I've got the (virtual metering) power
Since starting Demand Logic, the team has had energy on our minds - the core of what we do is to help you reduce the energy demand on your properties, to save money and (perhaps more importantly) to save carbon. But the complexity of modern buildings presents many challenges. The old saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is relevant - if you don’t know the scale of each problem how can you prioritise, and how do you judge results? But most plant assets don't have physical meters attached to them, so how do you measure them?
Years ago after bringing together many digital data-streams representing real world plant, we began using our professional experience to start estimating energy consumption within buildings - we called this "Virtual Metering". Some of these calculations used rule-of-thumb and industry standards, but gave good approximations to get a sense of how a given plant item performs, and provide good first ports of call when analysing misbehaving or misconfigured plant that could be wasting tonnes of carbon and thousands of pounds.
Full virtual metering of all the plant we analyse on our platform has always been our goal - to be able to say for any given plant item "how is it contributing to the energy load of this building?" and get a reasonable estimate. Our first outings of these calculations were in our beloved Lab Views; these versatile & dynamic number-crunching pages brought together a vast number of these data-streams, to show you how your Boilers and Chillers, or Air Handling Units, etc. were performing; by day, by week, by month. Valuable as they are, they are not scalable in the ways we need, owing to poor speed, ad-hoc configuration, site-specific peculiarities and regular changes in many of our clients' BMS's.
With the innovative progress we've made over the last couple of years, we now have an information architecture that is far more able to join otherwise disparate data-streams together, to make allowances for missing data and to fall back to other methodologies if the "best" one fails. With more recent advancements, we are able to crunch far greater quantities of data into summaries - including monthly aggregates. Putting these things together, we now have the capability to move beyond our old friends in Lab Views and push on with per-plant-item and plant-collection views that provide this data automatically. These give us the flexibility to view and assess plant based on its likely energy wastage, targeting worst offenders without the major capital expenditure of complex metering systems
Today, it is with great pleasure (and a degree of nostalgic sadness for our Lab View friends!) that we are launching our first step toward full virtual metering of energy consumption across all your plant that is represented on our platform. What this means is that for all simple plant (Boilers, Chillers, Pumps, Fans etc.) you will see a new tab on the asset's page called "Energy [BETA]" which shows half-hourly, daily and monthly energy consumption figures. These will also be available (on request) in aggregate with other assets of the same type, for example you'll be able to see all the Chillers together with their energy consumption stacked; or all the hot and cold coils inside Terminal Units, broken down by floor.
Next steps for us will be to make the aggregate views automatically available (so there is no need to request them) and to make the Energy tab available to more complex, or composite plant like Fan Coil Units, Air Handling Units, etc.
We're very excited to be releasing this next big step toward full virtual metering, and look forward to your feedback (via your Technical Account Manager or below in the comments!) so that we can continue to advance and ease analysis and correction of unoptimised plant.
Watch this space for more virtual metering developments!
