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Six-figure sum saved at King's College London


We are delighted to be able to announce results from our first case study. Since Demand Logic was installed at King's College London, savings worth around £390,000 have been identified.

Carbon saving 2500 tonnes per year*
Money saving £390,000 per year*
Project start date January 2013
Major plant items tracked 554 (inc. boilers, chillers, pumps, air-handling units)
Data points In excess of 100,000 (inc. sensors and terminal units)
Biggest source of savings Run time of major plant

(*Indicative savings based on changes in plant behaviour. See below)

"The Demand Logic web system allows us to see at a glance where problems are likely to be. Without this, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack" - Ian Armitage, Campus Operations Manager, King's College London

King's College London has been using the Demand Logic energy efficiency web platform since January 2013. The use of the platform is the latest in a series of leadership projects conducted by the college to reduce carbon emissions, for which the College has won numerous awards 1.

This latest initiative covers three campuses: Guy's, Denmark Hill and the Strand. Approximately 100 buildings ranging considerably in size and usage pattern were involved in the project.

The purpose of the Demand Logic platform is to identify energy saving opportunities in the heating, cooling and ventilation systems which are extremely hard to pinpoint in large, complex buildings. The system works by analysing data generated by the building control systems.

Savings

The project found that in the main, the College's facilities were running very efficiently thanks to determined efforts and successive energy efficiency drives. There are, however, many issues that can arise which cannot be easily identified by traditional energy management systems. This is why Demand Logic was chosen as a way to discover hard-to-find savings.

The project (still in progress as of Sept 2013) has so far unearthed 47 specific energy-saving opportunities. 38 of these have already been acted upon. Overall it is estimated the project identified savings worth approximately £390,000 per year. (NB: this is an indicative savings figure based on changes in plant behaviour as monitored by the Demand Logic system. It is not based on meter readings.) 2

The indicative annual carbon saving is estimated at 2500 tonnes 3.

The College's annual energy spend is approximately £5m.

What kind of problems were uncovered?

The different energy problems identified by the system were highly diverse. In one case, boilers were rapidly cycling on and off because they did not have enough load. In another, several conflicting "set points" (desired temperature settings) had been applied to the same open plan office, causing both heating and cooling of the same space.

In a particularly notable case, having uncovered a large chiller running all day in the middle of winter, the system then found a single office that was causing the problem. This single room was being heated by a personal electric heater which was fighting the centralised cooling plant. (The main plant was trying to cool the space, and the electric heater was trying to heat it). This discovery was possible because the Demand Logic system monitors each of many hundreds of ceiling-mounted air-conditioning outlets in the building, and was able to identify the one that was demanding the most from the central plant.

Importance of the in-house team

In order to ensure that opportunities raised by the Demand Logic platform were acted upon, the College brought together a team of key staff, comprising facilities managers and other personnel from each campus. This group were able to share with each other live and historical visualisations of the heating and cooling systems, for example showing when large items of plant, like chillers or ventilation plant, were running.

This team also uses the Demand Logic system to ensure that measures they introduce don't "slip back" a common problem in energy efficiency. Slip-back can be caused, for example, by plant being put into manual control for urgent reasons and then remaining in manual without being noticed.

Ian Armitage, Campus Operations Manager at King's College London, said:

"I believe that good control systems in buildings are the key to saving energy without compromising user comfort. Demand Logic has helped the College to find a host of issues about how our heating and cooling plant is controlled, leading to significant savings which we are using to fund investment in our student facing facilities. Our campus buildings generate a vast amount of data, but accessing and analysing this is a real challenge. The Demand Logic web system allows us to see at a glance where problems are likely to be. Without this, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

Click here to read the full story and learn more.

Date Posted
17/10/2013 17:44

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