Starting your journey towards a zero-carbon enterprise can be an arduous task. In addition to balancing economic expectations, the building owners and managers we work with, often need to overcome information barriers. Common questions we come across include:
-
Which initiatives can provide the highest energy savings to create a first success case?
-
Which technologies are available in the market and can be easily integrated with my facilities without causing disruption?
-
What if the technology does not deliver the promised savings?
-
Where can I get the necessary technical assistance while keeping costs to a minimum?
These questions usually emerge from a key challenge that enterprises still face today: lack of a modern energy management system that can provide real-time, data-driven insights for energy-related decisions. These challenges can be addressed through emerging digital technologies that now provide an easy way for building managers to simultaneously get a high-level understanding and granular details on their energy patterns. This, in turn, makes it easier to establish and achieve building-specific energy efficiency roadmaps.
At Athena Cleantech, we have created a project framework that leverages digital technologies for a holistic approach to energy efficiency. The journey towards a zero-carbon facility typically starts with smart metering solutions that empower building owners to gain a circuit-level view of their electricity consumption. Meter data is uploaded to our cloud platform for remote monitoring and analysis for real-time energy insights.
1 years’ worth of data from smart meters is then combined with building details and other data sets, such as weather, GIS, and occupancy, to create digital twins of our partners’ buildings. Machine learning algorithms conduct virtual energy audits on these digital replicas to benchmark consumption and efficiency. The audits can be conducted remotely in a matter of weeks to produce accurate energy conservation measures (ECMs) that can be segmented and simulated to asses ROI, capital costs, and other parameters important to the facility manager.
Once the ECMs have been simulated and prioritized, facility managers can then choose from a range of technologies from our product portfolio to implement the ECMs. We provide a diverse set of solutions from smart energy-efficient LED lighting and chiller optimization technologies to energy controllers for inductive motors. Athena’s engineers then work with the facility managers to oversee technology installation and conduct regular measurement and verification (M&V) checks to validate energy savings.
Our experience serving clients from various industries in over 20 countries has taught us that a long-term energy efficiency strategy must begin with breaking the information barriers that still exist in today’s building management systems. Digital technologies, when coupled with changing behaviour patterns, provide the opportunity to implement a holistic energy efficiency roadmap that can prioritize low hanging fruits and sets a successful precedent for future projects.
How is your enterprise breaking information barriers for energy efficiency?
