Current energy management solutions are not tailored for the SME sector, especially those traditional businesses that have modest revenues and to which the utilities costs represent a significant share of the total operational costs. Current solutions are either simple energy monitoring systems (mostly targeted at the residential sector) or too complex and expensive (usually targeted to big facilities). Only few solutions have been developed to the SME sector but, beyond existing in an insufficient number to address the whole market, these solutions still deliver incomplete feedback to aid the end users to be more efficient and are hard to be adaptable to the different needs of the different SMEs.
In addition, the few existing solutions are hardly including energy management strategies that help utilities to better manage their energy demand/supply value-chain (e.g. by fostering the implementation of demand response techniques to decrease the supply and the demand costs altogether).
The IE2Advisor has been designed to specifically address SME needs and arming non-energy experts SME owners with a layer of information and automation capabilities to lower energy consumption. With the conclusion of Phase 1, the IE2Advisor has been acquiring important features that enrich the feedback to the SMEs, helping them to deploy informed energy conservation measures (e.g. alarm setting for abnormal consumptions or when reaching the contracted power levels, benchmarking with other installations according to selected indicators, download historical data, integration of different sensors such as temperature, heat, electricity or gas, and remote controllers that can be programable with adaptive self-learning capabilities to optimise multivariate problems such as comfort maximisation and cost minimisation, setting the way to demand response).
The IE2Advisor can also be complemented by proprietary controllers (that are less expensive than if bought to third parties) and data aggregators that can be configured in installations where sensors or actuators from third parties already exist, with which they can communicate to (i) aggregate data to the IE2Advisor platform, or (ii) send commands to control loads. With this flexible and agnostic architecture with the hardware, the IE2Advisor cost can lower considerably and gains value.
The combination of these features structure a solution with higher value than what can be find in current solutions. This paradigm is even more favourable when planning an incremental development during Phase 2, where the adaptive self-learning mechanisms will be developed, enhancing the potential benefits of the IE2Advisor for different scenarios, taking into consideration the needs of the SMEs, utilities and ESCOs.
The IE2Advisor is highly aligned with the EU societal challenges addressed in this call: secure, clean and efficient energy. The Ie2Advisor contributes to a more efficient usage of energy with the advanced algorithms that characterise the consumption profile of each SME and suggests the most effective tailor-made energy efficiency solution through an advising platform that eases the implementation of such strategies. As described above, the IE2Advisor will incorporate advanced data analytics that will consider not only the demand side but also the supply side (utilities) and will be able to perform multivariate optimisation problems towards an effective implementation of demand response strategies that should benefit both the utility and the end consumer. In fact, by being able to effectively encourage the end users to implement corrective measures with encouraging benefits for both supply and demand sides, utilities will be able to better cope supply with demand, avoiding energy losses in the distribution and using acute electricity production assets such as gas-fired power plants with high marginal costs. Such ability contributes to a cleaner supply of energy. The combination of the demand response services with the demand forecast of the IE2Advisor algorithms will improve the better management of the demand/supply value-chain by the utility, therefore contributing to a decrease of the chances for blackouts, resulting in a more secure supply of energy.
In addition to the above, with a better management of the demand/supply value-chain, it will become more reliable to increase the penetration of renewable energy sources in the grid. The IE2Advisor is also able to properly quantify the benefits of the optimal PV solution for each SME, therefore encouraging the penetration of these distributed energy generation technologies, which contributes to a cleaner and more independent (secure) supply of energy.
