Everyone wants to improve energy efficiency, pollute less and recycle more. Equally if not more important is the critical need to improve the ongoing visibility and accountability of an organization’s carbon footprint, as well as how best to manage to it over the long-term. Sustainability management has three components: managing water, waste, and energy consumption. Sustainability management goes beyond green initiatives because it focuses on all aspects of a government or company’s operations—not just those that are easy to solve with efficient light bulbs or changes in the consumption habits of individuals.
Drawing on its proven Savi SmartChain software platform that’s integrated with wireless sensor networks, Savi is working with Lockheed Martin Technology and Engineering as well as other companywide groups to develop a complete sustainment management solution for governments and commercial enterprises. These capabilities, already battle-tested with international defense forces, can be easily reconfigured to address one of the world’s most pressing issues—the ability to automatically monitor the environmental impact of an organization’s daily use of energy, water, and waste. By wirelessly monitoring such usage from a robust software platform, public sector and commercial organizations can more accurately assess their overall carbon footprint and how best to minimize its impact and costs to their operations.
The U.S. federal government is taking the lead in requiring sustainability management solutions. Through Presidential Executive Order 13514, federal agencies not only need to set new goals for improving their own sustainability, but also to leverage federal purchasing power to promote environmentally responsible products and technologies. The executive order will require 95% of all government procurements to have a meaningful sustainability plan by 2012—a significant impact to Lockheed Martin.
“One of the most critical problems facing sustainability management is the ability to have accurate, timely and network-wide information about an organization’s operational systems,” says Lance Ludman, director of strategy and development for IS&GS-Global. “Today, much of the information used in sustainability management systems is inaccurate, outdated, and based on false impressions of the actual impact of an organization’s carbon footprint, whether it involves electrical, water, or waste systems. This is largely because much of the information is inputted and observed manually, as well as doesn’t include a big picture or single version of ground truth of the entire, inter-connected enterprise.”
“Traditional green initiatives such as energy efficiency measures target only 10-15% of the environmental problems,” says Craig Fitzpatrick, who heads the Future Energy Services team for IS&GS-Global. “Sustainability management has the ability right now to save Lockheed Martin business units and our customers 20 or more percent on our energy bills, but that’s not the endgame. Once we combine our solution with IS&GS Intel’s ability to visualize data, the artificial intelligence capabilities Lockheed is investing in with MIT, the power tagging capabilities being developed with corporate engineering and technology, and Space Systems’ ability to do atmospheric carbon density monitoring, that’s powerful stuff. We can not only be the first company to solve the U.S. government’s sustainability management and verification problem, but we’ll be the only ones who can check our math from space.”
--- Savi Group, a Lockheed Martin Company
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