The whole demand response sector is growing as communications and control technology are applied to finding energy savings at the individual enterprise scale, demonstrating the benefits of smart grid approaches one company at a time. These tools profile electricity use and control demand in a way that saves energy and doesn’t interrupt productivity. There have been big wins for this technology in the facility management and manufacturing sector, and growing opportunities in areas such as agriculture.
The ability for sensors and systems to profile and respond to energy demand is a key component of smart grid technologies, but here it’s applied as a system central to business operations with a clear positive bottom-line result. Given the fits and starts of large-scale smart grid deployments, with current technological limits to integrating meters and sensors on a city-wide scale, it seems that the first wins for such sensors and systems will likely be at this smaller scale. Indeed, the projected market for demand response is said to be a $5.2 billion market in the U.S. alone, with just $1 billion captured to date. The broader energy efficiency market is said to be a $37 billion play, by industry leading EnerNOC, and that will only increase as energy prices increase.
The demand response area provides a compelling case for smart systems that manage large volumes of data, provide real-time insight, and drive down use and costs. Sustainability should be centered on a new way of looking at things with a bottom line on efficiency. Systems and sensors are the means of achieving these efficiencies, and the clear benefits that are demonstrated at this local-first approach speak to the broader benefits when these approaches are applied at wider regional scales.
