Brin Sheridan, Chief Operating Officer at Utilitywise PLC, one of the UK’s largest and leading independent utility cost management companies; comments on how modern day intelligent energy bureaus can reduce energy consumption of HVAC systems.
Historically standard bureaus would review utilities metering data to assess and identify inefficiencies in building and equipment performance and consumption. This data analysis allows the bureau team to deliver insights, allowing businesses to make changes to the way in which they operate or manage their buildings/equipment with the aim of reducing utilities costs and consumption.
This facility identifies and manages inefficiencies such as out of hour’s consumption, high base loads or peaks in consumption. UK businesses are becoming more aware of the ability to map and interpret utilities metering data against building and equipment performance to identify inefficiencies in consumption and wasted costs.
Today’s intelligent energy bureau provides all this and much more. Inefficiencies in equipment and building performance can be identified and delivered as actionable insights to the maintenance teams. The Intelligent bureau, like the one from Utilitywise, brings utilities market intelligence as well as experience around procurement contracts. This additional service enables businesses to reap further savings not only from the improved performance of their buildings but also from their utility bills.
At Utilitywise, we embrace the opportunities for our clients in delivering this intelligent bureau. We believe bureaus that bring together maintenance efficiencies, consumption monitoring, market intelligence and procurement contract expertise deliver more savings and benefits for business owners.
Our market intelligence teams, data scientists and building optimisation engineer’s work together as part of this intelligent bureau to provide customers with the best solution.
This collaborative approach helps reduce utility costs, while ensuring building and equipment efficiency. The aim of this way of working is to deliver actionable insights to educate and quantify the business benefits through a number of media, from apps and cloud based software platforms. This is particularly advantageous with Smartdash, our analytical Report Builder platform and central engineering portal.
Intelligent energy bureaus:
- We bring in our extended knowledge of the energy markets and trends as well as procurement contracts to work with our customers to reap greater savings from their utilities bills.
- We look at utilities data to improve building and equipment performance, feed maintenance teams information to aid in proactive preventative maintenance programmes and provide the case for BeMS/controls.
- We can identify inefficiencies in consumption, quantify their effect on the utilities bill and validate the improvements achieved through controls and changes in equipment operations.
- We also consider the make up of the procurement contracts to allow our customers to benefit from time of day tariffs. This is done by shifting and shedding load when utilities consumption per kWh is greatest (known as DUoS and TRiAD avoidance).
- We can seek out maintenance issues and also respond to any fault alerts, twenty-four hours a day and analyse reasons for the fault and either fix the issue remotely or arrange for an engineer to resolve the issue.
- We help provide reports and visibility that businesses need for internal presentation and evaluation.
- We offer an all-encompassing solution that provides services both sides of the meter, from procurement contracts to find the best deal for our customers through to analytics and controls to effectively and proactively reduce consumption costs.
The intelligent bureau should offer building owners and occupiers the ability to reduce inefficiencies in performance, manage out of hours’ consumption but also shift or shed consumption when prices at that time of the day are greatest. Forward thinking and intelligent energy bureaus like ours, can also control consumption and cost while looking forward to market changes. With our ability to undertake long term forecasting, we can also predict future utilities bills for our customers and when we factor in their controls around time of day tariffs and against TRiAD alerts and the forthcoming changes to capacity markets there is more opportunity for business owners in their efforts to reduce costs. Last year, we saved our customers over 25% off their TRiAD bills thanks to our alerts and automation into our controls devices.
There are a number of drivers for these forward thinking, intelligent modern day bureaus but the most recent and current would be the forthcoming P272 legislation, which comes into force in 2017. This year businesses with meters in class 05-08 will have their usage settled on a half-hourly basis thereby paying more or less depending on the time of day in which they use energy.
Knowledge of the key components of an energy bill (commodity and non-commodity costs) coupled with knowledge of building and equipment performance and controls is imperative if businesses are going to optimise when they use energy to reduce a growing energy bill.
Intelligent bureau teams, like Utilitywise, work with businesses to move energy consumption when non-commodity costs are higher (DUoS/ TRiAD) and take advantage of lower tariff periods thereby reducing not only kWh consumption each day but valuable £s/pence.
The Climate Change Levy (CCL) further enhances the need for this type of intelligent bureau offering, this tax on energy consumption will be increased from 2019, making the currently higher tariff periods even more costly to businesses.
Incorporating information on procurement, energy markets, legislation and tariff rates, the Intelligent energy bureau team can use its expertise and knowledge to help clients not only use less energy but use less at key times of the day making an average 15-20% reduction in consumption which results in greater savings from the bill.
Intelligent bureaus benefit business three-fold, from cost savings to energy consumption reduction and legislation compliance. The days of energy bureaus not being relevant are over – make way for the intelligent bureaus of the future.
