[Music] we live in a time where artificial intelligence and digital technology have the ability to transform the way we approach spaces and systems and as more analog streams become digitized the Legacy mindsets and systems we've become so used to are being challenged but if we can reconcile these different generations of Technology we might just hold the key to a more sustainable future so how are these Innovations being made what systems need to be brought into the AI era and how will these advancements shape our future and solve the biggest challenges we face today most of the Legacy systems are operated by folks that aren't necessarily thinking about this from a digital standpoint and those systems and those teams behind that data are difficult to change Behavior we're at another inflection point where we have a lot of growth there's a lot of opportunities to work together across the value chain and I do believe that the schools and the universities and the government programs from the Department of energy and the Venture folks see the problem and are actively recruiting and backing research to solve you know Mega problems to meet this Net Zero goal we are working on some really cool uh capability where we take a physical object and we create a digital twin of that that machine so you're actually trying to compare how the machine is operating in real time versus the ideal operating conditions of the machine and you can see how data Rich that process is but you can also see the power of how much value we can add through that by finding out in great detail where there's gaps between what the performance should be and what the performance is you just heard from Ryan rut VP of strategy and Innovation at jwes accelerator Bob Irvin executive director at jewles accelerator and RI Ryan Chief digital officer at train Technologies and I'm Dominque Silva and you're listening to healthy spaces the podcast exploring how technology and Innovation are transforming the spaces where we live learn work and play in today's episode we will learn how combining digital technology and Innovation is improving sustainability efficiency and environmental impacts across several Industries we'll expl explore how enhanced connectivity AI driven efficiency and energy saving Technologies are benefiting the built environment and we'll also discuss how startups and Innovation are tackling climate technology challenges shaping our future and addressing today's biggest [Music] issues first my co-host Oakley Roberts VP of innovation talks with riia about how digital Innovation is transforming the built environment in Coal chain sectors I've seen a lot of change over the past two decades the big change that I've seen is the ability to run software close to the device but also in the cloud and that ability to do things both on the edge as it's now called uh and also in the cloud has Unleashed a whole host of possibilities let me give you a couple of examples first and foremost it's made it very easy inexpensive and secure to connect any kind of device to a digital fabric so today we talk about a digital fabric being a global common fabric a common layer if you will and you can connect different kinds of devices very easily to that fabric in a very secure fashion so for me that's super exciting to be able to do that at scale the second element which is exciting is the ability to retrofit existing devices that maybe did not have that capability when they were Shi the third thing the what you can do with that connection so as an example in the residential space we can monitor a machine and we can tell the customer the homeowner that something is going to go wrong with the machine before it goes wrong likewise in commercial in commercial the Big Value prop and the big use case of course is maintenance preventive maintenance and then of course breakdown maintenance and the ability to connect that back through the supply chain using data into Parts management food Transportation it's all about the cold chain these days you know the amount of energy spent in precooling containers and pre-cooling trailers is Mass massive just by cutting that down by 25% or 30% results in a massive savings for companies and it's also good for the environment so there's a massive amount of goodness that comes out of this it's not just about cost but it's also about Greenhouse emissions it's also about unnecessary heat and it's about the reduction in the use of fossil fuels so there's lots of benefits that come from this and digital technology can play a really vital role and a very tangible role and you can see how it connects back to our vision of challenging what's possible for a sustainable world yeah it's really insightful your point on the edge and the cloud and seeing how it's also bringing access in a more broader sense to to the users of the equipment especially in the built environment and being able to see exactly how buildings are operating and bringing that information right to the point of impact and it's it's a lot of data Raz so how much data are we recording every day from our customers now first of all I must say that we recorded very securely and be stored it very securely but it's about 5 billion data points per day and as we look ahead Oakley we think this number will grow to about 15 or 16 billion by the end of this decade so it's a it's a massive amount of data that we gather but we do it in a very secure way we do it in a way that is in complete compliance and in agreement with the customers and it actually helps them because it allows us to have a digital eye on how their building is performing how the AG back system is working and if you think about the economics behind this the average building about 29% of the operating cost relates in some way shape or form to their heating ventilation air conditioning that's a big number and if we can help shave a few percentage points or many percentage points of that and we can bring the cost down that's not only good for the owner of the building because it saves money it's also good for the environment it's just an incredible amount of data it's hard to get your head around and the ever increasing uh compute power capability that we have at our disposal is allowing us to unlock the potential of this data in new ways um you know what are some of the challenges and opportunities you see to unlock the power of the data you know number one I think it's really insightful these days how uh collaborative customers are in giving us access to this kind of data because they they see the massive potential as well they have seen reductions in energy consumption through