Leveraging Existing Infrastructure, Part I

I ran into my friend Keith Schaefer a month ago. A serial entrepreneur, Keith told me about his most recent company, BPL Global. BPL's premise devices shed electric load during peak demand and provide demand response tools so its customers can automatically shift load in response to dynamic pricing programs. Economically, BPL enables electricity markets to shift investment from generation to demand management. A marginal dollar invested in demand management effectively provides more power than a marginal dollar invested in generation.

An emerging idea is that incremental investments in information technology to manage expensive infrastructure like energy, transportation, and communications will provide a higher return than incremental investments in the infrastructure itself. Most of these kinds of infrastructure management technologies focus on three areas:

• Measuring infrastructure usage
  
• Providing methods to shift peak infrastructure demand to off-peak times
  
• Caching, or storing infrastructure supply locally to reduce infrastructure usage during peaks
  

BPL uses all three of these items to leverage existing energy infrastructure. Previously I wrote about an information technology for managing traffic infrastructure here. This technology leverages existing road traffic infrastructure to reduce congestion and increase automobile flow.

Information technology itself uses information technology to leverage its own performance. In fact, information technology probably uses more information technology to manage its resources more than any other industry. Caching is a common ploy to increase computer or network performance. Memory systems, for instance, layer memory to cheaper and cheaper caches. Memory on the CPU caches its contents to Random Access Memory which, in turn, caches its contents to hard disk drives which, in turn, cache their contents to tape or DVD back-up. System designers and the computers themselves use multiple measurements to calculate how much of each type of memory a computer requires, and where and when to move data between each layer of memory most efficiently.

Inexpensive measurement of supply and demand is key to leveraging infrastructure. No wonder information systems can utilize management systems so pervasively: they constantly measure (among other things) CPU usage, process load, and memory requirements by using existing components inside the computer. Other industries such as energy and transportation have not had the luxury of inexpensive measurements until quite recently. Rapidly decreasing costs of sensors and networks have begun to lower measurement costs to the point that these older industries can apply information technology to manage their respective infrastructures costs effectively.

More on how techniques for running computers more efficiently can help run other infrastructures more efficiently in Part II!