the shift toward more desirable supplies, and help manage the increasing demand. In addition to providing adequate supply to meet growing demand -- which clearly cannot continue indefinitely -- it must be possible to deliver the generated energy through the transmission grid and distribution tree reliably and safely.
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Residential grid-tie solar installations reverse the flow of electricity within portions of the local distribution tree. And the introduction of electric vehicles potentially introduces high point loads during recharging.
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Means of power generation with short ramp-up times tend to have low efficiency and high GHG emissions and operating costs. • Prediction accuracy and market volatility.
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. Many smart grid proposals focus on increasing the capacity and sophistication of the transmission system to reduce constraints imposed by transmission in matching supply to demand.
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Utilizing this precious resource to improve the management of utility capital investment and potentially having driving range unexpectedly curtailed represents adoption challenges, whereas scheduling overnight charging flattens the duration curve without such impediments. Stationary bulk energy storage need not obtain the very high level of energy density and power density demanded for the mobile case; it can potentially be designed instead for large recharge capacity and high turnaround efficiency.
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Also, peak energy has the greatest GHG emissions per unit of electric power because it is generated by less-efficient plants with shorter ramp-up times. However, reducing peak energy has limited impact on reducing the overall energy demand or impact on climate, which are dominated by non-peak demand.
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Approaches to a More Sustainable Electric Grid A forward-looking sustainable grid scenario presents a fundamentally more cooperative interaction between demand and supply and fundamentally greater transparency22 throughout the energy supply chain, with the goal of achieving deep reduction in demand and deep penetration of renewables in the supply blend.23 22For this particular goal, transparency is required for technical reasons: that is, to support a more cooperative interaction between demand and supply. However, transparency is also essential for reasons of trust, accountability, and fairness, to avoid the potential for Enronstyle market manipulations to be multiplied many times with the new grid technologies.
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Equally important is the ability to coordinate loads, often through the utilization of non-electrical forms of energy storage such as thermal, but also often exploiting flexibility in the actual task. In short, opportunities to improve the sustainability of the electric grid can be clustered as follows: (1)
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Computer science research and methodological approaches will be needed at all levels to address the broad systems challenges presented by the smart grid. Initial forays into both research and applications "wins" in this area include energy efficiency and smart mini-grid and distributed energy management,25 energy-efficiency planning and building management,26 and the integration of smart grids and smart electric vehicle planning and operation.27 In many of these areas, savings of one-third to one-half in terms of overall energy consumption, with improved service and significant environmental gains, are possible.
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A goal might be to bring factories with energy-production capacity into the supply chain to supplement peak-hour supply, assuming that the GHG output was not made worse. This goal would also require creating an economic situation that is agreeable to both the utilities and the owners of cogeneration plants.
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Whole new situational awareness tools are required to observe, monitor, and control the smart grid. The computational burden of doing this is significant, and the industry relies almost exclusively on vendors to supply solutions -- vendors who typically do not invest a great deal in research and development.
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A sustainable food system will be key to ensuring that the world's population receives necessary nutrition without contributing additional damage to the environment and society. As with the electric grid, the opportunities for IT seem most salient in the systems issues in sustainable agriculture.
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and policy, technology, and governance interventions that could help.33 This section briefly explores the challenges facing the creation of a sustainable food system that promotes public health and identifies potential areas in which IT and research in computer science can have an impact. Challenges to Developing a Sustainable Food System A few of the many challenges to creating a sustainable global food system are highlighted below.
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Approaches to Developing Sustainable Food Systems Creating a more sustainable global food system will not be easy. This section outlines several approaches, none of which is sufficient alone, although each contributes to increased sustainability and could benefit from the contributions of computer science and IT.
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Methodology for Measuring Costs, Benefits, and Impacts There is a substantial need for the development of methods and tools to measure the total costs, benefits, and impacts of different agricultural systems. For example, comparative studies of GHG emissions from different field-management practices for animal wastes would allow for better quantification of the environmental impacts of agricultural systems and, just as with the smart grid scenario, allow for prices to reflect costs and value better.
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One example of empowering individuals with information is the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch guide39 that 37National Research Council, Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century, Washington, D.C: The National Academies Press (2010)
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IT could also be useful for gathering information on regional surpluses or deficits, allowing fresh foods to be allocated to areas where they are most needed and diminishing reliance on processed foods with longer shelf lives. The Role of Information Technology and Computer Science in Achieving a Sustainable Food System As with the smart electric grid, information and data management are essential to making progress toward a smarter, more sustainable, global food system.
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The development of analytical software for optimizing sustainable food purchasing choices for both consumers and large-scale purchasers (such as supermarkets) is another rich area of IT contributions.
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Given a model of the food system, one could also assess the costs and benefits of various agricultural and farming strategies, the design of food sheds, and distribution systems. Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructures The resilience of the nation's societal and physical infrastructures poses deep and crosscutting sustainability challenges, especially when one takes a broad view of sustainability that encompasses economic and social issues.
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An additional challenge is that the frequency of disastrous events is such that recovery after one event (itself a major sustainability challenge) may well not be complete before the next major disaster strikes -- either in the same region, as happened with Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or different regions competing for resources and attention, as in the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 that was followed by severe flooding in Pakistan.
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47Dan Reed, vice president of Microsoft Research, discussed some of the computational chal lenges posed by the 2010 Gulf oil spill, noting that the disaster stemmed from a "complex multidisciplinary system with emergent behaviors across a wide range of temporal and spatial
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48 The Role of Information Technology and Computer Science Research in Developing Sustainable Infrastructure and Fostering Resilience Advances will be needed in IT and computer science research and methodological approaches to enable better simulations and better understanding of the uncertainties associated with achieving more sustainable development that is also more resilient in the face of disaster. Advances are also needed in the areas of encouraging citizen participation, developing indicators of resilience and future outcomes, and improving IT infrastructures themselves. Performance Running a simulation for a high-end, behaviorally realistic model for a major metropolitan region is a slow process, currently often requiring days, even on today's fast computers.
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. However, new or improved algorithms are likely a richer source of performance gain, which will be important because many of the applications envisioned require huge performance increases (for example, using a simulation in real time in a meeting, or running a simulation many, many times to compute information about uncertainty)
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Another important factor is how to engage the entire population, given the existence of groups with cultural and language differences and other special needs. Indicators of Future Outcomes Simulations already produce indicators of such outcomes as GHG emissions, consumption of open space, and comparative measures of compact versus low-density development, all for multiple years and under different scenarios.
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CONCLUSION IT and computer science could have a major impact in a wide diversity of sustainability challenges. The examples above illustrate some of the efforts that are needed.
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