A more effective response to climate change

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jan 17, 2008

Mark Crosier argues that industry and utilities should build products that make energy saving an intuitive process.

It's been 10 years since the introduction of Kyoto and the use of energy worldwide continues to increase at an alarming rate.

The EU reports that world energy demand (and CO2 emissions) are set to rise by some 60% by 2030.

Given that governments have introduced targets to reduce energy usage by 50% by 2050, it is hard to believe that these targets can be achieved.

Government and industry continues to place great emphasis on greener energy generation, which undoubtedly plays an important role in reducing emissions but how does this assist the reduction of energy use?.

The role new technologies can play in energy reduction is extremely important and should not be overlooked.

The aggressive reduction targets require radical measures to be taken.

A recent step that the utilities industry has taken to control spiralling energy use has been to introduce smart metering, which provides consumers and businesses with more information about their energy use.

However, although smart metering helps to provide accurate information about what levels of energy consumers and businesses are using, that information is currently of more use to utilities than it is to end-users.

The utilities gain real-time readings of energy use and also save on the need to send out someone to read your meter.

There is limited evidence that smart meters change consumer/business behaviour with reports of expected 10-15% savings.

However, having this information available requires users to take action, the savings are not automatic.

Also, the information available can be difficult to decipher/understand.

This may be OK in a business where they have a dedicated and trained energy manager or company assisting them but what about the untrained, busy, homeowner? In the home this information relates to the whole property, not individual appliances.

So where do we start?.

Concerned individuals are taking action by buying addon products such as the Intelliplug, which automatically turns peripheral devices such as the DVD player, home entertainment systems and game consoles etc off when you turn off the TV.

However these products depend on individuals taking action themselves and actively seeking out products that help them to control energy use and to take action once installed.

We believe that it's time for industry and utilities to build products that make energy saving an intuitive process that requires less direct action by users and more input from stakeholders such as architects, house builders and utilities.

Technology is on its way that can be designed into building structures or appliances and that provides real-time, accurate information about how much an individual appliance is using at different times of the day.

This technology can also be controlled centrally or remotely via the internet so that consumers can turn appliances off or set a policy to ensure that appliances are turned off at specific times of the day or night.

Automatically turning off the TV and games console in their child's bedroom at 11 in the evening, so as not to waste energy during the course of the night, or intuitively turn them off if not being used for a period of time for example.

Replicate this in a business environment where printers, heaters and nonessential lights can be turned off outside of office hours and the potential savings are huge.

The important point is that this technology will be available for new build and for retrofit into existing buildings, making it available and affordable for everyone to adopt, from homeowners to businesses.

By having this level of intuitive control over energy use, both consumers and businesses will begin to address the increasingly urgent issues of growing energy demand, global warming and climate change.

Mark Crosier is CEO of DeepStream Technology.