End-use technology – where it all begins for the electricity and gas industry! It is the ability to convert all forms of energy, electricity, natural gas, and oil, into the useful work that drives our economy. The ability to use the technology to produce goods and services that consumers value, is what cranks the economic engine of our society. But the conversion of this energy to useful work is often wasteful and, because of its complexities, is often not understood by these same consumers. Yet, pleasing the consumers should be simple; to quote an often-used expression, “all the consumer wants is hot pizza and cold beer.”
This ever-spiraling consumption of goods and services is depleting our supplies of conventional fuels, and the wasteful byproducts of energy conversion are contributing to greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. The question then becomes: how do we maintain the advantages that come to society through the use of energy without exacerbating an already delicate supply issue, reduce environmentally harmful emissions, and allow for countries like China and India to grow their economies?
One of the answers is through the adoption of new and better end-use technologies. Over the past 30 years we have seen the use of transistors and integrated circuits replace the radio tube. This has led to both a significant reduction in the energy required to listen to your favorite radio station, and, it can be argued, allowed for an explosion of new communications devices that would have been impossible had they been required to be tethered to the end of a 120 volt cord and carried around by a weight lifter. In the last 15 years we have seen the ubiquitous incandescent lightbulb being replaced by compact fluorescent lamps – again a marriage of integrated circuit technology and innovative manufacturing technology, yielding a 75 % reduction in the energy needed to produce the same light output. For motors, the workhorse of our manufacturing economy, innovations in materials and their applications have seen the introduction of high-efficiency motors – the ability to do more with less energy.
Even with the plethora of new technologies that do more for less, whether for new or existing applications, successful penetration into the marketplace has been slow, painful, and all too often unsuccessful. The freely operating marketplace needs to be tipped to give these products a chance. The compact fluorescent bulb now widely available at competitive prices has only been able to gain a foothold in the marketplace because of the wide scale deployment of utility-based Demand Side Management programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
End-Use Technologies
The continuation of the quest for new and innovative end-use technologies goes on. Research and development continues. The questions that must be answered before these products go to market include:
• How do we ensure that new products work with the energy consumption and other attributes claimed?
• How are these technologies being introduced to the marketplace?
• How can we overcome the pricing barriers that often plague the introduction of new technologies until they achieve economies of scale?
It is the collaborative role of electric utilities, natural gas utilities, governments, and manufacturers to work together in an attempt to tip the marketplace with the ultimate goal of getting these new energy-consuming products into widespread use with attributes that support and enhance the effective use of energy resources. The ability to accelerate the introduction of improved products is the lifeblood of our economy in a time of dwindling energy supplies and recognition of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on our environment.
The End-Use Technologies Interest Group of CEA Technologies Inc. (CEATI) has as its mandate to “…develop, demonstrate and commercialize technologies that present potential new loads, facilitate automation, and enhance efficiency and performance and that will also adapt easily to
industrial applications, improve competitiveness and sustainability, and address environmental concerns.” The group has identified 6 key areas of general interest that include:
• DSM Applications
• Load Management
• Energy Conservation
• Regulations and Standards
• Best Practices and Guidelines
• Efficient Customer Generation
• Customer Green Energy
• Advanced Innovations
The final leg of the continuing quest for market penetration of these technologies comes together in what we might call the 3 pillars of End-Use Technology innovation and dissemination:
• Efficient End-Use Equipment
• Information
• Pricing and Regulation
Pillar 1 – Efficient End-Use Equipment
Simply stated, there must be a pipeline of new and innovative technologies coming out of research labs and manufacturers’ facilities. The marketplace does not have the ability to analyze, verify, compare, and demonstrate to a wide audience the advantages of an efficient technology (efficient in use and efficient in when and how it uses this energy). Currently available products, profitable to manufacturers, dominate the advertising and promotion budgets and leave little room for the innovative product, particularly during its infancy when its price remains high because economies of scale in production have not been achieved.
It must be the role of groups such as CEATI’s End-Use Technologies Interest Group to:
• Verify the end-use data of the new and innovative equipment or process;
• Provide opportunities for actual field trials of the product or process;
• Help introduce the new product into the marketplace through the utility customer base;
• Help to develop product or process performance standards to ensure that the consumer can be assured that the product has a consistent performance standard; and
• Work with health and safety standard organizations to develop appropriate standards in these areas.
Pillar 2 – Information
Information is obviously a key component of product and process dissemination in the marketplace. The successful communication of information requires more than the simple presentation of basic energy and demand savings. The limited success of the Demand Side initiatives in energy efficient product adoption in the marketplace in the early 1990s demonstrates that energy and demand savings alone will not lead to wide scale deployment.