for example train autonomous controls that allows them to ruce their energy consumption by 27% in some cases right number two I see a lot of benefit in the coal chain the coal chain is uh we are only scratching the surface at this stage by helping reduce preal uh the coal chain can save literally hundreds of millions of tons of food bastage it can help us reduce energy consumption on the road it can help us drive decongestion it can help us with lots of other benefits again huge environmental impact and then finally I also believe that as ESG becomes more important and and decarbonization becomes you know it's a mega Trend that we see companies are getting more and more interested in how they can harness this data to drive awareness and to drive reporting and as some of this reporting becomes non-optional and becomes something that they have to do for compliance reasons we can help with that too so we play many roles now it's not just about the machine it's also about the data around the machine and around the context of the machine whether it's a building or transportation buildings represent about 30% of the world's energy demand additionally over 10% of greenhouse gas emissions come from food loss and waste so reducing energy consumption in buildings and preventing food loss are a significant opportunity to reduce carbon emissions but how can we utilize technology and foundational AI to achieve this kind of sustainable impact as well as unlock value for customers [Music] so we are working on some really cool uh capability where we take a physical object a chiller as an example which is a large machine roughly the size of a school bus and we create a digital twin of that machine this allows us to use the power of data to remotely access the machine to visualize that machine sitting tens of miles away or hundreds of miles away and for our Engineers to look at that machine and to track it and to actually compare the performance of that machine to its birth certificate so you're actually trying to compare how the machine is operating in real time versus the ideal operating conditions of that machine and you can see how data Rich that process is but you can also see the power of how much value we can add through that by finding out in great detail where there's gaps between what the performance should be and what the performance is the other example I would offer is around train autonomous controls now I talked about the machine let me talk about a building because a building has a lot of data around it the shape of the building the size of the building the sun position the existing weather conditions around the building the forecasted weather conditions the hastac mapping of there's a myriad of data millions of data points that can be then fed into a deep learning model that uses algorithms and the power of artificial intelligence to really figure out how best to manage the temperature settings in that building so you're not sacrificing Comfort but you're reducing the EXP defense on energy and this is classic artificial intelligence applied to HVAC and I'm very excited about this because I think we just scratching the surface here so it's hard to talk about technology and Innovation these days without discussing generative Ai and you know AI has been around for a long time humans have been trying to replicate human thinking since the invention of the computer but it's been only recently you know with Mo's law that we're at that point on the compute curve where gpus and CPUs can replicate human thinking and what do you think is the role artificial intelligence plays in a digital transformation of the built environment and how do we leverage it to do good for buildings to keep them healthy and safe and and more comfortable for the humans that occupy them every day in one of my priate companies I I ran a company where we built software using AI that was used by 176 million humans and we were able to mine that data using generative AI it was very powerful and it allowed a lot of great companies to get inside so I'm a big fan of generative AI I think it has great potential and I like to talk about tangible examples so let me give you two the first example I'll give you is how we serve our customers think about the millions of emails that transpire in any given year between our folks in the field and our customer base and any one human can only remember so much using the power of gen we can create excellent and workable summaries that can be shared by a lot of different people right it's kind of applying the idea that when you go to Wikipedia or you go to one of those sites you may not know everything but you can definitely find what you're looking for and gen can make a nice summary for you that's the basic idea but applied now to a very specific customer company interaction so that can save thousands of hours hundreds of hours of productivity and make people far more productive without missing out on any important details number two is imagine how much easier it would be for Crews that are actually working on customer site to find specific information about specific procedures or find specific parts that are needed to make that installation successful one of the things we are experimenting with right now it's very much a concept stage is to use visual search so you talk about generative AI imagine picking up your phone taking a picture of a specific part that might be a legacy part the AI then searches for it matches based on a multi-point match and gives you suggestions on what the part might look like or by the way it also tells you where it's located and how soon it can be shipped to you so these are the kinds of things that gen can help us with and that productivity will allow us to serve our customers better and eventually work towards our goal of being a sustainable addtive so looking forward into the future RZ you know what's next what do you think sou the front windshield uh with Innovation and technology and in our industry that's going to be reducing the Environmental impact of HVAC equipment transfer Refrigeration equipment and improving the lives of people I genuinely believe and I've seen this that train Technologies is at the Forefront of digitizing the hwac industry and we will lead not with words but with Deeds we have a lot of great Innovations in the hopper in the pipeline a simple example would be the connected mechanical service agreement the cmsa that monitors a machine in real time the analogy someone used the other the day which I love is like people with diabetes they used to just prick themselves twice a day but now you have monitors that