UK turning to cloud services to govern smart electrical meters

Monday, March 21, 2011

UK telecom Cable & Wireless and IBM recently announced a partnership to work together to create and implement a cloud computing structure that will govern roughly 50 million smart electrical meters in the area.

The managed IT system will monitor and analyze the amount of power being utilized at British homes and businesses in order to reduce the country's energy usage, and ultimately, lower the area's carbon footprint.

The UK government has a plan in place to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and has been looking to have smart meters installed in every home by 2020. Thus, in addition to IBM and C&W, many other wireless companies have focused on creating smart meter systems, hoping to receive a contract from government, which could be worth as much as $14 billion, to install them.

IBM and C&W's system will access data from each smart system several times a day, and then store it in a UK-hosted cloud, which power utilities can access to conduct their own analysis.

In another measure to reduce its carbon emissions, the UK government itself has begun investigating further cloud computing use, recently researching Google Apps as a potential solution.