Energy Efficiency

Meter Data Management

Unless you're banking on (and happy to commit to) a single supplier for all your metering equipment, you're going to need to deal with the task of gathering data from meters of a number of different types, from a number of vendors. Most meter data management systems don't handle this very well, and usually compromise their ability to reliably transfer consumption logs, by supporting a limited subset of the available communication options (e.g. real-time logging only). If you want to transfer interval log data out of multiple meter types and brands, you need a meter data integration product built for interval data transfer, and with native support for a wide variety of network transports and protocols.

In partnership with CETA, VRT Systems is offering a range of “WAGES Hub®” devices, that can be used to deliver an enterprise-scale meter data collection system that aggregates large volumes of disparate metering data, stores it in a common format, and then (if required) pushes the data into centralised corporate reporting systems, or even a master energy management system. VRT are able to offer WAGES Hubs integrated with your choice of on-site energy management system (EMS) or as part of a broader architecture that manages meter data collection and distribution to both EMS and billing systems, either on site or as a hosted service (e.g. VRT's cloud based IoT management platform, WideSky®).  www.widesky.cloud

Energy Management Software

VRT have been active in the energy management market since the days before packaged solutions were readily available, and in our early projects had to build our own. These days we far prefer to use the packaged solutions on offer, but that early experience gave us an unparalleled understanding of the workings of energy management software, and the design of scalable systems around them. We've also been exposed to our fair share of systems that simply accumulate, aggregate, and report on the data being collected, and really offer little more in terms of delivering real outcomes in terms of energy efficiency outcomes.

We actively work with our clients to understand the facility they are operating, and strive to implement solutions that report on asset performance (such as chiller plant and HVAC performance, energy intensity) rather than just accumulating energy used. In addition to reporting on what has already occurred, we have also built and delivered Energy Forecasting solutions (e.g. for Glencore Xstrata) to enable capacity planning for supply generation.

Energy Analytics

If you have an Energy Management System (EMS) it's probably fair to say that you have no shortage of data – the real question is how do you turn that data into actionable information?

At the heart of VRT Analytics is a learning engine purpose-designed for analysing energy data. It analyses for data quality and compensates for missing data. It can analyse operational and non-operational times (or different types of activity days) separately and produces characteristic curves for each of your circuits to illustrate circuit behaviours under these different conditions. It looks for changes in the time of consumption, the magnitude of consumption, and the overall signature of the consumption pattern, and can detect changes in consumption behaviour that would normally be lost in the noise.

Reporting and Business Intelligence

Coming soon.............

Smart Lighting Control

LED offers an exciting new option for lighting in public spaces, but deploying LED without considering adaptive control strategies may be wasting much of the technology's potential. Traditional “fixed intensity” public lighting solutions are usually designed around the trade-off between meeting minimum safety requirements and the cost of operation. This can result in lighting systems designed for the middle ground – wasting energy when the light isn't required, and not really as bright as they should be when the light is required.

The VRT Smart Lighting controller is a small dimming controller that can be installed in a wide range of new or existing lights. It doesn't require any additional cabling, or rely on power supply lines for signalling. Instead it uses a secure, self-healing wireless mesh network to enable the lights to communicate with one other, and operate either autonomously in response to local sensors, or by remote control.

VRT are able to offer autonomously operating lighting systems (which use a combination of PE cells and PIR presence sensors) with manual overrides, or integrate controls with your existing control systems (we have a Modbus interface that most process- and building- control systems can readily interface with).

This wireless based smart lighting solution is applicable to external and internal lighting situations.  Read more >