ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEMS MARKET ANALYSIS

Market Challenges And Opportunities

Energy harvesting system market Drivers:

Rise in Deployment of IOT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained widespread momentum across all industrial sectors including automotive, energy, defense, consumer electronic, and healthcare, among others. The increasing preference towards offering data centric, personalized experiences to the customers is pushing companies to connected as much devices as possible in order to gather more consumer related data. Therefore, technology companies such as Renesas Electronics Corporation, ARM Holdings, Microchip Technology Inc., among others, are investing heavily to develop systems and devices for such IoT applications.

According to Coherent Market Insights, the connected IoT devices are anticipated to reach over 25 billion till 2027, owing to the rising IT industry growth. The growth in the connected devices has led to an increase in the amount of data generated across these devices. The high amount of data generation is therefore increasing the capabilities of devices and hence, driving the development of microcontrollers that offer high performance with low power consumption.

The growing applications of IoT including smart cities, smart homes, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and machine to machine (M2M) communications, among various others is further expected to fuel the market growth for energy harvesting system in various applications such as consumer electronics, industrial, military and defense, home and building automation. Since energy harvesting systems are one of the prominent solutions which can power the low power wireless sensors.

Availability of R&D Funds through Organizations and Investors

R&D for energy harvesting devices has been on a rise owing to the requirement of innovative solutions to power wireless sensors and low power electronics. Further, the presence of funds through associations such as the U.S. Department of Energy and the European Commission results to enhance the development of innovative technologies.

For instance, European Commission under its Horizon 2020 is funding a project on “Metamaterial Enabled Vibration Energy Harvesting”. The project has commenced in January 2021 and is expected to end by December 2024. The aim of this project is to eliminate the requirement of batteries to power wireless sensors in the future.

In addition, new startups are also able to raise funds from investors to progress innovative product development.

In January 2021, Barbara IoT, a Spain-based startup company, closed a round of over USD 469.46 thousand (Euro 400k) to develop its operating system for industrial IoT

Availability of funds for innovative technologies through organizations and investors aids to fast track the process of new product development. Further, it also provides a better opportunity for new product developers to enter the market with their innovative products. These factors have resulted to drive the market for the development of innovative energy harvesting systems which will result to further boost the growth of energy harvesting systems in the forecast period.

Energy harvesting system market Opportunities:

Increasing data traffic and novel smart devices is expected to create growth opportunities in the global energy harvesting systems market during the forecast period. With increasing amount of data traffic and growing advent of novel devices, the demand for development of energy-efficient infrastructure and techniques is also growing all over the world. This further is likely to boost the demand for energy harvesting technologies in the future, which will offer multiple lucrative opportunities to market players in the global energy harvesting systems market. Growing need for energy efficiency will create ample opportunities in the global energy harvesting systems market in the near future. Energy efficiency has become an important aspect to successfully design and deploy the 5G and beyond wireless networks. As per the IEEE Communications society, the need for integrating energy harvesting technologies into cognitive radio networks will increase, to overcome the issues of scarcity in spectrum and growing energy consumption forecasted in 5G. Thus, this factor is likely to benefit the global energy harvesting systems market in the near future.

Energy harvesting system market Restraints:

Low Power Capacity Coupled With High Cost

Energy harvesting system are costly, since they perform tasks such as analysis of real-time information, setting up energy scavenging devices, and other integrating equipment. Thus, to gather real-time information, the deployment and servicing of associated infrastructure such as advanced metering systems, smart devices, sensors, transducers, and communication infrastructure are necessary. This is leading to the increasing need for transformation of the infrastructure of utilities, which is expected to drive subsequent investment while hampering market growth over the projection period.

The technology and infrastructure necessary for energy harvesting is still expensive as its R&D involves high costs. Capital spending is highly correlated with the financial health of a company. In addition, the return on investment is gradual and may take a period of nearly three to four years on case to case basis. The need for large investments and longer payback periods prove to be a major challenge for the market.

Application of energy harvesting remains limited due to its small conversion efficiency (around 5%) and its low power storage capacities. Therefore, the utilization of energy harvesting remains limited to low- power-consuming devices. Hence energy harvesting devices cannot act as a power backup solutions or continuous power supply for medium and large scale devices. Hence, energy harvesting devices can be self-powered in case of only ultra-low power capacity devices which is anticipated to hinder the growth of the market.

Disruption in spare parts supply chain to hamper the market growth

The supply chain of spare parts for energy harvesting system equipment is majorly affected due to the shutdown of production facilities. Manufacturing of most components in energy & power sector is slowing down considerably. This can be attributed to factors such as local and international travel restrictions, quarantine requirements, and lockdown, which together have caused a delay in shipment of already manufactured parts to be supplied to distributors and end users.

Energy harvesting system equipment manufacturers have access to an adequate supply of critical parts, devices, components, and materials for emergencies. But these companies are facing bottlenecks due to the limited production of supplies in countries that are severely affected by COVID-19. Manufacturers and end users are facing difficulty in procuring critical components from suppliers in affected countries.