Enterprise energy management: defining the enterprise. (Energy Online).

The term enterprise has a clear meaning when used to refer to computer networks. The enterprise is the highest level of communication architecture, meaning that both information and access at this level offer the greatest degree of utility within the network. Application software available at the enterprise level generally resides on servers that also communicate peer-to-peer, offering access to all software and information from lower level workstations, etc.

Energy Enterprise

Software companies offering products to access and summarize utility data first applied the term enterprise to energy applications. This use appears to arise from the fact that energy management is an enterprise, or business-wide, function encompassing revenue meters from several utilities and often multiple buildings.

The term enterprise seems to be applied appropriately since many energy managers want more than meter data. Energy enterprise software can operate on dedicated servers or via the Internet through an application service provider (ASP). The software makes available data from ancillary devices such as steam, chilled/hot water, and other meters. These data can be captured and displayed meaningfully to aid in making energy decisions.

Bob Jennings of Eka Systems says that Fairfax County, VA, is using the Energy Insight software, (figure 1), to save $50,000 per year. Fairfax monitors real-time energy consumption to identify and shut down equipment that is operating during unoccupied periods. Cody Graves, CEO of Automated Energy, believes that users need timely utility data in data screens such as this one to stop "...managing operations through the rear-view mirror." Software tools like Automated Energy's are used to analyze operations using an ASP, making it possible to access data from anywhere. It may also be possible to access interval data from the utility, which offers recent usage data, typically for the last 24-hour period. Managers can use utility interval information to affect the bill before it arrives by changing operations, and they can also build energy profiles. Soon these data should be available real-time in XML format, though today it is common for data to be provided on a monthly basis using proprietary software.

Recent software releases extend Enterprise/Internet functionality by allowing the creation of indices to measure business performance as a function of energy. Automated Energy has a feature for creating indices other than energy use and other traditional measures. These tools allow managers to create any energy metric. For example, McDonald's restaurants have long measured British thermal units per burger as a management tool to compare store performance.

In information technology (IT) today, the hottest topic is collaboration, which means leveraging the power of many processors in an organization to increase computing power. Some technologies simply grab processing time on idle machines to accomplish tasks that might otherwise queue up.