The worldwide discussion on climate protection and an ­increasing sensitivity of society to environmental issues is the motivation which has turned the improvement of energy effi­ciency into one of the major demands being made on developers and users of technical systems. Manufacturing industries have long since taken the topic to heart and are successfully ­offering energy-saving equipment. Even the ICT world, one which tends to concentrate on growth and heightened performance, has taken note of the issue and made so-called green IT devices available.

But telecommunications service providers have paid little attention to this market. These companies have given little consideration to energy efficiency except as a means of reducing costs in the operation of communications technology. Yet there are undoubtedly other opportunities to utilize the core competencies of the telecommunications companies and to offer lucrative value-added services which are congruent with the general trend towards improvement in energy efficiency.

Telecommunications value-added services in energy provision

A highly promising starting point for value-added services can currently be found in the energy provision sector. The technological structures for power generation and distribution have been undergoing major changes for some time. In the past, energy provision was dominated by a small number of large power plants and power distribution networks with a rigid hierarchical structure. Managing the networks and, in particular, securing a consistent level of power quality were fairly straightforward tasks. But today‘s promotion of renewable energy sources demands different types of structures. Energy producers who use renewable sources are frequently comparatively small, decentralized plants such as hydroelectric plants and wind farms or photovoltaic systems. This represents an enormous change from the large conventional power plants at a few locations. The ­large number and decentralization of these systems alone make network management more difficult, but the complexity of this task is further increased by the virtual impossibility to predict the quantity of electric power which these plants produce at any particular time, a consequence of the dependency of the production on current wind conditions or solar radiation. If the quality of the power and networks is to be secured despite the greater difficulty posed by these general conditions, new network concepts such as the “smart grid” concept are required.