Typically in an office air conditioning can account for 25-35% of the energy. There is usually significant wastage in their usage and the higher the wattage, the more the wastage costs. For instance, eliminating 1 hour of wastage a day for a 1.5 t.
Companies seeking to improve their bottomline in the current economy where they see flat or declining revenues, need to start taking a closer look at their operating costs to find efficiencies. Energy is one item that is a significant portion of the operating costs and is often not well managed at a central level given its distributed consumption across multiple facilities of the company.
The cost of power for commercial locations that companies occupy is often high, ranging from Rs 8 to Rs 18 kilowatt hour (kWh). A significant portion of the energy expense is wasted and companies have found themselves challenged in identifying and controlling this. The emergence of Smart Automation and Internet of Things technologies present cost-efficient options to tame this wastage and to capture its benefits to the company bottom-line in a transparent and data driven manner. These options often have paybacks well under 12-24 months in most circumstances, and work as retrofits to existing electrical assets thereby avoiding the expensive capital replacement.
CFOs must take notice, because investment in energy efficiency has the potential to deliver returns in the in the impressive range of 17-22% P.A. over a 3-5 year period, and the returns can be even higher if the cost of energy were to increase in that period. These numbers justify energy efficiency deserving to rank amongst the top corporate initiatives, in addition to the social benefits of helping the country to conserve a precious resource that is in short supply and to create a substantially positive impact on the environment in metros where it increasingly challenging to breathe clean air.
The energy consumption in the offices, parking areas and warehouses of most companies is primarily driven by electrical equipment for lighting, air conditioning (split, VRV/VRF, Central), fans and exhausts. Besides this, other contributors are usually plug loads (PC's and other office equipment) and a few items like, heavy electrical equipment such as pumps and motors, if a complete building is occupied by the company.
Typically in an office air conditioning can account for 25-35% of the energy. There is usually significant wastage in their usage and the higher the wattage, the more the wastage costs. For instance, eliminating 1 hour of wastage a day for a 1.5 ton AC can save almost Rs.500 per month in energy costs. In warehouses, even with LED lighting the wastages are considerable enough to reduce lighting energy costs by almost 60-80%.
These wastages and energy efficiencies are commonly acknowledged, but the challenge has always been in finding ways to alleviate them because these equipment's are typically distributed across multiple office spaces across cities where the company operates. Often these offices are in finished spaces that cannot be re-modeled or even slightly modified with say, additional wiring, due to the cost and the disruption to the business.Electrical equipment such as lighting may be moved to energy efficient LEDs for smaller investments, but air conditioners usually are more capital intensive to change to greener options. Despite these seemingly disparate challenges that range from geographically distributed spaces to multiple vendor products, to the inability to alter wiring or interiors, recent advancements in Smart Technologies and Internet of Things solutions make it possible to still achieve significant energy efficiencies.
Transparency, through quantitative data on energy consumption for each location on a constant basis is an important tool in the creation of energy efficiency. A variety of IoT technologies help to provide this, from Smart Energy Meters to small nodes that can monitor consumption of energy on individual ACs. A single common cloud based portal with software and apps can allow key metrics to be monitored with appropriate notifications when thresholds are exceeded. These nodes are also useful not only in monitoring, but also providing the ability to control the status of these device AC's, lights and more from a centralized location, even remotely if needed.
Some basic operating schedules can automate the whole process to ensure that there is a disciplined approach to conservation. In cases where data is not essential, wireless sensors that work autonomously without the cloud or internet infrastructure can be deployed to essentially shut off electrical devices when no one is present, thereby eliminating wastage.Zero wastage should be the goal at every location by selectively deploying these technologies for highest returns, since almost every office location wastes between 5-10% of its energy footprint and warehouses even higher at 15-20% of wastage.
