This article explains what energy management is and why it is important. It’s aimed at anyone who wants to know more about energy management or achieve energy savings within their company while simultaneously decreasing their carbon footprint.
What Is Energy Management?
Energy management can be broadly defined as the proactive, organized and systematic management of energy use. Amid this pandemic companies across all countries and sectors are turning to energy management reduce their operating costs. Utilities usually are the 3rd biggest operating cost, therefore any increase in efficiency can drastically decrease your spendings.
Ways of increasing efficiency differ by the sector, but the core principles stay the same.
- Monitoring
- Identifying opportunities
- Taking action
- Tracking progress
Why Should You Manage Your Energy?
2019 International Electricity Outlook (IEO 2019) by the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that world energy consumption will double from 2020 to 2050. With such demand and decreased supply of fossil fuels, energy costs are set to rise drastically.
Energy management tools such as Enectiva help you measure where you can lower your consumption the most, and help you track your progress. Taking action based on our analysis helps you decrease your carbon footprint while lowering your energy bills.
How Does It Work?
As I already mentioned earlier there are 4 steps in proper energy management, now we will look into them in more detail.
1. Monitoring
The more data you can collect, the better results and their accuracy you get.
There are multiple ways of collecting data such as importing them from monthly utility bill, manual collection or automatic uploads from smart meters.
Utility bill is a good starting point and gives you a general idea of how much energy you’re consuming, but won’t provide you with more detailed information such as areas and times of the highest consumption.
Manual meter checks give you little more data (depending on how often you collect the data) but are very time consuming and allow room for human error.
Smart metering allows you to access the most recent data from anywhere with a wifi connection. They transmit data to energy management software where it is analysed and stored.
2. Identifying opportunities
Once you start collecting and analysing energy data, you will notice interesting patterns it may be an increase in consumption caused by cold weather.
Use of graphs and analytics helps you to identify these patterns more easily. Energy management softwares can help you with this by automatically converting relevant data into visuals and graphs.
3. Taking action
Identifying opportunities for savings is important, but if you don’t take action it all comes to waste.
It is important to delegate someone responsible for energy management to build a support for action. Once it’s clear who’s responsibility this is, things tend to improve much quicker.
First you can fix issues that waste the most energy and then over time you can get into more complex efficiency improvements.
4. Tracking progress
In order for for your energy management to be successful it’s important to track your progress. New problems might occur or you may notice some problems keep coming back.
Tracking improvements also helps justifying investment into energy management to your investors or owners.
Conclusion
With the right tools and step-by-step plan energy management is an easy to do thing that can save you significant amount on operational costs. By following these 4 steps you can cut down on energy expenditures and make your office a better place.
Enectiva is an advanced energy management software, that helps customers like you save up to 60% on energy spendings. Our team is constantly improving our services and software we provide. For any additional information please don’t hesitate to contact us.