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Intelligent automation — the new horizon of energy efficiency

Oct 11,2017 - Last updated at Oct 11,2017

Over the past 50 years, our actions, such as deforestation and burning fossil fuel, increased the greenhouse gas emissions, thus aggravating the global warming problem.

We, as inhabitants, have an obligation towards nature to adopt simple changes that might not only help the earth, but would indeed save us money and improve our life style.

Automation is one promising solution to turn your houses or businesses into intelligent buildings that create the proper conduit to help one go green.

Nowadays, people are looking for solutions that are sustainable, affordable and secured. Automation offers a reliable and robust system that would think with us and help us control much of our equipment, as in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, lights and other.

Moreover, it offers us means to control our electrical consumption by collecting real-time readings that let us know exactly how much each item is consuming.

Consequently, we can easily and accurately estimate how much our next electrical bill would cost.

Other benefits would include the ability to remotely monitor our facility and programme a schedule where specific equipment is switched on or off during the off-peak periods. 

This would dramatically contribute to the energy efficiency of the building.

Commercial buildings do have a high electrical tariff compared to the residential sector. 

This should be a major driver that pushes us to adopt energy efficiency programmes to manage energy consumption.

Energy efficiency is a systematic programme that investigates the building to identify potential components of the facility that consume most power. Once identified, proper controls and solutions are recommended to be later implemented to reduce electrical bills and creating a better work environment that assures employees’ comfort and satisfaction level.

Automation, when integrated into the energy efficiency management programme, would facilitate the electrical demand side and flow smoothly with a cosy and comfortable environment.

Business owners can easily read data consumption at their facilities at any time and place.

It is imperative to consider security when adopting automation. Maintaining information integrity, authenticity and confidentiality is one of the vital function that must be addressed to assure service proliferation.

Numerous secure protocols and standards have been created to transmit data and to guarantee its privacy.

In fact, automation would enhance security by integrating preventive and detective countermeasures to alarm one when an electrical damage takes place or when there is high consumption of electricity during off times, for instance.

Our changing world requires us to think out of the box to tackle problems, as in urbanisation, global warming and lack of resources.

Energy efficiency is no longer an option, but rather a top priority we should consider in all our daily actions.

 

 

The writer is R&D manager at Green Tomorrow for smart sustainable solutions. She contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

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