Data Management: Why Data Matters in Energy Management

Energy represents a significant challenge for businesses. Between rising energy costs, stringent regulatory oversight, and increasingly green consumer preferences, finding ways to reduce energy output is front-of-mind for companies looking to cut costs and boost profits.

But how do you make broad and granular changes to your energy portfolio that are impactful and efficient enough to reduce your overall energy consumption while smart enough to automate energy-saving efforts? The answer lies in your data.

Understanding Energy Management for Facilities

Managing energy for a single location can be difficult without the right technology. But trying to intelligently manage an energy portfolio across multiple facilities without tapping into tech is downright impossible. Energy data captured from lighting, HVAC systems, and other energy-connected components can be used to not only determine system issues and energy consumption habits, but that data can be leveraged to automate energy-saving processes. That data can help your business tap into the $290 billion present-day value of energy management in the business sector.

The Role of Data In Energy Management

Energy Savings

For energy managers, utility costs are often a significant operating expense that cuts directly into profits. Many managers consider utilities a necessary operating expense, forget about them, and focus on lean operating models within their supply chain. But ignoring energy management can cost you some serious money. On average, around 30% of commercial energy is wasted.

Data is the key to reducing that waste. Combined with intelligent energy management software, data can give you insights into in-the-moment and historical energy use across your entire building portfolio. Why are your lights consuming energy at 2 am? Is your HVAC system operating at baseline comfort levels, or are you wasting energy pumping out unnecessary heat or air?

With energy data, you can immediately answer those questions. Better yet, you can combine energy data with IoT sensors and energy management software to automate your energy consumption habits. That means keeping HVAC units running optimally 24/7 and shutting lights off when no one is around.

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Meeting Energy Compliance

With an alphabet soup of regulatory bodies trying to decarbonize industries across the globe, compliance requirements for energy management are becoming more strict and incredibly nuanced. Energy data lets you both standardize your energy workflows to meet those compliance requirements, and data blended with software solutions give you the power to report on energy management — and increasingly important feature for energy managers.

The current nature of energy codes puts businesses in a difficult position. A smorgasbord of first-party, second-party, and third-party officials from various jurisdictions and regulatory bodies can pop up at any time to test energy compliance. You need to be prepared with dense reporting and best-of-breed automation.

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Energy Equipment Maintenance

Before energy-consuming systems fail, they almost always malfunction. Energy fluctuations can be a sign of problematic equipment. But, without access to energy data, spotting these malfunctions across your entire building portfolio is difficult. By using energy management systems and combining them with energy data and IoT sensors, you can detect equipment failures early. This leads to both energy savings and potential equipment savings when you catch issues early.

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Energy Data Challenges

Normalizing the Data

The most significant energy data challenge is finding ways to normalize data across all of your facilities and combine it into one interface. Creating energy-efficient strategies and implementing complex energy management workflows across different building blueprints can be nearly impossible without normalized data. If you're trying to render data coming from a variety of different buildings and machines, you need the right software to process and store that data effectively.

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Processing the Data

While normalizing the data in a way that makes it readily available is crucial for energy managers with multiple facilities, processing that data can be just as painful. Once you capture data, how do you use it meaningfully? Messy data control systems and manual processes can quickly turn the potential of energy data into a dud.

Instead, energy managers should focus on scouting out best-of-breed solutions that can automate energy consumption habits based on predefined functions across all energy-consuming equipment and facilities.

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Leveraging the Data Effectively

Between normalizing and processing, energy managers need a way to both track and analyze incoming data and to use it effectively. The Enterprise Data Xchange (EDX)® Smart Building Platform can automate energy consumption across your entire facility portfolio using user-defined settings. And, it gives you the power and flexibility to create custom reports and adhere to unique compliance requirements.

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