The Increasing Importance Of Smart Energy Management

Converging trends will certainly enlarge industrial enterprises' adoption of energy management solutions and develop their interaction with electric utilities and the grid.

FREMONT CA: Energy management has become a growingly important corporate strategy. Industrial businesses scrutinize their energy profiles more closely to uncover cost-cutting, decarbonization, and resilience possibilities. They apply energy management systems and take on-site resources like renewable energy and energy storage into account. Several people participate in existing utility programs to hit their energy management objectives. Some see more capacity in the more participatory electric utility and market programs.

Framing the opportunity for industrial companies

In the industrial sector, three trends are concerning, permitting for higher grid interaction of industrial assets. The first shift is significant toward Industry 4.0, which refers to the digital transformation of industrial processes and products. Cloud, AI, and IoT bring pervasive connectivity to everything from production line machines to heating and cooling systems to cooperate areas and factory lighting. Because of this interconnectivity, several of the assets within a building may be monitored, optimized, and maintained using data analytics and insights.

Following the more important energy transformation throughout the economy, the second trend is the electrification of industrial fleets, heating, and cooling in various structures. Electricity now accounts for only around 11% of the overall industrial energy usage, with the rest coming from natural gas and other fuels. But as industrial businesses aggressively explore ways to further electrify their energy consumption as part of broader sustainability efforts, electricity use will keep getting more important.

Energy management, which includes tracking and optimizing energy use to achieve cost savings, carbon emissions reduction, and increased resilience, is the third trend converging with digital transformation and electrification. Of course, resilience has always been a component of the equation for energy management for industrial organizations. Still, recent extreme weather or climate disasters, such as hurricanes, wildfires, and ice storms, have made it a priority.

DERs, like on-site solar power, wind power, and battery storage, are rapidly trying to make their way into industrial areas and can assist commercial and industrial businesses to accomplish their energy management objectives of cost savings, carbon reduction, and increased resilience. They include everything from decades-old combined heat and power systems to more current implementations of on-site solar or wind energy systems, battery storage, microgrids, building-level nanogrids, or electric vehicle (EV) chargers.