OpenEMS: The Future Of Retail Energy Management

By Philips Teletrol

Multi-site retailers are feeling the effects of rising energy prices and energy market complexity, forces that seemingly undermine efforts to gain control of retail energy spending. Establishing control requires a dedicated effort to gain enterprise-wide visibility of energy consumption, in real time. But many retailers struggle with this. According to RSR's 2010 report How Sustainable Practices Are Changing Retail, most retailers see store operations energy management as providing the greatest opportunity for strategic sustainability initiatives. A majority of retailers (66%) are therefore making store energy consumption the focal point of their sustainability strategies, and nearly half are looking for ROI within 24 months. Interestingly, more than half of the retailers surveyed in the report identified their existing technology/infrastructure as preventing them from moving forward with new solutions. That's where the concept of open energy management solutions, or OpenEMS, shines. OpenEMS helps multi-site retailers – with store counts ranging from the tens to the thousands – create standards-based connections between devices, applications, and organizations. This paper will explore how those connections drive exchanges of information that result in money-saving, proactively managed energy ecosystems. We'll discuss the workflows behind OpenEMS, and how leveraging existing standards can yield double-digit energy spend reductions, drastically reduced facilities maintenance costs, and automate administrative functions.