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FEATURE MONITORING & CONTROL LEVERAGING THE POWER OF DATA


TO TAKE CONTROL OF ENERGY The key to unlocking the best energy and cost saving potential is understanding your data. Here Rob Edwards, Business Development Manager at Energy Assets explains how to be in the know


Control within the Web Analyser portal


is delivered by Energy Assets’ Z-Lynk and Lynkswitch technologies, with users able to send command signals from within a browser environment to control electrical devices remotely and on-demand down to each 13A socket. The portal is also capable of controlling systems working on Zigbee radio architectures. Amalgamating all of this capability


within the same portal provides managers with an ability to witness ‘cause and effect’ with greater clarity. For example, when a manager links a heating system to external temperature sensors, the data reads will immediately show the impact on consumption. Subtle control changes initiated from within the portal can help optimise the benefit – with remote and dynamic load switching available when circumstances dictate. So what’s the next ‘big thing’ for energy


A


ccording to new research by the Energy Efficiency Financing (EEF)


scheme, small and medium-sized commercial organisations spend over £414m more on energy than is necessary as a result of inefficient systems and equipment. The latest insight comes at a time when managers are increasingly leveraging the power of data provided by advanced metering systems to benchmark performance across entire estates and to look for ways to improve their energy strategies. “Underpinning everything associated


with energy efficiency is the collection and analysis of accurate and timely data, because unless businesses understand how they are using energy, they cannot hope to tackle systematic or exception- based inefficiency within buildings,” says Rob Edwards, Business Development Manager at Energy Assets. Energy Assets has just launched a new energy management portal - Web Analyser - that captures half-hourly data from gas, electricity and water meters via its automated meter reading technology and presents it within a single dashboard covering consumption for each utility. In addition, the company is about to add control capability into the same portal to enable energy managers to act on energy ‘hot-spots’ revealed by the data in order to optimise system performance in areas such as lighting


16 WINTER 2015 | ENERGY MANAGEMENT


and heating. This will also enable electrical loads to be switched on and off remotely and on-demand. “Effectively what we’re doing is


bringing together in one place the critical elements of energy management and control, because having data insight is one thing but when combined with the ability to change consumption dynamically and remotely, it becomes a much more valuable resource.”


COLLECTING AND ANALYSING DATA Having all the data in one place certainly makes life easier for managers, and because Energy Assets is a multi-utility meter asset manager (MAM), it can provide AMR data from fiscal meters to its customers as well as importing reads from AMR-enabled sub-metering systems. This provides a complete picture of


how, where and when gas, electricity and water is being consumed, giving managers a huge range of reporting options across single and multiple sites at both a macro and micro level. In addition, performance parameters can be set to trigger alarms in exceptional circumstances, such as a water leak or unexpectedly high energy consumption overnight, enabling managers to take prompt remedial action. At the same time, the system automatically provides information on levels of CO2 emitted as a result of the energy consumed.


Figure 1:


Energy Assets has launched a new energy management portal - Web analyser - that captures half-hourly data from gas, electricity and water meters via its automated meter reading technology and presents it within a single dashboard covering consumption for each utility


managers? Moving quickly up the agenda alongside ‘control’ is growing interest in the capability that Big Data provides to search for waste energy. The huge volumes of information now at the disposal of businesses is opening up new opportunities in automated analytics that take a much more forensic approach to consumption than has hitherto been possible. Services such as AMR-DNA, developed by Energy Assets, can cross-reference vast swathes of historical consumption data against over 50 indicators linked to behaviour, weather compensation, occupancy, control strategy, plant capacity and much more. This reveals the ‘fingerprints’ of consumption in each building, identifies the waste hiding in plain sight, creates a remedial plan and attaches a value to it. “Energy waste results from things as


simple as not adjusting building heating or cooling systems to take account of changes in Daylight Saving Time, in occupancy patterns or external temperatures,” says Rob Edwards, “but it is only by automatically and continuously analysing the forensic detail of every single meter point that we can reveal these patterns of waste from within a deluge of data.” With all these elements now coming


together – half-hourly multi-utility meter data, advanced reporting and analytics, improved control, and sophisticated waste pattern recognition.


Energy Assets www.energyassets.co.uk 01506 405 405


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