Promising technologies are those that are at the service of the decompartmentalization of energy systems

A wind of technological renewal is blowing strongly on the final energy sector today. The novelties succeed one another and worry the most traditional actors: demand response, IoT, blockchain, storage, data security.

The boldest energy companies test them, one after the other, to evaluate their potential and interest. But what do these new technologies reveal? Do they all have the same attractiveness?

The demand response is a means to adjust production and consumption by varying demand, serving the balance of increasingly complex energy systems. It is also a means of valuing consumer’s flexibility, that is to say paying for a new way of consuming energy and interacting with global systems.

The IoT (Internet of Things) offers the possibility to collect information at more and more points and to possibly return orders to be executed in these different places. Many applications are now demanding more and more information: balance of energy systems, optimization of maintenance and operation of these systems, energy efficiency.

Blockchain technologies are at the service of the disintermediation of the chains of actors and the direct relationship between actors of the energy market.

Storage, like demand response, contributes to the balance of systems. It also makes it possible to regulate the energy flows, allowing, for example, a producer to consume its production; in this way, storage favours local energy flows.

Data security technologies will help manage and accompany the explosion of data by gradually overcoming the main associated disadvantages: loss of confidentiality, risks of intrusion and malicious actions on energy systems.

These five technology families are buzzing and seem promised a bright future. They share their contribution to more global energy systems. They are at the service of the decompartmentalization of energy systems. They enable consumers to participate actively in energy systems, which is essential for the emergence of intermittent and distributed generation technologies. They are, in my view, representative of an ineluctable general movement.

Testing them one by one may have an interest in learning these technologies, but all of them, without distinction, contribute to the global evolution: they will create value together and respond to the stakes.