Energy Management Information Systems: Global Markets

Additional Information

INTRODUCTIONoduction

Various studies have demonstrated that building energy usage can be reduced by 5% to 20% or more by identifying and correcting operational issues. Building owners and operators have various incentives to reduce their energy consumption, including adhering to business best practices, eliminating inefficiencies, reducing costs, participating in various governmental and private incentive programs, conserving energy resources, and reducing carbon emissions.

Many of these issues can be managed by building operators, energy managers, and other decision-makers using automated monitoring and control technologies that collectively are known as energy management information systems (EMIS), or sometimes enterprise energy management (EEM). This report uses the two terms interchangeably.

EMIS refers to data acquisition hardware, software, and communication systems that provide energy information to commercial building energy managers, facility managers, financial managers, and electric utilities. A number of providers offer products that are described as EMIS or EEM, although the specific details of their offerings differ widely between companies. This scope of this report also includes professional services that support the implementation of EMIS, such as needs analysis, project design, and integration services.

EMIS solutions are applicable for commercial, governmental, and non-profit entities in every segment of the economy, although some segments are intrinsically more energy-intensive and thus have a greater incentive to adopt EMIS solutions, such as manufacturing operations and datacenters. A growing number of individual consumers are using custom-tailored EMIS solutions to manage their household energy use.

Although formalized EMIS solutions are not directly applicable for private consumers such as homeowners, historical analysis and decision support to enhance energy efficiency of EMIS are frequently accessible through the EMIS solutions employed by power providers. These power providers enable consumers to become more informed and more efficient by providing historical and current power usage or appliance-specific utility-usage data. Current data analysis tools, such as data warehouse technology and other computing practices, allow power providers to provide consumer power consumption data periodically and on demand with the ability to secure other consumer information, or to group the data in an endless variety of ways.

STUDY GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

This report is an update of an earlier BCC Research report published in 2006. The overall goal of this report is to identify and prioritize the business opportunities for providers of EMIS solutions and related services that will arise over the next five years as these technologies increase their market penetration. In support of this goal, specific objectives of the report include:

• Identifying the EMIS technologies and applications with the greatest commercial potential over the next five years (2010-2015);
• Estimating the market for these technologies in 2009;
• Analyzing the technical, economic, and other demand drivers for these technologies, and other prerequisites of success in these markets;
• Projecting the potential markets for these technologies through 2015.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

The report is intended especially for providers of EMIS technologies and solutions and related services. Although the report is structured around specific technologies, it is largely non-technical in nature. That is, it is concerned less with theory and jargon than with what works, how much of the latter the market is likely to purchase, and at what price.

As such, the report’s main audience is executive management and marketing and financial analysts. It is not written specifically for scientists and technologists, although its findings concern the market for their work, including the availability of government and corporate research funding for different technologies and applications.

Government agencies and environmental and public policy groups with an interest in these areas should also find the report useful.

SCOPE OF REPORT

The study covers the major segments of the EMIS market, which are defined as:

• Industrial
• Business
• Governmental
• Residential

The study addresses the major enabling technologies for the various types of home automation products, such as:

• Sensors
• Software
• Wiring and networking devices
• User interface devices
• Controllers
• Actuators and output devices (e.g, dimmers, automated window coverings, dampers, etc.).

The study format includes the following major elements:

• Executive summary
• Definitions
• EMIS functions
• Enabling technologies
• Market environment (economic conditions, consumer attitudes)
• Current (2009) and projected market for home automation technologies and products through 2015
• Developers and suppliers of EMIS products
• Key patents.

While the main focus of the report is on the U.S. market, it also analyzes international markets for EMIS products and services.

METHODOLOGY

The findings and conclusions of this report are based on information gathered from developers, vendors, integrators and users of energy information systems. Interview data were combined with information gathered through an extensive review of secondary sources such as trade publications, trade associations, company literature, and on-line databases to produce the baseline market estimates contained in this report.

With 2009 as a baseline, market projections for each market segment were developed for 2010 to 2015. The projections are based on a combination of a consensus among the primary contacts combined with BCC’s understanding of the key market drivers and their impact from a historical and analytical perspective. The analytical methodologies used to generate the market estimates are described in detail, to enable the reader to evaluate their validity and substitute other assumptions and values, if desired.

All dollar projections presented in this report are in 2009 constant dollars.