With None, large companies can halve energy consumption
If you ask a business manager how much the company spends on energy, he most likely does not know. Is you ask what the car uses per mile, the answer comes with two decimals, says Frode Styve in Green Tracker. (Photo: Green Tracker)
With help from Cegal Green Tracker has developed a user-friendly system that provides full control over energy consumption, water consumption and soon also waste management.
“I usually compare with the TV show ‘Luksusfellen’. Participants often have a solid cash flow but have no idea where the money goes. This is also the case with energy consumption in almost all companies. Most business leaders have no idea how much energy costs or what draws the most energy. Green Tracker provides them with an overview”, says Frode Styve, CEO of the company behind the solution, Eta Energi.
None is a modern, user-friendly, web-based energy monitoring system. The solution is developed for companies, organizations, condominiums etc. which have a large and complex energy use. The users of None are industry, retail or hotel chains, major building owners and municipalities. Among the customers we find, Tveita condominium in Oslo, Haugesund municipality and the health trust Helse Fonna in Haugalandet.
Tveita condominium is Norway’s fourth largest with 819 apartments in 3 high-rises. Since they started using None, the energy consumption for heating and tap water has more than halved from about 12 GWh/year to about 5 GWh/year.
The Cegal effect
Green Tracker was founded in 2007 and a couple of years later Cegal was contacted to help develop the energy monitoring system.
“First, we tried with an IT company in Oslo, but they did not have enough expertise and knowledge about the energy sector. It did not work. Then we contacted Cegal and have worked with them since”, Styve says on video call from Haugesund.
Today, Cegal is responsible for further development and operation with responsibility for “full lifecycle management”. This goes all the way from architecture to development and testing, to further development and maintenance. The development has taken place in close collaboration with the energy experts in Eta Energy, which is the main owner of Green Tracker.
User-friendly system provides great savings
Styve praises Cegal’s expertise in the energy industry.
“The expertise Cegal has at the crossroads of technology and energy means that Cegaldelivers very high quality”, says Styve and continues:
It is easy to just relate to the electricity meters and retract data from them, but the meters are only a small part of the energy value chain. For example, the system must preserve the history, even when the meters are replaced. Cegal has worked with the power industry for so long that they understand which solutions that needs to be created.
The None energy monitoring system gives people a complete overview of what kind of energy sources have been used for electricity, what the energy has been used for and you can compare consumption with other similar buildings and users.
This overview is useful, for example, when a shopping center is to distribute the electricity bill to their tenants or when a municipality is to distribute the electricity costs to schools, kindergartens, sports, associations, and others who use the municipal building stock.
The energy monitoring system shows what uses energy down to the smallest detail. The alternative is to spend a lot of time looking in the accounting system for electricity bills and other invoices and then spend many working hours putting together the figures and doing analyzes on them, says Styve.
Green transition with None
With None you get insight into energy consumption, and you see the effect of energy saving measures. With a more detailed control of the consumption in the buildings, you can compare buildings to one another and improve areas that are not optimal. It can be revealed, for example, that a heat pump has stopped running optimally and uses more energy than before. Such improvements save both energy and the environment.
Green Tracker also has a similar solution that measures water consumption. Here, too, better control will mean that measures can be taken that reduce consumption, but the solution can also be used to report usage.
Green Tracker and Cegal are currently working on developing a solution for waste that provides complete insight in how companies handle their waste.
“There is an increasing obligation to report and to meet documentation requirements. With None, companies get tools that give control over the resources they use. None is a necessary solution for businesses to be greener and more sustainable”, says Styve and adds:
“Getting an overview of consumption is the most effective saving measure. With the energy monitoring system, you reduce energy consumption by five to ten percent just by starting to monitor consumption and gain insight into what the energy is used for.”
