SCTE Holds Energy 2020 Meeting, Joins Villanova RISE Forum

As the industry prepares to convene for INTX, one an important issue, though perhaps not the sexiest, is energy conservation. Take the Energy 2020 program for example. The cable industry’s initiative to achieve energy efficiency led by the SCTE, is scheduled to meet in Herndon, VA, Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, SCTE became the newest member of Villanova University’s RISE Forum. RISE—Resilient Innovation through Sustainable Engineering—seeks to advance the sustainable enterprise through engineering methods and is the industry consortium of the College of Engineering’s graduate program in Sustainable Engineering.

The goal of the Herndon meeting is to figure out ways to work with people outside the cable industry to move the program forward, an SCTE spokesman told us. Among presenters are National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is working with Time Warner Cable on hub site analyses with goal of implementing renewable energy sources as well as energy efficiency in general; University of Denver, which will present “Worth of a Watt,” an approach based on helping companies identify what they can afford to spend to reduce power consumption by one watt over the service life of the equipment. In addition, graduate students from Villanova will make a formal presentation during the Energy 2020 meeting. The team will present the first phase of their benchmarking analysis, designed to assess how the cable industry, as a whole, compares with other industries with respect to sustainability reporting and actions. The goal is to help SCTE and its members develop sustainability-related metrics and training materials, as well as to help cable to implement a strategy for making demonstrable reductions in energy consumption.

SCTE joined the RISE initiative because its mission aligns with the goals of Energy 2020, the group said. Through RISE, SCTE and members of the Energy 2020 program will work with faculty and graduate students from Villanova’s graduate program in Sustainable Engineering. Energy 2020 is intended to achieve cost avoidance of $1 billion in energy expenditures by the end of the decade, to ensure maximum customer uptime and to enable capacity growth via successful organizational, customer and environmental energy solutions. “Energy 2020 is an enormous effort that requires changes in technology and institutional thinking across the entire cable telecommunications industry. The RISE program’s head start in sustainable engineering and the collective knowledge of the RISE Forum membership will provide us with an entirely new set of resources that can help us drive energy planning and achieve our goals on schedule,” said Chris Bastian, senior vice president and CTO of SCTE.