Friday, March 29, 2024

Cloud control for energy use

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There’s now a real-time option for identifying exactly what “vampires” are sucking up energy use in dairies.
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Auckland-based company GridSpy is one of the finalists in this year’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority’s (EECA) energy awards. GridSpy founder and director Tom Leys said it had developed a cloud-based electricity monitoring system to identify power consumption from specific devices, highlight the use profile in an easily understood dashboard, and provide benchmark data to improve or reduce energy use.

He believes there’s a significant opportunity in larger dairy farming operations to rationalise power consumption by attaching GridSpy GridNode wireless data collectors to specific devices. The GridNodes communicate power consumption wirelessly to a central GridHub that exports the data to a cloud server, enabling remote internet access.

“There are monitoring systems around already, but none will offer real-time updates capable of being stored for up to six months, at an affordable price for businesses.”

The flexibility of the GridSpy system should appeal to farmers who want to customise monitoring themselves for dairy or irrigation use, he said.

“It’s very hard to separate out what your actual usage is from a power company’s account, and it certainly will not provide an indicator of what equipment is working efficiently, nor of any behavioural activity that affects power consumption, like leaving lights on in the farm dairy.

“It could be that by installing LED lights in the dairy you can calculate how much energy will be saved against conventional, and how much more through getting behavioural changes, like turning the lights off sooner.”

The ability to store the usage pattern and compare over time provides a benchmark when installing improved equipment.

GridSpy also helps analyse the “power factor” or efficiency in specific motors, and indicate whether corrective equipment needs to be installed, such as capacitors.

The system’s flexibility extends to the ability to lease monitors for periods from three months upwards, and with nodes able to be added or removed.

“Typically you could expect to save at least 10% by having better knowledge of power use and loss, and being able to make changes. For an average farm dairy there could be a potential saving of $2000 a year.

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