If you've designed and constructed a building to be energy efficient, real-time energy management can help you achieve your energy goals. Real-time energy management uses a technology-based neural network to monitor components within your energy systems. It can identify energy use trends and mitigate problems before they become costly to repair.
How Does Real-Time Energy Management Impact Your Business?
Resenal-time energy management solutions allow you to monitor your energy usage before you end up with a surprise on your bill. With energy management, you can view power output and analyze building energy performance, identifying optimization opportunities that can lead to cost savings and improved efficiency.
Improving energy efficiency within your buildings helps lower the carbon footprint by reducing usage. Since 2015, energy-efficient building standards have helped power companies reduce usage by 20%. Real-time energy management is a vital part of our clean energy future. But it also offers benefits to your business.
Improves Energy Performance
Before real-time energy management solutions, you had to rely on utility bills and other metrics to determine your building energy performance. And without concrete metrics, there was no way to know exactly what to fix to cut costs.
Real-time energy management gives you access to important data you can use to monitor your current and historical performance and identify potential faults in the system. You can use the data to track areas of your building that are less efficient than others and devise strategies to reduce your energy demand and power output. You could then utilize energy innovations that make better use of renewable resources.
Decreases Energy Usage and Costs
Once you've used your data to identify energy efficiencies and deficiencies within your building, you can optimize energy usage. For example, write up guidelines for how building staff can decrease energy usage. Replace old light bulbs and appliances with energy-efficient models.
Identifying how and where you're using energy lets you manage your usage, allowing you to save money. When the building staff isn't using as much energy, the utility costs decrease. You can use these savings to upgrade your energy system or allocate the money to other areas of your business.
Provides Insight Into Energy and Air Quality Metrics
Monitoring your consumption of energy isn't the only benefit of a real-time energy management system. It also lets you monitor the air quality to improve overall building health. With traditional management methods, you might be tempted to save energy by adjusting ventilation. But doing so could result in poor air quality.
Real-time energy management monitors the air quality, so you can optimize energy usage without potentially causing a buildup of hazardous particulate materials.
What Are Key Energy Benchmarking Measures?
When using your real-time energy management to boost energy innovation and improve your performance, you should record key benchmarks to learn how your performance changes over time. Track these metrics to meet your energy efficiency goals.
Energy Efficiency
Whether you've moved into an energy-efficient building or are interested in improving the performance of an old building, you need a baseline to measure how well the building uses energy. The energy use index is a common metric for determining a building's efficiency. It refers to the energy consumption per conditioned floor area.
A real-time energy management platform will display this information for you, so you don't have to make your own calculations. With this system in place for fault detection, you don't have to run individual tests like blower door testing and other measurements to see where energy may be leaking within your building.
Energy Consumption
This metric will vary based on location, weather conditions, the time of year, and other factors. In most areas in the United States, people may use lights for longer periods during the winter when it gets dark earlier. But their energy consumption might increase in the summer because of air conditioning use.
Energy consumption metrics let you examine your energy assets and demand over time. You may notice that your energy consumption skyrockets in the summer because you have to run the air conditioning all the time. If your building was made to take advantage of natural light, the sun's heat might be causing your air conditioner to kick on more often. In this case, you could install shades to reduce the amount of solar heating within the building.
Operational Inefficiencies
Overconsumption of energy could be costing you money, but real-time energy management lets you identify operational inefficiencies when they arise. Instead of waiting for a month to see a significantly increased utility bill, you can see inefficiencies in time to stop them.
Use the data to look for areas of your building in which energy consumption is higher than others. Then you can check for leaks or determine if sensors and other components of your system aren't working.
You'll save money if your energy management team can identify and fix operational inefficiencies earlier. You can make repairs before they cause whole system failures or result in months of rising utility costs.
Identifying operational inefficiencies earlier can also help you make your tenants healthier. For example, you may notice your ventilation system isn't working correctly, resulting in a buildup of indoor air pollutants. Fixing this problem when it arises keeps your tenants from breathing in hazardous pollutants.
Master Energy Savings With Efficient Energy Management
If you're ready to automate your energy system, Attune has an IoT-based solution for you. Our real-time energy management platform can be retrofitted to buildings with outdated or no automation.
Once installed, the Attune system sends information into a cloud, giving you access to real-time insights about your building. Use it to reduce energy consumption, save money, and contribute to the clean energy revolution.
Contact us to learn more.