by Shane Henson — June 15, 2012—Building owners and facilities managers need to think bigger, broader, and more “intelligently” to truly make their buildings energy efficient, and the same is true for those responsible for ensuring America’s cities conserve energy, says a new report released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).
The key is to stop thinking about energy efficiency simply in terms of individual devices (e.g., autos or refrigerators) and to start thinking about it in terms of complex systems (e.g., entire cities, transportation systems, and other networks) connected through Internet and computer technologies, says the ACEEE.
As the ACEEE report, A Defining Framework for Intelligent Efficiency concludes, “System efficiency opportunities produce energy savings that dwarf component-based efficiency improvements by an order of magnitude. System efficiency is performance-based, optimizing the performance of the system overall—its components, their relationships to one another, and their relationships to human operators.
One of the cornerstones of systems-based efficiency is information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, affordable sensors, and computing capacity that are the foundation upon which systems efficiency are built…If homes and businesses were to take advantage of currently available information and communications technologies that enable system efficiencies, the United States could reduce its energy use by about 12-22% and realize tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in energy savings and productivity gains.”
R. Neal Elliott, associate director for research, ACEEE, said, “This is not your father’s device-driven approach to energy efficiency. A large portion of our past efficiency gains came from improvements in individual products, appliances, and equipment, such as light bulbs, electric motors, or cars and trucks. And while device-level technology improvements will continue to play an important role, looking ahead we must take a systems-based approach to dramatically scale up energy efficiency to meet our future energy challenges. Through intelligent efficiency, utility systems, interconnected cities, transportation systems, and communications networks can become the new normal across the United States and will undergird national and regional economies that, even in the face of increasingly scarce resources, grow and thrive.”
Examples of “intelligent efficiency” case studies were included in the report, including one called “Envision Charlotte.” Through a collaborative partnership, Duke Energy, Cisco, and Verizon are working on a project to dramatically raise energy awareness in Charlotte, North Carolina, by enabling people-centered intelligent efficiency. The initiative calls for interactive video monitors installed in the lobbies of downtown office buildings that display, in near real-time, the collective energy used by buildings in the city’s core. The monitors give tenants the information they need to better manage energy consumption in the offices, providing information about energy usage, energy efficiency ideas, and tales of the most efficient “energy champions” in the building. Duke Energy anticipates that the project will produce a 20% drop in power use by 2016.
Through using intelligent efficiency, the Department of Defense expects to cut energy use at its Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois 30% by 2015 through using advanced energy management software and control technologies.
