Event
ACEEE ... American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy

ACEEE Intelligent Efficiency Conference ... The Westin Boston Waterfront ... Boston, MA ... December 06, 2015 to December 08, 2015

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

ACEEE Intelligent Efficiency Conference The Westin Boston Waterfront Boston, MA December 06, 2015 to December 08, 2015 Call for Topics Open: Submit Topic and Speaker Suggestions Now

Intelligent Efficiency Conference Overview

Intelligent efficiency holds the promise of substantially reducing energy use while transforming many energy-using markets. Achieving this outcome requires collaboration among the efficiency, technology, and user communities. These communities are largely distinct, and few opportunities have existed to date for the energy efficiency and technology communities to interact. Past interactions have been limited to speakers from one community addressing assemblies of the other.

ACEEE’s second Intelligent Efficiency Conference will convene these diverse communities to facilitate the sharing of ideas and forming of partnerships that will advance the adoption of intelligent efficiency in the marketplace. The Intelligent Efficiency Conference will provide an opportunity to hear from thought leaders and innovators, to learn what is happening in this rapidly evolving world, and to serve as a crucible for the formation of new policies, program strategies and commercial ventures.

Likely Participants Include: Energy efficiency program developers and administrators, state and local government policymakers, staff, and associations, chief technology officers and chief information officers, service providers, investors, entrepreneurs, hardware and software developers, ICT solution providers, building automation providers, and smart manufacturing, smart transportation, smart buildings, and smart cities leaders.

Program

Call for Topics

ACEEE welcomes your suggestions for cutting edge session topics and speakers for the 2015 ACEEE Intelligent Efficiency Conference.

Submit topic and speaker suggestions now through Friday June 19. Use the Call for Topics Submission Guidelines as a reference when submitting your suggestions.

Our Audience:

When making a submission, please keep in mind the backgrounds and interests of our conference attendees. The Intelligent Efficiency Conference will bring together people from the IT, telecom, energy efficiency, utility, solution provider, program administrator, policy and end user sectors. Attendees will represent a variety of functions within these sectors. Some will have great technical knowledge while others will have broad policy and market understandings.

What we are seeking:

We are interested in receiving session topic suggestions for the following issues related to intelligent efficiency.

Technology: we believe our audiences will be interested in learning about the latest technologies, software programs, communication and analysis capabilities that leverage information and communications technologies (ICT) to save energy. Information on case studies, research, demonstration and pilot projects will be of greatest value.

Energy Efficiency Programs: a key focus of this conference is the use of ICT in programs to encourage greater investment in energy efficiency. Many conference attendees will be interested in learning about the use of ICT to improve efficiency programs.

Evaluation, Measurement & Verification: ICT promises to automate, improve and lower the cost of EM&V. This will be of interest to end users, solution providers, program administrators, program evaluators, and policy makers.

Emerging Opportunities: What’s next? Which ICT technologies are poised to enable significant energy savings and in which sectors? For example: what is the potential of ICT to enable flexible demand response and integration of energy efficiency, renewable energy and storage for end-users.

Economic Potential and Co-Benefit Studies: Seeking analysis of the potential for to save energy, reduce energy intensity and improve economies. In addition to energy and energy cost savings, what additional benefits accrue from investments in intelligent efficiency? Analysis and case studies that quantitatively answer this question are of interest.

Risks and Challenges: this field is growing and evolving at an incredible rate and it is likely that there are associated risks that we have yet to discover. When software is updating in real-time, how can performance claims be verified? How robust are the algorithms? What protocols and standards are needed? What are the critical gaps and stumbling blocks? We seek topic suggestions that address these questions.

Customer Engagement: we seek topic suggestions on how ICT can be used to engage customers or improve existing customer engagement. We are also interested in how it can be used to verify claimed savings from customer engagement activities such as education, training and awareness.

Environmental Compliance through Energy Efficiency: under certain laws, it is acceptable to consider end-user energy efficiency as a mechanism to comply with environmental regulations. The proposed Clean Power Plan (also referred to as 111(d)) that will regulate carbon emissions from the electricity generation sector includes such a pathway. We seek suggestions on the use of intelligent efficiency related to environmental compliance. Policy: is a cross cutting and can include any combination of technologies and sectors. We seek submissions that include policy solutions to existing and emerging issues related to intelligent efficiency.

Each of these issues has applicability in the residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, utility, transportation and local, state and federal public sectors. A submission could address one or multiple blocks. When describing your suggestion, let us know the intended audience.

We look forward to receiving many great topic ideas and speaker suggestions. However, it is likely that due to the amount, we may not be able to contact each submitter individually to notify them if their suggestions have been included in the program.