Energy management for retail

Understanding the impact of new technologies (EV Charging)

One of our strategic customers in the retail sector, has historically offered free electric vehicle charging to all customers.

The energy team wanted to understand the impact the rapid uptake was having on their energy consumption and subsequently on their costs.

When we started working with the customer, during our well established and flexible data on-boarding process, we tagged all of the customer meters by type to make searching and filtering through thousands of data points quick and easy.

The customer simply had to type “EV” into the search box and all of the meters for Electric Vehicle charge points were selected. These could then be graphed using our flexible dashboards.

The retailer was able to see that their energy consumption on charge points had increased by almost 30 times! This was resulting in almost 4 million kWh of free charging a month at a time when energy prices had almost doubled compared to the previous year. 

The retailer now charges customers a discounted rate for using their charge points and offers one of the most competitive rates available to EV drivers.

This allows customers the ability to charge whilst shopping for less than they would pay at home, whilst ensuring that the retailer is operating in a manner that is financially sustainable.

The power of Optimum meant that this customer was able to clearly understand the impact of changing technologies on their business directly and move to mitigate the negative impacts that might arise.

Targeted energy investigations & resolutions on vast customer estates

Many of our strategic retail customers operate a vast estate of buildings that can be exceptionally difficult to manage. For these customers, noticing individual energy anomalies can be very time consuming and in reality, identifying issues of excess consumption can be lumped into the “too hard to handle” category.

By partnering with our remote energy management centre (EMC), these customers are able to benefit from a team of expert energy managers who continuously monitor sites in the customer estate using Optimum and who are able to make remote changes to energy management systems to resolve energy investigations.

For these customers, daytime energy profiles often change shape depending on what the daily operations of that building are and what building users are doing on each day, but monitoring night time energy profiles are a great way of spotting when the buildings are deviating from normal operations.

Optimum’s target based anomalies feature automatically calculates a user configurable night time energy baseline by looking at the site’s historical energy usage. It allows users to set up alerts that trigger when a night time target is breached. The alerts show a visual representation of the consumption and quantify the impact of this issue, allowing investigators to prioritise issues with the greatest financial impact.

Optimum Commercial and Connect & Control working in parallel allows direct connectivity to the customer’s Building Management System. We use the data we receive from the BMS and any other sources of data available to create a Digital Twin of the customer’s site when on-site conditions deviate from the Twin, we are able to react far quicker to issues, often noticing problems before building occupants do. This allows energy management to be far more proactive than ever before and increases the efficiency of on-site investigations and maintenance teams.

By utilising Optimum, the energy managers acting on behalf of this customer are able to flag issues to technical teams for remote investigations. Around 75% of issues identified by Optimum are able to be remotely resolved by experts in our Energy Management Centre, delivering substantial energy savings to our customers (in some cases more than £20,000 of savings per investigation). Issues that cannot be resolved remotely typically mean that something on-site has actually physically broken. In these cases, the team at the Energy Management Centre are able to raise work orders for customer engineers to visit the site and resolve the issue.

Tracking the performance of energy efficiency projects

With increasing energy prices and the race towards net zero becoming more prominent for organisations right across the spectrum, the ability to evidence progress from energy efficiency and decarbonisation projects is essential.

Optimum uses multivariate regression analysis to use external variables to predict and forecast energy consumption profiles.

Using a period of baseline data, the system can predict what your expected energy consumption, spend and CO₂ would be without the installation of an energy efficiency measure.

Therefore, Optimum is able to quantify the impact that different energy conservation measures have had on your energy consumption, providing transparent measurement and verification of spending.

Tracking energy projects transparently allows customers to validate their savings results against claims made by suppliers. It can evidence the return on investment of energy projects to management teams and ultimately enables them to invest more in energy projects.

For example:

1. The customer wants to undertake an LED lighting replacement across their entire estate. Using Project tracking in Optimum, this can be done with transparency and ease
2. Customer data is used to create a model to predict energy consumption based on all of the independent variables that are correlated with consumption.
3. The model accurately predicts consumption and can be fine-tuned by users
4. The savings of the LED Lighting replacement are measured against the baseline period and reported for transparency.

On-site displays: Showcasing your net zero commitments

For retailers and other organisations across the country and beyond, evidencing a commitment towards net zero is becoming increasingly important. consumers are increasingly making choices about where they spend based on sustainability metrics.

Many of our customers are seeking to provide more information and transparency to their customers and building occupants where they have made a decarbonisation effort or intervention.

Optimum’s uniquely flexible dashboarding tools can be used to create dynamic displays that provide viewers with up to date information about the energy performance of the building. Our most common use cases for on-site displays include:

• Showing the solar generation of a site compared to it’s energy use
• Evidence of carbon reductions
• Allowing active management of energy assets

Customers and building users on these sites are becoming more engaged with energy and are increasingly making small efforts to save energy. We find that, on average,  customers who actively monitor energy benefit from behavioural changes of their employees to reduce their energy consumption at work by making small interventions that really add up.

Where our dashboards are located in public spaces, our customers benefit from being seen to prioritise environmental issues by evidencing progress and avoiding greenwashing.