If you’re a small business owner, the head of a well-established organization, or the manager of a large-scale facility, you’ve likely taken the time to look for savings everywhere in your day-to-day operations. You could however be missing out on the motherlode of savings potential: proper energy management.
Every year, outages and mismanaged utilities cost companies billions. According to the Harvard Business Review, that number is potentially as high as $30 billion wasted on electricity. And that’s in the commercial sector alone. This is where the importance of energy management systems come into play.
Learn about the advantages of energy management and add meaningful shape to your energy data. Then, get a business-oriented solution for your building’s energy management system from the experts at Imperial Lighting.
What is an Energy Management System?
An energy management system is a computer system that tracks and controls the electromechanical facilities of a building. In tandem with utility monitoring and control systems, EMSs typically feed into a large-scale utility grid. This allows operators to check the energy performance of many buildings in a given location, but these systems have smaller-scale applications as well.
A centralized energy management system, for instance, runs on isolated microgrid systems. These systems perform the same functions as a large-scale EMS but tend to be much smaller, giving businesses more authority and exclusivity over their energy use. This is just one of the advantages of energy management, but businesses, particularly small businesses, stand to benefit even more if they understand the data their EMS gathers on a daily basis.
How Imperial Lighting Works With Energy Management Systems
Energy management and building automation systems are quickly becoming the standard in building operations to help owners realize greater energy savings and operational efficiency.
Imperial Lighting is fully certified to install and maintain these systems. Our crews have experience with the major system manufacturers, and we have detailed knowledge of the warranty and repair process.
Imperial Lighting energy management solutions can involve a number of services that help keep energy use efficient for commercial facilities. Imperial Lighting’s expert services include:
- Install and connect each light fixture, switch, and HVAC unit onto remote monitoring system
- Install and connect modems to communicate to centralized network
- Perform system monitoring for maintenance and efficiency issues
- Inspect commercial energy management systems and repair issues as needed
- Recommission and/or decommission systems
What Are the Advantages of Energy Management?
Energy management has many advantages including energy conservation, financial savings, and sustainability. While organizations don’t have to focus on all three areas to track success, they can hone in on key metrics to bring down monthly costs.
For instance, the amount of energy that goes towards heating might uncover the need for new insulation. Tracking energy use through lighting could open the door for an energy efficient upgrade or automated sensors, including adding dimming sensors in areas of a building where there is no activity. Any investment made in the present will lead to future savings.
This also applies to small-scale energy management systems. A few advantages of centralized energy management systems include awareness of price fluctuation, self-regulating energy consumption management, and being in possession of a small-scale energy information database.
1. Energy Conservation
As we stated, energy conservation is one of the biggest advantages of energy management because, just as utility and energy consumption aggregates, costs do too. If you’re spending too much on heating and cooling, these costs almost certainly detract from savings elsewhere.
By using less energy overall, businesses can save on utilities and energy, driving monthly costs down in a more meaningful way than simply upgrading one system while the other runs unmonitored. This access to data is one of the biggest advantages of energy management and it’s key to managing your overall energy consumption.
2. Financial Savings
Once an energy management system is integrated with the utility monitoring and control system, companies can begin interpreting their EMS data and discover the most feasible areas to create savings. Whether those opportunities involve cutting back on energy use or upgrading a system, EMS services and initiatives are a concrete way to receive that vital feedback.
Because remote utility monitoring and control systems are set up with the capability of allowing energy consumption meters to be read from afar, that lessens the chance of having poor readouts and it allows companies and organizations to restructure staff that it needs to utilize the systems.
3. Climate Protection
Energy management systems are useful to gauge the results of human activities and the effects of energy consumption. If your building better understands the data from its energy use, that empowers the organization to adopt changes that make an environmental impact.
In turn, a series of well-managed EMSs can have more of an impact than simply the business level. The importance of energy management systems become clearer when a group of large-scale facilities gain awareness around their energy consumption. In this case, energy data can become very powerful, creating case studies that guide thought leadership initiatives to improve whole metropolitan areas as opposed to a single building.
Make an impact in your business’s energy savings and your community today with a facility audit from Imperial Lighting. Contact us for more information.
