John Loo/FlickrGary Raymond had had enough of the lights in Warehouse No. 5.
The old metal-halide fixtures cast a sour yellow hue on the stacks of cardboard boxes inside the storage facility. They hummed incessantly and burned out well before their due.
So Mr. Raymond, the landlord, replaced them with a brighter, smarter Web-enabled lighting system. He hoped it would help attract and retain tenants in the increasingly competitive warehouse market on Chicago's Southwest Side. But when the next utility bill arrived, something looked very wrong.
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The bill appeared to show only partial electricity use, and the bottom line was a tenth of what it normally was. The tenant thought the new lights might be broken, but as far as Raymond knew, they worked just fine.
The local utility couldn't believe it either. Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) dispatched an engineer to double-check that the meter was operating properly, Raymond recalls, and later hired a consultant to monitor the lights.
Everything checked out. The meter worked. The lights shone. The partial electricity use wasn't a result of the "intelligent" lighting system working improperly. It was a result of it working exactly as designed – and better.
"We were amazed," Raymond says. "We thought it'd be around 80 to 90 [percent savings], and it turned out to be more than 90."
Annual electricity costs at the 177,413-square-foot warehouse dropped from about $50,000 a year to less than $5,000, and ComEd awarded Raymond a $65,176.90 efficiency rebate.
Today, Raymond walks under a cool, white glow in Warehouse No. 5, extolling those lights with the intimate reverence typically reserved for the latest smart phone or luxury car. Forklifts beep past as he strolls through rows of boxes filled with the empty plastic bottles made in an adjoining plant. Twenty feet above his head, networked clusters of light-emitting-diode (LED) bulbs brighten as he moves near them and dim as he walks away.
"I assure you, you've never seen anything like this on a lighting system before," Raymond says back in an office where he demonstrates the lights' online interface, which tracks consumption data. Laughing, he adds, "This is the type of thing you'd see on 'Star Trek.' "
Call it "intelligent efficiency," or "cleanweb." Call it the "soft grid," or the "enernet." There's a host of buzzwords to describe the growth of Internet-enabled efficiency, and they all mean slightly different things. But they all pose the same underlying question: How can we harness the power of the Web to consume less energy? Their end goal is identical: a resource as clean as wind or solar, but as light and gossamer as a cloud.
Internet communications, inexpensive sensors, and data analytics are enabling a high-tech, holistic approach to energy efficiency. In the past it was, "How do I design an efficient light?" Now it's, "How do I design a whole network of efficient lights that talk to one another via Web communications, adjust output automatically, and report back through online data portals that optimize performance?"
This mash-up of energy industry and information technology gives efficiency a shiny interactivity that expands the conversation beyond "eat-your-vegetables" lectures about insulation and compact fluorescent light bulbs. It promises an energy reduction boom to parallel the oil and gas production boom that has transformed the global energy landscape.
"The energy-efficiency potential is larger than the entire proven oil reserves under the sands of Saudi Arabia,"
The energy-efficiency potential is larger than the entire proven oil reserves under the sands of Saudi Arabia.
If that sounds hyperbolic, it's because academics, scientists, and politicians have long hailed efficiency as an unsung solution for the world's energy woes. But it can be abstract and hard to quantify. When President Jimmy Carter donned a cardigan to champion conservation, he did little to win over an abundance-loving public that often associates efficiency with discomfort and nanny states.
That's changing. Engineers and designers are taking topics we'd rather not think about – industrial lighting, utility bills, thermostats, our own energy footprint – and making them approachable, understandable, maybe even fun.
"[Beginning around 2005], we really saw the convergence of a bunch of technology innovations that enabled us to do things that we could have only imagined 20 years ago," says Neal Elliott, who leads research on "intelligent efficiency" at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). "With that, sort of came the awareness within the efficiency community that the component approach to efficiency was maybe not going to get us where we think the opportunity exists in the big picture."
Perhaps a systems-based approach could. We know it saves energy to turn off one unneeded light. We know the result of turning off a million lights simultaneously. Now we can harness the sum of those changes as a resource in and of itself, tallied in "negawatts" – a utility's "antimatter."
