IBM puts its talents to green use

IBM puts its talents to green use

Peter Williams, CTO of IBM's Big Green Innovations initiative, outlines how the IT giant is diversifying into solar power, smart grids and environmental management
James Murray, BusinessGreen 29 Oct 2007

BusinessGreen: How did the Big Green Innovations initiative come about?
Peter Williams: Last year we hosted a company-wide Innovation Jam event and asked employees, their families, and our customers to put forward ideas about where we should be innovating as a company. We received 40,000 ideas and we then boiled them down into a number of key themes and one of these was green technologies. From there we then ransacked the business in search of technologies that already existed and areas of strength we could use to develop new green technologies and found that we were already well positioned in several areas, most notably through work we were doing on water management technologies, work on smart grids and some work we'd done to use our expertise in semiconductors to improve solar panels.

So what does the initiative actually entail? What projects are you working on?
We divided the Big Green Innovations portfolio into four areas: water, alternative energy, carbon management and computational models.

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It's been reported that IBM has been making some interesting moves in the area of solar technology. Can you give us more details?
Basically we are again adapting some of our material science expertise acquired in the development of semi conductors and applying it to the silicon cells used in photovoltaic solar panels. We believe we can structure the silicon in a way that makes the cells more conversion efficient and we also have the manufacturing techniques to bring down the cost significantly. We're also looking at ways of improving the heat dissipation in solar panels. Many solar panels concentrate the sun's rays by a factor of 2,000, which means the cell's are getting very hot. But that is pretty much the same thermal intensity as found in a computer chip and we know how to deal with that. We expect to see the first products available in 18 months to two years.

So is IBM going to start selling solar panels?
You may not see this technology with an IBM logo as we may license it to a company with a footprint in that area.

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