IoT vs climate change | IoT Insider podcast episode 20

Dan Cunliffe
Hi, everyone, and thanks so much for tuning into the IoT Insider. My name is Dan Cunliffe and I’m Managing Director of Pangea. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Tash Terlecki, our new Partner Account Manager to talk about sustainability and going green and IoT’s role in all of that. Hi, Tash. Welcome.

Tash Terlecki
Thank you, Dan. It’s great to be here.

Dan Cunliffe
Thank you. Tash brings many years of experience as an integrated digital business and marketing strategist with a keen focus on innovation, technology in previous sectors such as obviously education, human resources, sports, entertainment, aviation, and mining. As the 4-IR and associated technologies take centre stage, and as an early adopter of all things digital, Tash seeks to support human, environmental, and machine blending, by connecting things. She’s also a really cool person. And one of the reasons we hired her, is not because he just has a South African accent, because she’s actually super talented as well. And today having her to join me is really, really, really cool. So Tash yeah, I mean, we’re going to talk a bit about sustainability, we’ll talk about what IoT influence could be, but one of the key things out there is, you know, as the climate crisis continues, there’s pressures for companies to meet sustainability targets and go green. Maybe we should start around about there. And if you want to kind of open some thought processes on that, yeah?

Tash Terlecki
Yeah, thank you, Dan. And it’s great to be a part of the team I’m a bit of a tech optimist, used to call myself a futurist. But now I see myself as a tech optimist. So thrilled to be in the industry and in the space, working with the team, who are an amazing group of guys and girls. I think if I can just set the scene around, you know, one of the things you mentioned there, which was the climate crisis, and also sustainability, and we need to distinguish between what global warming actually is and what a climate crisis is. And there’s a there’s a key thing that distinguishes the two and that is that global warming is entirely as a result of human action. And the climate crisis and climate change is as a result of human and natural reactions that have taken place. So you know, when we speak about the UN sustainability goals, we’re speaking about the climate crisis and climate change as a whole, which are more your long term effects. And global warming, which there’s a clue there in the name, it’s about the temperature. What the GSMA have based the industry standards that they have set for the industry around keeping to pre industrial rates of global warming, and the warming of the Earth’s surface, which is around 1.5 degrees to two degrees. And that’s what they’ve committed to by 2050. So I mean, we all we all know the history. And we know, it comes about by burning of fossil fuels and a certain amount of carbon and our carbon footprint that we leave behind and the energy that we emit our CO2 emissions. So that brings me to how, you know the industry is involved. And obviously, we use a lot of energy, and the mobile industry uses a lot of energy. So, you know, it brings us to the goals around sustainability. and sustainability is a word that is it’s horribly abused and overused, in my opinion. And it obviously comes with a lot of agendas. But if you look at the description, it’s the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level and the avoidance of depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance. And balance is the key there. It’s I mean, you know how much food and energy and water we use, through our devices and through our connected technology world. It’s how we meet our means and our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. And I think that’s where, you know, the sustainability piece comes in, and it’s all about environmental, but also the social and economic sustainability goals. And that’s, I think, where a lot of our users are going to be interested in in how IoT can help them in that space and how it can benefit their businesses, but also their global footprint and the emissions that they put out there.

Dan Cunliffe
Massive amounts of really interesting words there and like, hugely descriptive. Thanks, Tash. I mean, yeah, I mean, balance. Responsibility is probably the big things that you talk about that, you know, clearly governments and kind of world bodies are, are taking as seriously as possible but there’s always undercurrents of people who don’t or kind of don’t understand that and you know, while we talk about small increases in global temperature, the impacts are massive, right? I mean, they are really, really huge. And I guess sometimes we live in a very on-demand world and so we sometimes forget, or not even forget maybe’s the wrong word, but we don’t prioritise what’s going to be happening in 50 years. And I think a lot of people don’t realise that they’re probably not going to be around for another 50 years to kind of see these impacts, if we don’t make changes to it, I think talking about that, you know, one of the targets, particularly for the UK is aiming for a sort of net zero emissions by 2050. And also hosting the next UN Climate Change Conference and trying to reach these goals. It’s a bit of a Catch 22 for me sometimes, where you think, I have technology through the Internet of Things, through IoT, through mobile connectivity, the ability to learn what things are doing, what’s happening in my environment, so I can use that to better make decisions. Really, that’s what like, I started the IoT business a lot around the fact that I believe, very, very strongly that if you can understand what a device is doing well, you can understand what a thing is doing Internet of Things, right? You can stand but the thing is doing you can make it do better things, or you can at least give it the opportunity to do better things. Because you’re understanding every part of that analytical cycle.

