“Smart” technologies for a better life and lower energy consumption. Innovative services for large companies and homes that help manage energy are becoming increasingly widespread.
Energy means not only production but also consumption, and consequently efficiency and energy saving. Managing energy has become the latest technological challenge in the energy field, because if renewables are the solution to energy production, efficiency and energy saving are the answer to curbing consumption.
Efficiency is a continuously growing market; in 2015 it reached 221 billion dollars and has an enormous potential that has yet to be fully exploited, as the International Energy Agency highlighted in its recent "Efficiency market report 2016".
The use of intelligent and efficient technologies makes it possible to reduce energy demand and the associated production of energy from fossil fuels, with the consequent CO2 emissions.
Some of these technologies have already been tested and are present on the market, albeit in a state of continuous evolution. A classic example is electric cars, which have experienced a boom in Europe, recording an increase of 6.4 per cent in the first four months of 2016 compared with the same period the previous year. In other cases, smart technologies are still in the implementation phase and, given the premises, could prove an excellent solution for consumers.
Businesses that use large amounts of energy to keep their operations running were the first to move towards making their equipment more efficient, seeking to shift their consumption to times when demand on the grid is lower, so as to cut the cost of their energy bills.
Energy consumption is a keenly felt problem for supermarkets, for example, which need enormous quantities of energy to keep their products fresh in warehouses or in the large retail refrigerators — but only during certain hours of the day. Sainsbury's, a British supermarket chain, was among the first to address the question of how to limit energy consumption, finding the solution it was looking for in smart technology. The innovation came from Open Energy, a technology company which, by means of a chip installed in each refrigerator, was able to assess energy demand peaks and, on the basis of the information gathered, reorganise the refrigerators' cooling activity so as to switch them off or reduce their consumption during periods when they were not in use. This helped to reduce overall energy demand and also proved useful as an adjustment mechanism for stabilising the grid.
Tesla, the American electric vehicle manufacturer, is one of the few companies to have brought a home energy storage battery to market. Its Powerwall — which officially entered the Italian market this year and has been available since mid-May — is based on a system equipped with solar panels that supply more energy than a home requires. In this way, the Powerwall is able to take the surplus electricity and store it, so that it can be released when electrical production does not meet demand.
Electric vehicles could become a new form of battery. According to some researchers, electric car owners could — still theoretically, for now — sell a portion of the energy stored in their batteries to the grid when it is not needed for running the vehicle. However, there is still limited evidence on the feasibility of this type of exchange between cars and electricity grids, and the question of what would happen if one suddenly needed to use the car at the very moment when the grid is absorbing the energy stored in it has yet to find concrete answers. It is an idea that could nevertheless become reality sooner than we might imagine, given that the first European trials on the integration of electric vehicles and the grid are already under way.
In our homes, meters will be able to guide us in improving the efficiency of our consumption. Before long, smart meters will be able to monitor in real time how much energy we consume, enabling our supplier to offer us a tariff that allows energy consumption to be managed and consequently reduces the cost of our bills. This could be done manually or automatically, with smart appliances that decide for themselves, for example, to do the laundry at the time of day when energy prices are lowest.