Home » Archive for January, 2013
Vodafone hedges on both landline and mobile for smart meter roll-out
F1 racing engineers use machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to monitor a car’s performance Vodafone is expecting the impending smart meter roll-out to embrace both landline and mobile technology, one of the company’s machine-to-machine (M2M) specialists told Energy Demand this week. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is reportedly keen to lever smart meter technology –...
What Smart Grids Have in Store for Us
This article has been contributed by Linda Jackman, Group Vice President of Industry Strategy at Oracle Utilities. The electrification of the world during the 20th century has had a greater impact on the way we live than almost any other innovation. Since then however, there has been surprisingly little development around how our power grids operate. They were and have remained analogue distribution...
Japanese research predicts “complete shift” to cloud energy management technology
The technology used by SME energy managers to manage buildings’ energy use will undergo a “complete” shift to cloud-based systems by 2020, according to a report by Japan’s Global Issues Initiative (GII). The shift will see building energy management systems (BEMS) increasingly utilising data stored on an external cloud-based server accessible online, as opposed to any single hard drive residing...
Bluewater aims to cut energy bill by half
Bluewater Shopping Centre at dusk The UK’s second biggest shopping centre is attempting to halve its seven-figure energy bill using technology from Anglo-American firm Sefaira. With an annual energy bill of £1.4 million, the owners of Bluewater say they intend to use Sefaira’s ‘Renew’ software to seek out inefficiencies and attempt to develop a capital investment programme that they hope will...
Could DECC shift the Green Deal towards businesses?
Pascal Mittermaier, who heads up the sustainability team for the owners of Bluewater shopping centre, criticised the UK government for failing to lay out exactly how it planned to incentivise UK businesses to tackle energy efficiency issues. The government’s pay-as-you-save scheme – the Green Deal – could be re-targeted at UK businesses in future, according to sources at the Department...
Cornish solar PV centre charges up 2020 vision
The St Austell location for the Centre was chosen because the majority of the UK’s solar PV installations are focused in South West England with a total of 55,577 installations in the region. A new Building Research Establishment (BRE) National Solar Centre in the Cornish town of St Austell is hoped to help industry and government deliver on the solar PV (photovoltaics) opportunities set out in DECC’s...
Switching to electric (cars) could save businesses £350k per annum
British companies could save an average £350,000 each year by switching 10% of their fleet to electric vehicles, according to a new report from the UK’s Transport Research Lab. The report, commissioned by British Gas, calculated that businesses running large company fleets with 420-33,000 vehicles would be best positioned to make the saving, and could also cut their carbon emissions by 830 tonnes,...
Energy managers give CRC simplification cautious welcome & call for “coherent policy”
Energy managers have given a cautious welcome to government plans to simplify the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme – while calls for a “coherent” UK energy efficiency policy are getting louder… Energy Demand investigates. Last month the government announced a package of measures aimed at streamlining the CRC and reducing some of the administrative burden on businesses. Amongst the...
Rendering the standard colour chart for Green computing
David Snelling, The Green Grid This is a guest post for Energy Demand from David Snelling, EMEA Technical Work Group Vice-Chair, The Green Grid One of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of IT efficiency is the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, developed by The Green Grid. Like many of the best ideas, it is devastatingly simple: a figure representing the ratio between the amount of electricity...