This is the future - imagine the Age of Smart

By Dr Chris Tuppen, chief sustainability officer, BT

It’s mid-winter...early evening...in an office...and now it’s time to go home. You type “going home” into your ‘computer’ and this automatically triggers a number of actions...

You get up from your desk and as you stand up and walk away the screen automatically powers down.

Of course, this isn’t ‘your desk’ - no one has their own desk. And no one has a computer – all the intensive computing is done in mega, highly efficient data centres built near sources of renewable electricity. As the screen powers down the data centre immediately re-allocates its server capacity over to another user.

You walk down the corridor towards the car park. It’s a dark corridor but as you walk LED lights gradually brighten in front of you and dim behind – you walk in a halo of light.

At the car you are joined by a colleague from the car pool who was notified that you were leaving. You get in your electric car. Not something that looks like a converted milk float but a fashionable, comfortable vehicle.

As you drive home your mobile phone, with built in GPS, is constantly communicating with your home. Your home is extremely well insulated and very smart. The roof is covered in photovoltaic panels. Your home knows the weather, it knows when you will arrive, it knows how much solar heat it’s received today, how much electricity it has generated and how much it sold onto the grid.

It knows you usually have a shower when you get in, it knows which rooms you will use and it starts preparing them for your arrival. There is a neighbourhood heating system fed from a massive ground-source heat pump. You are proud of the community in which you live. You are the top community in the region in the smart living index which is based on real-time data feeds on energy consumption, transport use, local food production.

Video link

You arrive home, having dropped off your colleague, and plug in your car to charge up. You have your shower and as dinner is cooking you have a weekly video link up with your parents and two sisters.

Your parents are frail but live in their own house. In the last few years health and social care has been transformed. Sensors check people’s activity and state of health. Regular check ups are undertaken using remote diagnostics. Health problems are detected far earlier leading to a much more efficient health service.

As your day comes to an end you head for bed, there are no switches and the house lights simply dim behind you. Towards the end of the night the wind drops as a high pressure system arrives and the power company buys back some electricity out of your car battery to keep the grid stable.

Welcome to the future – this is the Age of Smart.

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