A Green Future with Smart Energy Management

Energy management is crucial to conserve ecosystems and natural resources for enhancing energy efficiency, optimizing energy usage, and leveraging renewable resources for energy generation. This helps reduce energy consumption, mitigate wastage and losses, and improve overall carbon footprint resulting in improved operation and maintenance. 

In order to achieve energy management, it is crucial for engineering operations and facility management teams to identify its main objective, which can be either reducing cost of energy or minimizing environmental impact while ensuring production and quality. However, reducing overall operational cost requires effective utilization of energy across infrastructure systems for large and distributed footprints.

Figure 1: Energy management challenges and opportunities

Taking a 7-step approach to energy management

Effective energy management means getting a holistic view of energy consumption across procurement, usage, operations, and monitoring. Also, energy performance management is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process for improvement which requires establishing effective energy management practices and processes to guide the energy management program based on the type of business, size and industry (see Figure 2). The 7-step energy management approach includes:

Figure 2: Energy management approach

• Committing to continuous improvement

Build a dedicated energy team, institute an energy policy, and implement steps for energy efficiency based on regular assessment of energy performance.

• Assessing infrastructure performance

Conduct technical assessments and audits for existing infrastructure through data gathering, analysis and evaluation. This helps establish the baseline matrix, benchmark past performance and conduct comparison between facilities, industry average and best practices for measuring future results of efficiency.  This also helps conduct periodic evaluation of energy usage for all major facilities and functions in the organizations.

• Setting goals  

Set performance goals to drive energy management activities and promote continuous improvement. For intended results, develop effective strategies for financial gains.

• Creating an action plan

Develop a roadmap to improve energy performance with a detailed action plan to ensure a systematic process to implement energy performance measures. However, it is crucial to regularly update the action plan and reflect on recent achievements, changes in performance and shifting priorities. This requires defining technical steps, targets, and determining roles and resources.

• Implementing an action plan

Implement a phase-wise plan to cater to different measurement levels within the overall energy ecosystem. This is crucial to continuously assess the action plan to monitor KPIs and make modifications for achieving larger set goals based on the awareness, commitment, and capability of the people. This requires creating a communication plan for key audience, raising awareness in the organization, building capacity, and tracking and monitoring progress regularly.

• Evaluating progress

Evaluate progress by reviewing energy usage data and compare activities of the action plan to your performance goals. This helps create new action plans, identify best practices and set new performance goals. This in turn helps measure the effectiveness of projects and programs implemented, make informed decisions about future energy projects, reward individuals and teams for accomplishments. In addition, this helps document additional savings opportunities as well as non-quantifiable benefits that can leveraged for future initiatives.

• Recognizing achievements

Provide and seek recognition for energy management achievements for sustaining momentum and supporting the energy management program. This helps validate importance of the energy management program for internal and external stakeholders.

Smart energy management for real time tracking and energy monitoring

Organizations can collect real time energy consumption data by connecting equipment through SDKs and industrial protocols over the network or by adding smart sensors that can collect data and share it over the IoT network with centralized IoT application and tools (see Figure 3). IoT based solutions can help organizations not only connect various data points through smart connected things but also collect and analyze real time energy consumption data by constantly monitoring equipment.  This is crucial to improve maintenance and downtimes.

At the same time, smart energy management solutions can help understand real-time status of electrical equipment based on availability of data points for humidity, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. This helps optimize the energy usage.

*ECM – Energy Conservation Measures, ECC – Energy Command Center

Figure 3: Energy management solution architecture

Additionally, a smart energy management solution can also provide early warning about potential faults that may degrade the overall performance of the assets resulting in increased energy consumption (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Tracking and analysis with smart energy management solution

Energy consumption optimization through actionable intelligence

By designing and implementing an energy management plan and system, organizations can monitor load consuming elements and provide actionable intelligence to optimize site energy consumption. This also helps get access to key data including energy data, fuel data and temperature data for enabling potential savings of the O&M and OpEx.

An enterprise level view of the total energy consumption across the network, as well as proactive monitoring, availability management and performance reporting of the energy asset helps create well defined Energy Performance Index for all relevant stakeholders. The end result: increased visibility into energy usage due to timely availability of data leads to improved asset lifecycle, winning CSR strategy, and reduced carbon footprint.

If you are interested in learning how Wipro is helping our clients achieve transformed energy management system, connect with us.

Pradeepsingh Bhangu

Senior Consultant - Cloud & Infrastructure Services, Wipro

Pradeep has extensive experience in data centers and IoT solutions, with a focus on energy monitoring and management solutions. His specializations include consultancy, project management, audit & benchmarking, and operations & maintenance. Pradeep has worked with various customers around the globe, delivering innovative and cutting-edge solutions.