With hospitals and healthcare settings across the UK facing cost challenges, energy management can provide insight that supports carbon reduction and makes real savings, whilst also improving building conditions for patients and staff.
Tracking the energy savings of a complete windows replacement project
This customer has an ageing healthcare facility that suffers from poor energy efficiency and old energy generation plant equipment. They were looking to find a partner to drastically improve the energy efficiency of their site as well as designing, delivering and maintaining a new energy centre.
We were able to design and deliver a wide-ranging retrofit programme of works including installing new windows throughout the space, a wide range of other energy efficiency measures and the installation of new plant to provide the facility with clean energy and heating. As a part of the extensive retrofit and refurbishment of the existing healthcare space, the customer wished to quantify the impact of the savings of the project. Optimum’s out of the box tools are able to streamline this process for their team, making measurement and verification of the savings delivered by the intervention measurable and easily reportable.
Tracking energy projects transparently allows customers to validate their savings results against claims made by suppliers, evidence the return on investment of energy projects to management teams and ultimately enables them to invest more in energy projects to help fuel their transition to net-zero.
Asset monitoring and performance reporting
In the healthcare sector, maintaining the availability of critical power infrastructure is key to ensuring continuity of service. With strict targets around plant availability, the customer needs to know of any issues in a timely manner.
Optimum’s flexible dashboarding tools allow teams to monitor asset performance via an internet browser wherever they are in the world. Built on the experience of managing our own fleet of low-carbon energy solutions, we're able to develop our solution to meet our customers’ needs.
Customer and operational teams are now more informed about issues in a more timely manner, alarms from the system help users react to issues and reporting provides customers with much needed transparency at a granular level.
Renewable monitoring & analysis
With the increasing uptake of renewables as companies try to control their energy spend and drive towards net-zero, many customers in the healthcare sector and beyond are installing assets such as solar PV on their estates. Understanding the generation from these assets is crucial for energy teams who have to report on return of investmen tand carbon emissions reductions and make recommendations for future energy projects.
Optimum has a range of flexible data ingestion routes, making it compatible with almost all devices used in the industry. By bringing solar data into Optimum, users can combine their solar data with their BMS and metered data alongside any other variables you'd like to use in analysis. It's useful to compare observed solar performance to the reference solar performance provided by the manufacturer to ensure that you are getting what you were sold. In Optimum's flexible dashboarding area user can configure their own dynamic reports to assess performance, allowing detection of faulty or defective inverters, data-driven maintenance and an understanding of how weather may impact generation. There's also the KPI management feature to track key ratios such as Investment Performance Ratios and many others.
With Optimum, you can be reassured that high CAPEX investments are performing as they should allowing you to react quickly if things go wrong, giving you increased piece of mind.
You'll also benefit from increased transparency and streamlined reporting, giving management the confidence to set more budget aside for future energy projects.
Asset connectivity status
In operationally critical environments such as hospitals and healthcare facilities, it is of paramount importance that energy and maintenance teams are receiving timely information on the connectivity statuses and availability of their assets to ensure an uninterrupted power supply to their site can be achieved. They also need to be sure that the insights that they are driving from their energy management system are based off an accurate and complete picture of their data.
Optimum has a range of tools that can track data quality and asset connectivity including an out of the box module dedicated to Data Quality and Completeness, as well as data quality dashboard widgets and a data completeness alerting function to inform users via email when key assets stop sending data to the cloud.
By keeping users informed of data quality issues and making these issues transparent, Optimum allows users to identify assets that regularly have communication issues, targeting them preferentially for comms upgrades and investigations ensuring continuity of comms. The data quality widgets also provide key details around the connectivity status of the asset as well as the last successfully ingested data point. Monitoring assets with these features allows targeted interventions to reduce comms blackouts and offers the user the flexibility to create their own alerts tailored for their sites.