Energy efficiency is one of the key organisational focus issues for 2010 and beyond and this is easier said than done at enterprise level due to the broad nature of the challenge. Saving power is one benefit of energy efficiency, but to leverage these savings many facets need to be brought into play. This is not unique to South Africa it is a global challenge facing the world.
The starting point is to be able to measure energy consumption, and this is not just your electricity, but extends to all the organisation’s utilities as they all have energy components:
* Water.
* Air.
* Gas.
* Electricity.
* Steam.
Omniflex has found that applying the 80/20 rule gets an enterprise quickly to a point where they can leverage savings without incurring massive capex expenditures. Measurement requires an enterprise to invest so working smart here can minimise capital expense and optimise the benefit of measuring technology. A quick educated survey will identify that 80% of the enterprise utilities consumption will come from 20% of the enterprise roughly and if these are measured they can be managed, logged, controlled and savings generated.
There is a caveat to this though; employment of technology alone does not guarantee savings – it also requires the buy-in of the people. So it is a combination of people and technology that generates maximum savings. According to Omniflex, studies have shown this to be well founded with tens of percent savings attributed to employment of technology and people compared with single digit savings by employing technology alone.
The Omnergy solution employs the use of latest technology to weave the technology elements and people together for an enterprise-wide utilities and energy efficiency monitoring and management system. Omnergy employs Omniflex’s award-winning remote monitoring technology to measure the usage and automatically profile, organise, report and alarm it to the people that need this information to leverage savings and improve the organisational energy efficiency. This closes the loop effectively by providing management with high level status and reporting and also allowing the organisation to involve people at every level with the tools and data to improve energy efficiency.
Readers wanting more information on the Omnergy solution from data collection at the front end to web based reporting can visit: http://instrumentation.co.za/+C14000A
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