Forward-thinking businesses understand that optimizing their energy strategy can help them to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and unlock new revenue streams to help them drive business growth. Businesses can also improve resilience and create a competitive advantage that will future-proof their business. Rather than looking at energy as a cost of business, they are using energy data to inform their energy plans, energy management and overall energy strategy to make their energy a lever in their business growth.
It is imperative that businesses partner with a provider that has the right energy insights tools and a platform that collects and centralizes granular device-level energy and performance data. This level of data will provide them with a deeper understanding of their energy estate.
Building management systems are often used to provide a top-level view of a business's energy estate. However, the granularity of device-level data provides businesses with a much deeper understanding of their energy infrastructure and can help inform their energy strategy.
Device-level data tracks the energy consumption of each device separately to provide businesses with real-time visibility of:
The costs of energy usage
Where energy is being used and potentially being wasted
How the business and equipment are performing
The risks to the business, such as equipment failures and downtime
Opportunities to optimize and monetize energy flexibility
Monitoring your energy usage at device-level gives you real-time visibility of how your business consumes energy. Gaining a deeper understanding of how your business uses energy will help you identify areas that can be optimized, potentially saving future energy costs or generating new revenue streams for the business.
Energy waste can be one of the biggest contributors to high energy costs. Without monitoring your energy usage at a device-level, energy waste can often go undetected and so the opportunity to reduce energy waste and improve efficiency is often not realized.
Energy waste is often the result of employee actions rather than the equipment. The intelligence provided by device-level data can also be used to help inform employees about how their actions impact energy consumption and waste and the changes that can be made to their behavior to help eliminate energy waste and reduce energy costs.
Monitoring device-level data can help your business gain real-time visibility of how your equipment is performing but also how your business is performing. This data can be used to help you identify where changes can be implemented to improve operational efficiency, unlock value and reduce business risk.
Device-level data can help your business avoid costly downtime from equipment failures with real-time insights and predictive maintenance alerts. Granular device-level data can help your business analyze capital equipment to identify inefficiencies and determine when equipment needs replacing or requires maintenance to keep it working efficiently. This reduces business risks, optimizes your maintenance schedule and extends the life of your equipment.
The data gathered can tell you when replacement or maintenance may be needed. It can also be used to perform a cost analysis to help you understand whether replacement or maintenance is more cost effective.
Sensors are being deployed in commercial buildings and industrial facilities and they’re making buildings smarter. But are they making the people who run the buildings any smarter? We chatted with Greentech Media and our channel partner, Renteknik Group, to answer that question and discuss the state of play for IOT in commercial buildings. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
The management and engineering team of a 2.48 million square foot office property in Chicago, for example, tracked their energy usage and was alerted to operating anomalies that could lead to excessive wasted energy. Data revealed that the majority of tenant floors consume electricity during unoccupied hours and that nighttime setback controls were keeping the floors at unnecessarily warm temperatures at night. It also revealed that heating was operating throughout the year, resulting in simultaneous heating and cooling during summer months. Using this data, the team was able to correct these operational problems and reduce annual energy use by more than 3 million kWh, saving $214k in energy costs.
By using real-time data, businesses can:
Real-time insights will enable businesses to make data-driven decisions to optimize their energy strategy and improve their energy management. Device-level data can also help drive business growth by informing decisions on using new technologies such as solar or CHP to help drive energy optimization and unlock new revenue streams.
Discover how you can improve operational efficiency and reduce business risks with our energy insights solutions.
