[pullquote_right]Will smart devices help us save energy or just continue to add idle loads to the system? The answer, it turns out, is yes.[/pullquote_right]Smart devices today present very tangible and increasingly affordable automation and convenience to homeowners. It’s the sort of tantalizing, futuristic vision that used to grace the covers of Popular Science (“The Digital Home of the Future!”), only it’s available now, and you don’t need to be Doc Brown from Back to the Future to set it up. Like many new technologies, smart devices also present some fundamental trade-offs. Recently, Consumer Reports and other media outlets have focused on the convenience vs. security/privacy trade-off.
But in the energy world, there is another equally tangible trade-off in the making with smart devices, and our work at Xergy touches on this every day. Will smart devices help us save energy or just continue to add idle loads to the system? The answer, it turns out, is yes. A brief video from the International Energy Agency’s 4E Annex explains the problem pretty simply.
On the one hand, we work with clients whose aim is to harness the connectivity of smart devices to better control a home’s energy use or to use established usage patterns in a building to better predict when and how occupants will use energy. They will use smart devices as part of the “glue” to cement together a smart grid in which all loads are responsive to the needs of the broader electric grid. Transparency of data will drive increased optimization of the entire system. So-called “intelligent efficiency” is already being embraced as the next phase of the energy efficiency movement, and as smart or IoT devices begin to appear in homes and offices, solutions will be waiting to, at a minimum, eliminate unnecessary energy consumption “automagically,” as the tech folk like to say. (Alas, we can’t talk as much about this part of our work, as it falls into more of the R&D category.)
However, there is a dirtier side of the smart device/Internet of Things/Internet of Everything wave. You won’t glimpse it in the various jingly Kickstarter campaign videos, with their happy hipsters and clean, sculpted, Scandinavian-designed sets. All of the connectivity behind the smart device revolution — if we can call it that just yet — will require expanding the footprint of the Internet as we know it, and that’s going to entail a lot of new electricity consumption if we don’t get it right. Current estimates by the International Energy Agency suggest that network devices could use about 6% of the world’s electricity by 2025, as much as the entire country of Russia! Just as one half of our shop sets its sights on the promises of intelligent efficiency, the other half is trying to quantify and propose solutions to the growing network standby power being caused by smart devices.
The IEC estimates that the energy use of networked products — including products used in homes, offices, and the data centers that drive the Internet — will require over 1,100 TWh of electricity only one decade from now. Nearly 2/3 of that energy use, however, could be avoided using techniques that already exist. Source: More Data, Less Energy, 2014.
There are actually several ways in which the gradual “smartification” of our devices will draw more electricity. First, the devices themselves will require a small but constant flow of energy to power network interfaces. Even a fraction of a watt here will have a large society-wide impact, as smart devices are anticipated to come online in the billions in the coming years. Next, those devices will need to connect to a network in our homes and businesses, and many of today’s smart devices require additional, specialized “hubs” or “bridges” to do so, all of which will require further electricity. Finally, the brains behind many smart devices frequently live in a cloud computing service. In order to make sense of all of the data that smart devices will produce, an invisible cloud infrastructure will need to be spun up, available 24/7, crunching the numbers so that your smart TV knows what sorts of ad content will best suit your tastes (or, in the case of Samsung, so that it’s able to interpret conversations occurring within earshot).
Here are several product classes to monitor closely, as they could be the next big energy users, at least as far as network standby is concerned:
- Smart TVs and other home A/V equipment: the next wave of TVs are sporting onboard computers and Internet connectivity, and so is just about every audio-visual gadget that you can connect to them. Today’s stereos, Blu-Ray players, and set-top boxes all require IP addresses.
- Network equipment: network equipment like cable modems and routers will continue to proliferate as connected things become ever more integrated into our routines. Many new smart devices may require their own proprietary routers/hubs, compounding the issue.
- Smart appliances: although still in their infancy, white goods are beginning to receive the smart treatment as well. If all white goods become smart, their connected energy use could dwarf that of network equipment itself.
- Connected lighting: although growth potential is uncertain, some of the early connected lighting products (lamps that can be wirelessly networked) can consume as much as 3W just to power their network connections! Consider the number of sockets that a single home could fill with these products, and you soon appreciate the potentially large growth in network standby we could see from smart bulbs.
Fortunately, the international energy efficiency policy community is quickly attempting to get ahead of this trend. The International Energy Agency and partner organizations have been working to embed concern over network standby into the G20 Energy Efficiency Action Plan. Natural Resources Defense Council also recently sounded the alarm over “idle loads” — products that are left on 24/7 regardless of the demand for their services — through a beautiful and groundbreaking new report. Electronics and networked products featured as a major factor in homes’ “always-on” load.
So will the IoT open new doors for intelligent efficiency and automation? Absolutely, although we are just in the early stages of experimentation and do not quite understand whether intelligent efficiency will live up to its promises. In the meantime, we need to continue focusing our efforts on the very tangible network loads that are consumers are unboxing every day and ensure that they adhere to best practices for efficient network design.