FountainBlue's September 10 VIP Roundtable was on the topic of 'Power Optimization', with opening remarks by PG&E.
We were fortunate to have a wide range of executives speaking on the challenges and opportunities around power optimization. It's clear that our appetite for energy will continue to rise, and it's clear that the infrastructure needs to be updated and upgraded in order to ensure access to reliable quantities of energy, preferably through sources which are renewable and less impactful for the environment.
Whether you're looking at the energy challenge from the consumer or from the enterprise lens, there are technology, policy, and adoption challenges and opportunities around decarbonization, digitization and decentralization. There were many more questions than answers in this month's conversation. Below are some of these key questions.
Decarbonization Challenges and Opportunities
What can we as consumers and as business leaders do day to day to manage our consumption, diversify our energy generation strategies, store and distribute energy, and keep energy levels reliable, safe and cost-effective, all while adopting sustainability-based business practices which decelerate climate change and support the earth?
What are the policy, technology, and infrastructure choices we need to make renewables options more attractive, more reliable, more efficient?
How can we better 'educate' decision-makers on the impact and ripple effect of their ongoing energy choices?
Digitization Challenges and Opportunities
How can we better optimize energy usage so it impacts our bottom line as well as our sustainability goals?
What can we do to facilitate adoption of the digital solutions which would help automate software and/or motivate adoption?
How can we progress from leveraging Artificial Intelligence models and its ability to understand historical patterns of energy usage to Machine Learning models which might factor in circumstances which have not occurred historically?
How would access to the wholesale energy costs impact the day-to-day energy decisions of energy consumers?
Decentralization Challenges and Opportunities
What policy, technology, and process changes need to happen to grow and maintain the core centralized network, which is essential even as we decentralize?
How can we better manage the growing base of energy-generators so that we can optimally store and fairly and efficiently distribute that energy?
How can we proactively predict and manage downtime and failures given the distributed nature of the energy generation system, and the structure and requirements of the grid?
How can we better design and architect hardware solutions for chips and devices which optimize energy usage?
The bottom line is that there will be more people, and there will be more people using more technology needing more energy. The choices we make around how we generate and use energy will impact our future and our earth. Nobody has all the answers. And nobody can do it alone. But if we focus on the real data and the real challenges, perhaps together we can make progress on this increasingly important challenge and make it into an opportunity to better support ourselves and our earth.