The Department of State has announced plans to deploy an Internet of Things (IoT) energy platform to conserve more energy, identify potential issues quicker, and monitor the department’s sensors.
It will be working with C3 IoT (formerly C3 Energy) to deploy the IoT platform to hundreds of thousands of “data points” over the coming years. This may include foreign embassies and treaty rooms, which the State Department control.
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“We will be able to identify and address outliers across our global buildings portfolio, learn how to improve upon previous embassy designs and operations, and … lower utility and maintenance costs,” said State Department senior adviser for energy, environment and sustainability, Landon Van Dyke, in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.
C3 IoT provides a development platform and a range of software-as-a-service apps for energy preservation. Detailed analytics can be provided to give the State Department smarter ways to lower energy consumption, while still keeping buildings secure.
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The platform runs on GovCloud servers, which are owned by Amazon Web Services and isolated for sensitive government information.
In the announcement, the State Department said it wants 200 posts deployed by 2017, with the job finished by 2020. It currently has 275 posts, all of which are expected to be upgraded in the next four years.
The project will see C3 IoT pocket $25 million if successful. The State Department seems confident in the capabilities of C3 IoT, after an initial deployment before the announcement happened.
C3 IoT is not the only energy company involved in the Internet of Things, Blue Pillar earlier this week announced Aurora 5.0, a new “Energy Network of Things” dedicated to lowering energy consumption and ensuring that if a state grid goes down, the lights stay on.