How ESCOs Use Power Monitoring to Save Their Clients Money

If you buy, manage, or rely on energy for your business, uncertainty has been your recent reality. Erratic costs, supply, and delivery—even when it comes to renewable energy—add stress to planning efforts. Governments around the world have been creating incentives that effectively reduce prices, but that can change from one administration to the next. You need to control what you can, and that begins with gathering the right information about your power usage so you can optimize your operations and save on your energy costs.

This is where Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) can help. ESCOs develop, design and implement projects that reduce energy, operations, and maintenance costs at their customers’ facilities. They make money by sharing a portion of the cost savings their clients realize. An ESCO can help you analyze the amount of energy required for specific business processes and then engineer custom solutions and implement technologies to help you access that power in economically (and environmentally) responsible ways. Oftentimes the solutions are related to renewable energies like solar arrays or wind farms.

A key part of an ESCO’s business model is creating baselines via precise monitoring of current power usage.

How ESCOs Monitor Energy to Help Your Business

An ESCO will use monitoring equipment to establish energy benchmarks including:

• the energy use of a single facility over time
• a facility's use relative to similar facilities
• a facility's use compared to the desired standard

Using wireless monitors for benchmarking makes setup that much easier, whether assessing a single piece of equipment or the utility feeds throughout a facility.

When implementing renewable energy infrastructure, it’s vital to accurately monitor equipment that consumes the most energy. Typically, that’s the HVAC system. Overheating or over-cooling any building space means wasted energy, increased expenses, and potentially damaging sensitive equipment.

ESCOs may also use temperature and humidity monitors as well as airflow monitors to track environmental conditions around HVAC equipment. They use the information to increase energy efficiency, reduce costs, and extend the life of these critical systems.

An ESCO will also look beyond HVAC systems. They can help clients track energy consumption of other high-power equipment to more accurately allocate costs and eliminate waste. Monitoring energy use over time enables identifying seasonal business changes, determining the efficacy of renewable power sources, and detecting possible problems before critical equipment fails.

The Power of the Data

You can be certain you’ll face uncertainty when it comes to energy—volatile market forces, supply issues, personnel challenges, weather swings, and more. You can’t control everything. But if you decide to partner with an ESCO some of the potential paybacks include:

• Lower energy costs
• Possible tax credits
• Increased value of a capital asset thanks to renewable energy investments
• Cleaner energy

Power and environmental monitors can provide the data necessary to plan and prepare better for uncertainty. If you’d like to discuss your monitoring goals we’d be happy to speak with you.