Saturday 12 January 2013

Go high on energy efficiency in operations and help save the planet


Greetings to you and Wish you all and your family a Happy New Year.

I am starting this blog on a concept that is near and dear to my heart. As I went about personally introspecting myself and the contributions in product and project services, I somewhere felt a lacunae showing a gap between my work and my aspirations. I wanted my work to be more purposeful than just providing services and somewhere felt that I am not able to value add to the infrastructure in general and projects in particular. 

We all have a social /moral responsibility to fulfill before we depart. It was my sincere drive leading myself to take a leap in to an arena of value added services in Energy conservation through better management using Active Energy Efficiency methods. When we say energy efficiency, it means different things to different people. It may start just from switching off an AC and lights in an unoccupied area to efficient management of high energy consumption units like chillers, motors, Computers, Servers and other equipments and finally to managing the peak loads and deriving benefits of subscribing to Demand- Response programs with the local power supply companies.

While we are familiar with the conventional metering more as a measure for billing, the demand response programs work on the roots of energy conservation and are popular in the western countries. Demand response programs provide a simple way for facility managers to get paid for reducing consumption and relieving load on the power grid when it is stressed.  In effect they are returning capacity to the grid and being paid for that asset.

When one analyse these it is said that an energy efficient building saves on 30-40% on the energy costs by investing on energy efficient technology and programs. A commercial building incurs about 40% of the original cost for its maintenance in its lifetime.  By a conservative estimate it is found out that efficient maintenance operations could result in saving of 50% of maintenance costs. A proper maintenance involves suitably automated building and a planned asset life management (ALMS) program.  As a first step towards this we bring to you maintenance management solutions and Software involving cloud computing of networked stand alone operations. The features of these are explained in the attachment. With our system it is possible to integrate several of your facilities into one system monitoring and controlling facility/ maintenance operations across the globe. 

The achievement of energy efficiency is an almost impossible task in manned operations. The reason is that however accurate we set the procedures and instructions, there is always a human error embedded with the natural perceptions and emotions et al. It is to a large degree impossible in semi-automated operations too. There is no substitute to complete automation.

Now we would be faced with questions like how would this be done in a multi tenanted operational structure? Does it affect the work and inconvenience the tenants? How would this be done? What budgets? What guarantee to prove the paybacks and savings? When to start and what is the time frame? Could the tenants be convinced to bear a portion of the costs considering their savings potential? How do we integrate the various computer subsystems and related software? These are important questions and there could be many more. 

We have positive affirmative answers to all the above questions and since we have spent time to think by putting on different caps, while at the same time as technologists are able to address any issues appropriately. The secret lies in forward planning, anticipatory evaluation of the challenges ahead, back-up action plans for each tasks and above all the confidence to convince others.

We are a country that are devoid of energy resources and adopting conservation and saving technologies plays an important role in our development. We at Kshitij Control Solutions believe in transparency in adoption of methodologies, handholding and guiding your team at all phases of the planned implementation and later successful deliverance of the committed attributes and performance.

For this to be achieved, we start with an audit of the infrastructure to understand the equipment and operations on a chargeable basis. We take inputs of your current and planned feasible budgets and plans of spending and through a process of iterations we submit a workable phased implementation plan. When once it is ready we can take up the implementation if the proposal is acceptable to you. To bring in single point of responsibility upon us, it is suggested to keep our involvement till the end, that is completion of one year defect liability period. Alternatively, in the case of procurement of material and services you may go in for tender or other means of procurement. Our role will be predominantly to show the published results. However, the scope can be flexibly adapted to achieve the end results.

Personally, I also request you to see our website www.kshitijcontrol.in, where you may find more details.