Businesses must constantly strive to improve processes and operations to become more efficient and reduce energy waste and this must be implemented across the entire operation.
But what do we mean by energy conservation and energy efficiency? And how can we create interwoven strategies that align with both business and sustainability agendas?
How Do We Maximise Energy Conservation Efforts?
Energy conservation is driven by behaviour. It’s an effort to use less energy, for example switching off the lights when leaving a room or turning off appliances whilst they are not in use. Aside from the sustainable benefits, businesses can gain greater control over their energy bills.
To conserve energy, a business needs an accurate understanding of how much energy they’re currently consuming. Hark’s Energy Monitoring tool was built for exactly that. Our platform can provide detailed insights on how much energy is being consumed, at what time and on what asset, across an entire estate of buildings, nationwide.
The Ins and Outs…
We implement cutting-edge IoT sensors to legacy assets; data from the sensors is transmitted to The Hark Platform which then displays real-time data on various factors from consumption and light levels to heat and humidity from potentially millions of data points. Our tools utilise AI and machine learning to deliver insight and decipher patterns such as peak demand analysis and asset health.
To conserve energy, the platform not only understands asset consumption, but it goes one step further with asset control and automated power downs or reduction in operation levels to conserve energy. For example, if a building’s lighting grid is a power drawing nightmare, our platform can measure the level of ambient external light and make corrective measures to lower inside light levels. This is not only a short term but a long term financially beneficial solution.
Energy can also be conserved by optimising the relationship between onsite energy production such as thermal, a technology which stocks thermal energy by heating or cooling storage mediums, with onsite energy storage facilities. The Hark Platform can help to control this type of asset and conserve energy at the best possible point and even take buildings and assets off-grid at optimum timeframes, avoiding the peak energy billing periods.
How to Monetise Eco-Friendliness
Automatically storing energy and conserving energy will also have financial benefits. Storing additional energy allows a business to go off-grid rather than being solely reliant on the National Grid; excess energy can even be sold back to the grid, creating a new revenue stream!
Utilising consumption data enables businesses to choose when it is the best time to go off-grid. For example, during the triad periods, the current peak times of electricity demands are between 4.30 pm – 6.30 pm making this time frame the most expensive in the usage of electricity, and when you consider the consumption levels of a manufacturing site, this might be a good time for some downtime.
Establishing Great Energy Efficiency in Facilities
Energy efficiency means using less energy to perform the same functions and therefore eliminating energy waste. This is especially important in meeting government carbon reduction goals. Energy efficiency is intrinsically connected to substantiality, which impacts the business’ social and economic dimensions.
When considering economic benefits, businesses can cut their costs by 10% – 20% by simple changes such as minimising lighting or switching to energy-efficient lightbulbs which use 25-35% less energy. Commercial buildings are especially known for their inefficiencies, this is due to the large spaces that require a lot of energy to heat, and the amount of energy used for lighting.
In facilities management, efficiencies can be established by connecting sensors to power-hungry assets to monitor their health. This works by allowing the devices to communicate their energy draw with a central platform in real-time, where data is analysed. Hark’s purpose-built machine learning algorithms help provide insight and analysis over individual assets’ efficiency and identify anomalies over time for predictive maintenance schedules to be created.
Next generation technologies are being implemented in both the conservation of energy and in the ongoing efficiencies of how energy is being used in business-critical assets. A sustainable future can be achieved for any business, no matter their energy draw. The secret lies in the development of a holistic, interoperable system that drives down energy waste through super-efficient smart systems that promotes systemic behavioural changes to conserve energy at all costs.
If you would like to know just how much you could be saving financially and environmentally, then get in touch today!
