Situation

With the rising cost of electricity, the Portuguese commercial bank Millennium BCP wanted to find a way to reduce their energy consumption and related costs by 10%, while also reducing their ecological footprint. To achieve this, they decided to implement energy efficiency measures in a large part of their branches throughout the country.

Millennium BCP was searching for a modular, interoperable and centralized energy management system that would allow them to:

• Obtain detailed information about their energy consumption.
• Avoid waste by restricting the working hours of their HVAC systems and outdoor lighting.
• Receive alarms whenever abnormal consumption is detected.
• Support their maintenance team.

Solution

Cleanwatts partnered with Millennium BCP to implement Cleanwatts™ OS to monitor energy consumption at over 180 of the bank’s branches. The project remit involved a permanent energy management service and the creation of a global, centralized and aggregated view of the entire energy structure.

Cleanwatts™ OS receives information directly from devices installed at each monitoring point, aggregating the collected data and making it easily visible to end-users. This allows users to access real-time and historical consumption data from all installed monitoring points and make all sorts of analysis.

The operating system also remotely controls the main consumers such as air conditioning systems and luminous signs. While Cleanwatts™ OS is intuitive and easy to use, Cleanwatts also provided Millennium BCP employees with training on the system to optimize the monitoring and management of energy consumption.

The Cleanwatts™ OS can also identify energy consumption anomalies and report them to Millennium BCP so that their maintenance team can correct them. Examples of these irregularities include HVAC with nocturnal consumption or outdoor lighting working outside of its programmed schedule. Cleanwatts also provides Millennium BCP with customizable reports and energy management services.

Results

Before the implementation of Cleanwatts™ OS, the total annual energy consumption of the monitored branches was 10.644.302 kWh. After the implementation of our management tools and services, the total annual consumption was reduced to 9.386.732 kWh. This represents a reduction of 1.257.571 kWh, or -11,8%.

In monetary terms, this reduction equals average annual savings of €163.484.