Tash Terlecki
That’s so correct. So correct Dan it’s, and I’m not sure who said this, but IoT is, it’s almost the earth’s digital skin. Yeah, and the nodes and the sensors and the devices that are connected out underneath that skin, are the nerves and the nervous system that speak into the brain, and help inform the brain around what’s happening around sight and temperature and control and quality and all of those things that feed into the environment and the social and economic structure.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. And it’s also about, I mean, maybe we start to talk a little bit about that, you know, the GSMA had a really interesting quote, which was to decarbonise, we must digitise. Nice little alliteration going there we love alliteration, but it is it is kind of true and what you’re talking about skin and nerves, using the IoT for that, you know, it’s in several places, we’ve got a few examples. But I think it’s not just about using sensors and devices to measure things. It’s also about freeing up humans to do other jobs, because you’re, you know, you’re automating some stuff that doesn’t need someone to go out and do that job, that person can do something a bit more influential. Whether it’s through analytics, or the next level, you know, something else that they can go and try and improve on.

Tash Terlecki
Yeah, I think there’s a there’s a lot of worry and concern around the machines are taking over. They’re replacing jobs. And yes, some jobs will be replaced, but there are jobs that possibly should be replaced, because they are labour intensive, they’re monotonous. And they don’t require key decision making and allow humans to enhance their jobs and go out and do the important things that do matter, or potentially there are dangerous jobs, that we can remove the human danger aspect from and make them more safe.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, totally, totally agree with you. Let’s dive into some examples. I think, you know, the listeners, and hopefully, you know, a lot of our partners who tune in, look this is a lot for you guys as well being able to understand where where are some of these more green if you want or climate affecting opportunities within my base that I can not only win some business, but I can maybe feel good about what I’m doing as well. You know, some there’s a there’s a lot in that. And I think a couple of bits we’ll talk about. So one of the first ones on the list is farming, you know, and precision farming. We come from a country in South Africa, where farming is huge, right? I mean, there’s lots and lots of space. And sometimes people maybe just go, great, I’ve got all the space, I can do what I want to, but there’s no substitute for being precise or optimising your farming right? Because every little bit counts, especially when there’s droughts or there’s things that go around. There’s lots of opportunities around smart irrigation, where you know, being able to adjust the water usage based on the upcoming weather. So you’d be smarter about it. Automating your fertilisation, I used to tell a really great story about a company that I, it feels forever ago, but when we started the business about how they would actually monitor the soil moisture, but for the components of the soil, so they knew my tomatoes were different to my cabbages or my crops needed different things. So I need to adjust my sulfites or my nitrite amount in my fertilisation and if I could do that in a, you know, a kind of, you know, more, I suppose optimised way you’re going to get better crops, right, you don’t have to do what they do today, which is, you know, create these super seeds, which sometimes are not always good for everybody to do that.

Tash Terlecki
And you touched on it there, Dan the important thing is a greater crop yield, I mean, in in 2050, or by 2050, farmers are going to have to produce 70% more food than what they’re producing now. So they have to have the precision agriculture in place and measure that soil quality and be able to less use or use less pesticides and decrease the the output because as we know, farming does contribute largely to those emissions. So it’s about doing it more effectively.

Dan Cunliffe
And back to your point around balance, right? Yeah, exactly. If you’re in the farming community, there’s you know, so many different sensationalised stories, but the reality is that, yeah, we have to make more food because we have more mouths. But we have to do it smarter, you know, we may have to even consider smart farming as a way in which you layer above each other, you go up vertically, rather than always having to go horizontally in terms of how you do that. And you’re going to need, you’re gonna need far more intelligent systems to manage that because you’ve got, you know, a really, really different way of farming.

Tash Terlecki
And it’s about controlling the amount that you feed and the times that you feed and, you know, the farmer is not getting on his horse and, you know, going around the farm to check you know, whether the the bowls are empty, there’s a, there’s a more efficient and more productive way to do that and monitoring your your tank levels and your water levels and just doing things in a more effective manner.

Dan Cunliffe
On like a totally, sort of similar passage. But whether it was gimmicky or not, I saw an advert the other day about a fridge that actually tries to mimic some of the day sunlight passage in in your fridge in your veggie drawer, right? It sort of tries to create a sunlight sunset model for your veggies because they reckon it gives it, I don’t know how many more percentage life by staying in. Which is actually like, you know, the whole from the farm, to the supermarket, to your fridge. Now you can try and keep that going for longer and longer. Smart storage. Totally. Yeah, so you know, food, obviously huge way to kind of use IoT to drive things, smarter farming, obviously, we’ve done a few deals ourselves down in Kent, where you live now you know, the whole of Kent Council is supported by Smart Lighting. And here, we’ve I mean, we’ve had this running for probably four years where we’ve connected many, many hundreds of streetlights to enable I suppose proximity sensors that automatically switch on switch off the whole point of this is really, why are the lights on when no one’s there. But why are the lights on when it’s actually pretty bright outside, it shouldn’t be based on time, it should be based on ambient, it should be based on what’s going on around you. Equally, I think there’s another level to this, which is it’s usually I think it’s 12% more energy efficient to run smart street lighting compared to standard.

