The Big Thirst, page 16
Each Celebrity ship used to make 7,500 pounds of ice a day, just to support that one buffet line. So each of the nine ships is saving 2.7 million pounds of ice-making a year, ice that requires 330,000 gallons of water to be made, frozen, and then treated and pumped back overboard.
From one perspective, on ships using more than a million gallons of water each a week, the rocks-for-ice swap is trivial. It comes to saving about two gallons of water per passenger per cruise.15
On the other hand, it is a small stroke of genius. Royal Caribbean has eliminated a whole category of water use, reducing its costs while improving both the environment and the cruise experience the company is trying to offer. “We were able to turn off one ice machine completely on each ship,” says Steenrod. “We literally put a sign on it that says, ‘Not in Use.’ It’s off at the circuit breaker.” And of course, on a cruise ship, every bit of electricity has to be generated by burning fuel, so unplugging an ice maker that used to run 24 hours a day saves real fuel and smokestack emissions, however modest.
More than that, the rocks-for-ice swap represents exactly the kind of mind-flip that a smart-water culture requires. Not just, How can we use less water? but, What are we using water for? Water, it turns out, has the capacity to inspire creativity about how we use it.
AT THE IBM microchip plant in Burlington, Vermont, the factory where they make the ultra-pure water necessary to produce semiconductors, the staff knows a lot about its water.
For the ultra-pure water—the exotic liquid that is so clean it isn’t safe to drink, so clean it requires its own separate factory inside the microchip factory—the water staff measures eighty characteristics all the time, in real time. Just for a moment, see how many characteristics of water you could imagine measuring—temperature, flow rate, pressure, pH, clarity. Unless you’re a chemist, good luck getting to ten.
But beyond the ultra-pure water system, IBM Burlington has created an internal nervous system to monitor and gather data about its water across the whole facility. The plant’s pumps, tanks, and pipes are wired with five thousand electronic sensors, which each gather about 1 data point a second. The water staff at IBM Burlington gathers 400 million data points about the factory’s water every single day.16
It’s hard to know where you’d even begin to use that much data effectively. If you wanted to, you could just sit at your computer in IBM Burington and keep up in real time: you’d only need to observe and interpret a stream of 300,000 data points a minute. For comparison, the double-deck stock ticker streaming along the bottom of CNBC provides 52 data points a minute.
Eric Berliner, one of the water and environmental managers of IBM Burlington, is giving a tour of the Central Utilities Plant, the place where water is heated, chilled, pumped, and cleaned to the point that only microchips can drink it. The plant hums twenty-four hours a day with the sound of pumps moving fat pipes of water; it has the musty smell that comes from water and metal pipes in contact for years. Berliner stops in an alleyway deep inside the plant and nods toward the ceiling. It’s hard to absorb the array of piping overhead. Perhaps six distinct layers of pipe, crossing over each other, some as big as a person’s waist, some no bigger than your wrist. Many have labels—“Hot Water,” “Chilled Water”—with arrows pointing in the direction the water is flowing.
“When you start to think like we think,” Berliner says, his eyes tracing the pipes, “you don’t see water in the pipes. You see dollar signs.”
The water bill at IBM Burlington, just to get 3.2 million gallons a day into the plant, is $100,000 a month. And that’s not the important cost. The water staff turns plain municipal water into a product—actually, into a portfolio of products, depending on whether someone is mixing high-tech chemicals or running air-conditioning chillers or supplying water fountains and coffeemakers. IBM’s utility plant creates nine custom varieties of water—and that’s where the real money goes, for chemicals, filters, energy for pumps and boilers and UV disinfection, for staff on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each brand of water costs four or five or ten times the cost of the raw water itself.
A few years ago, Janette Bombardier, site operations manager in Burlington, and her staff had a revelation: Water is so important that although it seems far removed from the final product—the computer chips—it could actually be a competitive advantage. “We’ve moved from being a facility that makes chips for IBM products to a facility that makes chips directly for the consumer market. We make cell phone chips, we make chips for printers, for TVs, for cameras and GPS systems. We go head-to-head with other fabricators in the Far East.”
We don’t think about the cost of the water necessary to make our cordless phones or DVRs or Sony PlayStations. But you can bet that IBM and its chip competitors think about it—there is hardly a more relentlessly price-cutting arena than computer chips.
From Bombardier’s perspective, if she and her staff can find ways to use less water, and to make water more smartly, she’s directly reducing the cost of IBM’s chips. Wringing expensive water out of the process helps the giant stay nimble.
“All the issues with water, with energy, with the increasing cost to produce water and move water,” says Bombardier, “that’s always inches from my nose.”
The daily water bill at IBM Burlington, including energy and chemicals, is $10,959. Most of the water used each day—2.2 million gallons— becomes ultra-pure water, the most expensive kind. Of the $10,959 bill, $9,300 a day goes to make ultra-pure water. That’s the big target for the water staff. Not much point in worrying about how much water the toilets use, when 85 percent of each day’s cost is in the ultra-pure water.
