Last month, the office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that LA’s City Council had approved development of the largest solar and battery energy system in the United States. The approved development will provide renewable energy for nearly one million residents at a fixed cost of less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the power, the lowest price offered in U.S. history.

At ACE IoT, we are brimming with pride to be associated with this historic project. Indeed, we agree with Mayor Garcetti’s admonition that the coming decade needs to be “the action decade, the climate decade.” Projects that marry utility-scale battery storage to solar power projects represent a significant and exciting step forward.

At the recent Smart Campus Summit, we saw an exciting example of hyper-converged infrastructure in the facilities management space.  Penn State University, working with partners GrayMatter, Lenovo, Onboard Data, Tempered Networks and ACE IoT Solutions, demonstrated a managed edge compute platform that will enable the university to enhance facilities management programs in a secure and efficient manner. 

PSU is testing a new approach designed to help accelerate wide-spread adoption of data-driven facilities management technologies. The initiative includes a managed edge infrastructure deployed consists of a new edge server platform from Lenovo, Zero Trust network security provided by Tempered Networks all integrated in a secure way by the Cybersecurity team at GrayMatter. This infrastructure ensures that any technology that PSU applies to the facilities management program can be deployed efficiently and securely.

Emerging standards to support Single-Pair Ethernet will have a meaningful impact in the smart building sector. Joining panelists from Analog Devices, Cisco, CommScope and Panduit, ACE IoT outlined how widespread adoption of Single-Pair Ethernet standards will help resolve long-standing challenges acquiring and deriving value from building operations data.