Published on 11/25/2016 | Strategy
There is no doubt that one of the most popular topics today is the potential of what has been called the "Internet of Things" (IoT). Beyond complex technical terms, what IoT means is that we will have more and more connected devices that will offer many (and massive) information and control capabilities.
At the same time, energy efficiency has been long discussed and agreed to be one of the major issues of current economies. We need to be more efficient not only because it is much more cost effective but also because our energy needs are increasing (globally) at a higher rate than the available net energy.
Some professional circles often discuss whether IoT is appropriate to allow more efficient systems and how both terms complement each other.
From my point of view, the question would be "when" rather than "how" or if that's going to happen eventually or not.
Bellow I will give 4 reasons why IoT systems for energy efficiency are a matter of time and how both terms are condemned to live together.
With that term I want to refer to the fact that most basic services will be available to a great part of the population. Mobility, health, communications or urban services are used for an increasing number of people, globally. Emerging countries population doesn't stop rising at the same time people are moving to cities looking for prosperity and services that are well spread in the developing countries.
People want to move, communicate and have basic commodities for their daily lives and the real truth is that all those services require some sort of energy, which means that as the population increases, and so their needs, the demanded net energy will increase as well.
Energy is produced by means of natural resources, renewable or not, so: Will we be able to increase the available net energy at the same rate as we are demanding it? According to the forecasts, no.
Then, it is pretty obvious that when the demand is pushing supply above its current production limits there one only way of getting over it: efficiency, energy efficiency.
When deciding whether to use technology or any other saving policy, one term leads the way when it is about the final decision: Return on Investment (ROI). It is clear that very few decisions would be made if the initial investment is not supported by an expected benefit that is worth it.
Technology systems applied to energy efficiency usually allow some estimated savings, usually measured in a certain proportion (%) of the current cost. Then, with a certain volume of initial investment (I) we expect a yearly saving (S), and their division will give us the estimated ROI horizon (I/S). If that time were reasonable, then we would invest. So far so good.
But regarding energy efficiency, we are in a very special situation. Due to the energy production system constraints and the increasing demand, energy costs are expected to rise if not continuously, for a very long time.
At the same time, IoT technologies are lowering their marginal costs, as they are more established and mature as well as scale economies do their job.
Both tendencies speed up the process and even if IoT systems costs were stable, it would be a matter of time that the energy cost would justify the investment in IoT systems.
Once again it is not about if that's going to happen or not, the question is when or how fast, considering that the process has already started.
In the early 2000's some new basic technologies were born. The purpose: to provide communications modules that could be produced and deployed massively for narrowband communications.
That means that in some applications we are not interested in a very big stream of data but in transmitting some bytes of information with a large number of sources and destinations within the network. 802.15.4 and ZigBee, 6LowPAN, CoAP, MQTT... all of those technologies are different in their specs and scope but they all provide light communications to allow a high aggregation of sources and to redistribute the information.
And that has some collateral effects. Those technologies allow cost-effective electronics at the same they are energy efficient. This means that if we want to deploy a tremendous number of devices to increase energy efficiency, those devices have to be cheap enough (so that the investment is affordable) and they cannot consume much energy (they could be run on batteries but if not, they wouldn't have a big energetic impact in the system). Finally, they operate in unlicensed bands, so we don't have extra costs. That's the key.
And the revolution is here. It is like if in the past we could only switch off the main breaker to save energy at home whereas now we are able to control each bulb and appliance, individually.
Yes, as seen, IoT devices allow us to have new monitoring and controlling capabilities, to such a small scale that we could control almost every single consumption source upon our will. But the same way that traditional manual switches didn't create energy savings alone so doesn't the IoT.
Some intelligence has to control those systems in order to save energy.
As a first approach to the problem, software systems could just apply basic rules (i.e. switch off the lights when nobody is present). However the real potential of these systems will come from the gathered information. Software systems will have the power to control the system and to measure real-time performance.
Machine Learning techniques will allow to continuously learn from experience and minimize the cost function (energy consumption vs a minimum quality of service in this case) far beyond our first iteration techniques based on human experience.
It is the virtuous circle of quality (plan-act-evaluate-redesign) but systemized and given with a huge amount of real and objective data.
A really promising future that will be possible thanks to those tiny and smart devices.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.
