How Your Team Can Get Started With (and Benefit From) Intelligent Energy Management

Organizations across industries are facing the challenges of rising energy costs, environmental concerns, and an overburdened power grid. Intelligent energy management has become a strategic way for sustainability officers, operations teams, and other leaders to address these challenges, but implementing solutions can sometimes be confusing. Here we’ll explore the idea of energy management, the benefits it offers to commercial customers, and how your team can start implementing an intelligent energy management system that maximizes those benefits.

What is Energy Management?

Let’s better understand the general concept of energy management. The goal of energy management is to optimize the use of energy resources within an organization to achieve better economic, environmental, and operational outcomes. These energy resources often include clean energy assets like solar arrays, energy storage systems, and electric vehicle (EV) chargers.  

At the heart of energy management lies the energy management system (EMS), which is a comprehensive solution designed to monitor, control, and optimize energy consumption and usage within a facility, organization, or across multiple locations. An EMS uses hardware, software, and automations to monitor energy data and improve the efficiency and sustainability of a site (or sites).

Benefits of Energy Management  

Companies that make use of energy management at their facilities can harness a wealth of advantages. One of the most attractive aspects of the technology is its ability to reduce overall costs. This is done by minimizing energy consumption while optimizing the way energy is used within a building. The financial savings companies stand to enjoy is a great way to convince internal stakeholders to invest in energy management.

Another big benefit to energy management is increased environmental sustainability. Using energy more efficiently means drawing less fossil-fuel electricity from the utility. And when you integrate assets like a solar energy system, you can greatly reduce your carbon footprint by using emissions-free energy to help power your operations.

There are many other benefits to energy management. You can learn more about them, as well as dig deeper into how energy management works, in our comprehensive guide.

How Is Intelligent Energy Management Different?  

Intelligent energy management goes beyond automation to make decisions based on analyzing and interpreting data, context, patterns, and insights. Due to the large volume of data that needs to be processed, intelligent energy management systems often leverage artificial intelligence to recognize patterns and make predictions. By continuously improving and adapting over time, an intelligent EMS can optimize energy usage and improve operational efficiency.

It’s important to understand, however, that not all intelligent energy management systems are equal. There are many things to consider when choosing an intelligent EMS for your business, including how well the system co-optimizes multiple energy assets and its ability to scale along with your operations. Next, let’s explore what makes a company like PowerFlex uniquely suited to fulfil your intelligent energy management needs.

PowerFlex’s Approach: Adaptive Intelligent Energy Management

PowerFlex takes a holistic and adaptive approach to intelligent energy management. We integrate and co-optimize all clean energy assets on a single adaptive intelligent energy management platform, PowerFlex X™. The platform uses patented algorithms to integrate and co-optimize solar arrays, energy storage systems, electric vehicle chargers, and facility loads. This achieves far better results than operating assets separately, in silos.

Like other intelligent energy management systems, PowerFlex X learns from data to become more effective and efficient over time. But it’s the massive amount of data that PowerFlex X draws from that makes the platform superior. PowerFlex has installed 400 megawatts (MW) of solar energy, 40 MW of battery energy storage, and more than 10,000 EV charging stations. With many assets operating at different types of sites and under different conditions, the quality of data at our disposal puts us years ahead of the competition. PowerFlex X analyzes this data to recognize patterns, adapt, and make better decisions in the future.

Benefits of Adaptive Intelligent Energy Management

Adaptive intelligent energy management comes with many advantages for customers. For one, PowerFlex X is constantly learning. The platform adapts its optimizations to your specific operating conditions, including building load patterns, weather, fleet vehicle schedules, and more. And when these conditions change, PowerFlex X changes along with them to continue maximizing the performance of your energy assets.

Another benefit of adaptive intelligent energy management is PowerFlex X’s ability to work autonomously and instantaneously, without human intervention. This eliminates the need for customers to adjust settings manually using trial and error — which is next to impossible when conditions are constantly changing.

How PowerFlex Can Help You Get Started With Adaptive Intelligent Energy Management

When work with PowerFlex, we guide you through the entire process of planning and implementing an adaptive intelligent energy management solution that will not only meet your energy needs of today but can scale and evolve to meet the challenges you may face in the future. The first steps we typically take with customers are:

1. Discuss and define energy usage goals: Are you trying to cut costs, generate a certain percentage of clean energy to hit sustainability goals, improve resilience, or achieve a combination of goals?

2. Perform a site assessment: We help collect relevant data like historical energy usage, utility rates, and operating data from any existing energy assets or EMS.

3. Provide recommendations and next steps: Based on our findings, we recommend products and solutions that will meet your unique goals, and then design, construct, and help manage your system.

Ready to start future-proofing your business with adaptive intelligent energy management? Learn more about PowerFlex X and book a demo here.