Chasing the green pound

Will plans for eco-friendly homes fitted with high-tech energy meters be a money-spinner for IT firms?

On BP’s web site, a “carbon footprint calculator” supplies information on all aspects of household energy use, related design matters, and the CO2 emissions that ensue.

That isn’t the only example of today’s growing association between IT and energy management. In his March Budget, chancellor Gordon Brown laid out £5m for a pilot study on the use of “smart” meters and “associated feedback devices”.

Now take, as a third example, the “microgeneration” of energy in homes and workplaces – by harnessing the wind and sun, for instance. While the government dawdles over nuclear power, its established policy is that microgeneration could cut CO2 emissions by 15 percent by 2050, and also reduce the UK’s dependence on imported fossil fuels. Thus Brown announced an extra £50m of grants to help fund microgenerators in schools, social and local authority housing, businesses and public buildings. The one thing he didn’t say was that microgeneration will also demand a lot of IT.

The emissions cuts that are hoped for in 44 years’ time depend on the consumer being able to sell the electricity generated at home back to utilities at the same price at which he or she would normally buy it. But here the DTI’s March report on microgeneration, Our Energy Challenge, is commendably realistic. It concedes that for the consumer to be paid for “exported” electricity, three separate meters will have to collect data on its import, export and generation.

What goes for householders will go for workplaces too. Just as Kent County Council has recently made water meters mandatory in homes, so it appears that those wonderful smart meters and associated feedback devices will have to spread alongside microgenerators at home and at work.

That might appear a nice save-the-planet bonanza for IT vendors – not just in supplying energy hardware and data management for homes and workplaces, but also in helping energy companies handle new data management tasks that are national in scope. But should IT vendors really salivate at these prospects?

In fact, as Our Energy Challenge makes clear, microgeneration is largely about changing people’s behaviour. Thus we learn that when children see microgeneration schemes in operation at their schools, that could influence their future behaviour. Indeed, the DTI approvingly quotes a Hub Research Consultants report on a pilot scheme involving three schools and about 20 households, which found “the behavioural impacts in terms of energy awareness and efficiency were often considerable”. The “qualitative” impacts of microgeneration, you see, “can be substantial, presenting a living, breathing and emotionally engaging face to energy consumption”.

How very touchy-feely. The idea that individuals – or businesses – should sell electricity back to the National Grid does hark back to the spirit of entrepreneurial services invoked by Margaret Thatcher. Nevertheless, microgeneration today is really about moralising, authoritarian, uneconomic demonstration projects in renewable energy, complete with IT bells and whistles.

To avoid being associated with confusion, disappointment and anger, IT suppliers should beware.