Eco influencing begins at home

Tuesday Mar 18, 2008

My new responsibilities at Sun this year include HPC and Eco management. According to my boss, I am Sun's HPC and Eco management Czar. Just got my business cards with that title

HPC and Eco are Sun's top initiatives. Our cool systems architecture and software products give us a unique competitive advantage in these markets. It is no wonder that HPC and Eco were in the top two spots of Sun's Top 10 stories of 2007.

During dinner conversation one day, I was explaining the Eco part of my job to my 10-yr old. We got into interesting discussions about rising power costs and that by 2012, power consumption costs of large enterprises will grow to $250B. We also talked about power consumption at consumer and household levels and how proactive energy management solutions were the need of the day. Before I knew it, he came up with the topic for his science fair project, on electric power consumption and alternative energy measuring/saving technologies. After several weeks of fine tuning, the project turned out fabulous.

 
What was fascinating to me about this "science" project experience was that, in addition to the underlying science of electricity, energy forms, wattage/voltage/amperage, fluorescent and incandescent technologies, errors in measuring instruments, this project experience also made him think and question about business aspects like tiered pricing model used by utility companies, truth in marketing vis-a-vis advertised wattage consumption versus actually used, and social aspects of baseline pricing and eco-responsibility among other things. All in all, it was lots of fun for both of us these past couple months. Don't remember my science projects being this fun.

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Posted at 09:03AM Mar 18, 2008 by Prasad Pai in Personal
Tags: eco electricity power sciencefair watt