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Energy Usage Benchmarking, Metering & Verification
- For Large and Medium sized retailers, this may be the lowest hanging fruit of all, but one of the most overlooked means of saving energy. Obtaining your energy usage data on a regular basis, and establishing your benchmark energy usage through your meter data is critical to controlling your energy usage and costs. Normally, the most appropriate use of these tools applies to meters with demand greater than 50 kW.
- For stores with demand lower than 50 kW, the cost of Automated Meter Reading (AMR) meters may not provide a sufficient return on investment, although more and more utilities are reviewing the possibility of installing them without separate costs to customers for the long term benefits they can provide. Mall owners may not provide separate metering to your store; you may need to ask your mall management if you have your own electric meter.
- Check with your utility company to determine all of your facilities that may have been retrofit with AMR metering.
- After you have installed energy efficiency measures throughout your facilities, and done all the things you can think of from a demand-side management perspective, you can use your energy data to ensure that those systems and devices are working properly, and continuing to provide you with the savings you intended.
- If you have the personnel and time to devote to acquiring the data, you can usually get it through your local utility for little or no cost. Otherwise, there are a number of services that can help you get your metered data, and provide you with summary and detailed reports on any scale you may require.
- Benchmarking can be established to compare your facilities with other similar facilities within a specific region or division of your organization, or by comparing your facilities with other comparable industry standards.
- Looking at the sample graph below, an actual report taken from utility grade metering, you can easily determine that the facility is using energy overnight at a rate that is quite high. This simple tool then provides you with the information that alerts you to determine why this is occurring. You can dispatch staff or your service company to the facility to analyze what needs to be done to correct the problem. Without this kind of easily accessible information, weeks, months, or even years can go by without knowing why the facility uses more energy than it should.
Similarly, this same type of program could demonstrate if a facility is spiking in demand during the on-peak hours, incurring high demand charges in the process. These peaks can be corrected through modifications to equipment and EMS/BAS programming, but you wouldn't know they were the culprit without the data.
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