The blogosphere is filling up with 2012 tips and trends for corporate sustainability, greener living, making the smart grid work and just about everything else you can imagine.
Rather than make up a whole bunch of our own, this Post will pick and choose from what’s already on offer, and then drill down briefly on what we think is really important from an energy future perspective.
- Heather Clancy (GreenTech Pastures) on ZDNet sees three smart grid trends to watch in 2012: Security, automation and integration (of micro-grids and renewable energy) are Heather’s ‘trinity of tasks’ faced by utilities and technology platform providers
- Greenbang (Energy Tech Insight) sees the ‘secret sauce’ of smart-grid services in 2012 being all about ‘show me the money’ rather than being greener, with the best offers being energy efficiency at ‘no upfront cost’
- Bill Roth blogging for Triple Pundit (people, profit, planet) has five ‘megatrends creating 2012′s trillion dollar global sustainable economy’, with the first being that energy efficiency is numero uno for Return on Investment (ROI). With electricity prices rising, he cites data that 52% of US businesses are seeking a 25% reduction in their electricity consumption by 2014
- 3BL Media on the CleanTechies Blog sees four trends to watch in 2012 in the shaping of the sustainable development movement: Transparency, global consistency, public/private collaboration and a focus on solar energy will combine to ‘take us to the next level’ on sustainability.
- Murrye Bernard writing for Buildipedia.com has ‘energy monitoring systems’ among his five green home trends for 2012.
- Patti Prairie, CEO of Brighter Planet, writing for Huff Post Green on the top sustainability trends to watch in 2012 included ‘big data analysis performing on her list, saying: ‘As application interoperability and cloud computing become new IT standards, expect sustainability applications that harness big data by integrating with existing business systems to become commonplace.’
Our tip is that 2012 will be remembered as the year when communities really start to drive the transformation to a sustainable, low-carbon future on their own terms – across a number of dimensions.
‘Do it together’ as well as ‘do it yourself’.
Community can be a geographic one, but it doesn’t have to be in all cases. It can also be a corporate staff community, a professional association, a higher learning institution, a club or many other ‘networks’ … with the important ingredients being the ability to capture and share hard data, so both technology platform and social networking components are likely to be vital.
Words and phrases that we think are going to be important in 2012 and beyond include resilience, independence, interdependence, co-reliance, interoperability, cloud services, return on investment, bundled solutions, community, and micro-grids. What can we be adding to this list?
