Operational Adjustments: The Quick and Easy Guide to Energy Efficiency
When it comes to improving your energy efficiency, you have two options: capital investment and operational adjustments.
Although capital investments often come with proven returns, they typically require a significant financial outlay that more often than not are not taken into account on annual budgets.
On the other hand, operational adjustments can provide significant savings via low- or no-cost changes to existing operations. And that’s what we will look at here.
Through data analytics and energy intelligence, low or no-cost energy efficiency matters can be implemented quickly and easily and provide noticeable and traceable improvements. These measures are:
Peak Demand Management: You can’t determine peak demand using the monthly utility bill but with hourly interval data, peak demand profiles are easily discerned. Facilities managers can utilize an analytics platform to ensure critical peak demand loads do not coincide with discretionary loads that can be shifted to off-peak periods.
Start-Up Synchronization: Peak demand can spike when multiple loads are turned on at the same time. By synchronizing the start up of equipment in a staged manner, a spike in demand and the subsequent energy charge can be avoided.
Weekend Consumption: Many commercial and industrial facilities have regular shutdown periods (weekends, off shift periods, scheduled maintenance windows) that should result in substantial reductions in energy consumption. A data and analytics platform provides the energy intelligence required to determine if optimal savings are being achieved, and if not there’s something wrong.
Weeknight Set Points: Analysis of off-shift periods is another area where savings are often achieved. For instance, shallow drops in energy demand during off-shift periods might indicate only a few pieces of equipment shutting down. Having access to historical demand data to create a relative performance benchmark allows the comparison of energy use over time to see how drift and variance might be wasting energy.
These measures will result in significant cost savings, and a data analytics platform will identify the anomalies and variance that provide evidence of failures before money is wasted. Business owners can make immediate improvements just by being aware of the areas to watch, and then analytics can provide the ongoing intelligence to maximize that efficiency.