What is energy monitoring and what are its benefits?

Higher fossil fuel prices and the pressing climate crisis over the medium term will accelerate the transition to clean energy and the prospect for effective methods to boost assets’ energy efficiency  will be urgently addressed. Systematic and well planned energy monitoring helps drive the case for limiting environmental impact while having a coherent energy management software will be vital for businesses to plan out operations for the long term.

Let’s take a closer look at how to perform energy monitoring for an asset and what are the benefits of the energy management process.

What is Energy Monitoring?

As the name suggests, energy monitoring is the process of monitoring – therefore gathering, recording and analyzing data on energy consumption, whether that’s an individual asset or an entire building. The second step, the energy management phase, involves the management of consumption based on what was detected by the previous monitoring phase.

Carrying out accurate energy monitoring is vital in terms of saving and enhancing the efficiency of an asset. During this phase you can identify:

• inefficiencies, such as excessive heating or cooling of underused areas;
• failures and malfunctions in plants or their components;
• appliances with poor energy efficiency.

Taking action according to what was detected by energy monitoring therefore allows you to:

• provide detailed information on the operational needs of an asset;
• reduce energy consumption;
• increasing energy efficiency;
• reduce emissions and therefore the environmental impact.

It goes without saying that, the monitoring phase continues even after any management interventions. In this case, the objective is to verify if the solutions and technologies implemented are having the desired effects or if it is necessary to review the improvements made previously.

4 reasons why Energy Monitoring is important

As mentioned, energy monitoring provides important information with regards to quantifying and controlling energy performance, therefore identifying opportunities for improvement to companies. The energy crisis has hit businesses hard at international level, at least as badly as the climate crisis has hit the environment. Intervening by stemming these two phenomena is an increasingly pressing responsibility and can be addressed with energy monitoring. Let’s see in detail the 4 main reasons why this phase is so important:

1. Accurate measurement: thanks to energy monitoring and the use of specific software for the energy management of assets it is possible to find extremely detailed measurements which enable you to consider whether to adopt any improvements.
2. Issues detection: monitoring an asset efficiently means identifying problems and malfunctions of equipment and/or systems, or their components, and therefore reducing energy consumption.
3. Real-time monitoring: Real-time monitoring enables you, for instance, to intervene on a fault that has just occurred in order to limit waste as much as possible or facilitates predictive maintenance so that resources can continue to operate efficiently and with less failures.
4. Analysis of consumption trends: continuous monitoring of energy consumption facilitates the identification of moments of particular use and those of plant downtime. In this way energy managers and determine the best solutions to reduce consumption and the possible planning options for a balanced use of resources.

The importance of energy monitoring

What are the benefits of energy monitoring?

The energy monitoring phase, included in the broader phase of energy management, allows us to save on consumption and therefore on bills and at the same time reduce the impact that an asset has on the environment. Other benefits of energy monitoring are:

• reduction of the carbon footprint of companies;
• savings on energy consumption costs;
• accurate measurements in real time;
• improvement of plant and asset performance in general;
• identification of usage peaks and excessive consumption.

How to improve an asset’s energy efficiency?

Boosting energy efficiency is extremely important for a company. Mainly because it allows on the one hand to reduce expenses and on the other to limit the environmental impact. Some studies have shown that most companies have the potential to reduce energy consumption by a variable percentage between 10 and 20%. Particularly trough simple actions that can be identified thanks to energy monitoring.

It is therefore clear that reducing energy consumption has multiple benefits. But how exactly may we enhance the energy efficiency of our good? Let’s take a look at three simple steps:

• monitoring and analysis: to improve energy efficiency, it is firstly necessary to identify inefficiencies within our asset. To do this it is necessary to implement an effective energy monitoring solution. One in which each equipment, plant or the entire asset will be monitored and any anomalies will be highlighted.
• implementation of improvements: once the energy data is collected and analyzed, it will be possible to identify inefficiencies and improvements to be implemented to derive the best benefits.
• constant monitoring and evaluation: after implementing each change, it is important to monitor the results and the level of improvement achieved so that we can determine which changes are the most effective and if there are further improvements to be made. To ensure a constant level of energy efficiency, it is therefore essential to constantly refine energy monitoring and management strategies.

The aspects of monitoring and energy management are fundamental within an asset’s management. Therefore the purpose of this delicate step is to guarantee energy consumption’s saving thus lowering an asset’s environmental impact.

My advice is to make use of specific and professional software for energy management. One that allows the rapid identification of energy-intensive systems and the corresponding savings opportunities.