Energy management for hospitality

Project tracking - Monitoring the success of new technologies

This customer wanted to increase the amount of renewable generation for their portfolio of hotels. They also wanted to be able to generate a running report of the energy savings delivered by the project.

We designed and installed solar PV technologies for the customer. They already use Optimum for their energy reporting, so the generation information was networked back to the BMS and then to Optimum. By using our built-in project tracker, the team were able to run complex regression analysis on the site’s past consumption, taking into account independent variables such as weather conditions, occupancy of the hotel and building schedules to generate a model to forecast a robust baseline with which to report energy savings against.

The Energy team of the hotel group were clearly able to demonstrate energy savings from the intervention to their management team, allowing them to secure greater budgets for investing in energy projects across more sites in the future.

They credit the transparency and simplicity provided by Optimum to helping them rapidly decarbonise their estate whilst also minimising running costs.

Remote Energy Management - EMC

Managing a large, multi-site estate with diverse buildings, different operational patterns, energy technologies and use cases can be extremely difficult for businesses.

As energy costs increase and many more businesses set their sights on net-zero, we've seen a growth in the amount of data now available. This can mean that energy, maintenance and operational teams are increasingly challenged by what to do with this huge influx of data.

E.ON Optimum allows organisations to combine energy, operational and maintenance data to drive real energy savings.

Optimum is developed collaboratively, with our remote Energy Management Centre (EMC) – who manage over 7,000 customer sites to deliver significant energy savings. They are able to monitor buildings, detect energy anomalies and report on sites with excess energy consumption.

In many cases, they can also remotely resolve the issue, saving customers valuable engineer time – indeed they have a 75% remote fix rate on issues.

By combining BMS data collected from the customer’s sites using Optimum connect & control, with energy data from their suppliers, we are able to create a digital twin of every site on the customer’s estate. When the customer’s site begins to deviate from this twin, we know that the customer’s site is not operating optimally – this usually is an indication that energy is being wasted.

In this example, a general supply fan has been put into override by someone on-site, who has failed to re-enable automated control of the asset. After an agreed period has elapsed, an alert sent to the EMC team from Optimum flagged that the supply fan continuing to differ from it’s digital twin, prompting a remote investigation and the issue was remotely resolved using Optimum connect & control. 

Air quality & temperature monitoring in leisure facilities

In hospitality environments such as hotels, leisure centres and health clubs, maintaining healthy building environmental conditions is key for the comfort of building occupants and many facilities have strict comfort policies that must be adhered to.

Optimum can ingest data from smart devices and sensors to allow you to carefully monitor and analyse environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, CO₂ levels and much more, ensuring that guests are comfortable and any issues are resolved quickly. By closely monitoring environmental conditions within the building, customer teams can identify areas which frequently breach the parameters set indicating potential issues with assets.

This allows data-driven maintenance and keeps building operators more informed.

Well run buildings contribute to the wellbeing of the individual building occupants, helping them remain more comfortable and ensuring that they have the best experience possible on your site.

Happy customers are more likely to return to the sites again, helping preserve reputation and customer satisfaction.

Data-driven maintenance also increases the effectiveness and efficiencies of operational teams and can help to reduce callout charges.

Live dashboards and site overviews

The maintenance teams of customers with vast estates can often have hundreds of thousands of assets to maintain and routinely rely on planned preventative maintenance or bi-annual check-ups on sites to identify and resolve issues. This can mean that on-site issues can go for weeks, months or even years without being resolved. These teams need the right tools to enable data driven maintenance of their equipment.

Optimum allows for much more than just visualisation and analysis of data. By combining Optimum commercial’s long term data analysis features and trending with real-time dashboards from Optimum connect & control, we're able to highlight and alert on issues in real-time and often resolve them remotely via connect & control before building occupants even notice a change.

Combining our software systems with remote energy monitoring allows issues to be picked up quickly. We can then begin remote investigations  and remote resolutions where possible. Where a remote resolution is not possible, a targeted work order can be generated for field engineers who will already have an understanding of the issue before arriving on site. This increases the chance of an on-site resolution being achieved without the need for costly repeat visits. Whilst on-site, engineers can even scan the QR codes on assets to visualise their past performance and really understand the issues in detail.