For large consumers of energy, the ability to respond strategically to changes in consumption costs plays a key role in your cost-reduction strategies. When it comes to an organisational budget, utilising demand-side response (DSR) programmes is an advantage.
Due to a combination of climate change commitments, ageing infrastructure, and rising populations, governments and national power generators are increasingly using imaginative pricing strategies to penalise their largest consumers of energy. In some countries, including the UK, this surcharging can increase tariff rates between 7 and 40 times—for hours at a time.
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Developing Demand-Side Response Programmes
A DSR is a technology or practice that helps energy producers flatten the demand curve resulting from their everyday activities. For example, a grocery store must run large food refrigeration equipment concurrently with HVAC, heavy-duty baking equipment and lighting. Stores are notorious for being energy-hungry beasts and consequently, grocers are billed much higher during periods of elevated pricing, causing a significant impact to their bottom line.
Developing a DSR programme with a trusted solution like Accruent’s—acting as the DSR conductor—allows a grocer to schedule changes in their devices based on multiple criteria, including:
- Refrigeration product type.
- Equipment schedules.
- Equipment manufacturer.
- Site operational hours.
By considering the increasingly connected nature of controls devices beyond refrigeration (e.g., HVAC & commercial refrigeration), and affiliating them to Accruent’s Industrial IoT control capability, businesses now have the opportunity to develop and deploy comprehensive, enterprise-scale, Demand-Side Response Programmes.
Accruent offers the ability to utilise these demand-side response programmes through a customisable rules engine in our energy management software. With our remote monitoring and IoT solution, large consumers of energy can respond strategically to changes in consumption costs that can play a significant role in your cost-reduction strategies. This insight allows you to move peak energy usage hours and save money during these costly energy hours by turning off key pieces of equipment, dropping setpoint changes on temperature-sensitive equipment, and cycling HVAC systems.
For example, you can anticipate paying an increase for using electricity between 5pm and 7pm. To minimize the cost incurred during this timeframe, Accruent’s solution creates a demand-side response program strategy to drive down chiller and freezer temperatures in the 30 minutes prior to the electricity cost increase window.
Minutes before the increase window, Accruent’s energy management software can:
- Increase the temperature setpoint of any cooler and freezer.
- Raise refrigeration alarm setpoints to prevent false alarms.
- Disable electric refrigeration defrosts.
- Switch various services to generators.
- Reduce store lighting levels by 20%.
- Reduce store heating or cooling demand.
Once the increase window has closed, Accruent’s solution automatically returns all parameters to their default state and provides automatic compliance and audit reports of changes. The cumulative effect of these changes across a large grocery chain can produce annualised savings measuring in the millions of pounds/euros—a welcome change to a bleeding budget.
Investing in a software that can help you take advantage of demand-side response programmes can unlock significant savings for your organisation.
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