Digital ​Dashboard ​Could Make Cities’​ Power & Water ​Smarter

Published on by in Academic

Digital ​Dashboard ​Could Make Cities’​ Power & Water ​Smarter

Understanding how to mitigate these environmental impacts is vital, and the technology that enables cities to be “smart” is a big part of that.

By: Jori Mendel

nu5396j.jpgTechnology can help communities around the world become cleaner, safer, and stronger through connectivity solutions that unlock environmental, social, and economic benefits.

As a provider of Smart Cities technologies, AT&T explores ways to better understand and quantify how technology – and the data insights it generates – can help address these complicated environmental issues. It’s part of the AT&T 2025 goal to enable carbon savings 10 times the carbon footprint of its  operations  by deploying low-carbon technology solutions.

Smart collaboration

Over the summer, we – an Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps Fellow and an AT&T Smart Cities team member – began working on a methodology to measure and share the sustainability of AT&T’s digital solutions. We took a look at carbon, water, waste, and energy reductions associated with some of the Smart City technologies that we’re deploying in spotlight locales, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Miami-Dade County (FL), Chapel Hill (NC), and Montgomery County (MD).

We also created a blueprint of a Smart Cities sustainability dashboard that will give city officials and citizens an easy way to understand the key sustainability benefits of this technology. The sustainability component will be a part of the AT&T Smart Cities Operation Center (SCOC), a digital dashboard that utilizes secure connectivity and data analytics to give city officials a window into real-time operations, enabling them to keep tabs on power outages, water leaks, traffic issues, and more – all from one location. For example, a single water pipe leak can waste almost 400,000 gallons of water per year.

The SCOC enables city managers to catch issues like this before they grow.

Technology plays an increasingly critical role in the transition to a low-carbon economy. As AT&T continues to work hand-in-hand with environmental organizations like EDF to calculate the positive impact of Smart Cities technology, we get closer to unlocking its potential to help citizens and the world around us.

Read full blog: Environmental Defense Fund

Media

Taxonomy