Electrical Engineering Solutions

The efficiencies that Information Technology (IT) has delivered to commercial and industrial operations are being realised in helping these enterprises score valuable Green points.

IT products and solutions are being deployed in organisations’ buildings as a tool to help accurately determine and manage energy consumption and increase the performance of buildings.Electrical Engineering Solutions’(EES) managing director Bradley Hemphill is one of the panelists at the annual Connectivity Week being held in Santa Clara, California in June who will discuss IT for Energy Efficiency and Building Performance.

As the pressure mounts for enterprises to better manage their energy usage – with severe financial penalties looming for those who don’t cut back – facilities managers will increasingly use specifically developed IT solutions.

Widely used in the northern hemisphere, where energy-savings consciousness has been in play for some years, are applications and tools that predict energy performance of a building’s utilities and smart infrastructure.

Some are even commonly called Software as a Service (Saas) which facilitate monitoring of energy usage and compare this against local authorities’ invoicing to check accuracy and help manage payments.

IT solutions exist to enable architects, builders and developers research the economic viability of renewable energy technologies and the efficacy of products – such as the thermal performance of windows, doors and walls.

But it is the field of energy business intelligence that focuses attention on using a myriad of current IT technologies and solutions based on internet technology to make facilities management easier.

These energy intelligence systems tend to be based on web portals with data warehouses, online analytical processing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web services that overlays applications like Key Performance Indicators (KPI), What-If decision support systems, geographical information systems and business processes onto building systems to create an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and financial management tool for energy as well as a real-time management and energy policy enforcement tool for the building owner.

Converting terabytes of energy and building information is a major challenge and energy intelligence systems are designed to converts the data gathered from sensors placed strategically on the infrastructure’s network into knowledge to publishing useful – and auditable - information about data and carbon footprint in real-time.

Energy use and improved savings will be a crucial component of corporate triple bottom-line reporting and executive management and shareholders will demand credible information on green issues. This means increasing pressure to put in place networks and applications to gather base information against which to chart progress in utility savings.

This is an exciting new IT field and the experiences of pioneers in the field will be shared at Santa Clara.