by Angela Miller
One of the systems we’re building at NCTD is a security system for our COASTER commuter rail that extends for over 40 miles from Oceanside to San Diego, California.  The geek in me is excited about this project from a pure technology perspective:  the ability to monitor activities in and around the vehicle while it is moving at 60 miles an hour, well that’s a real technology challenge.  Our solution along the rail is a mesh network.

We have a series of ‘nodes’ that we’re installing at about 1 mile intervals that provide a wireless infrastructure along the rail.  With that network, we can then install other wireless devices – for example cameras, or VOIP devices.  But what would this have to do with being green?

Our approach to these nodes has been to install solar panels at each node.  On the one hand this is simple practicality because some sites are very remote and far from existing power sources.  But, for more than half of the nodes we could have chosen to plug into wired power sources.  So as a CIO, I had to make a choice- use solar or use grid power?

The business case is not so straight forward.  While we will save power using the solar, we incur higher installation and maintenance costs to ensure the solar systems provide consistent, reliable power to each node.  We cannot claim that we chose to use solar simply because it was the greener choice – that would be a deceptive message.  However, I can say that as the CIO I had the architectural design choice to go with either solution and chose solar – it seemed to be the more stable choice, and the choice that would still operate if we had a power outage, and yes when all solutions were compared it was the more sustainable, environmentally-friendly approach. 

So I leave it in the reader’s mind – perhaps security at NCTD is green, and perhaps not.  You be the judge.