Chapter 3. Reduce Energy with IoT
From buildings and lighting to equipment and electronics, every business requires energy to run. Today, most of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. For instance, in 2015, two-thirds of the electricity in the US was generated from coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Additionally, natural gas remains the standard fuel source used for heating in this country.
Generating power from fossils fuels releases greenhouse gases (GHGs); primarily, water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. Water vapor dissipates in a few days, but the rest are more persistent. As they accumulate in the atmosphere, they absorb the sun’s energy and slow or prevent the loss of heat to space. GHGs act like a blanket, making Earth warmer than it would otherwise be. Rising global temperatures can cause significant, and often unpredictable, shifts in climate and weather. As a result, this can increase risk for businesses—potentially constraining or interrupting the flow of resources in their supply chains, impeding their own ability to operate, and reducing the capacity of some customers—because they are dealing with these changing conditions—to buy goods and services.
A sustainable response to this situation is for businesses to become more energy efficient and shift to non-carbon-based power sources. Optimizing energy use and adopting renewable energy can generate short- and long-term financial savings and help to slow, and eventually reverse, the ...
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