Andrew
Eaton
Last week I attended an excellent conference at the Energy Institute headquarters in London: The Energy Efficiency Conference 2017: Embedding behaviour change to unlock efficiency potential and Energy Behaviour Change workshop.
On day one I had a speakers slot to discuss “Developments in technology and innovative approaches to increasing energy efficiency”. This can be a wide ranging subject and one that can quite literally have no boundaries. After careful consideration, I decided to discuss developments with the Internet of Things (IoT) and energy analytics. For me, this represents the immediate and long term future, but the main reason is because it’s a future that is within reach now!
As I discussed this topic, I made reference to the amount of people and customers that I still speak to that drag huge amounts of data into Excel to carry out various types of analytics; visuals, graphs, charts, savings proving… the list goes on.
As I looked around the audience, virtually everybody was nodding their head. I found out afterwards that they were not only agreeing with what I had said, but are doing the same thing themselves. Several of the attendees spoke to me afterwards and told me how they related to this scenario. Some were even paying for aM&T packages and then using them to download data to put into Excel.
Now don’t get me wrong, Excel is a great piece of software that has been around for many years, and one that a lot of us are very familiar with. It’s also very powerful. But should we be using this to visualise and report on our energy usage?
At the end of last year, SSE Enterprise Energy Solutions launched a cloud based data analytics platform, Business Energy Intelligence, designed to be an intuitive way of visualising meter data. It also helps combat the need to download data into Excel.
We spent a long time speaking to our customers and researching market needs, and on the back of this we designed and delivered a platform that presents an exciting meter visualisation package to help businesses manage and reduce their energy and water usage. Business Energy Intelligence can capture data from a wide ranging variety of meters, electric, gas, water, main or sub-meter, also heat meters and virtual meters.
As the Energy Analytics Manager for our business, it was important to me that the platform could deliver on three very specific areas:
So if these three things are that important, how have we delivered them?
As Energy Analytics Manager, I understand the importance of data integrity (DI) and ensured this was incorporated into the alarm platform. So not only can you see exceptions in energy use, you can ensure you are actually receiving data. If your data stops, how can you manage your consumption? Understanding if you are receiving data is paramount, so we have included this as part of the platform too.
Being able to visualise your consumption, understand trends, patterns, good and bad behaviour, managing by exception rather than searching for problems – these are all essential and are the prime objectives of the Business Energy Intelligence platform.
These are just some of the highlights, but Business Energy Intelligence also provides normalised league tables, tariff analysis, and out of hours usage. All of this is provided in the cloud, so it can be accessed anywhere, at any time.
And to put the icing on the cake, we can provide Business Energy Intelligence as a self-managed platform or you can utilise our remote Energy Management Centre and we can provide a managed service. In a nutshell, we can be your energy management team.
If you want to discuss Business Energy Intelligence and how we can help reduce and optimise your energy, get in touch today.
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