By Prof. Dr Pascal Bouvry (University of Luxembourg) and Dany Donnen (Tri-ICT)

This paper provides a summary on the 2012/27/EU directive of the European Parliament and Council on Energy Efficiency seen from an ICT perspective.

In order to slow down the global warming effect and for the sake of future generations, it is required to reduce the use of fossil energy and emissions of CO2. Additionally, in a world of limited resources, in despite of the recent shale gas exploitation efforts, energy price keeps raising and Europe is largely relying on energy import. The energy efficiency directive can also be seen as a way to boost Europe economy by emulating new approaches and technologies for energy production, transport and usage. These different reasons justify the adoption of the energy efficiency directive by the EU parliament and council.

The adopted measures will highly rely on new ICT based technologies. New generations of sensors enable near real time smart metering of the whole lifecycle of energy from production, to transport and usage. Accurate and continuous measurement, coupled with data collection and analysis, allow demand driven production of the energy. Local production and storage also raise the efficiency of the global solution by coupling local demand to it and enabling a global market approach.

The directive addresses all levels of society from states, to large corporates but also SMEs and citizens.

Member states are in charge of showing the example to the rest of the society. First the states have to use energy-efficiency as a key discriminant when purchasing products, services and buildings. In particular the states have to renew 3% of the heated or cooled floor space of public owned buildings every year. The overall target is to reach for all nations a reduction of 20% of the energy consumption by 2020. This directive has to be transposed into national laws and regulations by the 5th of June 2014.

Data collection on Energy Efficiency

The EU states need also to collect all data related to national efforts in terms of energy efficiency and report to them to the EU commission. This requires defining precisely such actions by carefully scoping them and their object, producing a baseline and then measuring the gain. The commission will establish a central site that will relate the global, national and local efforts.

Member states shall also provide the right incentives for others mirror their approach. Finally the states are also in charge of establishing the right level of knowledge, awareness and auditing facilities for easing up the adoption of energy efficiency approaches, the related measures and assessment.

Special care is taken to avoid that the new set of regulations would be seen as administrative and costly constraints for the SMEs. The states have to provide the right environment for supporting the SMEs efforts in terms of energy efficiency. The member states will also ensure that smart metering will be used as much as possible in order to measure electricity, natural gas, district heating/cooling and domestic hot water for individuals.

And right actions

For the CIOs, the need of having precise information on energy usage (power and hear/cooling) will be of an increasing importance. This will allow them to participate to the global effort, enable cost reduction and ensure to comply as easily as possible with future energy regulations. It is first required to have a concrete definition of what the IT consists of (data centers, computer rooms, telecommunication equipment, terminals and external suppliers). Then the right metrics need to be established (e.g. computer power, cooling power, heat) and the related data need to be collected by the use of sensors. Finally the data collection and analysis need to be organized in order to take the right actions and assess their effectiveness.

Finally a large set of IT related business opportunities and services emerge from this directive and are directly related to the collection of the data based on smart metering, their analysis and decision aid. It is indeed required for each state to constitute an expert basis to assist and assess the global effort. We also highlight the need of effective methods and tools for helping deciders to choose in a multi-objective fashion the most suited solutions in terms of energy-efficiency versus cost.

As future research directions, we foresee that, aside of sensors, next generation systems will be equipped with actuators and smart software agents that automate the decision making in a decentralized and multi-objective way. These autonomous solutions will be equipped with feedback loops to auto-adapt to new situations and tuned with user preferences. Recent approaches based on game theory allow local agents to tune their strategies based on pay-off functions while still ensuring good global behavior of the system.
Let us also repeat that security and safety of the existing and emerging systems are mandatory aspects to be studied.

 

By Prof. Dr Pascal Bouvry (University of Luxembourg) and Dany Donnen (Tri-ICT)

Pascal Bouvry is currently heading the Computer Science and Communications (CSC) research unit of the Faculty of Sciences, Technology and Communications of Luxembourg University, and serving as Professor specialized in optimization and distributed computing. Pascal Bouvry is member of various scientific committees and technical workgroups (IEEE TCSC GreenIT steering committee, Vice-chairman of IEEE CIS taskforce on Cloud Computing, ERCIM WG, ANR, COST TIST, LIASIT, etc.)

Dany Donnen, “IT Manager of the Year” (’95) by Data News, Belgium, is currently PhD candidate at University of Liège, Belgium. Dany has been active many years as team and project manager in the public and in the private sector. After leading major IT projects he spent a few years as strategic consultant for top companies in different sectors (Banking, Chemical, Pharmaceuticals …). In the position of COO of a company active in automotive he developed the business and manage the day-to-day operations. He completed his expertise portfolio by acting as CEO of a company providing services and new technology tools to the media market. He recently accepted to take the lead of Tri ICT aiming to develop high value ICT services in Belgium and Luxemburg. Dany Donnen is co-owner and member of the board of TouchCast, Belgium specialized in streaming.