Every year, companies pump large amounts of cash into powering their organisations, from desktop computers and lighting, to large energy guzzling data centres.
Companies could save as much as 50 per cent on current energy costs just by implementing smart grids to track and monitor their energy usage.
This, according to industry players who have noted greater interest from companies to increase energy efficiency as they seek out options to cut cash, monitor energy usage, and increase efficiency.
Guido Jouret, Chief Technology Officer of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group, said: “For example, one of our customers is BC Hydro up in Canada and they have a smart meter project under way where we have over 2 million meters connected up over our field area router.
“Now, it is important that smart metering is one application, but these utilities are creating a highway where they are going to deploy multiple applications, not just metering, but also what we call substation automation.”
“So this is about improving the delivery of electricity making it more efficient, but also about other things like physical security,” he added.
One company, Joulex, says that it can help companies save as much as 40 or 50 per cent of the energy used to power their office infrastructure.
Tom Noonan, Joulex’s president and CEO, said: “Joulex has innovated with a network based software application that automatically monitors, analyses and controls the energy being consumed by those systems.
“So if we see that utilisation is low we automatically reduce the power that is being consumed by that device. When you take this across a large corporate scale, the savings are dramatic.”
And Joulex has its eyes set on Asia for expansion; it opened its first office in the region one year ago.
“I am actually speaking with the Singapore Economic Development Board right now. We are talking to them about the possibility of a technology call centre to support Asian countries,” Mr Noonan said.
“We have a partner in Singapore today, we are looking for expansion not only in Singapore as our potential hub for Southeast Asia, but also in as a hub for Australia in support of our Australian customers.”
Joulex adds that Asia currently contributes 15 per cent of its revenues, but it expects this to go up to 30 or 35 per cent by 2015.
