You’ve probably noticed more stories about distributed energy, energy storage, vehicle-to-grid, fuel cells and other disruptive energy technologies.
These technologies aren’t always placed under the energy efficiency umbrella. But they should be.
Many people think of energy efficiency as switching out light bulbs in homes, greening buildings, or upgrading manufacturing equipment for higher performance.
All true. But energy efficiency is much more.
Look closely at today’s revolution to create a more distributed electric grid, and what do you find? All of this disruption is ultimately about energy efficiency — wringing the most value, the most energy, out of each dollar (or euro, pound, yuan, etc.) spent. It achieves this by:
- Giving the consumer more control. And what we control, we better appreciate and use less wastefully, more thoughtfully.
- Producing energy in a cleaner way. Less pollution means less expense fixing the environment or our own health, and therefore greater economic efficiency.
- Placing energy production closer to where it’s consumed, avoiding the need to build costly central power plants or long transmission lines. When energy is made onsite, it also averts ‘line loss,’ the natural dissipation of electricity as it travels distances.
Our readers have shown keen interest in articles about disruptive energy. So we want to let you know that more are coming your way. (Interest has been so high in microgrids that about six months ago, we gave the topic a venue of its own, MicrogridKnowledge.com, the first independent news site devoted solely to microgrids.)
Of course we will continue to focus on traditional forms of energy efficiency — the heart and soul of the industry — lighting and controls, appliance standards, energy and behavior, building energy management, industrial processes and equipment, and similar topics.
And as always, we’ll focus on the business and policy side of things: the creating, governing, buying, selling, opportunity-making activity that shapes the industry.
EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com is nearing its second-year anniversary. We thank our readers and advertisers for making it a success. We feel fortunate to be recording energy history during this remarkable time, and promoting energy technologies that will improve the health and economics of the planet and those of us on it.
We encourage you to make use of Energy Efficiency Markets to shape this evolving market. We offer several ways you can participate: Industry Perspectives, White Papers, Case Studies, Studies/Reports and by commenting on articles and podcasts. We also encourage you to join our LinkedIn Group, Energy Efficiency Markets, and its subgroup, MicrogridKnowledge. Also, follow us on Twitter @EfficiencyMkts and like our Facebook page.
