What is Energy Management and How to Use it?
Energy management can be broadly defined as the use of proactive, organized and systematic energy management in buildings or organizations to meet environmental and economic needs.
Companies across the sector are shifting to energy management as a way to reduce their operating costs. Specific requirements and practices vary by sector, but core principles apply to all companies. It involves the following steps:
- Collecting the data and metering your energy consumption
- Identifying opportunities to save energy
- Taking action to save energy
- Tracking the progress and ongoing improvement
How energy management work?
1. Data Collection. The more data you can get, and the more detailed it is, the better. Energy data can come from your monthly utility bill, from manual checks (once a month), or from automatic uploads from smart meters. Monthly bills may be an easy starting point, but you will see the limit of the approach quickly.
Lack of detail in terms of time, area, and type of energy use makes it difficult to find useful information. Manual meter checks can give you a daily curve, but this process takes time and error-prone.
Smart meters that record, store, and transmit data, where it can be viewed and processed using specialized software platforms, is ideal. However you choose to get your data, this is the first step necessary.
2. Identify Opportunities. When you start investigating and analyzing your data, you’ll start looking for interesting bit of information. This may be an increase in your monthly bills after adding a new air conditioning unit, or increasing the use of lights during overtime hours.
Whatever the situation, you need the right visualization (graph) and analysis to find out what’s going on behind the raw data. This is difficult to achieve with spreadsheets, but simple year-to-year comparison can be a good starting point.
3. Action. Reaching storage requires action. When you identify the opportunity to save, the next natural step is to act on them. Some solutions may be one-time repair, while others may require more internal co-operation and persuasion.
4. Track progress and Ongoing Improvement. It’s time to track the process and implement a continuous improvement table. New issues will arise over time, and the old ones may come back.
To ensure that your energy optimization initiative is successful in the long run, you need to monitor your progress, verify your savings, and react rapidly to abnormalities.
Feel free to contact E-SPIN for your energy and utilities industry digital transformation solution, from consultancy, blueprint, architect to deliver end to end unified IT infrastructure monitoring, system security and protection.
