To be sustainable, old cities need new, smarter infrastructures,
says HP Labs sustainability visionary Chandrakant Patel Since
arriving at HP Labs in 1991, HP Fellow and director of HP’s
Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab Chandrakant Patel has worked to
make IT systems more energy efficient. His early research in
microprocessor system design led Patel to pioneer the concept of
‘smart data centers’ – data centers in which compute, power and
cooling resources are provisioned based on the need. He now
extends his vision of energy efficiency beyond the data center
to what he calls ‘City 2.0.’ As nations look to rebuild their
aging infrastructures and at the same time take on the challenge
of global climate change, Patel argues that resource usage needs
to be at the heart of their thinking. And, we must take a
fundamental perspective in examining “available energy” in
building and operating the infrastructure. Only if we use fewer
resources to both build and run our infrastructures, he says,
will we create cities that c