With energy prices skyrocketing in recent years, moni-toring of energy consumption is becoming imperative for many private businesses and public agencies. There are many cases, in which the installation of energy monitoring systems has helped many people to identify critical prob-lems and take the right actions, which have had drastic results to the direction of reducing the overall energy con-sumption and consequently the costs.
To this direction, a bright example can be the energy mon-itoring solution, which was successfully installed on the island of Kythnos by the company Ether Applications S.A. within the framework of the "Kythnos Smart Island" pro-ject, on behalf of the non-profit organization DAFNI - Net-work of Sustainable Greek Islands. The offered solution covers the part of the collection of consumption data, the transmission, and the representation of them to the web platform for further analysis and processing, helping to identify high energy consumption points of the facilities and buildings.
"Kythnos Smart Island" project is divided into several cat-egories, depending on the nature of each problem. One of these categories was the energy assessment of the is-land's facilities and buildings by utilizing smart electricity metering and recording systems. Project directors and en-gineers were called to evaluate the island’s facilities and buildings and propose specific solutions that would reduce consumption and increase energy efficiency at the same time. However, decision-making and interventions that would lead to this direction were not possible, as there was no clear picture of the energy consumption of these facilities. It is also a fact and has been proven in the past that in many buildings, high energy consumption devices may still be operating even when it is not required, wrong wiring connections affect the Power Factor negatively and faulty devices increase the total energy consumption, cre-ating a puzzle with no solution for the facility managers and engineers.
With the provided solution, Ether gave the project managers and engineers the opportunity to properly measure and record the energy consumption, in a friendly way that will help them make the right decisions and restrict unjustified consumption. The solution consists of three (3) levels:
The heart of the solution is the device that measures the energy consumption or production. The data of the measurements must have an almost zero error rate so that the conclusions can be drawn safely and reflect reality. For this reason, the installed meters were selected based on the product's compliance with the European MID (Measuring Instruments Directive). In addition, the meters offering a plethora of measuring quantities such as Incoming-Outgoing Power and Energy, Power Factor (cos(φ)), Voltages of all phases etc. All the previous quantities can be gathered and sent to the main platform with a frequency up to 1 second given that the communication infrastructure supports the appropriate speed.
The communication module may vary each time depending on the provided telecommunication infrastructure. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, GPRS/2G/4G are the most common options. In our case, knowing the wide coverage of the island by mobile network, 2G/4G modems with M2M SIM cards were selected.
Powered by uiTOP™, “Energy Monitoring Solution” (EMS) platform has been used with some adaptations on this project. EMS is a unique web-based platform that gives the user the convenience to access a user-friendly environment, from any browser, any device. During the implementation of the project many customizations and modifications were made to meet the challenges of the project, making the EMS a powerful tool in the hands of facility managers and engineers of the project.
The most important features of the platform based on this project are:
Taking into account all the previous it is obvious the necessity of energy monitoring. Knowledge can be a bene-fit of troubleshooting and deci-sion-making, while the lack of it can lead to higher consumptions and fur-ther mistakes in our attempt to solve the problems.
