Accenture extols local power

Last week the UK government launched its first micro-generation energy strategy aimed at making homes and businesses more self-sufficient.

The strategy includes grants of £50m to encourage individuals and businesses to be more energy efficient and to explore how they might generate energy themselves. IT could play a key role in its success.

Announcing the strategy, Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks, said it is important that individuals and businesses are more understanding and respectful of the energy they consume.

‘We just flick on a switch and expect everything to work,’ said Wicks.

‘This distance from our energy sources leads to waste, but by having micro-generation technologies in our buildings we can reconnect with how much we’re using and find ways of being more efficient with it.’

But how can micro-generation make businesses use energy more efficiently and create it themselves with less environmental impact?

Marion Mesnage, a senior researcher working on energy systems at Accenture’s Technology Lab in the south of France, thinks she has some answers.

Accenture is working on a concept it calls ‘smart energy’, where power is created and stored close to where it is being used and controlled by a network of intelligent sensors and meters to make it as efficient as possible.

Because the energy is generated by solar panels, wind turbines, gas or industrial waste burners and even water-powered micro-turbines in drainpipes, the electricity would be free.

Smart energy could significantly reduce society’s reliance on the current system of large-scale centralised power generation and IT will be critical to making it work, says Mesnage.

‘Meters, appliances and power electronics that can connect to the electricity grid are coming now, with greater intelligence and connectivity,’ she said.

‘These meters are capable not just of sending out information, but also of being updated. They can react in real-time to data such as user consumption.’

These individual sensors can also be combined using a company’s existing local area network and controlled dynamically using software on a company’s server.

Such energy management systems will, in time, be able to predict a company’s energy use, optimise its consumption, diagnose faulty hardware and highlight significant events.

It would also be able to divert the excess power a company generates into gas fuel cells to be used at times when it is expensive to purchase energy from the electricity grid.

Smart energy management could even turn businesses into power suppliers instead of consumers, with systems programmed to sell unused power back into the electricity grid, a potential development that Mesnage calls the ‘micro-grid’.

‘The utilities know how much a business uses by watching its meters. A similar system could see how much a business is putting back into the grid,’ she said.

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