by Brianna Crandall — January 28, 2015—Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, just announced new solutions for building energy efficiency during the 2015 AHR Expo taking place in Chicago: Building Insights, and Power Manager for SmartStruxure.
Building Insights
Building Insights is a cloud-based solution that provides enterprise small buildings real-time visibility and control of all heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting and metering devices from anywhere at any time. It enables enterprises with multi-site portfolios of small buildings—such as restaurants, retail stores, healthcare offices and banks—to efficiently manage thousands of sites simultaneously via a computer, tablet or smartphone. Armed with actionable information, building owners and managers can make smarter energy management decisions to achieve up to a 30 percent reduction in energy costs while optimizing operations, increasing energy efficiency, reducing risks and improving occupant comfort, says Schneider Electric.
The solution offers facilities managers two levels of control: site-level and cloud-level. At the site-level, the Building Insights solution supports both wired and wireless devices for HVAC, lighting and metering applications, providing fully integrated control of energy on-site and remotely. With the solution’s foundation in the cloud, FMs can monitor and manage their facilities through powerful cloud-based software that offers a custom dashboard. This dashboard will incorporate advanced data and analytics to provide actionable insight and can be used to configure devices, add lighting schemes, create automated schedules and respond to trends, alerts and issues. In addition, the dashboard also can provide tailored reports—for example, monitoring specific HVAC sensors and/or delivering trend analysis of overall monthly consumption to allow for continuous improvement.
With remote, centralized management of building devices, FMs are empowered to elevate performance and improve operations. The Building Insights solution offers:
- Actionable insights from advanced data and analytics that communicate the information building managers need to maximize energy and operational efficiency, performance and return on investment;
- On-site controllers that can integrate Modbus, EnOcean and Zigbee metering and pulse-counting devices to pinpoint problem areas and discover opportunities for savings;
- Easy monitoring and control of both basic and advanced lighting systems—either wired or wireless—with integration of switches, relays, motion, lighting and door/window contact sensors; and
- Safe and secure Web access to sites and storage of user, project and site data.
Leveraging open protocols, the Building Insights solution from Schneider Electric can easily expand to meet growing building requirements, reducing downtime and labor and material costs. In addition, the solution’s wireless technology makes it well-suited for retrofit applications, as it requires virtually no downtime during installation, adds the company.
Power Manager for SmartStruxure
Power Manager for SmartStruxure adds electrical systems management—specifically power monitoring and energy accounting capabilities—to the company’s premier building management system (BMS) SmartStruxure solution. Power Manager for SmartStruxure enables organizations with non-critical electrical network applications to better monitor, manage and optimize their buildings from a single, easy-to-use interface. This is said to ensure electrical system health, increase power quality awareness, and improve energy accountability. As a result, customers can improve: operating expenses by reducing energy consumption, building availability and equipment life; and tenant/occupant satisfaction while achieving sustainability goals.
Energy is one of the largest expenses for facilities owners and managers and is under increasingly rigorous regulations, notes Schneider Electric. However, many organizations have minimal visibility into their utilities. Power Manager for SmartStruxure solution addresses these challenges by providing a fully embedded, cost-effective power monitoring solution that can be managed via a single system.
Power Manager for SmartStruxure solution provides users with actionable information to ensure the ongoing health of electrical systems and increase power awareness. Equipped with tools to monitor electrical equipment and key capital assets, organizations can improve response times for power-related issues, better understand power factor, harmonics and voltage disturbances, identify faults and quickly diagnose key electrical problems. Energy managers can also continuously improve energy usage by tracking energy consumption, using this data to achieve energy conservation objectives or corporate sustainability goals.
Available features of the Power Manager for SmartStruxure solution include:
- Attractive, configurable dashboards: Users can quickly and easily create dashboards customized for the data most important to their organizations. The dashboards can display any unit, show energy usage comparisons, breakdowns or improvements, and they can be shared.
- Comprehensive energy usage reports: A powerful real-time reporting engine provides users with a simple interface and options to automate reports. Out-of-the-box report templates include energy cost, multi-device usage, usage trends, load profiles and more.
- Electrical network health summaries: A simple health status view of the electrical system indicates whenever there is an electrical problem.
- Direct access to power meter data: Pre-engineered power equipment screens provide a comprehensive set of data on power meters, breaker trip units and protection relays. With this access, building managers also can view real-time values, alarms and historical data trends.
- Power system engineer views: One-line diagrams show animated breakers and bus bars, enabling managers to quickly locate information and details related to alarms.
- Support for all utilities such as water, air, gas, electricity and steam (WAGES).
The company says that Power Manager can help building personnel effectively monitor, manage and view energy in the same way as their HVAC, lighting and fire safety, helping save up to 30 percent on an organization’s annual energy consumption. It is recommended for buildings with non-critical power requirements such as commercial offices, retail or education applications, existing SmartStruxure solution sites, or even those transitioning a BMS to the SmartStruxure solution.
For more information about either solution, readers are encouraged to visit the Schneider Electric Web site or to contact a local Schneider Electric sales representative.
