The commercial and industrial sectors use energy (electricity) excessively. Food processing, pulp and paper, chemicals, metals, and oil refining sectors are energy-intensive. These industries represent more than 80% of the total global electric CHP (an energy-efficient technology that generates electricity and captures the heat that would otherwise be wasted to provide useful thermal energy). The mentioned industries are known for their high process-related thermal requirements. These requirements do not change with the daily and seasonal weather-related fluctuations. Clearly, proper availability of energy is an important part of their business. But, energy is not used by these industries intelligently.

Unnecessary energy consumption is the reason why hefty electric bills shock them at the end of each month. The need of the hour is to optimize energy consumption and enhance operational efficiency with a smart and secure energy management solution. Here, the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with the best energy management solutions. The energy-saving & management processes include managing and planning energy consumption patterns in the commercial & industrial sectors.

If you are a plant manager belonging to a particular industry, then you can take complete control of your energy consumption data at a fundamental and granular level while reducing your energy costs significantly. With IoT solutions for better energy monitoring, a plant manager can precisely identify how, when, and where the minimum, maximum and excessive quantity of energy is consumed. Accordingly, the best energy-saving & monitoring measures could be taken. Also, the plant manager can monitor several remote sites in a unified portal and integrate with existing meters & systems for higher productivity. S/he can also understand & visualize the energy profile of the organization, improve energy budgeting corresponding to the new energy consumption plan, and more!

Let us explore some more advantages of IoT for energy-saving measures.

# IoT Sensors Collect Minute Data Which Help Plant Managers To Use Energy Effectively:

The industrial sector can have smart buildings through Energy Management Systems built on IoT technology. Earlier, the building management systems focused on controlling the systems from where power was harnessed. With IoT sensors, buildings can now collect, analyze and translate data about energy into information. That data could be broken down into smaller and more accurate pieces of information that could be strategized to utilize energy better. In a plant, the energy consumption status of lighting, ‘heating-ventilation & air conditioning, air ventilation, elevators, floor equipment, and more could be gathered. This will give clear insights to the plant manager about the energy consumption that is compulsory and the ones that are just excessive.

The data collected by the IoT sensors on energy consumption can be combined with some other connected sensors and devices. Those sensors are designed to connect data on local weather, street traffic, and several more. It helps the plant managers to automatically adjust the plant temperature, ventilation, and lighting so that the machineries in the plant could be used to its full potential without damaging the machinery. IoT sensors strike a perfect balance between the comfort level of the manpower present in the plant (so that proper temperature could be created to enhance working conditions for them in all seasons) and optimizing the energy levels. Such steps can return a 25% reduction in operating costs.

# IoT Driven Energy Consumption Provide Environmental Benefits:

Energy efficiency is one of the most effective ways in which an organization can manage to reduce its ‘carbon footprint’. Greenhouse gasses are very harmful to the environment and are the very reasons why the climates change so drastically. So basically, ‘carbon footprint’ is the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that industries emit while producing goods and services to meet the demands. In fact, the reduction of greenhouse gases is the new parameter to measure the cost efficiency of building management. The evolution has simply managed to earmark the global building energy management systems industry to reach $9.32 billion by 2023. With IoT sensors, excessive energy consumption could be identified as the sensors will send alerts to the plant managers in real-time. Thus, preventive actions could be taken immediately.

# IoT driven Energy Monitoring System Helps in effective Machine Uptime (OEA)

As a plant manager, it is crucial for you to know when and why your machines were not running. But with IoT-driven solutions for energy monitoring, getting real-time insights into your machine’s availability and its performance is not complicated any longer! The user of this solution will have the access to a dashboard where information related to the machines’ availability will deliberately be showcased. That dashboard can be customized. Reducing unwanted and unexpected equipment breakdowns and scheduling maintenance sessions for the machinery will get simplified as this solution will monitor equipment downtimes that enable the user to perform accordingly.

For manufacturing that is equipment-intensive, the main factor of productivity reflects through the machine/equipment performance. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a crucial factor that depends on the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). This is measured as the product of three factors:

OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality

Availability = Run Time/Total Time

Performance = Total Count of Parts/Target Count (based on a standard)

Quality = Good Count/Total Count

IoT simplifies machine uptime by focusing on the areas of improvement that hinder the OEE and pulls out the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to help plant managers to maximize plant efficiency.

On a concluding note

As companies grow in size, it extends their operations to match up with the market demand. This way, the companies increase their energy consumption hence energy management and optimized energy consumption become critical. It becomes mandatory for the organizations to meet sustainability goals hence it becomes compulsory for the organizations to comply with the ever-stricter regulatory requirements. Energy could only be managed once energy consumption patterns will be tracked by the IoT sensors. This might require the overhauling of the inflexible legacy systems.

With IoT solutions for energy management, it is easy to automatically retrieve and analyze power quality events. Unlike traditional energy management systems, the current day energy monitoring system extracts the real-time energy consumption insights from your plant and provides you the machine uptime, equipment efficiency, and power consumption information on your mobile/PC. The system also covers the power generation and its utilization which makes it a one-stop solution to earn better profits.

Monitoring, controlling, and optimizing energy performance in a plant does not remain complex any longer. IoT-driven energy monitoring system measures the generation, transmission, and consumption of energy. This is how plant managers diagnose problems like over-consumption and energy leaks across the entire plant. Increased ROI, reduction in energy consumption, tracing energy capabilities, getting real-time energy insights are now easy. Also identifying abnormalities in consumption and predicting future energy needs will get simplified and less time-consuming.

Author Bio

Sanjeev is the founder of Biz4Intellia, one of the leading IoT development companies in the USA. He is extremely passionate about the Internet of Things and keeps on exploring the possibilities unleashed by IoT on a constant note. At Biz4Intellia, his concrete focus on building a rapidly growing, market-driven organization that delivers influential IoT Energy Monitoring solutions, is simply unmatchable!