The information pillar has in fact many components. These include:
• Identification of the energy and demand savings as well as other attributes of the product. This is a basic necessity.
• Product Information and comparisons to help the lay consumer get an understanding of how the innovative and efficient product is better and lowers energy and demand consumption.
• Workshops to help inform industrial and commercial customers of ways to grow
production and productivity at a lower per unit energy cost and have the ability to shift demand to lower costs further.
• Regulation is often required to try to tip the marketplace towards the adoption of new and innovative products. Simply stated it could be a better way to keep the beer cold, at less cost. Governments are working hard in this area. At the Federal level, the use of the Energuide label in Canada, the Energy Guide in the USA and the Energy Star labelling are all working to attempt to set standards for efficiency and where possible provide regulation. But more work needs to be done at the provincial, state, and municipal levels to set regulations in place that ensure the energy efficient product is supported in the marketplace.
• Daily energy information. This is probably the weakest link in the drive for new, innovative and efficient end-use technologies. For most customers, across all rate classes, there is no daily or next day consumption information.
At the residential level the customer gets a 60-day bill approximately 10 days after the end of the 60-day period. They have no idea what happened 60 or even 3 days ago. This class of customer needs daily consumption information if they are to truly understand the impact of their consumption patterns and, ultimately, their decision to buy energy efficient and/or demand-shifting product. From the demand perspective there is no information on the peak demand even though the price of energy delivery has a time value for the manufacture and/or delivery of electricity and gas. This is beginning to change in some jurisdictions as smart meters and real-time information devices are being introduced.
At the commercial level, except for the few very sophisticated customers, consumers have no idea of their energy or demand consumption until approximately 5 days after the end of the 30-day billing period. Many questions, such as, “When did the demand occur?” “What caused the peak demand?” and “What drove the energy costs?” remain unanswered from the utility bill. As a result the energy purchase cost is off their radar until something drastic happens and even then it is only after a long search process do they begin to understand how the purchase and use of energy impacts their bottom line costs.
At the industrial level, for large industries where complex business decisions are made, much of the energy and demand information is available and solid business decisions are made to adopt new and innovative technologies. The small manufacturer spending their time managing the production of their products, however, unfortunately runs into the same problems as the commercial customer.
Pillar 3 – Pricing Signals
The adage that ‘money talks’ continues to be true. For new technologies to be successful in the marketplace, appropriate price signals need to be introduced to encourage the consumer or user to adopt the innovation. In order to allow the price signals to filter through to the customer, the utility should consider changing their pricing structure such that all classes of customers be provided with time-value pricing of electricity and gas. This would provide all consumers with a link between the use of energy-consuming products, the efficiency of use, and when and how they use the product. This would also help energy-efficient and time-shifting technologies gain a foothold in the marketplace and hopefully tip the level playing field towards new and innovative efficient products.
Another important initiative would be the elimination of Federal, provincial, state, and municipal taxes on the differential cost of these new products. Generally efficient and time-differentiated products cost more on a first-cost basis. The differential between the new product and the established product should be tax-free. Eliminating the taxes on the differential cost between a high efficiency gas furnace and a mid-range efficient furnace, for example, would help sell the higher efficiency product.
Finally, we can examine the introduction of Demand Response strategies that financially reward consumers, in addition to utilities, for program participation and for adopting new and innovative technologies, whether it is an actual end-use product or an advanced communications strategy that is of benefit to the utility and the consumer.
Conclusion
End-use technology research, development, and demonstration – the innovative process – must continue! As the 3 pillars of technology, innovation and adoption for end-use technologies have demonstrated, with the exception of the items that are clearly the role of government
policy and regulation, widespread support for this process must come from the collaborative effort of utilities, governments and manufacturers.
End-use technology innovation, and the adoption of new and better ways to do things, continue to be the ultimate enablers in the drive to mitigate the demand for fuels and reduce greenhouse gas. Support for the efforts of research, development and demonstration must continue, and even accelerate, with broad and collaborative participation if the global community is to reduce per unit energy consumption and find a better way to make hot pizza and cold beer.
End-use technology, where it all begins.
About the Author
Mr. Phil Elliott, a professional engineer with an MBA, leads the End-Use Technologies Interest Group (EUTIG). As a consultant, and during his 25 years of utility experience at Nova Scotia Power, he has spent a significant portion of his career involved with electric end-use technologies, including demand-side management and the marketing of energy efficiency. He has heldpositions as Director and President of the Canadian Committee on Electrotechnologies and served for several years on a wide variety of CEA committees, including the R&D Utilization Committee, the DSM Task Force, and the Energy Efficiency Committee. He has also been a member of the Task Force on Lighting and Electric Power Requirements for the National Energy Code (National Building Code of Canada). For more information, please contact info@ceatech.ca or visit www.ceatech.ca.
