What is a BMS and is it enough?
Why energy management solutions are needed? Electricity accounts for approximately 46 percent of total utility costs in a typical hotel. That's why most hotels use Building Management systems; these systems control the facility's HVAC assets, but it's mainly used as a switch for the assets to turn on or off what needs to be. Also, in older buildings, these systems are overruled by other methods; thus, they don't have much of an impact on the facility's energy consumption, and they aren't making any dents in the electricity bill! To truly cut down on energy consumption, you need operational insights and intelligent systems that automatically turn data into insights and insights to direct actions. Here's where AI, ML, and IoT energy management systems come in!
AI, ML, and IoT energy management solutions and how it works
Our partners at FlamencoTech have their own AI, ML, and IoT energy management system, and this is how they believe it takes cutting energy consumption to the next level: "Data, expertise & analytics can play a crucial role in understanding the current state of operations, and issues, thereby uncovering areas of improvement.
Technologies such as AI, ML & IoT play a vital role in helping Building Managers continuously optimize their buildings' energy performance. There are typically four stages of Active Energy Management. Monitor, Measure, Identify and Optimize. To save energy, we must measure & report energy usage, analyze energy wastage, and optimize for energy savings. First, automatically collect real-time energy meter readings (AMR), UPS readings, and BMS data and indicate normal and abnormal operations. Then we must report real-time energy data, energy tracking, trending, and forecasting with automated alarms on breaches of targets, thresholds, or events.
Then we must analyze real-time and historical data to reveal energy usage trends and patterns, demand peaks, spare capacity for additional load, and relationships between equipment and system stability conditions. We must measure and compare power consumption across buildings, departments, zones, shifts, and processes and allocate costs.
Calculate the cost for energy usage based on tiered rates and Power Factor penalties. We must support algorithms for analysis of energy consumption, savings, and wastage and optimization metrics to identify and prioritize best practices for energy savings. Validate utility bills and billing errors against totalized consumption. Our Digital Blanket Energy.AI is a cloud-based Energy Savings platform that identifies, prioritizes, and acts on energy-reduction opportunities in an automated manner. Its AI-enabled Fault Detection & Diagnostics algorithms predict energy usage, calibrate HVAC flow basis derived or occupancy, and can also reduce maintenance downtimes and increase asset life-cycles."
How does Digital Blanket Energy.AI empower energy saving?
According to FlamencoTech it:
- Provides adapters for retrofitting into existing environments, including Grid, UPS, Diesel Generator, Gas, Lighting, HVAC, Solar, etc. While controlling the HVAC and lighting based on zones, schedules, and occupancy.
- Regulates energy usage through control of HVAC and Lighting. Real-time monitoring, alarming, and power quality analysis to avoid critical conditions that can cause equipment failures and downtime. Identify locations of poor power factors and justify power factor improvement measures.
- Enables target setting and tracking energy wastage due to poor scheduling and improper set points. It correlates building occupancy data with power consumption for building operations to help understand energy wastage. Reveal historical and current load patterns and hidden capacity in correlation with occupancy.
- Helps transition data to insights with pre-configured KPIs and descriptive and predictive dashboards (comparisons - historical to current, between buildings, floors.) with the flexibility to personalize the visualization layer. Digital Blanket® employs advanced Fault Detection and Diagnostics for HVAC, enabling direct energy reduction due to early fault detection and suitable addressing of these faults.
- With condition monitoring, we simulate multiple operating scenarios of rotary equipment like chillers, pumps, cooling towers, etc. Then we can link such simulated performance curves to the current performance to identify possible conditional variances and, hence develop faults.
- Condition Monitoring can be combined as a unified process for continuous improvement in tune with the best practices for Energy Management (ISO 50001), Asset Management (ISO 55001), ESM, and Performance Measurement & Verification (IPMVP), providing measurable and verifiable outcomes. Integration with energy control enforces energy conservation and sustainability and helps you to comply with your energy efficiency and emission-reduction obligations.
Benefits of using AI, ML, and IoT energy management solutions
Energy management solutions - Cost reduction
Less energy consumed is less money paid each year! Energy.AI transitions operational data to meaningful insights with pre-configured thresholds and analytics. The automated interventions can result in 20% to 40% savings in HVAC Energy Bills.
Energy management - Lower your carbon footprint
Radisson Blu and E.ON are setting new standards for sustainability in the hotel industry. Thanks to a highly innovative decentralized solution, the Frankfurt Radisson Blu will generate its own energy in the future.
The fuel cells will supply about three-gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity and two GWh of heat to the hotel. The highly efficient technology also allows the Radisson Blu to reduce CO2 emissions by about 600 tons a year. This amount is equal to the CO2 emissions from 50,000 cars driving 100 kilometers.
By efficiently using energy when needed without compromising your hotel standards, you can massively decrease the energy you use, thus decreasing your overall carbon footprint.
Expand your market reach with ecotourism
Booking.com found that the number of travelers seeking eco-friendly accommodation rose to 68% in 2018. While 67% are willing to pay up to 5% more for services if it has a positive environmental impact.
~source When your establishment becomes more eco-friendly, it'll attract more customers who are conscious of the carbon footprint threats and environmental damage.
Keep your brand name untarnished
Brands and businesses who insist on following the old ways and disregard the blatant damage they are causing to the environment are getting called out for it. The public cancels their brand names because of it, which causes these establishments to lose millions of dollars in the process. By adopting new advanced technologies, you can now cut your energy spending, cut your costs, help save the environment, and keep your brand name clean.
Here at i2M Tech we believe in providing entities in Egypt with the latest technologies they need to upscale their facilities and utilize their untapped resources; that's why we partnered with FlamencoTech to provide their Smart energy solutions here in Egypt.
