Computing giant IBM and the British telecom concern Cable & Wireless say they’re collaborating to build a cloud computing system that would monitor the power usage of some 50 million smart electrical meters in the UK.
The idea, they say, is to use cloud computing to monitor and analyze power use at British homes and businesses, as part of an overall plan to reduce the country’s energy use and therefore its carbon footprint.
Several existing wireless players have tossed their hats in the ring to build smart meter systems, including BT, Telefonica and Vodafone. They all want a piece of a big UK government contract that could be worth as much as $14 billion to install smart meters in every home by 2020 as part of a wider plan to reduce its carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050.
IBM and C&W say their plan, which they call the UK Smart Energy Cloud, will gather data many times a day from smart meters around the country and store it in a cloud hosted in the UK. The data would then go to power utilities for analysis, to make sure customers are billed according to their usage.
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