monitor the blood sugar level throughout the day guess which is more effective well the latter same idea applied to heavy equipment is what the cmsa is so we lead with action and not just with words we have a lot of other Innovations coming I talked about the digital twin but equally I think there's a lot of things we're doing on artificial intelligence we're doing things around autonomous controls there's a lot of work coming on that there's a lot of we're coming for the residential user we're working on things that will help monitor home equipment exactly what you said especially in the shoulder Seasons it's always complicated for the homeowner to figure out exactly how to set it and I think this will help and then of course in transportation so all of our businesses including life sciences and Supply are humming on all cylinders uh as far as digitization is concerned the other big Frontier Oakley is connecting the front end the customer facing digitization with our supply chain that's going to unleash another wave of opportunity in the future so I see huge amounts of opportunity to create value to harvest value and as you said to drive towards our mission of of driving greater sustainability for the [Music] planet as we delve deeper into the impact of digital transformation it's clear that this transition holds the potential to really Drive sustainability riyaz also highlighted The crucial role of digitization across various sectors and its potential to revolutionize our approach to environmental challenges building on this Vision we now turn to Bob and Ryan from the jeweles accelerator to find out how startups and Innovation play a pivotal role in addressing modern sustainability challenges and drive growth in the clean tech [Music] space I'm Bob Irvin I'm the executive director of Jules accelerator we've been around for about eight years now we're a nonprofit and we are a clean tech climate Tech accelerator we try to identify across the world interesting startups that can work with our community our community can be cities they can be corporations they can be universities and what we try to do is bring the newest and latest early stage uh Technologies to our Marketplace to get them some kind of Business Development opportunity yeah I'm Ryan rutage I'm the DP of strategy and Innovation with Jules here Bob and I joined on roughly around the same time at the end of 2015 early 2016 and my job primarily is to go out and Scout startups engage with them and advise them through this process of Engagement with the corporates we end up looking at about 1500 startups every cycle at a very high level and then we narrow that down ultimately to a top 25 which we share with our partners when I think about our world's big challenges around how do we create a more sustainable world and address some of the the big issues around decarbonization and Emissions reductions it can be daunting but the one thing that keeps me super optimistic about our future and that we will find solutions to solve these challenges is when I engage with the startup community and programs like juwels accelerator I know in your accelerator you've seen many startups come through that are leveraging what's available to us today in terms of digital technology to make a difference I'd love to hear from you about how you think about digital technology having an impact on emissions reduction decarbonization or other climate technology challenges that are trying to be solved and how's it different today than what it was back when you started at juwels so what's your perspective on on that there's a huge amount of growth going on right now and it's weighed against doing it in a sustainable environmentally friendly way I've mentioned I know in the past that if you go back 60 70 years ago we had this big uh need to upgrade the grid upgrade infrastructure double the capacity triple the capacity of power to meet air conditioning load it was a pretty daunting task and nobody thought we could do it and it was like a 10 or 15 year period we had to triple the uh utility infrastructure needs and uh we did it now we've got this huge AI need data center need and you got this grid that's part physical infrastructure with you know Transformers and poles and wires and then there's also a um the digital layer where you know it's making sure that it takes on the market signals and it delivers the energy and these are two forces that are becoming more aligned you know you keep hear people say the four DS about decentralized distributed digitalized there's another D in there I can't remember off the top of my head but all these forces now are kind of creating this need to make change faster than ever before to meet the growth demands and that's what and you probably recently saw where folks like Google are saying we need this energy now so we're willing to build it ourselves we don't have to go through a utility rate hearing we can work with Duke but but we can also work with a startup or a new innovator and also a tech provider to make it happen to meet the needs so I think the big thing is we're at another inflection point where we have a lot of growth there's a lot of opportunities to work together AC across the value chain so I just see huge growth I don't know you know where the infrastructure and the skill sets are necessarily going to come from but I do believe in Market forces and I do believe that the schools and the universities and the government programs from the Department of energy and the Venture folks see the problem and are actively recruiting and backing research to solve you know Mega problems to meet this Net Zero goal over the last almost 10 years now we've seen kind like three waves almost of different types of Technologies come up through this process when we first started iot was just becoming a thing and so we started to see this distributed data collection opportunity and we worked with a couple iot companies very early on working on you know solving that initial primary problem within the next two to three years we started to see kind of these secondary Technologies come out of that so the software layer was built on top of the the iot solving some pretty basic challenges but I mean you know real savings uh it was the lwh hanging fruit on the industrial side of efficiency along with the utilities and as that transformation happened we also started to see a little bit of pull from the social and the policy side of things and the capital was just starting to catch up also so like these four things have to come together and converge at the same time so we got those platforms we got the software layers and