Adopting Digital Transformation to Drive Smart & Effective Energy Optimization

Dear Energy Consumers,

I would like to share my thoughts on why you should adopt a strategic digital transformation to embark on a journey of continuous and deeper energy optimization.

How is Electrical Energy being Managed by the Infrastructure Owners

Electrical energy management includes a strategic investment of money and operational efforts to continuously optimize consumption, reduce electrical downtimes, manage power quality and reduce electricity bills. Energy is a very important aspect as it forms a significant part of your operational costs. And all the infrastructure owners are running different methods to manage the cost and power quality. The infrastructure can be either an industrial factory or commercial real estate. One of the key methods is getting consultancy from third-party auditors. However, the internal departments are also tasked as energy optimization requires routine activities. Optimizing energy consumption for any infrastructure would require regular measurements to understand the consumption at different levels like mains, distribution, and equipment. Small consumers would typically rely on electricity bills as a means to their measurement. And heavy consumers would prefer to track at all the levels to drive energy efficiency. Based on the analysis of these measurements, one can only tell which area requires more focus. Hence, the implementation of energy meters has become a necessity to drive optimization.

Time to Move-on from Manual Data Collection

Most of the infrastructure owners are relying on manual data collection from the implemented energy meters and further performing manual analysis to identify the areas of improvement. This method is very questionable and cumbersome at the same time. Questionable because it involves human intervention leading to error-prone data. One can gather data from a particular energy meter once or twice a day. These problems affect the authenticity of the analysis and put the analyst in a constant dilemma. Also, there are instantaneous data like the voltage, power factor, power, harmonics that require continuous attention in order to attend to electrical anomalies that can cause expensive equipment damage or production loss due to downtime. And cumbersome because manual data collection is not a job! You will be putting your resource’s valuable time into collecting the data that can be used in other activities that are far more productive for your company.

Digitization of Energy Meters

Adoption of data acquisition and monitoring software that enables the operators to collect data digitally and continuously has become a logical next step to mitigate the issues of manual methods. Today, all the multifunction energy meters come with Modbus communication to facilitate digital data acquisition. The software would definitely solve a big chunk of the problem by automating the manual task. And hence most of the customers are happy with basic data collection software. But, far more optimization potential lies in insight generation capabilities of the software which are overlooked due to inertia towards recurring pricing and adopting new technologies like cloud and AI. The inertia is due to a lack of technology experience and realization of the outcome.

Digital Strategy for Energy Management

Digital strategy is essential for all the enterprises that are striving to become energy efficient and achieve ISO 50001 standard. The energy management software will play a key role in reaching your energy goal. Without measuring, you cannot save! But, if you are planning to connect 200 energy meters and each meter sending you 30–40 parameters, you cannot monitor & analyze all of them at all the time. Hence, it is necessary to have an automated reporting & alerting system along with digital data recording. Reporting and alerting features should continuously provide you insights about actionable events and insights that can help you to respond. And once your team adopts and starts responding, your digital dream is here! However, it is not necessary that the software may give you all the insights at the start. There may be some elements missing. This is where you have to work with your software provider to jointly solve the problem. This way you can make the system more and more mature and appropriate for your infrastructure. Moving further, you should be able to digitize your breakers, transformers, expand to your other factories, bring experts to get deeper insights from the data when the need comes.

So, the selection of products and vendors is very crucial for success and strong ROI. If your criteria are only pricing, then you will end up with relatively lesser optimization and lose a lot more money there! And energy management is a journey and your vendor is your partner. To discuss more, you can reach me at parth@faclon.com.