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Our thoughts from The Energy Event

By 29th September 2016 April 18th, 2019 No Comments

We were lucky enough to be part of the RWM Energy Event this month at the NEC Birmingham. The Energy Event is widely considered the UK’s leading event for energy and utilities procurement professionals, attracting more than 7,000 visitors and thanks to ESTA Energy not only could we mix and mingle amongst industry professionals, our very own Ian Clark was given an opportunity to share our thoughts on the Internet of Things and how it is shaping SME and residential space. Here is a summary of what Ian shared:

We constantly need to review and assess the industry that we are in to make sure we can adapt and stay ahead. We are one of many Internet of Things solutions in a market that is estimated to be worth $14.4 trillion dollars by 2022. This doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a piece of the pie for everyone, or that every commercial sector will have a need for every new device. With this in mind we can openly say that the Internet of Things is not going to dislodge anything in the large building and industrial space any time soon, where hard wired building management systems are well established, reliable, safe and repeatable.

However, in the SME and residential space (Connected Homes and Smart Buildings) there is already lots of new IOT products making themselves known, such as heating boiler controls HIVE and NEST and smart washing machines which are tied in to things like solar PV, so they switch on when it’s sunny and then email you when it is finished and they need hung out. Speaking of washing machines, a programming language called IFTTT (If This Then That) allows you to bring together different web services. In this case by pulling weather predictions which would then schedule your washing machine to start. How cool is that?

In the commercial SME world there is improved access security, work place management, where the biggest change and renewed focus is on productivity and building health/staff wellbeing through monitoring CO2, Lux and UV air treatment etc.

Other possibilities are emerging every day, where you could start monitoring mobile phone Wi-Fi/MAC addresses (unique), where you could identify how many people are in a building, how many are new or repeat visitors and also their dwell time and ration between staff and visitors. Combining this kind of business intelligence data with energy data and building data can bring whole new, as yet unimagined services to the market.

In the end it is likely that these new products and services would reduce the SME/Residential energy spend by at least 20%, and that isn’t factoring in the potential saving from swapping standard bulbs to more efficient and longer lasting LED bulbs. Our question: What are you doing to keep more money in your pocket?