Halid Hrasnica Eurescom hrasnica@eurescom.eu

In the long history of human existence on Earth, securing energy resources and exploiting them efficiently has played a very important role. On a  socio-economic and political level, the consumptive needs for energy and scarcity of energy resources have strongly influenced energy production, our environment and our quality of life. Two major trends have recently stimulated the need for reducing energy consumption and improvements in energy production: increasing energy costs, which reflect the steep rise in demand and the scarcity of carbon-based energy resources, and increasing CO2 emissions caused by carbon-based energy consumption, which are contributing to negative climatic changes. 

Accordingly, the reduction and optimisation of energy consumption are among the main goals of the European Union. At the end of 2006, the EU set its ambitious 20/20/20 goals to cut its annual consumption of primary energy by 20 percent and increase the production of renewable energy to a share of 20 percent by 2020 and adopted a corresponding Action Plan for Energy Efficiency (2007-12). The achievement of these goals will only be possible through mobilising public opinion, decision-makers and market stakeholders and by setting minimum energy efficiency standards and rules for products, services, and infrastructure. In the ICT work programme of EU Framework Programme 7 (FP7) for the period 2009-2010, the European Commission clearly addresses issues related to the application of ICT for energy efficiency, climate change adaptation, and smart electricity distribution and calls for significant research work to be done in this area in the next years. 

There are two major aspects to be considered in regard to ICT and energy efficiency:

• Energy efficiency in the ICT sector, where energy savings are particularly envisaged for the ICT infrastructure, and

• Energy efficiency in all areas of production and consumption, in which ICT can help to achieve the EU’s 20/20/20 goals related to more effective energy production and distribution as well as energy consumption by end users. 

Related to the first aspect, the ICT industry is aiming to reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices, for example by  ensuring a longer life-time of batteries and sensors, and, more importantly from a global point of view, by reducing overall energy consumption within the ICT infrastructure. Significant efforts are made in developing of new less-energy-consuming transmission methods and communications protocols. In addition, innovative solutions are developed for ICT devices and network equipment which aim at reducing and optimising energy consumption in stand-by mode. 

On the other hand, ICT resources, which include a number of intelligent devices, high-performance computer systems, and widely deployed communications network, can improve energy efficiency in different ways. Thus, ICT systems are already successfully used to optimise electrical energy distribution and production and are continuously improved taking advantage of recent research results in the ICT area. Various possibilities for optimising both industrial and private consumption of electricity are applied and further investigated, in order to achieve reduction of related costs and to adapt to time variant electricity supply. Furthermore, integration of alternative energy sources in global supply networks, in particular small wind or water electricity plants, requires significant improvement of the distribution networks and management of expected bi-directional energy flow. Finally, even though the main part of measures applying ICT for energy efficiency considers electrical supply networks and consumption, ICT can also be successfully applied to improving the efficiency of other energy sources and their distribution in a similar way.

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