MONITORING & METERING FEATURE
Five reasons why IoT and energy intelligence matters for business
Centrica Business Solutions’ John Hyde explains why it’s crucial for businesses to gain complete visibility of how, when and where they are using energy across their entire estate – from utility meters and on-site generators, right down to a device and process level
With an integrated energy management strategy that captures, analyses and visualises real-time energy data from your devices, utility meters and on-site generation assets, you can use energy as a lever for growth and value
T
he more you know about your energy, the better you can manage
it. If your energy intelligence is lacking, how can you understand where waste is occurring and the best opportunities to make savings or use power more flexibly to generate revenue? With an integrated energy management
strategy that captures, analyses and visualises real-time energy data from your devices, utility meters and on-site generation assets, you can use energy as a lever for growth and value.
IOT ENERGY INSIGHTS TECHNOLOGY Internet of Things (IoT) technologies enable you to gain deeper energy insights at a circuit-level of granularity. This works by linking a cloud-based analytics platform to both utility meters and wireless sensors that monitor critical assets, such as energy intensive equipment and processes, HVAC components, lighting systems, etc. The self-powered sensors are non-invasive and can be speedily snapped onto the outgoing electrical wire that powers each device, without disrupting operations. The sensors and third party utility
Right: Centrica Business Solutions’ energy insights technology
meters continuously collect critical energy data and deliver it in real-time to an energy management platform, such as our PowerRadar system, which sits at the heart of our customers’ energy strategies. This platform creates a single, holistic view of your energy footprint – providing up-to-date visibility of energy performance, at the required level of detail. In this way you can holistically
manage consumption to inform your
energy and operational strategies and deliver the following benefits: 1. Reduce energy costs and carbon emissions By monitoring your energy usage at a device-level, hidden areas of waste can be identified – creating opportunities for high impact energy efficiency improvements that can deliver big cost and carbon savings. Energy insights can also inform and influence employee behaviour change to further improve energy performance. For example, textile specialist, Pincroft,
has used our IoT energy insights solution to transform how they manage energy across their operations. The company has reduced weekend energy spend by 94% and weekday energy spend by 29% – putting them on track to achieve annual CO2
savings of 648
tonnes. This delivered a payback on investment in just three months. 2. Improve operational efficiency Device-level data often drives improved operational efficiency and business resilience. Anomalies picked up by the energy
analytics software can be symptomatic of deep-lying faults in equipment, or weaknesses in operational performance that are difficult to detect. Data intelligence can also inform maintenance requirements, including predictive alerts, to reduce downtime, increase productivity and extend asset life. It’s sometimes possible to identify potential equipment failures even before they happen. We partnered with
a global building materials supplier to measure energy use and pinpoint consumption across different equipment, buildings and plant. By monitoring real-time energy usage of critical energy-hungry machinery and using our analytics platform to examine the data, we identified that a conveyor motor was not working correctly. This was
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creating a bottleneck in the process. Fixing this achieved an annual £211,383 operational and energy saving at just one location. Further cost savings have been made through identifying unnecessary out-of-hours energy use across buildings and plants. 3. Optimise and monetise energy flexibility Data insights also inform demand side response (DSR) opportunities. For example, businesses gain a clear understanding of how they can shift loads to avoid peak time power costs and where they have flexible power capacity to generate revenue from DSR grid balancing markets. Many of our customers use our PowerRadar platform to help optimise their energy flexibility. 4. Simplify energy and carbon reporting Detailed data can also be collated across multiple sites and reports downloaded for environmental and fiscal reporting, for example to assist compliance with the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) or Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR). 5.
Inform energy investment
Another powerful reason for higher level energy monitoring is to inform energy efficiency improvements and make the most of existing resources. This is particularly important as organisations move beyond the ‘quick-win’ energy saving measures towards more sophisticated methods of demand reduction. By optimising data, organisations are able to understand their energy priorities and build an accurate and convincing case for capital investment in distributed energy solutions, such as renewable generation and battery storage. Organisations are also able to base equipment sizing
and specification on accurate energy consumption figures.
Centrica Business Solutions
www.centricabusinesssolutions.com
ENERGY MANAGEMENT | SPRING 2021 23
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