Empowering the Energy Revolution

With the acceptance of the climate change crisis in the U.S., the business community is exploring how to turn this challenge into an opportunity to innovate, reinvigorate the nation’s technology leadership in the world and strenghen the economy.

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th century, followed by the Information Revolution of the late 20th century is paving the way for a new “Energy Revolution”, a revolution that centers on utilizing IT to fundamentally change how we create, distribute and employ energy.

The future of billions of connected smart devices from home appliances to environmental controls to industrial robots lie at the heart of this vision, with intelligent connectivity of these devices as a critical element for success.

ConnectivityWeek is a collection of related events that focuses on this important connectivity element.

ConnectivityWeek 2008 is made up of the following events

The convergence of building systems and IT is bringing with it a plethora of new opportunities for commercial building and facility owners, operators to evolve how they design, build and operate their facilities. Since 2003 BuilConn has been the gathering place for thought leaders in technology and deployment of IT for buildings. In these five years, attendees and speakers at BuilConn have evolved a clear picture of the future of IT in the context of buildings.

With the increased deployment of smart meters in North America and around the world, connectivity in homes is now driving a growth in Home Automation applications related to energy management. HomeConn is a new event held as part of ConnectivityWeek, focused on exploring how the deployment of millions of smart meters and smart energy appliances will create a new and vibrant markets for smart home devices from security, heating, air conditioning, lighting and lifestyle / entertainment systems.

Industrial Automation has been at the forefront of smart connected devices for decades, since the creation of PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers) in the 1970s. The use of connectivity and IT in industrial applications has significantly increased in recent years. IndConn, a new event organized in partnership with the OPC Foundation and Open O&M.

As the North American electricity grid comes under stress from increasing demand, a focus on curtailing peak load provides an opportunity for building owners and building automation stakeholders to participate in load shedding strategies driven by lucrative incentives offered by electricity suppliers. Many early implementations of DR have tended to be simplistic, using event and price signals to simply turn off consuming devices and/or initiating distributed generation that are often not environmentally friendly.

The increase in distributed renewable energy components can only be possible with a broad and comprehensive real-time information infrastructure to control and manage all of the components of the electricity delivery system. The GridWise vision is a critical component of such a future system, a vision that maps out the creation of a smart grid to manage electricity system from generation, through transmission, distribution and consumption.

In the evolution of wireless technologies for control and monitoring applications, ZigBee stands alone in leading the charge of creating a standard for wireless mesh networking. The ZigBee Expo is organized in partnership with the ZigBee Alliance, an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly-networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard.

While much of M2M to date has been about technology and applications within specific vertical segments and markets, the full power of M2M will only be realized as a grand integration platform enabling cross vertical interoperability and business opportunities. The M2M Expo is the only global expo focused on the implementation of M2M. In 2008 the focus of M2M will be on energy management and sustainability.