Digital Twin for Energy Management - A Practical Approach
Despite the advances in technology, I have seen many industries relying on traditional approaches to managing their energy consumption. Sadly, the only way they get information about their electricity costs is by looking at their utility or diesel bills. They have no visibility, whatsoever, into overall usage, or breakup across different equipment, or actual loads.
With no insight into electricity consumption, they are in no position to have control over their electricity spend – let alone avoid power factor and demand penalties. I strongly believe that such organizations can completely transform the realm of energy management by adopting a digital twin. Read on to understand why, I think, having a digital twin for energy management is the only way to have control over electricity spend – without impacting production or quality of operations.
Digital Twin for Energy Management
Having a digital twin for energy management is one of the best ways to monitor power consumption and control energy sensors within an establishment.
A digital representation of your real, physical environment can provide the information you need on energy consumption across your facility, including weather data, energy distribution, temperature, humidity, and CO2 trends, and total energy costs. It can also help you run your business more sustainably while foreseeing energy outlays and automating energy management – as far as possible.
A digital twin can help virtual simulations across historical data, current weather data, as well as future demand and enable several optimization scenarios – right from maximizing the use of green energy to reducing peak loads. Such simulations can help cut distribution costs while systematically monitoring energy consumption, wastes, and emissions at every stage of the value chain.
A digital twin once established, you can seamlessly automate the entire energy management process and set up a closed-loop, fully autonomous system. Such a system would optimize itself constantly for both cost and sustainability criteria, and provide a completely transparent and highly effective system.
What to Look for in a Digital Twin Energy Management Solution?
If you want to set up a digital twin for your enterprise for efficient energy management, you need to invest in a solution that offers a variety of innovative features. Here are the top 5 features to look for:
Remote monitoring:
For industries with dispersed facilities and grids, a digital twin allows for effective remote monitoring – so you can get real-time insight into energy consumption patterns and issues. By monitoring and analyzing energy usage from anywhere using direct web access, a digital twin can aid in timely and accurate energy decision-making, allowing for optimized consumption and costs.
Intuitive dashboards and reports
A digital twin that offers intuitive dashboards at the facility, tenant, and zone can deliver direct and derived KPIs at different operational levels. Such dashboards can open opportunities for continuous energy optimization, and help you cut energy and utility costs while driving reliable remote monitoring of your industrial setup
Automated capabilities
Automated capabilities are also extremely sought-after for effective energy management. For instance, an automatic thermostat setting based on a defined schedule and/or motion sensors can help deliver several benefits to overall energy costs and comfort. By maintaining a consistent temperature based on occupancy or ambient conditions, a digital twin with automated capabilities can improve air and ventilation quality and efficiency and help maintain a comfortable atmosphere for improved health and safety.
Events and alarms
Digital twins can pave the way for efficient and accurate fault diagnosis, especially for remote locations. They provide much-needed insights into energy and power parameters, allowing you to leverage configurable events and real-time SMS/email notification alerts to respond quickly to issues and bottlenecks – with traceability to the exact location.
Flexibility and scalability
Modern digital twins offer high levels of flexibility and scalability, so you can meet the growing energy needs of your business with ease. By allowing you to easily configure the solution and then extending it to an enterprise-wide power management system in a few steps, it can provide accurate visualization of both the supply and demand-side data in a single platform while allowing you to configure complex cost calculations for enhanced energy management.
As the discussions on climate protection, resource efficiency, and environmental regulations pick up steam, businesses are under constant pressure to embrace new models and technologies to deal with rising energy usage and costs.
A technology like Delpheon’s EPM can help businesses move to a carbon-neutral environment quickly and easily. By enabling remote monitoring, offering intuitive dashboards and reports, automating critical energy management tasks, offering timely events and alarms, and enabling seamless flexibility and scalability, a digital twin can help reduce carbon footprint while helping you save significantly on your energy bills.