Quantum computing carries significant potential to impact an enterprise's response to sustainability- and climate-related problems, even as the technology continues to mature, according to D-Wave's Murray Thom, VP of quantum business innovation.

One major issue at the heart of corporate sustainability is the use of fossil fuel energy and the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The full-stack quantum computing company has heard from energy companies that their biggest anticipated change is shifting from a hub and spoke model – where one large power plant provides nonrenewable electricity for a large number of individual destinations – to a heterogenous distributed model made up of multiple production plants with different renewable energy capacities.

In that distributed scenario, a water dam, for example, might be used as an energy capacitor in a metropolitan area, and energy companies will need to optimize the flow relative to expected power demand.

"That's quite complicated on an individual-component-of-a-network level," Thom told SDxCentral. But it's also the type of complex optimization test ideal for quantum computing, he said.

Reliability is another major challenge for the energy industry, especially considering the varying ages of electrical grid infrastructure components. "Some of the infrastructure is very old. Some of it's newer and more modern. Deciding where that network needs redundancy and what set of failures would cause a critical issue – that's a very challenging simulation problem," Thom said.

If one network component drops out, it's not too hard to predict how the network will react. The real challenge comes when considering "a cascade of failures," he said. "What if one of the failures triggers load that causes another one to fail, and then you get a sequence of them – that's much harder to model" without quantum computing.

"When you have to make those decisions about something happening or not happening and it impacts on other systems in a network, that's exactly the kind of problem that classical computers have a hard time solving," Thom added. "That's why we're hybridizing classical and quantum computers together so that they can play a role to help create solutions for businesses in that space," he said.

Thom touted D-Wave's modern practicality as its biggest competitive differentiator. "This isn't about technical devices for their own sake," he said. "This is really [about] how we can help businesses operate more effectively, reduce the amount of systems they have sitting around waiting," and accelerate optimizations that allow for shorter response times.

"Quantum computing has the potential to impact the problems we're working on right now," he added. "We're laser focused on production applications, and those real-world use cases really set us apart from other providers."

With D-Wave's professional services team, for example, if customers can describe their goals and constraints in words, "our team can basically turn that into formulations and code that our computers can understand," and a solution can be developed. As quantum technologies and tools continue to improve, Thom expects to see significant performance gains and an increase in the breadth of real-world applications based on this hybridized architecture.