the corporate start to get socialized to the idea of working with startups at at that level and then over the last two to three years with AI I mean that's like this tertiary layer sitting on top of all of this combining data that we've been collecting for ages but also especially over this last 10 years and providing actionable insights to Those sensors and and the hardware behind it so that's what we've seen I I think you know at this point we're working with a lot of startups that are filling those gaps between the key corporate players their vendors and the end users and solving some of those problems that unify this this system of Technologies and uh Machinery yeah that that layer that technology stack is really evolving with these startup companies trying to solve the problems and the interoperability and the communication that I think Bob was mentioning Ryan can you what are you seeing within the technology and startup Community that's helping making that that information flow better from the demand to the consumption side what are some of the problems that are being solved one of the big things is organizing unstructured data and we see a lot of companies all they're collecting Legacy paperwork and putting it together and saying to hype and Foundry types of operations that have this data going back 60 years you know if you turn your pumps on at this certain time you'll save you know 15% on your your energy bills it's taking all of these analog data streams putting them into the digital system and then using that to kind of like take this next step forward and that's been a real challenge actually so we we go to the social side of things most of the Legacy systems are operated by folks that aren't necessarily thinking about this from a digital standpoint and those systems and those teams behind that data are difficult to change Behavior so it's taking that information and making it actionable in such a way that they're then willing to make those changes yeah another example Oakley is when we had a company work with one of our local utilities here on preventive maintenance when they should shut a wind turbine down to improve any type of safety issue or reliability issue that was able to save the company a million to million and a half dollars and it was a startup and a lot of these corporations and Utilities in particular don't like working with early early stage stuff they want a little more credibility so when we get them to work together on a pilot that's a first step at least in terms of kind of creating that that trust Bob you've spent your most of your career in the utility industry we were talking about how the grid is seeing unprecedented demand because of things like data centers and the electrification of many things right and as you've seen that in that industry over the decades go through different Cycles what's unique about this cycle and how is technology going to solve the challenge in front of us to match the demand and the supply side you know the growth is pretty significant the consequences of managing it properly are pretty significant in the old days you know the grid was just sort of a one-way transaction from generation transmission distribution to the customer and now the grid kind of operates bir directionally you know it's going two ways now information is Flowing a couple of different ways it's real time you need it now you know it's that FedEx mentality we need it right away 247 firm needs to be available but the strains that Renewables bring you know with intermittency issues without enough battery with not enough nuclear and maybe geothermal capabilities and that it's putting a strain on a you know a Priceless asset that needs to transform faster and quicker than it ever has before but I think the pace of change is greater I I think there's a greater sense of urgency utilities to me are very valuable but the problem is and I've worked with a lot of utilities I still think the average age is over 55 but that's okay if we hunker down on operational excellence and we're willing to partner and not do it ourselves because a lot of the utilities I think always felt like they can do it better and they don't need to respond as fast they would sit down and do these 30-year integrated resource plans and they weren't really too worried but they always underestimated Innovation so it's just more worldly there's supply chain issues there's more data there's more knowledge there's aging workforces so it just puts a strain a little bit on everything to find Solutions and that's why this Innovation piece that so many of us accelerators and incubators are working on are doing well ample was a company that was out of San Francisco that had a an idea that everybody was going to Electrify their Fleet so how was FedEx going to do that how was UPS going to do that how was Herz going to do that well they started a model called charging as a service so they build own operate and maintain that asset for the Federal Express folks that needed to Electrify their Fleet so that they didn't have to get in the business of optimizing when when to buy Power or when to uh do some kind of maintenance on a charging station or what charger to use so they came up with that idea and they were quickly they quickly enabled I think a number of climate goals that needed to be met by these big corporations Brian when you think about you know that change in the grid from being a one-way Street to being this two-way street within your co-arts of technologies that you've seen is there an example or two that that you see that's helping address that operability challenge we've seen a handful of these uh over the years and it's funny just you know to kind of big back on Bob's points there it wasn't that long ago that the utility was rolling out Smart Meters you know like that wasn't that was five years ago they were trying to get total coverage across their jurisdiction just to know when power outages were happening we've seen an early case of this sort of control over the you know between the utility and the End customer we worked with a company called weave grid as part of our cohort 4 weav grid came in and and said hey we want to figure out how to intelligently charge vehicles and this was still a very kind of early days for all of this I think it's 2018 that we were working with them but they could see that this challenge was on the horizon and so working with the utilities working with Duke Energy they help build this product in this platform that now is adopted widely to help utilities charge vehicles on a schedule that meets the supply side of this and so that was a a not