This opinion piece is provided for Energy Demand by Rob Bamforth, marketing director at software platform company Ecosteer.

A quick glance around energy management solutions in recent years has been almost reminiscent of the1990s IT industry. Lots of proprietary solutions, with hardware tied to software and services – some opportunity for innovation, but many too well established players enjoying some level of market control.

Investing in energy monitoring and management can be an expensive proposition.

Uncertain economic times

With this in mind, solid returns on investment need to be demonstrated. For organisations and industries where energy costs are clear or high, this should be relatively straightforward, but even then it might not seem a priority investment when compared to other aspects of the business. Further justification often comes from government legislation or directives to curb energy usage or show commitment to carbon reduction. This too can help, but when economic times harden, uncertainty returns — and as many energy managers would readily admit, they often face an uphill struggle to garner acceptance and sufficient budget to do what is necessary.

This situation “should” be starting to change as there are significant innovations, which will affect the market and alter cost models. It may in part be due to the maturing of the nascent machine-to-machine (M2M) industry with the emergence of open standards, in particular the networking protocols of the Internet, leading to the much hyped term, ‘the Internet of Things’ (IoT). This may be responsible for some effects, but the key drivers for significant change in energy management appear the same as those that are making revolutionary changes elsewhere in IT – consumerisation and commoditisation.

All consuming consumerisation

Consumerisation, that is the adoption of technology by consumers and for consumer-oriented services, is pushing down the costs of both the end point devices — sensors and energy meters as well as handheld and tablet devices for users – as well as those for network communications. This, in addition to new communications technologies, is making data connectivity an almost universally available commodity, with high speed fixed fibre networks, broad coverage cellular networks and low cost short range wireless networks such as widely accepted Wi-Fi and device related technologies such as Bluetooth and Zigbee.

This consumerisation opens up the possibilities for an entirely different approach to energy management. Rather than it being an expensive proposition from the outset with difficult decisions having to be taken about prioritising investment and embarking on the right strategic path, it becomes possible to start quickly, trial, experiment and then grow and adapt as capabilities and requirements evolve.

Sensors make good sense

However, this still requires a flexible and adaptable choice of solution. Despite the increasing consumerisation at the edge, there is still a need to provide a sophisticated enterprise grade architecture that can scale, deliver the robust services that enterprises require, whilst coping with a vast array of sensor devices and types from vendors that have yet to embrace open standards as well as those that already have.

While the architecture must be enterprise grade, it still needs to be cost effective and must also be able to scale down to encourage pilot deployments and experimentation.

With costs for the core components (sensors) and connectivity falling, the relatively more expensive elements become the costs of installation, integration and in-life maintenance services, all of which largely involve people. These are the costs that energy managers need to be aware of when looking at technology solutions for energy monitoring and management.

Scrutinise licensing & operational costs

Then there is the cost of the core architecture. With an open and scalable approach, it becomes possible to grow from a small starting point to a sophisticated setup which measures and monitors all kinds of information that might be relevant to energy management across an entire organisation. This is where software costs can quickly escalate, and so energy management solution licensing and operational costs should be under scrutiny, especially if they impede the energy managers ability to dramatically swell the number of sensors or objects being monitored.

This is the key to unlocking the potential value for energy management – measure everything, integrate it all together, understand it now. It is what many refer to as ‘big data’; not simply large volumes, but a variety of sources, moving at speed (velocity) and needing to be validated and intelligently presented to obtain business value.

Energy monitoring and management might never be free, but an open, scalable and flexible approach will feel liberating for those that have been stuck with proprietary and limited solutions. Consumerisation and commoditisation of the core technologies are making this possible, today.

This contributed piece for Energy Demand comes from Rob Bamforth, marketing director at software platform company Ecosteer – the firm’s market proposition is that monitoring energy consumption (or production!) is not enough to know if your business site is really efficient: what really matters is how energy usage changes with varying temperature, humidity and luminosity.