This ever-spiraling consumption of goods and services is depleting our supplies of conventional fuels, and the wasteful byproducts of energy conversion are contributing to greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. The question then becomes: how do we maintain the advantages that come to society through the use of energy without exacerbating an already delicate supply issue, reduce environmentally harmful emissions, and allow for countries like China and India to grow their economies?
One of the answers is through the adoption of new and better end-use technologies. Over the past 30 years we have seen the use of transistors and integrated circuits replace the radio tube. This has led to both a significant reduction in the energy required to listen to your favorite radio station, and, it can be argued, allowed for an explosion of new communications devices that would have been impossible had they been required to be tethered to the end of a 120 volt cord and carried around by a weight lifter. In the last 15 years we have seen the ubiquitous incandescent lightbulb being replaced by compact fluorescent lamps – again a marriage of integrated circuit technology and innovative manufacturing technology, yielding a 75 % reduction in the energy needed to produce the same light output. For motors, the workhorse of our manufacturing economy, innovations in materials and their applications have seen the introduction of high-efficiency motors – the ability to do more with less energy.
Even with the plethora of new technologies that do more for less, whether for new or existing applications, successful penetration into the marketplace has been slow, painful, and all too often unsuccessful. The freely operating marketplace needs to be tipped to give these products a chance. The compact fluorescent bulb now widely available at competitive prices has only been able to gain a foothold in the marketplace because of the wide scale deployment of utility-based Demand Side Management programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
End-Use Technologies
The continuation of the quest for new and innovative end-use technologies goes on. Research and development continues. The questions that must be answered before these products go to market include:
• How do we ensure that new products work with the energy consumption and other attributes claimed?
• How are these technologies being introduced to the marketplace?
• How can we overcome the pricing barriers that often plague the introduction of new technologies until they achieve economies of scale?
It is the collaborative role of electric utilities, natural gas utilities, governments, and manufacturers to work together in an attempt to tip the marketplace with the ultimate goal of getting these new energy-consuming products into widespread use with attributes that support and enhance the effective use of energy resources. The ability to accelerate the introduction of improved products is the lifeblood of our economy in a time of dwindling energy supplies and recognition of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on our environment.
The End-Use Technologies Interest Group of CEA Technologies Inc. (CEATI) has as its mandate to “…develop, demonstrate and commercialize technologies that present potential new loads, facilitate automation, and enhance efficiency and performance and that will also adapt easily to
industrial applications, improve competitiveness and sustainability, and address environmental concerns.” The group has identified 6 key areas of general interest that include:
• DSM Applications
• Load Management
• Energy Conservation
• Regulations and Standards
• Best Practices and Guidelines
• Efficient Customer Generation
• Customer Green Energy
• Advanced Innovations
The final leg of the continuing quest for market penetration of these technologies comes together in what we might call the 3 pillars of End-Use Technology innovation and dissemination:
• Efficient End-Use Equipment
• Information
• Pricing and Regulation
Pillar 1 – Efficient End-Use Equipment
Simply stated, there must be a pipeline of new and innovative technologies coming out of research labs and manufacturers’ facilities. The marketplace does not have the ability to analyze, verify, compare, and demonstrate to a wide audience the advantages of an efficient technology (efficient in use and efficient in when and how it uses this energy). Currently available products, profitable to manufacturers, dominate the advertising and promotion budgets and leave little room for the innovative product, particularly during its infancy when its price remains high because economies of scale in production have not been achieved.
It must be the role of groups such as CEATI’s End-Use Technologies Interest Group to:
• Verify the end-use data of the new and innovative equipment or process;
• Provide opportunities for actual field trials of the product or process;
• Help introduce the new product into the marketplace through the utility customer base;
• Help to develop product or process performance standards to ensure that the consumer can be assured that the product has a consistent performance standard; and
• Work with health and safety standard organizations to develop appropriate standards in these areas.
Pillar 2 – Information
Information is obviously a key component of product and process dissemination in the marketplace. The successful communication of information requires more than the simple presentation of basic energy and demand savings. The limited success of the Demand Side initiatives in energy efficient product adoption in the marketplace in the early 1990s demonstrates that energy and demand savings alone will not lead to wide scale deployment.
The information pillar has in fact many components. These include:
• Identification of the energy and demand savings as well as other attributes of the product. This is a basic necessity.
