With rising electricity prices and a recognition that we face a global challenge where buildings account for 40% of energy consumption in Europe, it is more important than ever to work concretely on energy-reducing measures. Tools for energy management have traditionally consisted of BMS systems (Building Management Systems) and EMS systems (Energy Monitoring Systems). These often carry significant costs, and not all buildings have such systems. With property technology on the rise, there are many exciting products on the market that mean everyone can engage in energy management that is financially profitable from year one. It is clear that deep expertise and experience within the segment has traditionally been a key factor, but with the help of new and accessible technology you can do a great deal on your own.
It is also the case that only a small percentage have both BMS and EMS systems. With proptech, everyone can save energy without compromising indoor climate.
All electricity meters for commercial buildings and residential properties now have new main meters that are in reality advanced network analysers with an enormous amount of information.
– HAN stands for Home Area Network and is an output on your electricity meter where real-time data about your consumption is sent. The data includes, among other things, how much power you are drawing in real time, and the quality of the voltage supplied to you, etc.
This gives us unique insight that we previously had to pay large sums for. How this will develop in terms of machine learning as loads switch in and out, one can imagine that even though these are just main meters, we can still get data at micro level. If you look at what Tibber is already managing to do with this in the residential market for a thousand kroner, it goes without saying that we have a lot of potential in our commercial buildings.
The use of sensor technology with CO2, humidity, VOC and temperature can give us a simple overview of over/under ventilation of zones, floors and buildings. You can get started with this in a few hours by placing available sensors around, and they will do the work for you. The image is taken from Airthings' way of communicating simple energy management in fixed reports to operations. The next step, in my view, is for this to be corrected directly against the ventilation system and adjusted automatically.
Another example might be to check important functions such as the heat recovery unit in a ventilation system. The difference between 40% and 88% efficiency on a rotating heat recovery unit can be a significant sum. If you don't have a BMS, you can do this simply with sensor technology.
At Proptech Bergen we have installed 4 sensors from Disruptive Technologies to verify the efficiency of the ventilation system. The suspicion was that this was lower than the calculated 80%. This appears to be the case, and so far we have only seen 60% when it runs at 100%, and we need to supplement with a heating coil at higher outdoor temperatures than projected.
"Our mountain cabins have become smarter than some commercial buildings that use 100 times more energy."
A lot of data is available from third parties so that you can retrieve data that is easily accessible. The idea is that not all buildings need outdoor sensors, but can share with neighbouring buildings. Elhub and WasteIQ are two concrete initiatives on data sharing.
Elhub is a neutral data hub that handles all measurement data and market processes in the Norwegian electricity market.
What is exciting about this is that energy data should be available to you as the building owner; however, there are delays of 1 day. This is interesting for processing data, but too slow to actually act and take measures. A shame, since the limitation is not the meters but the data management in the cloud.
WasteIQ
WasteIQ is a digital platform that collects data from various parts of a waste company and makes it available to all those who need such data.
The idea behind WasteIQ is to share all sensor data from waste systems versus today's solution where you have to import a CSV file after each emptying into the energy monitoring system.
There are many examples of how technology available today can help us work more efficiently on energy management. The most important thing is to start today – the technology is already there.
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