We all remember exactly what we were doing when momentous events took place.

I was innocently watching the solar eclipse at the time when the new Energy Union Strategic Framework burst on the horizon. That soon put the solar system and the galaxy in their place. As soon as someone mentioned a new EU policy framework, I shot back into the house and went on the Internet to find out more.

Oddly, the subject of Energy Union wasn’t trending on twitter. Everyone seemed to be concentrating their energies on outside events as the moon harmonised with the sun. There’s not much we can do about The Sun and the Moon but we do need to stop ourselves totally squandering our earthly resources.

Unless we can create an intelligent efficient internal market for power, the EU says, member nations could lose a collective €590 billion!

None of us – not even the most Europhobic isolationist – wants that, surely. But neither do we want to lose ourselves in the EC Framework document, which runs into hundreds of pages and makes the average software licensing agreement seem like light entertainment.

To save you from that, I am willing to risk accusations of over simplification by summarizing it here. The EU needs a much more efficient internal market for all the energy. The challenge is that each of the variables multiplies the complexity of the task. There is a massive variety of suppliers, an enormous range of techniques for creating electricity and a huge lack of uniformity and reliability over the timing of energy creation.

If those conditions didn’t conspire to create enough complexity, there is a seemingly endless variety of consumers of power across the nations, industries and peoples of the EU. Oh, and for extra interest, the flow of energy doesn’t necessarily follow the rules of the market. Energy created in surplus in some areas does not flow, across national boundaries, to nations in which demand exceeds supply.

So the creation of an internal market for energy is not going to be easy. The distribution of power never is – especially across such a wide, diverse geopolitical terrain.

How are we going to create the necessary low-carbon, resilient and affordable energy system we all desire? The EU says it wants ‘an energy system that is robust to geopolitical risks, unstable fuel prices and an escalating climate crisis’.

We are going to need a lot of tinkering and systems integration. We are going to need an Internet of Things on an industrial scale. But is this a case for wholesale changes in the infrastructure?

In matters like these, it’s always interesting to see what the original infrastructure providers say.

General electric (GE) made its money from solid dependable revenue sources like electricity, oil, gas, water, aviation, health, transport and health. It still does today, having survived in this highly competitive business since its founder, Thomas Edison, had the very first ‘lightbulb moment’. So GE must be doing something right.

These days its software division (GE Software) is charged with fine tuning all the well established production processes to get more out of the existing infrastructures.

The plan for cutting wastage and boosting productivity is based on getting information from the machinery of each industry – the oil pipelines, wind turbines and jet engines – and nipping problems in the bud quicker. For example, there are 5000 variables in a jet engine which GE software’s intelligent agents can monitor and manage.

For two years, GE Software has been building applications using its own purpose built software creation system, Predix, that can be used in other divisions. GE Energy, for example, has managed to fine tune its processes to create a five per cent improvement in electricity yields from wind turbines. It achieves this by gathering intelligence about weather patterns and electricity flow and the performance of the turbines themselves. Small improvements in productivity translate into massive financial benefits, as a consequence of the sheer size of any supply chain.

So it’s not the Big Eclipse moments that help the industry progress. It’s the small victories, like getting more out of existing resources. Micro-innovations, if you like, that don’t get the headlines but which collectively add up to a massive deal.