The University of Hawai’i’ has announced the completion of an Energy Internet of Things (IoT) platform across its 10 campuses. The school worked with Blue Pillar and Elemental Excelerator to create an “energy smart university.”
Blue Pillar’s Energy IoT platform provides the UH Office of Energy Management (OEM) with enhanced visibility into its energy usage by centralizing data across disparate systems and equipment. With funding support from Elemental Excelerator, the energy network is a foundational component of the University of Hawai’i’s goal to achieve net zero energy use by 2035.
The project helps advance the university’s strategic sustainability priorities, which focus on energy data management, energy efficiency and expanding its renewable energy portfolio. The platform collects and analyzes data from more than 30 of the most energy-intensive buildings across UH M?noa and is integrated with:
According to the University of Hawai’i’, this is one of the first university projects in the world with a vendor agnostic IoT energy platform aggregating such a wide array of distributed assets, systems and equipment.
The new IoT network provides energy managers with a central data repository for all energy data regardless of asset type, manufacturer or communication type. From directly connecting to an asset, to IP based building automation systems, to integrations with third-party, cloud-based applications, UH says the Aurora IoT network provides a scalable way to collect energy data.
The new platform enables the collection of more than 2,600 new data points every second. The UH OEM has used that new data to significantly reduce the amount of human hours needed for monthly inspections, meter readings, and manual data input; improved the accuracy of the readings; and includes power quality and analytics as part of the automated reporting. Before this installation, meters were read manually, with a pen and clipboard at each of the buildings on campus, and later typed into a spreadsheet, vulnerable to errors along the way. Now, the UH OEM has an automated database with precision energy and power quality readings, synchronously tracking multiple buildings in one centralized system. This is all a part of UH’s energy management strategy that helps get the $400+ million research university to its net-zero goal.
The UH OEM has already used this data to create a baseline on energy consumption and will continue to mine this data to optimize strategies for energy and cost savings for the University of Hawai’i’.
The 4th Annual Environmental Leader & Energy Manager Conference takes place May 13 – 15, 2019 in Denver. Learn more here.
