September 2012: The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has released a report titled “Boosting Energy Efficiency Through Smart Grids,” which was commissioned by ITU in support of “International Year for Sustainable Energy for All.” It focuses on how ICTs can help mitigate climate change by making energy management more efficient.

The report discusses the role of ICTs in the smart grid to promote energy efficiency and also discusses the possible path toward a “green” ICT. The report concludes by underlining the need for an optimal trade-off among performance, redundancy, reliability and energy efficiency in the design of the communication architecture for smart grids. It further underlines the need for standard directives to provide design guidelines and power-saving requirements for next-generation ICT devices and installations, and suggests that this should be developed by the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) in cooperation with the major standardization bodies in the ICT and electrical fields.

The report was officially launched at the second ITU Green Standards Week held in Paris, France, from 17-21 September 2012. [Publication: Boosting Energy Efficiency Through Smart Grids] [IISD RS Story on the Second ITU Green Standards Week]