Energy management services nowadays use software to keep things accurate and simple. If you want to implement your energy management to meet your sustainability and energy efficiency goals, it would make a lot of sense to do a prior analysis of the current situation of your facilities and buildings. Read on as we analyze how to implement a management system in your business to avoid surprises during the process.
Know why you want to implement an energy management system
The most obvious answer is to reduce costs and save energy. This is usually the main objective for decision-makers when they implement an energy management and monitoring system in their business. But with an EMS, you can achieve more things than that.
Energy efficiency experts try to achieve more things than just energy saving. They have a more long-term and sustainable vision of what they want to achieve. Other goals they may have are: reducing their carbon footprint, digitizing the operational processes of energy, achieving climate neutrality, and providing customers with services that add value.
It is, therefore, important to know the purpose of implementing energy management in your company. This method of defining objectives can be applied to different projects but sometimes we do not know how to do it. It is very simple. When it comes to defining your goals, you should check each of them and ensure they are specific, achievable, measurable, time-bound and realistic.
Depending on the objectives that you wish to achieve in implementing your business EMS, you need to check if the chosen energy management system fulfills your needed requirements.
Are there digital meters or sub-metering systems in your building?
It is very important to review and analyze the equipment you already have in your organization. At this point, you need to analyze whether your building already has energy sub-metering systems. These are also known as digital meters. It is very important to keep this in mind.
When you have sub-metering, it allows the EMS to know the consumption profile of your buildings and installations, as well as allowing it to make predictions of future energy consumption.
On the other hand, the data sent by submitters to your BMS will provide timely information for real-time analysis of energy usage. This allows you to detect any problems and correct them before they become costly. Also, being able to do a real-time analysis with your BMS allows you to identify any anomalies such as the levels of energy consumption other than poor power factor, average values and more.
If digital meters have not been installed or you would need to have new ones installed then you should consider hardware neutrality or a closed system.
Do your buildings have BAS or BMS already installed?
Building management systems (BMS) also known as BAS manage your HVAC system. Energy management services providers or facility managers use these terms interchangeably but they are different. BAS building can manage the consumption of energy in a building alone but using a system that hasn’t been developed for this role will result in missed opportunities for reducing energy consumption and saving costs.