Today we’ll discuss the basic functionality of one of the markets best energy monitoring system Energy Log. We’ll use the case of a chain of supermarkets to show you the main functionality of the Energy Log, focusing on three supermarkets one in Delhi one in Mumbai and one in Bangalore. The Energy Log shows you to the dashboard login which brings you right to this screen. Which gives you a quick overview of your facilities in real-time. Dashboard indicators are fully configurable widgets. Widgets present information in a way that’s clear and easy to understand. When we detect an inefficiency, we can go to the analysis, reporting or alerts areas to view the facility in more detail. The Energy Log navigation functionality which is based on hierarchies and filters makes it extremely easy to locate exactly the information we need to know.
Customized Dashboard
We will compare the performance of three supermarkets in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore and monitor their general consumption. We will view their utility meter and its consumption of HVAC refrigeration and lighting systems. We can create an unlimited number of dashboards for our analysis of the three supermarkets. We’ve created a different dashboard for each of our user profiles energy manager, finance director, and maintenance staff users. They can set up their own dashboards and share them with other users which saves time and keeps teams in the loop.
Real-Time Analysis
The analysis area is where we access all our data so we can understand consumption patterns in our facility or group of facilities. Energy Log analysis tools help you to easily visualize and understand consumption cost evolution and billing. For example, if we want to view the real-time consumption of our Delhi store we just go into the consumption tools and select all the meters installed, we see is in real-time. It will show us the hourly consumption for the past week. We see exactly what time lighting and HVAC systems are switched on and off. How much energy they are consuming? We can see here that refrigeration levels are constant, but they should be changing according to outside temperature. We can also view the evolution of energy consumption for each individual meter from week to week if we select a date range and choose to view weekly consumption.
Global-View and Excel data Downloads
Energy Log displays an overview of the consumption trends of facilities, so we can identify patterns of all data and graphics which can be exported to excel for future reference or graphical reports. We can also have a global view where we can compare our three supermarkets. We will select fiscal meters and do an hourly comparison. We can see the activity level by hour is similar in the three stores but that there are notable differences among consumption levels. It appears that the Mumbai store consumes the least followed by Bangalore and then the Delhi store. Delhi has the highest level of consumption.
Energy Performance Indicators
But when we go into more detail by viewing the daily evolution over the course of a year. We can see that the variations, we have identified are visible throughout the year. This might be the result of variations in surface area, weather variables, consumer volume or other factors because there are so many things that might affect inconsistencies. We need a fast and intuitive tool that allows us to easily view energy use in the context of a range of variables. So, we can pinpoint the exact causes this is where ratios are especially useful. For example, when we factor in the surface area of the stores, we see that the Mumbai supermarket which originally ranked first for energy efficiency falls to second place and the Bangalore store comes in first. We can filter our original results by entering a wide range of ratios like degree days, average temperatures, ticket occupancy levels, average sales or anything else that might be useful to understand exactly what is affecting consumption.
Let’s repeat the analysis but this time focusing on the lighting systems, first we’ll select three lighting meters and compare their yearly consumption. When we control our results for surface area we see that from the beginning of the year up until August, the Delhi store averaged to consumption of 0.6 kWh/sq ft which is higher than that of Mumbai at 0.7 kWh/sq ft and much higher than the Bangalore stores consumption which is only 0.2 kWh/sqft. So we know right away that we have a problem of excess lighting in the Delhi and Mumbai locations we can look more closely to see that lighting levels are in fact double. There should be values of more than 2,000 Lux are showing up when the established baseline for a retail space is closer to 750 Lux. Analysing more deeply we can see that shutting off one out of every two fluorescent lights on July 7th in the Delhi store and on August 8th in Mumbai effectively reduce the kWh/sqft ratio and brought down the lighting consumption of the three stores to similar levels.
Put Comment on Analysis Sheets
The Energy Log comments feature allows us to easily log these changes and their energy-saving results, so we can better track and manage projects. We can just click over add Comment and select the date on which the improvement was implemented and add a title and description to identify the improvement. We then select the kind of comment the location where the improvement was implemented where we indicate Delhi and we publish our comment. Once published our comment is visible in the graphic in the form of an icon. When we hover the mouse over the icon the title of the improvement appears.
Monitoring and verification of Energy Saving Achieved
As we have implemented our lighting efficiency improvements, we can look at how they translate to savings. Let us compare for different time periods by day month or year which helps to see the evolution of our consumption over time. We select the Delhi store and its lighting node and then select a before and after the efficient implementation and we evaluate our results. A graphic display’s two colored curves representing weekly consumption, the blue represents before and the green represents after in the chart below the graph.
We can clearly see reduction in lighting consumption, our weekly lighting consumption per week has dropped by nearly 30 %. It’s even more interesting to see how these saving translates to the financial savings. For this we simply go to the cost screen where we can see in real time exactly how much money we are spending according to the tariff plan of the DISCOM. If we look at the cost of lighting at the Delhi location, we see a cost of over three thousand dollars a month. Most of the consumption comes from the peak level which corresponds to the contracted tariff. We select lighting choose a weekly view and look at the levels one week before the implementation of the improvement. We can view the hourly consumption for the selected week. We see that there is hardly any passive consumption and see penalties for peak hours. Energy Log quickly calculates the weekly lighting consumption based on these factors and comes up with a weekly cost. If we view consumption in dollars after the implementation, we see that our weekly cost represents a yearly savings of $15,000.
Energy Log offers a multitude of tools that help us to easily analyze and detect potential in-efficiencies. We can use its intuitive tools to measure passive reactive or other kinds of consumption or even customize a screen with variables.
Reports
Reports area is where we find all our reports and view those generated during a particular project. You can use a public template or use the reports assistant to customize a report. We just need to select a template and activate it. We can automate a report to be generated and sent to our inbox every Monday or every 1st of the month. Energy Log displays a history of all reports filterable by template type and configuration. We can generate simple weekly reports or more advanced monthly reports. We can create reports that simulate electric utility invoices, so we can compare our invoices with those of the DISCOM. The analysis of the HVAC system in detail reports allows us to track different indicators throughout the project lifecycle and deliver them in an easy-to-understand format to the energy manager, finance director or the end customer.
Alerts
Another valuable feature of the Energy Log is the alerts. Area alerts are extremely simple to configure and let us put the system to work for us by configuring alerts and monitor variables. This feature alert intimates us the instant there is an inconsistency in the system, means we can react immediately to malfunctioning systems and failures and greatly reduce down-times. Energy Log has a range of pre-configured alerts that are designed to catch common potential problems such as excesses or reactive penalties which show us the exact cost of a penalty as soon as it is incurred. The alerts areas organized by locations by our custom configuration which makes it easy to access and view all alerts. We can also configure alerts to be sent by email or SMS to anyone registered in the platform. This should give you a good sense of the most basic of Energy Log extensive functionality. You have seen its ability to improve all aspects of energy management from analysing the consumption of an individual facility to doing comparative analysis. To detecting potential savings and determining the monetary value of improvements. It gives you full visibility of your facilities and systems by using reporting and alerts.