That, in fact, is the first lesson from IBM Burlington. It’s not about saving water per se—it’s about understanding how you use water; where the costs are, and reducing them; where the value is, and preserving that.
In that sense, IBM Burlington’s water factory is just like a Celebrity cruise-ship buffet line or the shower of a Las Vegas hotel. You still need the qualities that the water is providing—you want to rethink your use of ice without leaving the chicken salad lukewarm, you want to reduce the amount of water the hotel bathroom consumes while preserving an indulgent shower experience. But if in those examples Royal Caribbean and MGM Resorts are working with an inspired idea and good instincts about their customers, IBM Burlington is working from the analytics—from the billions of bits of information it gathers about water, sifting for patterns, trends, for bulges of wasted energy that aren’t being harnessed. That, in fact, is part of IBM’s business: teaching people to sift huge quantities of data for important insight, and then selling them the computers and the software to do it themselves.
In the ultra-pure water factory, though, as on the buffet line, it’s the mind-flip about water that gets you started. You have to take a step back and look at the water cycle as a whole. “One of the most innovative things we’ve done,” says Bombardier, “is we take the energy the water inherently has in it, and we use it for other purposes.” Or, as her deputy Eric Berliner put it, Everywhere you see water flowing in pipes, think dollar signs.
Water comes into IBM Burlington cold from Lake Champlain and the Champlain Water District. It’s so cold, in fact, that it has to be warmed up before they can turn it into ultra-pure water. Meanwhile, the factory has thirteen massive, two-story-tall chillers using huge quantities of electricity to produce cold water, even in winter.
If it seems stunningly obvious to connect these two problems—well, not really. There was coldness in the incoming water that for most of its fifty years, IBM Burlington wasn’t quite smart enough to use—in fact, the coldness was undesirable; IBM spent money getting rid of it. In another part of the 750-acre campus, water had heat in it that was undesirable, and IBM spent money getting rid of that. In most companies, in most organizations, though, there wouldn’t be much of a pipeline connecting the specialty department that creates ultra-pure water with the everyday engineering department that is running the air-conditioning systems.
What IBM Burlington’s engineers have done isn’t nearly as glamorous, or as comprehensible, as substituting cold river rock for ice. But it is, in fact, exactly the same concept. In a plant that already has something like eighteen plumbing systems—from steam to a segregated fire-sprinkler system—they’ve created three fresh loops of water, to capture cold and heat where it is and use it where it’s needed. The cold incoming water, for instance, is routed to areas that need chilling. It provides “free” cold, and in the process, it gets warmed up, also “free,” so it’s ready to be ultrapurified.
IBM Burlington also now uses cold outside air—which is abundant in Burlington, where the average high in December, January, and February is never above freezing—to make cold water in winter, instead of using its big chillers.
All of this saves water, and it saves all the things water requires to do its jobs. These kinds of projects are daunting enough that IBM Burlington uses computer models to track water, temperature, and energy to make sure its ideas are going to work.
And the result? Between 2000 and 2009, IBM Burlington cut its water use 29 percent—that saved the factory $740,000 a year in water bills. But here’s where the magic of water really kicks in. Cutting water use by $740,000 is saving $600,000 in chemical and filtration costs each year. It is saving $2.3 million in electricity and energy costs.
For every $1 that IBM Burlington cuts its basic water bill, it saves $4 more in chemical, electricity, and energy costs.
By the end of 2009, production of chips at IBM Burlington was up 30 percent compared with 2000. So over the course of nine years, the water staff had cut water use 29 percent, saving $3.6 million a year—while the facility was actually increasing its output by a third. The result: Between 2000 and 2009, “water productivity” at the plant very nearly doubled. A thousand gallons of water in 2009 produced 80 percent more chips than a thousand gallons of water in 2000.
So it isn’t just that Janette Bombardier’s team saved $3.6 million a year by being smarter about water. If they’d done nothing, increased production of chips would have actually raised the cost of water by perhaps $2 million in 2009. The real savings—out there in a world where even $4.99 birthday cards contain computer chips—the real savings is $5 million a year.17
“We did fifty things to get there,” says Bombardier. “Angles of usage, treatment, energy capture, using less pump capacity, capturing internal pressure that comes with the water in the line—fifty different things.”
As IBM has discovered, the measuring alone creates an imperative for curiosity and innovation, for changing behavior—just like when you keep track of every calorie you eat, you start cutting back, just like when there’s a real-time miles-per-gallon number on a car’s dashboard, you can’t help but drive in such a way as to keep the mpg number high.
“We are never done,” says Bombardier. “We are never out of ideas.”
Water consciousness has a kind of infectious quality, an upward spiral in which better water management spins off all kinds of benefits that reinforce the original impulse to think about water. For IBM, the real inspiration from Burlington has been far more dramatic than simply saving water and money. Burlington has helped IBM change the way it thinks about itself. IBM, the computing company, is creating a whole business around water. IBM wants to do for its customers—for companies, for cities, for utilities, for whole natural ecosystems—what it has done in IBM Burlington.
