This past week brought another announcement of a big name shifting investment away from energy management solutions, which has led some of our clients to ask what’s happening and what’s next.

For starters, Smart Grid represents a bold, new world, full of lots of opportunity and potential.  Countless companies have placed their bets, the government has helped spur innovation through grants, customers have piloted solutions, and we’ve seen the market react through acquisitions and divestitures.   This is healthy and unsurprising.

We’ve long believed, and research has supported, that success in Smart Grid requires an ecosystem of partners, a spirit and willingness to innovate quickly and adapt, and a focus on integrating systems and finding value in data.  We’ve also seen that a lot of the growth in this space comes from smaller firms, who are able to rapidly develop, deploy, and change solutions during these pilots.  And to that end, we have enlisted several to help with our pilots in building energy management and smart grid.

Despite these market moves, energy management remains the “killer app” of the smart grid. 

Traditional Building Management Systems (BMSs) are becoming obsolete and are being replaced with energy management systems.  A host of new types of sensors are available that are wireless and cheap, allowing companies to deploy them quickly and monitor power usage of their lighting, heating, cooling, and other systems.  Vendors are developing applications that integrate with these sensors and with the BMSs (which are becoming IP-enabled).  These applications are moving toward the enterprise level, giving the Real Estate and Procurement departments, not to mention the CFO, visibility into a previously undermanaged commodity across their portfolio of properties.  We believe this represents another great opportunity for our cloud infrastructure, and we are developing a cloud-based solution for our customers.

These solutions are also evolving toward integration with the Smart Grid.  It would be a shame to collect all this data, create elegant dashboards, develop great insights into how to improve energy efficiency – then not be able to act on it immediately.  Plus, once you’re armed with the knowledge of which pieces of equipment are using power at specific times, wouldn’t it be great to tell your utility that you could turn off non-essential equipment or raise the temperature, and bid that power back to them during peak periods?  That type of solution already exists, and we are working with our partners to improve upon what is already there – giving our customers a way to reduce energy consumption, participate in the energy markets, and create new revenue streams, while maintaining business processes and employee productivity.

This is the promise of energy management.  The best is yet to come.