Derek DiGiacomo has worked for nearly 20 years in IT leadership for SCTE before transitioning in 2010 to focus on driving SCTE's Energy 2020 program. The program aims to reduce power consumption and costs, decrease grid dependency, and optimize facilities footprints for the cable industry through the development of standards and operational practices. Key initiatives include establishing a Sustainable Management Subcommittee, implementing energy saving technologies at SCTE headquarters, and defining the Adaptive Power Systems Interface Specification to allow energy consumption to match service demand across the cable network.

1. t has been an amazing few years since I
migrated from SCTE/ISBE’s IT team to
focus on and help drive the industry’s
Energy 2020 program. I had nearly 20
years of IT leadership when in 2010, Mark
Dzuban, SCTE’s new President and CEO,
approached me with the idea of driving the
energy program for SCTE. I saw the
opportunity to influence change on a wide scale
and have come to appreciate the ability to make
a difference in the industry. IT is in my DNA.
It is something I focused a lot of personal time
on (to earn undergraduate and graduate
degrees); however, the ability to work on an
important new focus was very exciting. Since, in
IT, I was responsible for critical systems,
making the transition to the new energy
endeavors made sense.
Growing out of the Cable-Tec Expo Green
Pavilion concept, SCTE formed a new
Sustainable Management Subcommittee in the
SCTE Standards Program.The new committee
was responsible for defining the first focused
operational practices and ANSI-accredited
standards to begin to influence change.
Standards and industry agreed-upon practices
are a key enabler to change and adoption in a
way that should result in improvement and
efficiency for implementers.This was a great
first step to help our industry make energy a
priority. Enter SCTE’s Smart Energy
Management Initiative, or SEMI for short.This
phase of SCTE/ISBE’s Energy Management
Program focused on proof-of-concept modeling
at the SCTE headquarters office. During the
2010–2013 time period, SCTE installed some
serious new energy technologies to include:
• Hybrid power system (fuel cell, batteries,
solar photovoltaic) to power the critical IT
load responsible for SCTE/ISBE’s
customer-facing platforms
• LED lighting in the office and parking lot
• Server virtualization consolidating the 6 plus
kW load to about 1.5 kW, all while
improving capacity, processing and
redundancy through the use of hypervisor
technologies
The projects were a great learning experience
and provided a foundation, but we felt we
needed something a bit more to better
encourage the industry to prioritize energy
management.
Enter Energy 2020. People ask, “What is
Energy 2020?” I like to describe it as a program
rooted in SCTE/ISBE Standards that has four
goals driven by cable operators with solutions
developed in conjunction with technology
partners. Cost avoidance is important as it has
been estimated though initial data collected by
SCTE/ISBE that the industry spends more
than $1 billion in energy. Also, as products and
services continue to be rolled out at a feverish
pace, we want to be sure that energy does not
become an obstacle to our competitive delivery
of advanced services.
So, the four goals of the program are the
compass for the development of the right tools
(aka, the standards and operational practices) to
support the desired change.
20 BROADBAND LIBRARY SUMMER 2016
Defining the Energy Future
SMART ENERGY
Derek DiGiacomo
Senior Director, Information
Technology and Energy
Management Programs
ddigiacomo@scte.org
Derek has been with
SCTE/ISBE for close to 17 years
and his first responsibility is
managing the SCTE’s Energy
Management Program. Derek is
helping drive Energy 2020 a
component of the SCTE Energy
Management Program that has
focused initiatives on five areas:
Facilities, Plant, Operations,
Technology, and
Marketing/Regulatory. Energy
2020 will envision and enable
what energy will look like for
cable in the year 2020.
Also under Derek’s leadership,
SCTE at its Exton
Pennsylvania headquarters has
seen a dramatic 50% reduction in
the dependency of grid supplied
power. Key projects contributing
to this savings include:
installation of 25 kW DC solar
photovoltaic (PV) system; LED
lighting deployment.
CARTOONSTOCK.COM
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2. The four goals include:
• Reduction of Power Consumption by
20 percent on a unit basis
• Energy Cost Reduction by 25 percent
on a unit basis
• Reduction of Grid Dependency by
10 percent
• Optimization of the Technical
Facilities and Datacenters Footprint by
20 percent
We kicked off the focus program in
2014 at Cable-Tec Expo, and since then
we have published a total of 15
documents! Visit Energy Management
under the Areas of Interest section of
www.scte.org.
The documents include how we are
going to measure change (the metrics),
standards for products, and operational
practices addressing everything from
critical facility energy management to
approaches to find funding via tax and
incentives.
So where do we go from here? Let me
paint a picture and report on a recent
experience.
Take a look around, bask in the sun’s
warm glow, and feel the breeze on a spring
day; these are all the subtle hints of the
future of energy. Flipping on the light
switch is second nature; you rarely have
anxiety that the light may not come on.
With the life expectancy of LED
solutions, that confidence is amplified. In
March, I attended an Energy Industry
conference bringing utility, vendors and
end-user industries together in New
England, and some of the highlights
included bi-directional controls of
electricity on the grid, embracement and
deployment of smaller micro-grids, and, of
course, the ultra-efficient vendors
showcasing LED, fuel cell, HVAC, and
consulting services. With an estimated
$1 billion spent annually as figured by
research conducted under early Energy
2020 data gathering, we are compelled to
not only begin deployment of some of the
latest-and-greatest efficiency products
witnessed at the show, but also motivated
to define our own solutions.
People will be at the heart of this
defining activity.The cable industry has
some very creative and talented people
who are extremely passionate about
success. One of the projects that is
venturing into new territory for
SCTE/ISBE is APSIS™, or Adaptive
Power Systems Interface Specification.
The simplest way to describe APSIS™ is
that it is a cable network end-to-end
energy command and control system that
will match power consumption with
service demand. In 2015, SCTE/ISBE
published the ANSI-approved standard
that defines what APSIS™ is and how it
can be implemented.
When we dig a bit deeper into the
APSIS™ concept, how will the definition
contained within SCTE/ISBE’s
document become a deployable, industry-
changing technology? In early March,
Frank Sandoval of Comcast and I
presented the idea to an open source
community (OpenDaylight.org) where
APIs modeled after the APSIS™
standard could be built.This API would
work across the cable domain (and even
beyond), influencing how much power
devices demand in relation to the services
provided.The simple diagram depicted
below (taken from our presentation to the
OpenDaylight community) helps
illustrate the concepts of APSIS™. The
community approved the project, and
work is ramping up. We saw some
APSIS™ proof-in-concept
demonstrations at Cable-Tec Expo 2015
in New Orleans, and with the start of the
open source project, the spark is lit.
I am excited to be a part of this game-
changing Energy 2020 excitement. Get
involved, connect via social media (yes, we
have a LinkedIn group at
www.linkedin.com/groups/8484997, and
reach out to me if you have questions or
want to share your own energy story!
22 BROADBAND LIBRARY SUMMER 2016
Application Domain
Energy Mgmt
Application
Energy Mgmt
Application
Middleware Domain
Device Domain
Energy Mgmt
Application
Northbound
RESTful API
Southbound
On-the-wire
protocols
CCAP CMTS Amplifier
Energy Mgmt
API
OpenDaylight
Protocol Adapters
Energy Mgmt
Plugin
OpenFlow SNMP Net-CONF IPDR Others
We saw some APSIS™ proof-in-
concept demonstrations at
Cable-Tec Expo 2015 in New
Orleans, and with the start of the
open source project, the spark is lit.
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