Omega-Integrated Solutions Inc.

If it wasn't for the global need to save energy, the term "energy management" might never have even been invented.

Energy management is a term that has a number of meanings, but we're mainly concerned with the one that relates to saving energy in businesses, public-sector/government organizations and homes.

Most organizational energy expenses account for more than 25 percent of the total operating costs. Omega can help you control and dramatically reduce those costs by 30 percent or more. Resultant energy savings can be used to improve facilities, make capital investments and improve profits.

Omega offers a flexible program customized to your specific needs for a system, single building, campus and multiple enterprise locations. Energy management improvements can significantly reduce energy consumption and provide proportional savings.

Omega's energy management services can help:

• Maintain and repair existing HVAC, lighting, water and power systems
• Temperature controls and automation systems
• Install energy-efficient equipment
• Manage meters, alarms and emissions
• Track consumption and analyze utility market data
• Report, analyze and forecast energy demand
• Analyze utility rate structures and utility bills
• Assess and recommend energy purchasing options

Omega has certified energy managers (CEM) and LEED AP experts who can act as your energy advocate, putting their knowledge of complex energy alternatives, negotiating skills and energy analysis tools to work for you. Omega can facilitate with the installation, upgrading and maintaining of systems in existing buildings to improve working environment, additional productivity, added comfort, higher safety and at less operational costs.

Omega utilizes powerful Siemens Energy Management software and metering solutions that automate equipment, analyze energy consumption, provide paging on critical alarms and demand control. Siemens software solutions deliver an almost unlimited stream of total facility data related to the operations energy consumption and vulnerability to electrical power disturbances providing information to give the end-user operator the ability to make more informed decisions when it comes to preventive maintenance, troubleshooting, power quality improvements, and much more.

When it comes to energy savings, energy management is the process of monitoring, controlling, and conserving energy in a building or organization which typically involves the following steps:

Metering your energy consumption and collecting the data:

• This often requires upgrading your existing metering infrastructure to include Intelligent Energy Meters and Energy Management Software to monitor and store the data.
• As a rule of thumb, the more data you can get, and the more detailed it is the better.
• The old school approach to energy-data collection is to manually read meters once a week or once a month. This is quite a chore, and unfortunately weekly or monthly data is hopelessly inadequate when compared with the data that comes easily and automatically from the modern approach.
• The modern approach to energy-data collection is to fit interval-metering systems that automatically measure and record energy consumption at short, regular intervals such as every 15-minutes or half hour.
• Detailed interval energy consumption data makes it possible to see patterns of energy waste that it would be impossible to see otherwise.
• For example, there's simply no way that weekly or monthly meter readings can show you how much energy you're using at different times of the day, or on different days of the week. And seeing these patterns is critical to finding the routine waste in your building.
• The crux of the matter is that it rarely makes economic sense to spend time trying to squeeze useful information out of weekly or monthly meter readings when interval metering is readily available, and the detail from interval-metering systems opens up so many more opportunities to save energy.

Finding and quantifying opportunities to save energy:

• You would typically analyze your meter data to find and quantify routine energy waste.
• You might also investigate the energy savings that you could make by replacing equipment (e.g. lighting) or by upgrading your building's insulation.

Taking action to target the opportunities to save energy:

• Typically you'd start with the best opportunities first.
• The detailed meter data that you are collecting will be invaluable for helping you to find and quantify energy-saving opportunities.
• The easiest and most cost-effective energy-saving opportunities typically require little or no capital investment.
• For example, an unbelievable number of buildings have advanced control systems that could, and should, be controlling HVAC well, but, unbeknown to the facilities-management staff, are faulty or poorly configured, and consequently committing such sins as heating or cooling an empty building every night and every weekend.
• One of the simplest ways to save a significant amount of energy is to encourage staff to switch equipment off at the end of each working day.
• Looking at detailed interval energy data is the ideal way to find routine energy waste. You can check whether staff and timers are switching things off without having to patrol the building day and night, and, with a little detective work, you can usually figure out who or what is causing the energy wastage that you will inevitably find.
• Most buildings have open to them a variety of equipment- or building-fabric-related energy-saving opportunities, most of which require a more significant capital investment.
• Although your detailed meter data won't necessarily help you to find these equipment- or building-fabric-related opportunities (e.g. it won't tell you that a more efficient type of lighting equipment exists), it will be useful for helping you to quantify the potential savings that each opportunity could bring.
• It's much more reliable to base your savings estimates on real metered data than on rules of thumb alone. And it's critically important to quantify the expected savings for any opportunity that you are considering investing a lot of time or money into - it's the only way you can figure out how to hone in on the biggest, easiest energy savings first.