Tash Terlecki
And I think there’s a there’s a you can expect to reduce the consumption and there’s a saving of about 80% with the use of smart street lighting. They refer to it as demand driven luminosity, I quite enjoyed that terminology.

Dan Cunliffe
That’s a cool one, I was gonna just add in like a safety level. So we do a lot of work in the lone worker space where we can connect people to any network, you know, in the UK, around Europe, and know that your staff, especially nurses, or engineers, working late nights can be seen. But one of the really cool things I would love to see around smart city and Smart Lighting integration with lone workers, is why would the lights not come on for that person coming home, and maybe allow, make sure that you know you have that level. So that’s another deeper level of integration, which can be quite cool around kind of human safety, or make it brighter if that person is more vulnerable person. And we could learn that they needed that help, you know?

Tash Terlecki
For sure. So it’s it’s so exciting. And I mean, when you speak about proximity sensors, it brings to mind some of the work that’s being done around the London borough and looking at curbing flytipping. And I think, you know, potentially, that would be something that will be housed within your streetlights and looking at the proximity sensors to pick up activity and that then automatically kicks in some sort of alert or filming or you know, whatever it is whatever the IoT solution is, but again, just a way that it creates awareness, and you can speed up the response time around preventing those types of things from happening.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, this isn’t about you know, another episode of Back to the Future like this is stuff that is real because the data is there. It’s about how do you harness it? Make it useful, put some budget towards it, that’s really what it comes down to sometimes as well.

Tash Terlecki
That’s the word Dan, it’s data, data is visibility, you cannot manage what you don’t measure. So that’s about measuring that stuff, gathering that data and helping that to make smarter decisions and use that for predictive maintenance to reduce incidents, etc.

Dan Cunliffe
We talk about reducing stuff there’s another very well known one, which is the old Big Belly Bins, who have got solar powered lids if you want on the top so that they don’t need power to kind of tell the bin collectors, I’m full, come and get me type scenario, right it’s like an on demand bin collection and kind of rubbish collection but what it really has driven and we’ve got loads of them in Kingston, which is where the office is. You know, it can reduce the collection by up to 80% which means less rubbish, you know, less bags waste and less emissions from those trucks. It’s it’s creating a rubbish collection, improvement ecosystem model like it just everything around it gets better.

Tash Terlecki
Effective waste management. Yeah, there’s no point in having the vans driving around and individuals sort of doing those routine checks when you can automate that process and make it a bit more effective.

Dan Cunliffe
I want to touch on two more examples that were close to us. One is one of the first opportunities we ever did in Pangea was connecting over 4000 bicycles in Birmingham City Council where we were involved with a little sensor that actually went into the handlebars, it’s in the stem in the front of the handlebar. And this was measuring, you know, about 50 different data points of which some were air quality, obviously, calories burned by the person on the bike, various different pollution attributes. And the point of this was really to tell Birmingham Council, look, I’ve got x amount of government money for sustainability or for planting trees. But actually, if I knew where to plant them, because of the more effected areas, I could be better use of my money. Again, another great example of what the IoT does, it just gives you that data gives you that opportunity to be more efficient.

Tash Terlecki
And then allows you to make the decision that’s going to be important. And I mean, that’s, and that particular project was amazing. And I know that that was included in that was our Multi-network SIMs.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah got to be right, because we were travelling, although the bikes are going anywhere around them. Yeah. Yeah. So that was one of the fun ones. I still actually remembered delivering those SIMs. I delivered them by hand. Yeah, all 4000 of them in like a bag on a train. Yeah, those those were the days as they say, the startup days. The start up days where we deliver anything by hand, just to make sure, we do have very good courier service for those listening now. The other one, though, is probably a little bit sort of wider reaching. But we do have a product, which we’ve kind of termed the Fitbit for buildings, which is all about smart energy systems, everything from being able to monitor your gas, your electric, even your water consumption. But in general, smart energy and the smart electric metres market, I just want to touch on something super interesting here. So we all get notifications that sign up, get a smart metre, get a smart metre, but it’s important, right? Because it will help to automate not only the way you pay for it, but also accurately get you to pay for it. Yeah. But equally, it is it is a way in which you can warm your house when you need to, not just because it’s on a timer, or you can warm your warm water when you need to, you know, you might be away for a weekend and you’ve forgotten, you know, that’s two to three days of wasted energy. Times that by 60 odd million people around the UK, that’s a lot, you know, very quick it’s 180 million days for one weekend that we go away and forget about. So it’s quite a lot of effort in terms of making it better. And you know, according to the GSMA, smart energy systems could save 1.3 trillion pounds, and reduce the carbon emissions by almost 8 billion tonnes. That’s 23% of all emissions.