insignificant challenge that they went after but what we're seeing now at this you know kind of third layer of Technology development is we need more handshakes between all of the digital assets across the the platform here across the grid and to make that happen so we've got these companies popping up with these apis where they broker the contracts between all of the players they're they're kind of the bizdev handshake between all of these players and they're a trusted layer that then sits on top of you know that second layer so we're seeing a lot more of that and it's making the pace of innovation faster for everybody involved if you can trust that all of a sudden you're working with the actual companies in a verified manner on the other side you can make things happen a lot faster as technology continues to evolve rapidly it impacts not only the energy grid but also other critical areas food loss and waste is one example contributing to 10% of global emissions so how is the jewels accelerator supporting companies that focus on innovations that combat waste it's a big issue for North Carolina you know we have a lot of farms and so when we pick a sector to go after so for each cohort we kind of identify a theme this theme happens to be grid for cohort 14 but we did have a some other themes we never had a fully want one called indoor agriculture but if our customers which are our sponsors wanted us to do that we'd be more than happy to because there is a uh NC State or up in Raleigh there's a nice little an accelerator in this space that we talk to Epi Electric Power Research Institute also has a group but we have brought a company in yes where we've worked with indoor agriculture what's interesting you think about it is we're all focused on say the grid and New Generation opportunities and Energy Efficiency opportunities but what happened is indoor agriculture is very the demand for electricity is significant so the load is a good load for economic development it's not a data center so you're seeing these this data center load lead to the building of fossil plants again gas fire generation but the load is significant and utilities like dominion and Duke and Georgia Power they're interested in bringing that load to their region for economic purposes and especially in Eastern Carolina which is a region that could use more uh Business Development and growth and so when we when we enticed when we brought this company over here Duke was willing to give them a uh lower rate an incentive to grow their crops and vegetables and uh and it turned out from a technology standpoint the problem with the indoor agriculture was to make it economical and one of the solutions to make it economical was is to locate the shipping containers that were producing the lettuce and the cabbage and these new uh new products in the parking lot of these distribution centers from Walmart so that made the economics look a little more attractive so I can speak to it more from a utility standpoint from a technical standpoint we do rely on EPI and the accelerator in Raleigh but Ryan did you have anything to add yeah well I I was going to say kind of from the the food standpoint there's definitely a trend right now in the climate space uh in the energy space uh we've we've seen with the geopolitical challenges that the world's facing on food security as well as energy security and and you know Supply chains there's been a real change of heart about how we go about making things like ammonia and so we don't you know this is one of those unloved materials that's been around forever the habbos process has been around for 120 years but it's Central to the world's food supply and it's responsible for about 3% of greenhouse gas emissions globally and so we've seen a lot of startups all of a sudden that are taking green hydrogen which has been promoted by the federal government through credits and and other programs over the last few years and combining that with nitrogen and we have these electrified chemical supplies for agriculture and so that's where we see kind of the most play right now in the food side of things like Bob mentioned we we worked a little bit with indoor a but you know one of the things that we learned over the 2017 to 2019 frame is it's really inexpensive to grow lettuce outside uh in the dirt with the Sun so there's been this pullback from indoor EG just kind of generally but what we see like I said now is is two things the chemical supply for the fertilizers is a central piece of this larger climate and and digital uh or electrification theme and then the digitization of crop management one of the companies we worked with early on the founder exited from uh this company called uh roadbotics and where they took cameras and they you know looked at uh managing Road wear and tear and he took that knowledge and turned it into a new company which is working with agriculture so they they have cameras that go down the rows of crops and they tell you when your food is blighted and that sort of thing so that's where we've seen the most digital transformation taking place in the food supply a big thank you to riia Bob and Ryan for joining us on today's episode where we discuss the transformative impact of digital technology across Industries at train Technologies we believe that every job is a sustainability job and every role provides an opportunity for impact that's why each week on the podcast we'll feature how someone is building healthy spaces in their organization or Community this week we're sharing a submission from parita ganam manufacturing engineer in Bangalore prita is creating healthy spaces in her community by participating in community volunteerism and promoting sustainability practices every quarter she and her community plan activities such as planting trees organizing cleanups and converting waste into compost they also refurbish items for reuse and have even replaced local street lights with solar powerered LEDs prash thank you for everything you and your team are doing to make your community a more sustainable place to live would you like to share how you're building healthy spaces too well visit us and share your story at train technologies.com healthy spaces podcast thank you for listening in to the healthy spaces podcast where we explore how climate technology and Innovation are transforming the spaces where we live work learn and play if you want to find out more about our conversation today make sure you check out the show notes and remember to rate and review us in your favorite podcast app that's it for today's episode we'll see see you next time [Music]
2024-08-21