What's Driving Energy Projects Today?
Businesses of all types and sizes – and across geographies and industries – today face three major challenges with regard to energy:
- Cost
- Security of supply
- Emission reduction
In a bid to manage these risks, utility engineers, energy management professionals and facility managers are demanding rich energy data to understand consumption patterns and work toward an efficient, reliable and cost-effective supply of power.
These goals can only be achieved with the help of a complete energy measurement, benchmarking and analysis plan.
An Energy Plan
What needs to be done is to take back control – in other words, to monitor, measure and analyse each operation, and understand the best way that it can be optimised for energy consumption. With the help of the right, intelligent technology, it’s possible to accomplish this – and turn the fixed, relentless challenges of energy management into measurable, manageable variables in the long term.
There’s no fixed ‘normal’
Sustainable and ROI-driven energy optimisation varies across organisations. And with disruptive new technologies, business models, and energy optimisation goals cropping up at an alarming pace everywhere. You need a decarbonisation partner who can help you navigate the new energy landscape, go the distance with you, and most importantly, prepare you for what’s coming next.
4 Steps to Ensure Your Energy Projects are Creating ROI
Step 1: Define the business problem
Before you jump headfirst into energy projects, you first need to ask the right questions. Coolplanet helps you ask the right questions to arrive at the perfect business solution for your context. Our seasoned experts come with a wealth of industry experience, and walk you through the process of identifying the right questions to ask to achieve the maximum business results.
Our precise questions break down business complexities into common business language – for instance, given an HVAC, its performance data, and its operational and maintenance records, one of our first questions would be, ‘When does the HVAC not need to be running at full power?’ or ‘When should its next maintenance be scheduled so that it has the minimum impact on output?’
Our goal is to establish the relationships between routine, seemingly harmless business concepts/ incidents/ issues, and overall business goals. In other words, we look to answer questions and identify trigger points that can help you choose the right energy projects to drive reliability, productivity, profitability, and competitiveness.
Step 2: Freeze the KPIs
Our energy management solutions allow you to consolidate, visualise, track and control your smart systems across multiple sites – from manufacturing plants to buildings to distribution warehouses. For instance, these days, many companies have to deal with different HVAC systems supplied by multiple vendors across site locations in an effort to manage energy spend.
A client’s goal in this case could be adopting a unified approach to smart building management across these numerous sites – and a solution, in this case, could be automating HVAC and light controls based on ambient conditions (read our article about commercial LED lighting ).
Once a client has identified the desired goals, it becomes easier to determine which metrics need to be tracked and measured – instead of analysing everything and burdening the system with data that isn’t even relevant.
Step 3: Identify baselines and business goals
The next step is to gain insights into asset performance via real-time monitoring and analysis. You need to be able to gather detailed data on energy consumption and savings for analysis at asset, process, operation and site levels.
As you monitor and compare your KPIs across sites, you will be able to identify which of your sites are performing the best, and which ones are in need of help to perform better.
Step 4: Unleash the power of data-driven decision-making
Once the data has been processed to establish baselines, you can benefit from real-time analysis of asset performance and intelligent triggering of alarms – ones that matter, and you shouldn’t ignore.
However, even these alarms should be prioritised, so that you’re clear about which ones require immediate, urgent attention, and which ones can wait till later.
CoolPlanet’s AI-based algorithms allow your subject matter experts to effortlessly build any number of models at scale. Models that have been built for one use case may be further built upon and re-used for other use cases.
These alerts also help you take action at just the right time to not only save energy but also maximise asset life. In other words, you don’t just spend less on energy, you also save equipment maintenance and replacement costs.
Our masterclass about engineering projects for decarbonisation will provide you with food for thought about the many energy projects businesses could choose to undertake. By working closely with your decarbonisation partner, choosing the best ones for you becomes a whole lot easier.
How Does CoolPlanet Help Businesses With Energy Projects?
At CoolPlanet, we future-proof our clients. We work with our clients to understand their unique energy efficiency and cost-saving goals (across sites if applicable) and come up with systems customised to achieve your goals.
The result? Transformed, intelligent spaces that are highly productive as well as efficient.
Our software platform, CoolPlanetOS , leverages the power of data and unparalleled algorithms to monitor assets and offer recommendations in real time so that you can make necessary changes on the run – with minimal disruptions – and benefit from continued productivity and increasing efficiency.
Through the Net Zero Glidepath feature, CoolPlanetOS highlights the biggest cost and emission-cutting energy projects available to our client and facilitates a collaborative space from which to execute those energy projects.