IBM’s leap seems bemusing on the face of it. Why would the world’s legendary computer company go into the water business? The answer is really both simple and brilliant. In most places, in the United States and the rest of the world, water is not smart. Traffic signals have intelligence, highways have intelligence, the electric grid has intelligence, the cell phone network, the cable TV network, heck, even Wal-Mart’s long-haul trucks are connected on an intelligent network. Water’s network typically moves only water, not any information about the water. Even at the simplest level, for instance, most water meters are still read, not automatically but manually, with someone striding along and popping open your water-meter cover.
“Water is not really measured and monitored in a way that allows you to manage it,” says Sharon Nunes, a vice president at IBM in charge of the company’s Big Green Innovations effort. Her job is to create businesses for IBM out of the exploding world of sustainability. “We think there is a big business opportunity around managing water. Water is not disappearing. But as it becomes more scarce in more areas, it becomes critical to manage it better.”
IBM, in fact, wants to do for water what Apple’s iTunes has done for music. At the simplest level, iTunes is just what the corporate IT types would call a “dashboard” for managing your music. You can see what you’ve got, you can see what’s out there, you can see how much it costs, you can see what you’ve bought, you can even see what other people are buying. iTunes is a music ecosystem—Apple doesn’t know anything in particular about music, except how you might want to use it, display it, arrange it, analyze it. iTunes offers you a “smart music” system.
That’s exactly what IBM wants to offer for water users. What IBM can do is lay down a nervous system of water sensors, feeding an array of computers, loaded with analytical software that lets you see and understand your water—whether you’re running a microchip factory, as IBM does, or a sprawling university, or a sewage treatment plant, or trying to understand the hydrodynamics of a whole bay. IBM wants to offer a “dashboard” of water intelligence, a way of grasping your whole water ecosystem. That kind of intelligence has transformed the world of music—for anyone who listens to music, for music companies, and for the artists themselves. (One crucial difference, of course, is that iTunes is a closed system, valuable but hermetic; water is the original open-source system.)
IBM, in short, wants to usher in the era of what it calls “smart water.” That’s what it has created with its five thousand sensors and its 400 million data points a day in Burlington: smart water. Not just the kind of information that lets it use less water here and there, the kind of information that lets it take the qualities inherent in the water it is using, and shift those qualities around to where it needs them.
In March 2009, IBM formally announced the creation of a water management services business unit, along with a list of pilot customers and projects, including a sensor system to monitor Ireland’s Galway Bay, a similar system to model and monitor New York’s Hudson River, and a contract to create an “end to end” smart-water utility for the island nation of Malta.
The conventional estimate is that around the world, water is a $400 billion-a-year business—that’s four times the size of IBM’s annual revenue, but it includes everything from digging up worn-out water pipes to building billion-dollar desalination plants. IBM says the information technology part of water, the smart-water market, could be $15 billion or $20 billion a year.
For the moment, water seems to be inspiring not just a mind-flip at IBM but also a burst of creativity and cross-pollination that is a reminder of how spartan water technology really is, despite a hundred years of modern water systems. The century-long golden age of water has made the water world complacent. There aren’t many areas of modern life in the developed world where thousands of staff people routinely maintain vital technology that is forty or fifty or even a hundred years old. But that’s the standard in water. Even lightbulbs—evolving from incandescents to compact fluorescents—have made more progress than most water technology.
In the spring of 2010, IBM vice president Sharon Nunes announced a partnership with a Saudi Arabian research center to develop a new, inexpensive desalination system that could be powered by solar energy. In the Middle East, of course, where the whole region needs to manage its fresh water with an eyedropper, finding ways to use the sun to make cheap drinking water is a near obsession. What was remarkable about the IBM announcement is that the project relies on combining two unrelated areas of IBM’s technology portfolio: microprocessor technology (in a new kind of solar panel) and nanotechnology (in a new kind of desalination filter), in the service of a third business—making clean water, a business IBM wasn’t in just four years ago.18
If water is going to get smart, or more to the point, if we’re going to get smart about water, that’s the kind of convergence, the kind of cross-disciplinary leaps, that are going to be required.
IBM, in fact, seems to be betting that it can learn about the water business even while it is teaching its customers about their water. Most of its early water projects include partners with deep experience managing or understanding the water part of water systems. “There are very few water experts in IBM,” says Cameron Brooks, who is part of Nunes’s team in charge of building IBM’s water business. “For the moment, we’re trying to bring the capabilities we already have to this new area, to figure out how to make a difference.”
IBM’s favorite example of smart-water effectiveness, in fact, is its own Burlington semiconductor plant. “We bring the institutional expertise in how to do this,” says Janette Bombardier. Her senior water system manager, Jeff Chapman, has been tapped dozens of times for sales presentations around the world, including as far afield as Singapore, to explain what it means to look at your pipes as if they have dollar signs flowing by. “Jeff is helping to create a strategy for the whole corporation,” says Bombardier. And what is Chapman’s hourly consulting rate to IBM’s sales operation? Bombardier smiles. “I give him up for free, until there’s a real contract signed.”