Intelligent efficiency could cut US energy consumption by 12 to 22 percent, according to a June 2012 ACEEE report. That would translate to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in energy savings and productivity gains.
We may already be seeing the effects. In the United States, carbon emissions are the lowest they have been since 1994, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Energy consumption is still growing, but "energy intensity" – energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product – has been steadily dropping since the early 1970s and is expected to continue to decline. That's thanks to proliferation of many efficient cars and appliances, and a more service-based economy, according to EIA.
Could the future of energy be in the power we don't use?
Caveats and political common ground
Internet-enabled efficiency is no panacea. Some evidence suggests efficiency gains are at least partially offset by savings applied toward more carbon-intensive purchases. The operator who installs smart lights reduces lighting energy, but might use the money saved to buy a gas-guzzling truck.
"You can carve off part of the system and say, 'Look at all the energy and money we saved,' " says Ted Nordhaus, chairman of The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland, Calif., "but it's an open system, not a closed system."
This "rebound effect" is why many economists approach efficiency with an it's-too-good-to-be-true skepticism. Efficiency effectively reduces a good's price, which any Economics 101 student will tell you encourages more consumption of that good. But to what extent is debatable, and estimates range from a modest 10 percent to more than 100 percent.
Most critics don't suggest efficiency is flat-out wrong, but they do caution against irrational exuberance for energy-saving schemes.
"It obscures the scale of the climate challenge, rather than illuminating it," Mr. Nordhaus says. "It basically tells policymakers, 'It's all going to be easy, cheap, and you don't have to do the hard things. You don't have to make the scale of investments or regulations that you need to take to actually decarbonize the economy.' "
The supersmart next wave of efficiency also raises important questions about data security and privacy. Could a thief hack into a smart thermostat and find out if you're home or not? Does collecting data about the grid open us up to cyberattacks from abroad?
Those threats are serious, energy experts say, but manageable, and the benefits outweigh the risks. Energy data live behind layers of cybersecurity, they say, and the information energy companies collect pales in comparison with what online banks, stores, and social media sites collect from their users.
Overhyped or not, efficiency garners support from key stakeholders, and the intelligence component makes it even easier for politicians, investors, and (yes) journalists to fawn over. Even many utilities embrace efficiency, despite its resemblance to asking customers to buy less of their product. It's cheaper than building new power plants and is often mandated by public utility commissions, and it builds rapport with ratepayers.
"We want people to use less energy," says Cheri Warren, vice president of asset management at National Grid, an international electricity and gas utility headquartered in London. "We don't want to make our money on how fast the meter spins; we want to make money on the assets themselves."
In Washington, the issue of efficiency is a rare opportunity for common ground amid polarizing energy topics like clean-energy loans and power plant regulations. At press time, a bipartisan efficiency bill once thought to be a legislative slam dunk in the Senate was sidetracked indefinitely by issues wholly unrelated to efficiency – namely, political wrangling over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare." The bill would have provided funding for efficiency upgrades in buildings, manufacturing, and the federal government, and it would have been the first major energy bill to pass since 2007. If it were to eventually pass, the bill would save more than $65 billion and create 174,000 jobs by slashing energy waste, according to a September analysis by ACEEE.
An electric bill to look forward to
Up on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in Boston's innovation district, dozens of 20- and 30-somethings pore over computer screens in a gleaming white work space. It could be any high-tech firm designing the next cool photo-sharing application or smart phone game, but this space is as much about atoms and particles as it is about pixels and bytes. The software engineers here rub shoulders with electrical and mechanical engineers. There's a 3-D printer out back and a temperature testing chamber that simulates environments as diverse as the Arctic and the Amazon. In a sort of digital wood shop, 21st-century tinkerers labor beneath dangling wires, lights, and plugs, pawing through an array of colorful bins filled with metal and plastic bits that do only engineers know what.
This is Digital Lumens, the company behind the intelligent lights in Gary Raymond's Warehouse No. 5. Its goal, as president and chief executive officer Tom Pincince says, is "to use information technology and the LED [lights] component together to build a system where every light in the world is intelligent, and that intelligence goes towards efficiency that is dramatic, if not radical."