Green Technology Needs Green People

Jadi ceritanya bulan lalu saya daftar lomba Great KL Challenge, berimingi hadiah internship, study trip ke Sweden dan ikut innovation class selama 10 minggu.

Syaratnya ‘cuma’ ikut 3 set quiz tentang sustainability energy dan diakhiri dengan case study. Karena kebetulan saya ada paper tentang green energy, jadi deh saya ambil sebagian kecil dari paper itu untuk dijadiin jawaban case study.

Seperti yang telah diprediksikan, saya ga menang (bukan pesimis, tapi realistis :p). Saya pikir ga adil juga kalau tulisan saya cuma dijadikan simpanan panitia. Jadi apa salahnya di-share di sini?

Oh ya, sebelumnya mau terima kasih kepada Giri Kuncoro, sang master Smart Grid yang tahun lalu udah membantu research saya ini (dapet full mark loh Gir..)

Green Technology needs Green People

Challenge and Problem

Making a self-sustaining area is one way to preserve limited resources, such as electricity. Electricity reliability and environmental impact have been influenced by the increased population and advancement technology. For example, in single home there might be multiple person, and each person might have multiple devices (PC, smartphone, Tablet, etc). All these make electricity become very important. Meanwhile people don’t realize that electricity is limited. Therefore, we need to develop and implement the alternative and renewable resources.

Solutions

In Kuala Lumpur where the sun shines brightly, it will be more suitable if we choose sun as the renewable energy. With the sunlight, we can construct smart electrical grid that can produce electric power. This smart grid can be defined as the technology that covers the advance power system, information technology system, and management technology system, where there is intelligent communication in between to link all the system connection.

To date, Smart Grid technology has not been implemented in Kuala Lumpur. Another reason why Smart Grid can be potentially implemented in KL is due to its stable weather and climate.

                     

By using smart grid, the environmental benefits could be energy savings, reduction of green house gas emissions, and self-management of house-hold electricity. Because smart grid gives impact for better environment, all the people who work and contribute to make this technology happens are considered as green collar worker.

You may know the terms of white collar and blue collar. But how many of you have heard about green collar?

Basically green collar worker is a person who do a job that can help to conserve and restore the environmental or ecosystem, reduce the high consumption of energy, material, and water, decarbonize the economy, and also minimize the pollution.

Why this relates to Smart Grid? Because renewable energy industry can create jobs which never exist before and this is called green job.

In Kuala Lumpur, there are many graduated and working people that can actually develop themselves to be a green worker. By adding knowledge about environment sustainability and nature protection, a person can simply be a green worker.

Many, many, and many green technology has been created, but sometimes the most important part is missing. It is people who must be well educated in using all these technology. They should be aware how to utilize all the features so that the functionality to save the environment can work. For example, if we are talking about Smart Grid, the people should know how to use it so that they can manage the house-hold electricity and save the energy.

It is true that by saving the energy and improving environment, it could be some reasons of the better quality of life. But, it may be pointless if we don’t have great green workers and well educated green user. In other words, both of them are the people. Both of them are us, people in Kuala Lumpur.

 

Fadhilah Hana Lestari