Stuck with Islands of Efficiency? Comprehensive Energy Management Yields Greater Gains

?Imagine transporting a manufacturing executive from 1998 straight into an operations meeting (at the very same company) today. This wildly confused exec would look at today?s raw material costs and quickly pronounce them insanely inaccurate. Just over a decade ago, our world was dubbed as ?drowning in oil,? (a phrase coined in a March 1999 issue of the Economist). Experts predicted we had more than enough affordable energy and other (now-limited) raw materials to comfortably carry on rapid, global industrialization. But though our fuel was plentiful, data on how we used it was not. Needless to say, such a statement is not so easily made today. Volatile energy prices and uncertainty over the source that will power us into the future, compounded with rising environmental and climate-change concerns, have made energy efficiency and management a make-or-break strategy. And though our world has shifted, we now have one tremendously significant advantage -- a plethora of inexpensive, easily captured data. Integrated Solutions are Needed Comprehensive energy management integrates all parts of a business, from the data center to the manufacturing floor. It is no longer acceptable or smart to allow each domain of the operation to consume energy independently of the others. In fact, it is vital we know where our energy dollars are going, where more are needed and where consumption and waste can be reduced.
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We?re seeing more and more of our customers in multiple industries combat rising energy costs by intelligently using available data to adopt energy efficiency and automation technologies, and apply them throughout the organization -- especially those that can optimize existing facilities or processes. Intelligent Metering Provides Granular View Advances in data collection, remote monitoring and automation have enabled the water and wastewater-management sector to precisely predict storms like never before; and alert, prepare and ready their operations for storms from one point of access -- saving energy and taxpayer dollars. In manufacturing, intelligent metering is being used to get a granular view into where and why high energy usages occur -- and eliminate them when unnecessary (such as on weekends when production drops). And in energy-intensive industries such as mining, companies are now adapting to governmental and societal pressures to reduce their carbon footprints by turning to three major tools: power metering solutions (to measure the entire spectrum of energy utilization, including air, gas, electric and steam); monitoring software; and enterprise energy management systems, which control the cost, quality and reliability of energy.

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