We talk to many system integrators, working in many industries, and one of the most popular IoT use cases we get asked about is smart energy management.
It’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to get IoT into an organization and provide value immediately. That’s because the cost savings can be immediate and quite large, definitely high enough to return a positive ROI on your IoT investment.
McKinsey analyzed the value of energy management from increased efficiency and decreased malfunctions. They estimated:
- Intelligent energy management systems can reduce energy use in offices by 20 percent, making your energy company a lot more attractive. Overall, in the office space, IoT can produce a potential economic impact of $11.7 billion to $20.5 billion per year in 2025.
- In the factory setting, firms could save 10 to 20 percent on energy by switching to your IoT-enabled energy management.
- Applications in smart cities could have an impact of $33 billion to $64 billion per year globally in 2025.
How do you track and manage the energy consumption?
Add a simple sensor to monitor and manage the electricity consumption of anything that consumes electricity in an organization.
- Lighting – Coordinate with motion sensors to keep lights off automatically when not in use. You can also get real-time alerts when light bulbs go out.
- HVAC – Monitor and adjust room temperatures remotely and independently of other room temperatures. Coordinate with real-time weather to provide the perfect “just right” conditions and withmotion sensors to turn off automatically when not in use.
- Refrigeration – Monitor refrigerators continuously. Create alerts when power consumption is abnormally high, the door may have been left open or there may be a mechanical issue you wish to examine.
- Office devices – ranging from PCs and servers to lab equipment, monitoring these devices is usually a low priority, but there is a large potential for savings across a large office building or company with many employees.
- Industrial – monitoring motors, steam systems, boilers and other heavy energy consumers can present an opportunity for energy savings through more efficient processes and heat recycling.
- Smart meters – Can detect loss of electricity in distribution, as part of a smart building or smart city initiative.
A successful smart energy project always starts with monitoring. Once you know what your energy consumption problems are, you can take steps to reduce that consumption with data at hand that can make sure your investment in change will pay off through the reduction in your energy bill.
We’ve also seen successful implementations start small and scale once ROI is proven. So start with refrigeration in one outlet of a fast food chain, expand once you’ve discovered that you can reduce refrigeration energy consumption to more than justify the cost of the sensors and platform.
If you select Axonize for your smart energy project, you can expand it into additional monitoring, cost savings or revenue generating applications for the same customer. The Axonize IoT platform works with any sensor or protocol. We also allow you to easily expand or combine IoT applications, so IoT project growth is scaled to meet the customer’s business goals at all times.