Green Savings: Tapping AI-Driven Tech To Slash Energy Costs While Boosting Sustainability
By Richard Smith, Senior Director Energy Management Solutions, MRI Software.
The need to drive business’s gas and electricity consumption towards zero carbon goals has become a less abstract concept over the past year as soaring energy prices have bought home the critical need to boost energy efficiency to cut costs.
Being green is no longer just a nice to have but a business imperative – and facilities management teams are playing a pivotal role in helping companies of all types to reduce their carbon footprint.
When the Energy Bill Relief Scheme (EBRS) for businesses ended on March 31 as a far less generous discount programme replaced it, many organisations became concerned about how they will navigate these costs in future. Nearly two-thirds of British businesses (64%) say energy is now their top business risk, with 91% saying their board is concerned about how they are dealing with this issue, according to the npower Business Energy Tracker 2023.
Where To Start
The starting point for virtually any company is to understand just how much they are spending on energy consumption – a less straightforward task than many might expect. In fact, over half the companies that have spoken to managing their energy consumption say that they don’t have access to their total costs in this area.
Part of the problem can be simply the logistics involved. For instance, a company operating 100 buildings with 10 energy metres on average per site could create over 17.5 million records per year, which it would have to process to understand its energy consumption. That’s a lot of data to track. And a global company might have, say, 55,000 properties being managed worldwide, making the magnitude of processing the data much greater.
The good news is that today software tools that capture, measure, and analyse massive amounts of energy usage data – often through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning – make the task of turning efficiency and sustainability goals into insights and real actions much more manageable.
Harnessing The Data
A key to capturing and understanding the data any business generates across its property portfolio is identifying where and how data is being generated. When you look at a retail store, an office block, a hotel, a shopping centre, a medical facility, or another commercial building, you will understand that there are sensors available for tracking and managing footfall, air quality, desk occupancy, meeting room use, WiFi and other aspects of occupancy. The challenge is to bring this data all together in a way that enables companies and their FM teams to glean insights that can then be actioned.
The solution for many is to put in place technologies that automate data collection on energy usage, compiling it into a user-friendly application for further analysis and reporting – often employing AI-driven analytics to make sense of complex and voluminous data. This process enables organisations to identify and combat the most common and often unnoticed energy wasters across their properties. The result is complete visibility of energy consumption and a clear line of sight to reduced usage.
Through this process, we have seen some glaring problems identified in spaces utilised by organisations – some that went beyond the bounds of improving energy efficiency. One retailer taking a closer look at energy consumption discovered it had been leaving on escalators connecting its different floors running 24/7 for five years. In another instance, sensors installed to track energy usage in an office meeting room discovered very high CO2 levels, explaining why staff got headaches when they met there.
Enabling Genuine Action
The management of energy usage is becoming more strategic and centralised among businesses of all types and sizes as they tap into tech tools and AI capabilities to measure, monitor, analyse and manage energy consumption. The result is to enable businesses to make their environmental reporting more accurate and transparent while helping eliminate wastage going forward.
Having a clear picture of energy usage empowers any organisation and its FM team to make smarter decisions, with most seeing energy efficiency boosted by 30% – which translates into tangible cost savings as they begin their journey to a zero-carbon future.
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