SMART 2020: PATHWAYS TO SCALE

'SMART 2020' outlined the opportunity to capture savings of both energy and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in 2020, through a range of actions developed by the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector. Many of these actions are being taken today, but not at the scale that would be needed to realise the 7.8 Gt CO2e reductions outlined in the report.

We set out to understand what actions were being implemented on the ground, today, and what impacts they have. We started by highlighting case studies of energy and carbon efficiency in buildings and offices, transport and logistics, and in the electricity network.

Read a summary of key case studies, lessons learnt, and our recommendations.

Case studies on this website break down into the following high-level categories:

Many of the solutions are, not surprisingly, in pilot or early phases of maturity. Further analysis of the case studies show that their impact is mainly confined to one sector (ie. buildings) or another, with untapped potential for cross-sector impact.

The solutions faced a number of barriers in their development and implementation phases. The most common was lack of awareness of the benefits of the technology among partners or customers, or no barriers cited at all. In most cases, once a demonstration pilot project has been decided, there are few regulatory or cost barriers. However, market barriers do remain once the pilot needs to be scaled up.

We also were interested in whether the projects relied on behaviour change or other optimisation and automation for their impact, and concluded that there is still a large untapped opportunity in enabling behaviour change.