Year-End-Planning: Where to Spend Your Excess Budget

We’re rounding the corner on year end, and many businesses have money left in their budgets they need to spend. As we continue to experience extreme weather events, many wish to put it towards sustainability projects, such as making the move to electrify and use natural refrigerants, but not all OEMs and suppliers have the goods. Lead times and custom controls for most equipment are atrocious.

So what can you do while waiting to install upgrades?  

One option is to enhance the efficiency of your energy consumption. Demand Response programs, always important and beneficial to multiple stakeholders, are critically important today, and even where IoT platforms and enhanced building automation systems have been adopted, they may not be used to their full functionality.  

Year-end planning:Making best use of measurement

An understanding of digitization and enhanced networking of sensors and meters, and integrating with work order management platforms, can help not only to make best use of demand response programs but to allow for benchmarking, continuous commissioning, and energy savings all year.
Working with existing controls manufacturers and evaluating solutions that can be easily layered on (without spending a fortune or starting with all new components) can provide significant benefits pretty quickly.

Better Insight From Reports

Another important feature of these systems is front end graphics and exception reports These have got to be easy to view and must provide enough granularity to allow for immediate correction or dispatch of service providers, with enough information to allow them to quickly make adjustments or repairs.

Mixing Energy with Water

Finally, connecting these to other meters and tracking programs, such as water and waste, will provide further opportunities for optimization and usage and cost reductions.

In view of the severe droughts we’ve witnessed and the water-energy nexus, we’ve also got to pay attention to all kinds of water reduction and management opportunities. Sub-metering to identify leaks and other issues will be paramount.

Our sustainable design, engineering, construction, manufacturing, operations, and facilities management community has always been a busy one, and it keeps getting busier.

Get in touch with our team to learn more