Tash Terlecki
Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, that’s where you start to see the real impact in what the green economy can bring to the table. And, you know, it’s interesting there, you spoke about the consumer, and how they can better manage their use of electricity and set their heating and cooling and their energy levels based on their lifestyle. So not just letting it burn all day, and not worrying about that. So we have this ongoing debate as well about how single efforts of the consumer are kind of a pointless drop in the ocean, when set against this mess of systemic change that’s needed in the world to combat climate change. But it’s kind of like the old sort of lead by example, belief system. And when presidents arrive on their private jets to climate conferences with their 14 car entourages, it smacks of hypocrisy. So it kind of starts with setting the example, you know, and getting the consumer to do something that they believe is going to make an impact and has some sort of purpose. So, you know, people don’t rush into a burning building because they see smoke, they rush in when they see others rushing in with buckets of water. So you know, when you see others doing and you see it happening, and you hear about it, and you communicate about it, that’s when it starts to spread and becomes a collective effort. There’s a clue there to be a collective effort. It has to be collective, it can’t be done on its own or by by one person. So yeah, it’s it’s bigger than that.

Dan Cunliffe
Because the impact is so huge, it needs to be collective. You can’t get that level of impact without that piece. I mean, and I think I think just to just to sort of bring it to a close, and we know, mobile connectivity is at the core of every sort of IoT solution, you know, we need to understand that a lot of what we’re trying to do has to talk to the internet or has to talk to some kind of application to improve itself. Obviously, Pangea has, we just explained, about five or six different things we’ve actually been involved in and have delivered, but the ability to connect to any network from a single device so that you have ubiquity. So you don’t have to have these challenges which you would have had in the past. It’s like, how do I do that rural, you know, connectivity on that farm? Or how do I get these bikes to connect when they travel around because while it’s great to get the data, you want to be accurate, and you want to be making sure you’re making the right decisions with the right data and you need the ability to connect wherever you are, you need the ability to connect through a cellular model, or even through a more sort of lower power model where the smart metering market is, is needing that today where you know, we will be sunsetting technologies like 2G and 3G in the future, which have currently provided the services for smart metres. So essentially smart metres, which we spoke about and huge impacts that smart energy systems will have require things like Narrowband, or LTE-M. And these are the technologies that obviously to today, we have and are ready to talk to our customers about and can help them but it is it’s a huge opportunity to not only do something good, but also win some business.

Tash Terlecki
Absolutely, I mean, you spoke earlier about decarbonisation through digitisation and and I love that I love the sound of that. But it speaks again to the benefits of the green economy and how businesses can actually benefit. So through the use of IoT, and as part of their digital transformation strategies, what are the benefits, I mean, they can look at new revenue channels, this is going to create new innovation in business models. There’s reduced energy consumption, and people want to buy from brands that are socially and environmentally conscious, don’t they? It’s important, you reducing that risk and the erosion on your profit. And there’s a long term value creation that is created for business as they pivot. And as they shift to a different way of doing business. Energy companies will shift to, you know, new models of of getting the consumers to to store their own energy and then repackage it and sell it back to other consumers. I mean, there’s so much exciting stuff going forward. So it’s the IoT is at the heart of all of that. And Pangea is at the heart of all of that. And we’re bringing it back to what Pangea really is, is pre continental shift when everything was together and everything was connected. And that state brings all of our our knowledge and our data into one place. And that helps us make these decisions to become more environmentally conscious.

Dan Cunliffe
If that doesn’t inspire you today, nothing will people. Look Tash, massively appreciate you joining us, I think, lots of good insights there. We could, we could probably talk for a bit longer on this. I could talk forever on this. The stats say, we shouldn’t go too much longer to keep people interested. Look, if you are listening, thank you, first of all, but also head over to our website, the content will be there, the podcasts will be there. There’s various things that we can kind of talk to you about not just you know, from a sustainability perspective, but also from an IoT and a tech perspective to help you guys get through. I will thank Tash again. Thanks so much for joining us. It’s an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me, Dan. No problem. So yeah, Dan Cunliffe wrapping up the IoT Insider podcast for Pangea. Thanks so much for listening. And we look forward to having you guys listen again very shortly. Thanks so much.