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Broadband Benefits: Environmental Sustainability
Excerpt from the Baller-Herbst Report
Discussion of the environmental benefits of broadband typically begins with the impact of telework on oil consumption and pollution. As discussed in the prior section, this is certainly a real and important factor. But the environmental implications of broadband go far beyond this.
For one thing, broadband enables buildings to communicate with utilities, utilities to communicate with each other, and the energy market to provide real-time information to both buildings and utilities. “Smart buildings” and “smart grids” hold great promise for dramatic reductions and greater efficiencies in energy consumption.
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One of the ways wiring our homes and offices promises large economic payoffs, along with immense environmental benefits, is by allowing interactive monitoring of and more efficient energy use. By creating “smart buildings” tied to the local power grid, as a 2002 Department of Energy report highlighted, utility companies won’t have to keep as much wasted reserve power on hand, leading to “lower prices and less price volatility” which will “create a more resilient electric grid that is more robust and secure against brownouts, blackouts, and hostile attacks” – the latter especially attractive in the wake of the 2003 blackout of much of the Northeast and Canada.
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The State of California, for example, is funding an ambitious programtargeting energy use by commercial buildings. One third of all electricity consumed in the state is by commercial buildings – about $10 billion per year. The goal of the High-Performance Commercial Buildings Project (HPCBS), launched in 2000, is to cut energy use by 70 percent in new buildings and save 50 percent in retrofits of older buildings using broadband connections combined with other technologies.87
Another way that broadband enhances environmental sustainability is by enabling a wide range of programs that can collectively contribute to overcoming global problems that experts believe would otherwise be insurmountable. For example, the cities of Amsterdam, Netherlands; San Francisco, Ca.; and Seoul, Korea, with support from Cisco, have launched a pilot program to use fiber optic technology to reduce traffic congestion and carbon dioxide emissions.
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Similarly, visionaries in the utility industry are exploring ways to use fiber technologies tomanage electricity usage in ways that will significantly reduce the need for expensive new power plants. Billy Ray of Glasgow, Ky., has estimated that the cost of providing FTTH connectivity to the ninemillion homes in the Tennessee Valley Administration (TVA)‘s service area would cost no more – and probably far less – than the $18 billion that the TVA proposes to spend on expanding its nuclear facilities over the next 10 years, would result in reduced energy usage equivalent to double or triple the electricity that TVA’s investment in new facilities would produce, and would give the residents of the TVA region all of the other benefits that flow from FTTH.
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World-renown fiber expert, Bill St. Arnaud, has similarly proposed creative means of deploying FTTH through utilities to marry critical energy savings with expanding availability of cheap, ubiquitous FTTH.
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Perhaps most important of all, broadband also contributes in countless other ways to environmental protection and sustainability, by making production, distribution, and service processes more efficient. The following excerpts from “Digital Prosperity,” ITIF’s trenchant analysis of the economic benefits of the information technology revolution, illustrate this:
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Today [information technology] enables just-in-time (JIT) production in which businesses gather better information from suppliers in order to track moment-by-moment changes in the supply chain. The ability to track shipments online allows firms to time production and anticipate bottlenecks in supplies, while up-to-the-minute information about inventories tells suppliers when fresh deliveries are needed. An example of an integrated and informed supply chain is Cisco Systems. Using remote monitoring of production lines, Cisco can detect a problem and adjust production at an assembly line or distribution center immediately in factories across the globe, often not even owned by Cisco, all from its headquarters in San Jose, California.
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Because of difficulty in predicting demand, transportation equipment is often underutilized. For example, trucks might be fully loaded for delivery, but might make the return trip partially or completely empty. Indeed, about onefifth of trucks at any one time are “transporting air.” With global positioning systems (GPS), cell phones, and wirelessly connected computers, truck drivers and dispatchers can now more easily find loads to pick up for return deliveries. The Web enables this kind of demand aggregation. Sites like Getloaded.com act as a matching service, preventing excess capacity from going to waste by connecting trailers that would otherwise be traveling empty with loads that need to go to the same destination. One study found on-board computers that allow managers to better coordinate trucks and loads boosted capacity utilization 3.3 percent and saved $16 billion annually in the $500 billion trucking industry.
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New advanced teleconferencing technologies that enable “telepresence” (enabling eye contact between participants, life size images, and no jerky video images) will likely spur even more substitution of travel. ... Compared to reading a newspaper, receiving the news on a PDA wirelessly results in the release of 32 to 140 times less CO2, and several orders of magnitude less NOx and SOx. The energy involved in selling $100 of books for a traditional superstore vs. an online bookseller is 14 times more. Romm documents how a 20 mile round trip to the mall to purchase two 5 pound products consumes about 1 gallon of gasoline. Shipping the packages 1000 miles by truck consumes 0.1 gallon of gasoline.
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Not everyone agrees that broadband will reduce travel and the resulting burdens on the environment. For example, Professor Andrew Odlyzco argues,
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The reasons for the simultaneous growth of supposed substitutes are manifold. There is a direct stimulation effect (higher capacity on fiber cables enables off-shoring jobs to India, but the workers there have to be trained, supervised, and coordinated, which means a jump in air travel to and from India). There are also improvements from one technology that are absorbed into another (computer and communications improvements led to better and much less expensive printers, which satisfied the latent demand for printing on the desktop, and have thus far made a mockery of the “paperless office” concept). And there is the old Jevons Paradox, which says that greater efficiency often increases usage ... All these combine to yield a simple observation, with overwhelming evidence going back centuries, that as society develops economically, both communication and transportation boom. They are both services whose consumption grows with technological and economic advances. Thus simply deploying the Internet more widely and with increased capacity is likely, in the absence of other developments, to stimulate travel and energy usage. This would be true even without counting the energy usage of the Internet and the computers connected to it.
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As Professor Odlyzco recognizes, however, history may not turn out to be instructive here, as diminishing petroleum supplies and skyrocketing energy prices may reinforce broadband-enabled reductions in travel.
93 In any event, even if broadband does not completely displace travel, it can substantially reduce it and its adverse effects.
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