Energy Efficiency

Negawatt Business Solutions (NBS) helps companies in any sector reduce their energy expenditure while maintaining occupant comfort, optimal throughput and product quality. Through a combination of expertise and a number of the world's most advanced and powerful analysis technologies, NBS is able to significantly reduce its clients' energy consumption and help reduce carbon emissions. Experience has shown us that clients who implement NBS energy efficiency systems achieve savings of between 10 and 25% on their energy costs. Return on investment is typically less than 18 months and has been as low as 3 months. However, the benefits to your company are not restricted to reducing costs. Your customers are more likely to buy from companies who are committed to reducing their environmental impact.

Energy Efficiency Platform

Negawatt Business Solutions provides a powerful Energy Efficiency solutions platform (NBS-EE) used for energy consumption tracking, energy efficiency optimization and automated demand response for commercial, industrial and institutional buildings globally. The heart of the system is a powerful analysis and decision support engine with a proven track record of solving complex energy problems in commercial office buildings, multi-site locations, grocery store chains, manufacturing facilities, etc. While it is important to measure what is going on in any energy management application, it is more important to work out why consumption patterns occur the way they do and to work out the contributing factors to energy consumption. Sub-metering and advanced energy calculations that utilize a variety of data sources allow NBS-EE to do this analysis and provide substantial savings for our clients. NBS-EE is a web-based solution and therefore requires no software installation at the client's site. To access the full capabilities of NBS-EE users only require a standard web browser. Access to the system is password controlled and users see what they are entitled to according to their job function. For instance, at a local level a store manager can only see the data for his store, while at a national level the corporate energy manager can see the data for all the stores under his/her control. Sites can be grouped into regions and territories and all values for the sites added to the region or territory totals.

The NBS-EE platform is compatible with all the meters provided by major meter manufacturers or energy suppliers as well as the majority of building management systems (BMS). It is capable of handling data from electricity, gas, heat and water meters as well as any other data streams - whether collected through hardware or from manual data input. NBS-EE is not constrained by half-hour periods and can read and display data at sub-minute resolution. The calculations engine, which has been benchmarked as 'best in breed' by NBS-EE clients in the utilities industry, allows any calculation to be defined, be it energy and cost for a set time period or more specific calculations on production efficiency. Any calculation defined in the calculations module can be displayed using any of the dashboard widgets.

NBS-EE is data source and data destination neutral. We can accept data from any meter, sub-meter, electronic instrumentation, database, control system, manual data entry form, or BMS installation and use this data to analyze energy use in terms of process throughput and product quality. We will then use these results as an output to any control system, BMS, database or electronic device.

The NBS-EE system connects to sites by direct communication via RF gateway or by secure simple data transfer from a client's network to NBS secure external servers. Whatever a client's internal set-up, NBS-EE has a solution to data collection and presentation.

NBS-EE can handle anything from a single site for a small client to many thousands of sites spread around the globe. Automated alarms, alerts and reporting functions within the system ensure that one person can manage many hundreds of installations on their own. The database and calculations engine, which lies at the heart of the NBS-EE solution, is capable of handling huge quantities of data and has been designed to operate just as effectively for a single site user as it does for a multi-national corporation.

System pricing varies in terms of the complexity of the solution that needs to be provided. Supply and installation of instrumentation and hardware is normally carried out by our partners. Negawatt's energy solution engineers provide advice on required data for best return on investment for our clients. Typical payback periods for NBS-EE installations have been less than 18 months.

NBS-EE Features:

Databases supported

• Microsoft SQLServer
• Oracle
• PostgresSQL

Connectivity

• Connection to any Utility meter
• Connection to most popular sub-metering systems
• Connection to external data collection systems by GSM/GPRS/TCPIP/IP etc
• Invisible systems
• RadioTech
• Adam
• TMac
• Torex
• Synetica
• LEM
• HiTechnologies
• Danfoss
• Tridium

Connections to :

• BMS
• Control systems
• Control instrumentation
• External databases
• Data historians
• Full OPC compatibility for two-way communications with all modern control systems.
• Support for Bacnet, Modbus, Lonworks, oBIX, iLon, EnNet multiple other interfaces
• Export of data to any other system
• Export of data to MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Manual keyboard entry on web forms
• Import of data from excel
• Import of data from CSV etc.
• Import of data from FTP transfer

System

• Web-based
• Password controlled access
• Single or multiple sites - fully scalable
• Easy to use
• Complex calculations engine with full Boolean logic support
• Templates to define site requirements
• Minimal set up time, define a site type and the system will build all sites of that type
• Define access levels for what a user will see upon log in

User Interface

• Standard web browser is all that is needed
• Geospatial map-based view for multiple sites
• Widget based
• User can design own web pages using simple drag and drop techniques
• Full graphing and trending display package
• Refrigeration HACCP management and reporting
• Automatic alarm and alert generation
• Full alarm management capability
• Full systems monitoring capability - the system monitors and alarms on itself!
• Alarms on the web, via email, SMS, smart phone and I-Phone app
• Simple traffic light notification
• Automatic reporting, user-defined Excel reports can be incorporated on the web site for viewing
• Bench marking across sites
• Enterprise-wide KPIs and league tables
• Full bill validation and 'mock' bill creation to estimate expenditure
• Carbon footprint calculation and reporting
• Alarm against measured data and KPIs
• Compare any data value against any other
• Set up and alarm on any calculation
• Measure everything in cost terms
• Set targets and have ranked tabular displays of worse variance against target for energy, cost against efficiency measures
• Predict energy spending and manage energy costs

Types of user-defined widgets available

Most of the widgets support drilldown to sub data sets, month-to-day to half-hour etc.

• Site Information
• Geospatial map front end, Virtual EarthTM navigation
• 2Y axis plots
• Degree day analysis, electric/gas
• Emissions offset equivalent
• Excel custom reports
• Gauge display with alarms levels displayed
• Overlays of data assets
• Site communications status
• Meter alarm profile
• Alarm configuration
• Alarm History
• Tariff analysis
• Bill Validation
• Mock Bill
• Site contract allocation
• Site contract analysis
• Carbon breakdown
• Carbon footprint
• Consumption report
• Temperature heat maps and HAACP report
• Total cost breakdown pie chart (site or totals)
• Utility league tables for all sites
• Utility consumption year-to-date
• Utility usage targets
• Usage versus target
• Data Entry
• Links