• Product Information and comparisons to help the lay consumer get an understanding of how the innovative and efficient product is better and lowers energy and demand consumption.
• Workshops to help inform industrial and commercial customers of ways to grow
production and productivity at a lower per unit energy cost and have the ability to shift demand to lower costs further.
• Regulation is often required to try to tip the marketplace towards the adoption of new and innovative products. Simply stated it could be a better way to keep the beer cold, at less cost. Governments are working hard in this area. At the Federal level, the use of the Energuide label in Canada, the Energy Guide in the USA and the Energy Star labelling are all working to attempt to set standards for efficiency and where possible provide regulation. But more work needs to be done at the provincial, state, and municipal levels to set regulations in place that ensure the energy efficient product is supported in the marketplace.
• Daily energy information. This is probably the weakest link in the drive for new, innovative and efficient end-use technologies. For most customers, across all rate classes, there is no daily or next day consumption information.
At the residential level the customer gets a 60-day bill approximately 10 days after the end of the 60-day period. They have no idea what happened 60 or even 3 days ago. This class of customer needs daily consumption information if they are to truly understand the impact of their consumption patterns and, ultimately, their decision to buy energy efficient and/or demand-shifting product. From the demand perspective there is no information on the peak demand even though the price of energy delivery has a time value for the manufacture and/or delivery of electricity and gas. This is beginning to change in some jurisdictions as smart meters and real-time information devices are being introduced.
At the commercial level, except for the few very sophisticated customers, consumers have no idea of their energy or demand consumption until approximately 5 days after the end of the 30-day billing period. Many questions, such as, “When did the demand occur?” “What caused the peak demand?” and “What drove the energy costs?” remain unanswered from the utility bill. As a result the energy purchase cost is off their radar until something drastic happens and even then it is only after a long search process do they begin to understand how the purchase and use of energy impacts their bottom line costs.
At the industrial level, for large industries where complex business decisions are made, much of the energy and demand information is available and solid business decisions are made to adopt new and innovative technologies. The small manufacturer spending their time managing the production of their products, however, unfortunately runs into the same problems as the commercial customer.
Pillar 3 – Pricing Signals
The adage that ‘money talks’ continues to be true. For new technologies to be successful in the marketplace, appropriate price signals need to be introduced to encourage the consumer or user to adopt the innovation. In order to allow the price signals to filter through to the customer, the utility should consider changing their pricing structure such that all classes of customers be provided with time-value pricing of electricity and gas. This would provide all consumers with a link between the use of energy-consuming products, the efficiency of use, and when and how they use the product. This would also help energy-efficient and time-shifting technologies gain a foothold in the marketplace and hopefully tip the level playing field towards new and innovative efficient products.
Another important initiative would be the elimination of Federal, provincial, state, and municipal taxes on the differential cost of these new products. Generally efficient and time-differentiated products cost more on a first-cost basis. The differential between the new product and the established product should be tax-free. Eliminating the taxes on the differential cost between a high efficiency gas furnace and a mid-range efficient furnace, for example, would help sell the higher efficiency product.
Finally, we can examine the introduction of Demand Response strategies that financially reward consumers, in addition to utilities, for program participation and for adopting new and innovative technologies, whether it is an actual end-use product or an advanced communications strategy that is of benefit to the utility and the consumer.
Conclusion
End-use technology research, development, and demonstration – the innovative process – must continue! As the 3 pillars of technology, innovation and adoption for end-use technologies have demonstrated, with the exception of the items that are clearly the role of government
policy and regulation, widespread support for this process must come from the collaborative effort of utilities, governments and manufacturers.
End-use technology innovation, and the adoption of new and better ways to do things, continue to be the ultimate enablers in the drive to mitigate the demand for fuels and reduce greenhouse gas. Support for the efforts of research, development and demonstration must continue, and even accelerate, with broad and collaborative participation if the global community is to reduce per unit energy consumption and find a better way to make hot pizza and cold beer.
End-use technology, where it all begins.
About the Author
Mr. Phil Elliott, a professional engineer with an MBA, leads the End-Use Technologies Interest Group (EUTIG). As a consultant, and during his 25 years of utility experience at Nova Scotia Power, he has spent a significant portion of his career involved with electric end-use technologies, including demand-side management and the marketing of energy efficiency. He has heldpositions as Director and President of the Canadian Committee on Electrotechnologies and served for several years on a wide variety of CEA committees, including the R&D Utilization Committee, the DSM Task Force, and the Energy Efficiency Committee. He has also been a member of the Task Force on Lighting and Electric Power Requirements for the National Energy Code (National Building Code of Canada). For more information, please contact info@ceatech.ca or visit www.ceatech.ca.
