Qualcomm Intelligent Solutions (QIS) has announced that it has worked with OSIsoft LLC to deploy connected resource-monitoring infrastructure to provide real-time data to the Petco Park (San Diego Padres’ home). Randy McWilliams, a senior director of the facility, expects to reduce operational expenses by 25% in the next five years.
It may be hard to believe, but many venues share something with your home: the owners aren’t 100% sure about which elements/areas uses more water or electricity. In a different city, a stadium didn’t know how much it costs to use the retractable roof, so they only used it scarcely. After measuring the cost, they found out that it was inexpensive ($5 each time), and decided to use it more to increase the public’s comfort.
To be fair, stadiums and baseball parks have huge operating contrasts: they go from just having a skeleton crew to having tens of thousands of visitors. Not surprisingly, even the places built just 15 years ago don’t have much regarding sensors and overall resource consumption visibility. That’s because this was all before the explosion of smartphones and related wireless computing+technology, along with the fall in costs and the rise of hardware performance.
Qualcomm QIS has been busy working with venue owners to deploy instrumentation and management tools that will provide the necessary visibility to highlight potential waste (or anomalies).
It works by adding sensors to key locations (the granularity depends on the actual venue) to be able to monitor everything in real-time. In the past, there was maybe one data point (often a main meter) every few days, weeks or even once a month. With the new data, it’s easy to perform tests to see where resources are spent and devise a savings strategy, without affecting operations’ efficiency.
Not surprisingly, a lot of this happens with wireless connectivity (this is Qualcomm, after all), which is convenient because the deployment is much easier than trying to “wire” these huge places. On the edge of the network, there are gateway boxes that are powered by Snapdragon processors.
When we talked to Kiva Allgood, the president of Qualcomm Intelligent Solutions, he mentioned that the work could be surprisingly quick. For example, when Qualcomm deployed this solution on their campus, it only took a couple of weeks before the deployment was done and the data could be read and acted upon.
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