Poste Italiane has saved around €3.5m by introducing a Building Energy Management System (BEMS) that controls energy consumption across its corporate buildings remotely. The system was put in place as part of a company-wide drive to reduce energy consumption from buildings, which accounts for more than two-thirds of Poste Italiane’s carbon emissions.
The plan will see over 8,000 energy measuring devices installed in buildings, premises, and some equipment by the end of 2015. The 7,000 that have been fitted so far are already monitoring and collecting data for display in real time. Similar buildings are clustered to allow for better analysis, while decisions on relevant energy efficiency improvements are bolstered by information about the building’s condition provided by a remotely accessible monitoring dashboard.
The programme has cut carbon dioxide emissions by around 7,000 tonnes per year and is on course to reduce yearly energy consumption by 18 GWh as building management becomes more tailored. In addition, the initiative has realised an immediate return on investment as the provision of measuring devices was included in the new maintenance contracts at no additional cost.
The next steps will be to identify ideal consumption profiles per site rather than using average usage figures from each cluster and also to build greater employee engagement.