The future is brightness as a service

When astronaut Barry Wilmore needed to carry out a repair on board the international space station, he needed a tool, a socket wrench, he didn’t have. Previously, this would have meant waiting months for the next supply rocket, or sending a specific flight at great cost. But not now. The crew back on earth designed the tool on their computer, emailed the file to the space station, where it was manufactured by the on-board 3-D printer. A fully functioning socket wrench was then used to carry out the repair. This probably holds the world record for the single most impressive energy efficiency action: one email instead of a rocket sent from Earth to deliver the required tool.

The same month this took place, December 2014, there was a terrorist incident in Sydney, where 13 people were held hostage in a café for a number of hours. Understandably, large numbers of people wanted to get out of Sydney quickly, and many turned to Uber for a ride. The surge in demand caused a surge in prices, the Uber model, and the cost of a ride quadrupled. This turned into a PR disaster for Uber, who were accused of cashing in on the attack. Within hours Uber was offering refunds and apologized, for operating the most basic rule of economics: supply and demand balanced by price.

And here were the two now-common features of the digitalization domain – the fantastic promise of new technology, plus complex societal debate about the social consequences, acceptability and governance.

Undoubtedly, new digital technologies offer tremendous potential to improve the efficiency of energy supply and use in all sectors. It offers great opportunities for better control and optimisation, and reduced costs. But for energy efficiency, maybe digitalization is going to be more fundamental, more akin to the leap to emailing wrenches into space. The space station story has specific relevance – additive manufacturing could have huge implications for energy use in industry. But more broadly, new digital technologies could unlock huge amounts of energy efficiency potential previously out of reach.

We now have control of energy use that we have never had before. Real time monitoring is enabling the closer interrogation of energy use patterns; artificial intelligence is being applied to this interrogation; and new levels of optimized, efficient, control are being delivered. The analysis and control can be done anywhere - I recently visited a control centre in Dublin that was managing energy in real time in office towers in Dubai.

Thanks to new technologies, many of the classic barriers to energy efficiency around knowledge, confidence, certainty, measurement and verification are falling away. Performance can be measured in real time, energy use compared before and after upgrades, factors such as weather and behaviour can be observed and stripped out. Systems can also track and verify savings, thus unlocking new ways to finance and contractualise energy efficiency gains.

This allows the deployment of new energy services business models that have been mooted for many years but were very often too complex to deliver in practice. These include various forms of performance contracting and, more excitingly, business models that focus on energy services, not energy. The user demands services such as heating, lighting, mobility, and leaves the details, including ownership of the equipment, to the experts. I want light, not lights.

Digitalisation will allow us to manage all parts of the energy system better. For energy efficiency, though, it is not just doing things better, but potentially doing new things. But of course, whether this potential is realized depends on many factors. Trading energy efficiency as a commodity, offering new demand response services to grids, selling integrated energy service packages to businesses and householders – all will test markets and regulations created for something else, and of course will meet resistance from those they disrupt. It is not new that business and technology innovators force policy makers and regulators to catch up, but perhaps the pace of change we are now seeing makes this different.

London based company Bboxx sells energy access in Africa to communities far from the electricity grid. It doesn’t think in terms of how much power to supply, but rather the energy services required. It offers a package consisting of a television, a radio, phone chargers and lights; and has built a system, with a solar panel and battery, to deliver that. Super-high efficiency appliances are central to the solution, and a service business model is used – the user pays a fee for the services delivered, not the energy used. It is all rooted in digital technologies for monitoring and billing. Think of these kinds of innovation - in the technologies, the business models and the ideas themselves - applied to every part of the energy system. The future is not just bright, it is brightness as a service.

The views expressed in this column are those of the columnist and do not necessarily reflect the views of eceee or any of its members.