IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 41

sustainable development. The report characterizes
these two key concepts as follows [7]:
■ "the concept of 'needs', in particular the essential
needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given";
■ "the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's
ability to meet present and future needs."
The capacity of the environment to serve human
needs is not infinite. Achieving sustainability is the
challenge, in order to manage and distribute resource
consumption and its benefits equitably over space
and time, and to ensure an equal quality of life for all
individuals of current and future generations. In order
to achieve and maintain sustainability, especially in
respect to climate change, society has to react to the
new requirements with a change in production and consumption patterns and resource use. As a precondition,
society has to become aware of the importance of the
change that has to take place. Since it would not be sufficient if only parts of an economy or society addresses
the sustainability issues we face, the common term to
describe the change in society that has to be achieved
is a Low Carbon Society. This vision depends on three
dimensions of sustainable development comprising economic, social, and environmental scope (see Fig. 1). An
additional institutional dimension holds them together.
Institutions, such as governance structures, act to combine the requirements of the three dimensions in order
to achieve balanced development [8]. Sustainable development requires that none of the three dimensions outweighs the others. Each dimension has to be respected,
which involves avoiding exploitation of the environment,
supporting the abatement of poverty, and pursuing positive economic development. There is a minimum standard
that has to be reached in each of the three dimensions.
The role of ICT in sustainable development originates from
its potential to enable energy and emission savings.

Energy Efficiency
Energy existing in nature, such as oil, gas, uranium,
or sunlight, is called primary energy. To make this

natural energy usable for human processes and products it has to be transformed into secondary energy, for
example into electricity of the type that is finally used
by devices or systems to serve for human purposes.
In other words, it is necessary to create tertiary energy
(see Fig. 2). This includes at least two transformation
processes from natural energy to the final purpose of
energy usage and each transformation process creates losses. Keeping these losses as small as possible
results in the optimization of energy efficiency.
Energy efficiency usually refers to the efficiency of
the process using secondary energy to create a service.
In this context energy efficiency is a property of products and processes that determines the ratio of energy

The capacity of the environment to
serve human needs is not infinite.

used (input) and service created (output). An increase
in energy efficiency can therefore be characterized as a
reduced input of energy resulting in a constant level of
service, or a higher level of service with the same input
of energy [11]. In industrial production a measure of this
kind of energy efficiency can be defined as "energy use
per unit of product" [8]. Another measure of efficiency is
called carbon efficiency which considers the CO2 emissions per unit of product and denotes the amount of
carbon dioxide emissions that arise during the production process and the generation of the needed energy.
However, when dealing with the efficiency of energy
usage, one should keep in mind that useful (secondary)
energy has to be generated first. The process of energy
generation efficiency is relevant as well and can be
defined as "the ratio of the useful output energy to the
input energy" [10]. Considering the whole transformation process of energy there are three options that can
be taken to reduce primary energy usage [10]:

Losses

Primary
Energy

Transformation
Transportation
Distribution

Losses

Secondary
Energy

Utilization
Device or
System

Final
Useful
Energy

Figure 2. The transformation from primary to secondary to tertiary energy [10]

MARCH 2015

∕

IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015