Environmental Sustainability, Operations & Maintenance
Ways to Save: Energy Management and Information Systems
By: Owen Kavanagh, BOMA Georgia Identifying, calculating, and managing your energy consumption data is vital for building operations and improvement. Energy Management and Information Systems (EMIS) are an important set of tools to understand and improve your buildings energy performance.
Monthly Data Analytics
EMIS
The first and oldest of these systems are Monthly Data Analytics. These systems use utility bills to monitor energy use and track expenses and weather data to normalize the utility data for comparison. Monthly Data Analytics are excellent for observing historical trends, setting, and tracking goals, and comparing energy use between like buildings. These systems have been around for over 30 years and offer a wide selection of vendors.
EMIS are tools to help building owners, managers, and engineers better understand everything going on in a building. EMIS are software that use data from weather stations, utility bills, interval meters, Distributed Energy Resources, Building Automation Systems (BAS), and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This massive amount of data is stored and processed in a data warehouse before being used by an EMIS to analyze your building’s energy use. Building engineers can use this analysis to make repairs, improvements, and observe the changes implemented to check their efficacy. There are a few categories of EMIS to choose from, each with associated vendors, implementations, and uses. The systems under the EMIS umbrella, as identified by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are Monthly Data Analytics, Energy Information Systems, Fault Detection and Diagnostics, and Automated System Optimization. At their best, an EMIS can save 11 to 22-percent on energy costs across a portfolio. These systems have varying costs and benefits, but all of them are cheaper than a large upgrade or retrofit.
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Insight • Issue 4, 2021
Monthly Data Analytics can also tie into ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager to make the benchmarking process even easier. These systems are the cheapest to implement, though they do not affect the building directly.
They are an analytics tool, and their data must be used by building managers and engineers to improve operations. Buildings using Monthly Data Analytics to track and benchmark their energy use saved 2.4-percent annually. ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager is an excellent and free example of this, other examples include EnergyWatch, EnergyPrint, EnergyCAP, and ENGIE Impact.
