Three Gradations of Advanced Energy Management and the Success Factors to tackle them.

Three Gradations of Advanced Energy Management

We distinguish different levels of continuous control and optimization, which are essential for planning implementation projects:

1. Basic Stability and Safety: Ensure the system operates without disruptions and safely.
2. Operational Optimization: Harmonize communication among assets to maintain operational control, unlocking use cases such as peak shaving to avoid grid connection capacity issues and penalties.
3. Cost and Risk Optimization: Achieve the overall lowest possible cost and risk by using advanced financial controls, minimizing price exposure and maximizing renewable energy use.

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Planning Advanced Energy Management

Plan your energy management projects according to these gradations:

• Select High-Quality Hardware: Choose hardware with reliable firmware that supports industry-standard communication protocols.
• Establish a Common Hardware Control Layer: Create a unified control layer for data capture and process control. This layer should enable interoperability among different energy-consuming, producing, and storing assets and unlock first operational optimization use cases, e.g. peak shaving based on grid connection capacity.
• Implement Advanced Financial Steering: Use financial control mechanisms on the established hardware control layer to optimize costs, reduce price exposure, and enhance renewable energy use, e.g. through imbalance optimization. Embrace the financial complexity of energy optimization, as simple day-ahead arbitrage might be suboptimal.

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Key Success Factors

• Support Open Ecosystems: Select vendors that support open ecosystems to avoid risks associated with single-vendor, closed systems. Use standardized protocols like OPC-UA to integrate various vendors and avoid lock-ins.
• Prove Value Quickly: Avoid large, disruptive implementations. Instead, follow a use case-by-use case approach. This allows adaptation to rapid industry changes and generates income and savings before triggering significant CAPEX costs - think of creating your own budget this way :)
• Respect the Gradations, but Don’t Think Purely Sequentially: Follow the sequence of gradations for each use case scope, but develop a few simpler scopes to the highest optimization level early on to gain transferable learnings.
• Leverage Industry Experience: Recognize that many solutions and innovations are transferable from other industries. Partner with innovation leaders to provide cost-efficient optimization solutions integrated with your asset control layer.

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Next Steps

The first step is to map out the various energy management scopes related to your energy-consuming, producing, and storing assets within your organization.

Clarify the use cases for each energy management gradation to guide the structured implementation of advanced energy management solutions tailored to your situation.

For more detailed discussions, feel free to reach out. At Companion.energy, we support multiple large businesses in delivering advanced cost and risk optimization, tailored to their specific energy context and contract mix. Savings of more than 20% are no exception.