CEZ – Motivating employees to save energy and introducing the AMM smart metering technology

CEZ Group (electricity producer in the Czech Republic) is raising awareness among its employees about wasting energy in large office buildings. It uses a fun way to motivate employees to save energy and to present the capabilities of modern AMM smart metering technology.

Horizontal menu

Solutions

The main project goal was to accurately measure and present on-line the energy consumption in CEZ buildings – lighting in general, power sockets, toilets (hand dryers, lights), kitchenettes (lights, fridges, coffee makers, dishwashers, ...), under-window air-conditioning units and window blinds. The metering needs to be broken down to the level of individual floors and building segments.
The aim is to display the consumption of various areas in real time at screens in the lobby. In addition, the consumption will be recorded and analyzed. As a result, not only are the advantages of AMM presented in an eye-catching way to each visitor; the recorded values are also presented to employees in a competition in order to save energy and increase their awareness about smart energy metering.

Solution

A HWg-PWR unit was used to measure the consumption. This unit for metering the consumption of electricity, water and other utilities connects to external meters with an M-Bus interface. Up to 25 M-Bus meters can be connected to one HWg-PWR unit. Individual meters are third-party products, and existing meters at the customer's premises were also used.
The unit provides a Web interface, displays charts, supports SNMP and Modbus/TCP output, and provides data logging, e-mail and SMS alerts, and much more. Thanks to its capabilities, it was possible to provide an on-line overview of current values as well as record the values, export them to XLS and analyze them.

Benefits for the customer

Thanks to the ability of HWg-PWR 25 to process up to 100 values from 25 electricity meters, a single unit was sufficient for the analysis.
This helped to significantly reduce the customer's costs. The HWg PDMS software provides on-line overview of measured data and native export to XLS for easy analysis by the customer's marketing team.

Since the analyzed data were used for a staff competition, employees keenly participated and within three months, energy consumption in measured circuits at individual floors decreased by up to 20%.
This means savings in the order of MWh, so the solution not only increases employees' awareness of new technology and reduces electricity consumption in the building – the financial investment returns in just a few months.

Future expansion
As of this time, the customer did not take advantage of alerts to excessive values. This can be used to monitor for failures or to alert the operator if the measured values are near specified limits. It is also possible to monitor other electricity circuits (air-conditioning, elevators, etc.) as well as other utilities. This would enable a more precise analysis and thus greater financial savings.