Is IoT The Smart Solution to Conserve Natural Resources?

Internet of Things or IoT is not a new concept. It’s one of those revolutionary technologies offering us smart solutions to ease our work at home, office, and elsewhere. We have discussed how IoT is becoming mainstream in our daily lives, at length, in our previous blogs.

IoT not only offers smart solutions but also helps in conserving traditional energy sources, water and safeguarding our environment. How to conserve resources, has always been a concern and has come a long way within the last two decades.

What is Energy conservation?

Energy conservation is the practice of decreasing quantity of energy used, through conservation, improving efficiency, Technology (IoT) and Renewable Energy.

For decades, we are trying to teach people the importance of saving energy. We ask them to turn off lights and other electric equipment’s when not in use. So that we can contribute in saving energy and lower energy consumption but these efforts haven’t really achieved much.

But IoT might bring in the long-needed change in terms of saving our renewable resources of energy.

IoT helps in conserving precious natural resources by providing practical solutions. Here are some of the best instances of how IoT might go a long way in saving energy.

• Smart Grid: Helps us to identify where we lose energy and where the savings can potentially be done. This in return helps to evenly distribute energy in real time on the basis of immediate data.
• Solar cells: Helps in monitoring and optimization of performance in solar energy plants, also known as Photovoltaic Installations.
• Smart meters: A smart meter is a new kind of gas and electricity meter rolled out to automatically send meter readings to optimize energy increase profitability. Also, helps to keep an eye on your energy spending and usage

• Building Automation Intelligent Thermostat: Integrated building solution that will allow you to reduce power consumption and automate the temperature settings – from your smartphone, tablet or computer. An eye to reduce energy consumption and improve energy efficiency management. It will reduce operational cost and the hassle of installing multiple autonomous system.
• Art Preservation: An automated solution to monitor conditions inside museums in a non-invasive manner which will help to preserve our precious antique pieces better.

• Remote monitoring and access: Focuses on automatically monitoring building operations, utility consumption, receiving data from sensors, user inputs, and pre-programmed procedures, in order to control heating, lighting, safety, and security systems from offsite.

• Preventive maintenance: Designed to determine equipment failure thus reducing the time and labor costs by proactive maintenance.

• Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Reservation: Saves time by locating nearest charging station and identifying whether it’s in use or not. User can make their reservation and forget about standing in queues.

• Liquid level bulk volume sensor: helps to detect leakage, prevents water from overflowing, monitors reservoirs, silos to avoid wastage and efficiently using of water resource.

• Level Sensors: Internet of Things effectively helps to analyze right amount of water present in reservoirs, tanks. This information collected via sensors and analytics helps officials, citizens, and businesses to determine the amount of water usage on daily basis. Helps in potential water savings up to 20-30 percent
• Smart Irrigation: Beneficial in smart irrigation, helps in monitoring soil moisture, water supply, this helps in handling irrigation, boosting crop yields

We don’t value our renewable resources because for us, they are available free of charges. Especially water, but future generations might not have it so easy if we aren’t careful now. For longevity of human kind, we need to restore these resources. And IoT surely looks like solution we need.

At the crux of the issue—we can only say that we are getting a technology which helps to conserve our resources at a very low cost, so why not to use it?

Reduction of energy consumption is requirement of both human race and environment as energy is lifeblood for anyone. It helps not just in cost saving but also increase productivity. Right IoT platform helps in calculating the significant costs on investment, how to manage the usage, to tell the peak usage hours and cost involved. This all helps in optimizing operations efficiency.

Internet of Things technology not only helps in conserving energy it also helps in saving and collecting water. This is done by schedule maintenance, shutting down of water pumps on regular basis, which even helps to reduce the price. Also residents are informed beforehand about unavailability of water to meet adequate water demands.

IoT will do its task, however one should make it a point to turn off the lights proactively when there is no consumption, save rain water utilize renewable energy source like solar energy.