Targeting the opportunities to save energy:

• Simply finding the opportunities to save energy won't help you to save energy - you have to take action to target them.
• For those energy-saving opportunities that require you to motivate the people in your building, energy awareness is very useful. It can be hard work, but, if you can get the people on your side, you can make some seriously big energy savings without investing anything other than time.
• As for those energy-saving opportunities that require you to upgrade equipment or insulation: assuming you've identified them, there's little more to be said.

Tracking your progress at saving energy:

• Once you've taken action to save energy, it's important that you find out how effective your actions have been.
• Energy savings that come from behavioral changes (e.g. getting people to switch off their computers before going home) need ongoing attention to ensure that they remain effective and achieve their maximum potential.
• If you've invested money into new equipment, you'll probably want to prove that you've achieved the energy savings you predicted.
• If you've corrected faulty timers or control-equipment settings, you'll need to keep checking back to ensure that everything's still working as it should be. Simple things like a power cut can easily cause timers to revert back to factory settings - if you're not keeping an eye on your energy-consumption patterns you can easily miss such problems.
• If you've been given energy-saving targets from above, you'll need to provide evidence that you're meeting them, or at least making progress towards that goal.

Regularly repeating the above process as energy billing structures change, new technology becomes available or when your facility undergoes growth or change:

• Regardless it is a good idea to have a process in place to ensure that energy savings policies are is adhered to.
• Managing your energy consumption effectively is an ongoing process.
• At the very least you should keep analyzing your energy data regularly to check that things aren't getting worse.
• It's pretty normal for unwatched buildings to become less efficient with time: it's to be expected that equipment will break down or lose efficiency, and that people will forget the good habits you worked hard to encourage in the past.
• So at a minimum you should take a quick look at your energy data once a week, or even just once a month, to ensure that nothing has gone horribly wrong ... It's a real shame when easy-to-fix faults such as poorly configured timers remain unnoticed for months on end, leaving a huge energy bill that could have easily been avoided.
• But ideally your energy-management drive will be an ongoing effort to find new opportunities to target, to target them, and to track your progress at making ongoing energy savings.
• Managing your energy consumption doesn't have to be a full-time job, but you'll achieve much better results if you make it part of your regular routine.

Energy management is the key to saving energy in your organization. Much of the importance of energy saving stems from the global need to save energy - this global need affects energy prices, emissions targets, and legislation, all of which lead to several compelling reasons why you should save energy at your organization specifically.

Energy management is the means to controlling and reducing your organization's energy consumption which is important because it enables you to:

• Reduce costs - this is becoming increasingly important as energy costs rise.
• Reduce carbon emissions and the environmental damage that they cause - as well as the cost-related implications of carbon taxes and the like, your organization may be keen to reduce its carbon footprint to promote a green, sustainable image. Not least because promoting such an image is often good for the bottom line.
• Reduce risk - the more energy you consume, the greater the risk that energy price increases or supply shortages could seriously affect your profitability, or even make it impossible for your business/organization to continue. With energy management you can reduce this risk by reducing your demand for energy and by controlling it so as to make it more predictable.

Omega can help you with all of the stages of the energy management process. We are experts in Intelligent Energy Meters, Energy Management Software, AMI, AMR, implementation, metering energy consumption, collecting data, finding/quantifying opportunities, designing/implementing Energy Management processes & policies as well as sourcing and installing related products.

Globally we need to save energy in order to reduce the damage that we're doing to our planet and reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels that are becoming increasingly limited in supply.

Renewable and Alternative energy technologies can only do so much - we humans use a lot of energy!

Energy management is the key to saving energy in your organization.

Most of the energy savings principles that apply to businesses and other organizations are also applicable to homes.