Green buildings, greater savings

Companies look to find cost-efficient ways to reduce carbon emissions in light of European environmental targets, focusing more so on energy performance

 
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The enteliWEB software in action

The International Energy Agency estimates that buildings represent 40 percent of primary energy usage, a number that coincides with the European Commission’s target carbon emissions reduction by 2050.  It is clear that making buildings more energy efficient can significantly help achieve a more sustainable environment, but recent research by the University of Reading also shows there are measureable revenue benefits as well as cost savings.

A new industry of building energy management systems (BEMS) has emerged, which uses building automation data to measure and report on building energy performance. And it is a market with a compound annual growth rate of 14 percent.

Green measures
As every CEO knows, you get what you measure, and that is especially true with energy management because it requires changes to behaviours, processes and site management.

Companies have found that leading a true green company means having easily accessible and accurate metrics, which result in specific functional actions. You can design BEMS to reflect your existing key performance indicators, but you should be able to drill further down into information to explore issues.  If energy measures are not constantly visible they slip down the priority list, so it is important to make it as easy as possible for your staff to get the essential information they need for their roles.  Just as importantly though, these dashboards should be linked seamlessly into your building automation systems to allow real changes to the systems they are monitoring, but often this is not the case because some BEMS only monitor and report data.

When selecting an energy management system today, you have to think about tomorrow

Sites are expensive assets and by investing in a BEMS that is integrated with building control like the enteliWEB system offered by Delta Controls, you are able to control facility performance and quickly respond to trends identified by the BEMS. Importantly the combination of a building operating system with energy management systems enables you to configure alerts sent directly to the mobile devices of the people who need to know.

This empowers your staff to adjust set points and the system directly from the software, so enteliWEB does more than energy reporting, it provides immediate energy management actions. Delta Controls systems have a reputation of being user friendly. Many clients’ in-house facilities teams are able to maintain their own systems and now they are able to multitask delivering additional energy management results as well.

It can seem an expensive commitment to make a more sustainable organisation a reality. Public dashboards make your sustainability agenda very visible and have been proven to improve energy savings. Reporting on energy progress is also incredibly valuable when it comes to writing the annual report to substantiate your corporate social responsibility initiatives with real quantifiable data to avoid any green-wash accusations.

Energy for tomorrow
“When selecting an energy management system today, you have to think about tomorrow,” says President of Delta Controls, Brian Goodchild. Energy and utility issues that we are dealing with now weren’t around a decade ago, nor were things like automated demand response programs, critical peak pricing and other smart grid implementations. Your system must be flexible enough to incorporate new strategies as they arise.

Delta Controls provides this with enteliWEB; a full building operations system with customisable energy reporting and energy analytics software. Powerful dashboards simply display the data you need and integrate other systems to give your team all the information on one page. Most BEMS won’t give you the ability to adjust your building systems yourself; enteliWEB does, which gives you freedom to act quickly and control facility operations costs.

More than just a BEMS, enteliWEB is a full building management system with energy management, so two separate costly systems are unnecessary – it empowers your staff to see energy saving opportunities and act on them.

For further information visit www.deltacontrols.com/enteliWEB