[LINK] Award Winning Green ICT Papers

[Tom Worthington]

The winning papers in the Eckermann-TJA sustainability challenge are 
now available: "Broadband and the sustainable use of water resources" 
(Saleem, Wicks and Dassanayake ) , "Vehicle to grid using broadband 
communications" (Dennis and Thompson ), "Leveraging advances in 
mobile broadband technology to improve environmental sustainability" 
(Claussen, Ho and Pivit). This is an annual award for the best papers 
on how to use telecommunications for environmental benefit. The 
papers are published by the Australian Computer Society at: 
<http://publications.epress.monash.edu/toc/tja/59/1>.


BROADBAND AND THE SUSTAINABLE USE OF WATER RESOURCES
Syed K Saleem, Byron Wicks, Kithsiri B Dassanayake
DOI: 10.2104/tja09002

Agriculture accounts for more than seventy percent of total fresh 
water consumption. Water use efficiency in the industry is often less 
than fifty percent. A changing climate and increasing competition for 
fresh water are stressing water supplies globally and limiting the 
scope for further expansion of agriculture to meet growing food 
production requirements. This situation is threatening the economic 
viability of many agricultural regions both in Australia and around 
the globe. It is a national imperative to develop solutions that will 
sustain this vital industry in the future.

Improving water use efficiency through better irrigation practices is 
one method for coping with these challenges. Costs associated with 
capital outlays and engineering complexity are barriers to widespread 
adoption of efficient irrigation technologies. This paper presents a 
platform that leverages broadband communication networks to reduce 
these barriers to technology adoption and thereby vastly improve 
water use efficiency in agriculture. Results from recent field trials 
are presented that demonstrate increases in water productivity in 
dairy pasture and horticultural production.


VEHICLE TO GRID USING BROADBAND COMMUNICATIONS
Mike Dennis, Bethany Thompson
DOI: 10.2104/tja09003

The impending mass electrification of road transport, driven by 
concerns for climate change and sustainability, enables an 
opportunity to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions from 
passenger vehicles and to simultaneously provide services to the 
electricity grid. Electricity grids are characterised by a lack of 
storage capacity, which can be provided by grid connected electric 
vehicles charging and discharging their batteries under centralised 
control. This paper argues that the Vehicle to Grid (V2G) methodology 
offers operational, financial and sustainability synergies between 
vehicles and electricity grids. Broadband communications is an 
essential service to facilitate the aggregation, distributed control 
and metering of V2G services.


LEVERAGING ADVANCES IN MOBILE BROADBAND TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE 
ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Holger Claussen, Lester T. W. Ho, Florian Pivit
DOI: 10.2104/tja09004

Advances in mobile access broadband technology have a high potential 
to improve environmental sustainability both directly by enabling 
novel network deployment concepts and indirectly by changing the way 
people live and work. In this paper, improvements of the network 
topology enabled by ubiquitous broadband access are investigated. It 
is shown that a joint deployment of macro- and publicly accessible 
residential picocells can reduce the total energy consumption by up 
to 70% in urban areas. In addition the high potential of indirect 
effects of improving telecommunication networks, such as enabling 
teleworking and replacing business travel through video conferencing, 
is demonstrated and compared with the direct effects.

From: Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Volume 59, No. 1, 
February 2009: <http://publications.epress.monash.edu/toc/tja/59/1>.


ps: The Eckermann-TJA award was set up by Robin Eckermann, Principal, 
Eckermann & Associates and Adjunct Professor, School of Information 
Sciences and Engineering, University of Canberra.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University