Intelligent Efficiency: Opportunities, Barriers, and Solutions

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are making possible analysis and levels of performance that could not be achieved as recently as ten years ago. Equipment and systems used in buildings, transportation, and manufacturing are becoming adaptive to environmental inputs, anticipatory in their performance, and networked to one another within a facility as well as throughout a supply chain. They display intelligent efficiency. This is the term used by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) for the deployment of affordable next-generation sensor, control, and communication technologies that help us gather, manage, interpret, communicate, and act upon disparate and often large volumes of data to improve device, process, facility, or organization performance and achieve new levels of energy efficiency. We estimate that the annual energy cost savings of intelligent efficiency technologies for the commercial and manufacturing sectors could exceed $50 billion.