Solar, The Sharing Economy, and Data: GreenBiz 2016 Key Takeaways

GreenBiz Forum 2016 was a great success. Urjanet appreciated the opportunity to sponsor such an important event for moving the conversation around business and sustainability forward. Among all the valuable content shared at GreenBiz, there were a few key themes we noticed:

The economics of solar continue to evolve rapidly.

The interplay between utilities, solar companies, government, and residential / commercial solar customers creates a challenging and uncertain environment for continued adoption of solar as a source of renewable energy. Stakeholders need to align environmental and economic incentives to enable solar to flourish. Storage will continue to impact the long-term feasibility of solar as it reduces risk to increasing reliance on solar.

Combining technology and the sharing economy can create sustainable solutions.

Innovations in technology and consumers’ increasing acceptance of resource sharing are unleashing a flood of new value creation that can have long-term sustainable impacts on society. Apps such as Ride combine the benefits of saving time and money with reducing one’s carbon footprint. In these types of enterprises, everyone wins – people, planet, and profit.

The importance of data as the foundation of sustainability initiatives continues to rise.

As sustainability reporting continues to evolve away from vanity metrics to more comprehensive accounting of an organization’s total environmental impacts, more granular data becomes key to assessing the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives. From the more established data on energy use to the rise in importance of water and waste data, organizations need a plan for collecting and leveraging as much data as possible to tell the most complete story around its sustainability efforts.

Did you attend GreenBiz Forum 2016? What are your thoughts on the key trends we highlighted above? Let us know on Twitter!

You might also be interested in:

• Solutions Sheet: Utility Data for Energy Management & Procurement
• Don’t Underestimate the Cost of Obtaining Energy Data
• Take Your Energy Management Program Beyond the Bill with Interval Data

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