In Focus: Building Energy Sensor Networks
Greentech Media
There’s a key barrier between the technology that runs modern HVAC, lighting and other energy-intensive building systems today, and the quest to make it run more efficiently: a lack of energy data. Beyond the meters that record the entire building energy use, and perhaps some sub-metering for individual offices or building systems, there just isn’t that much real-time, granular energy measuring going on.
Panoramic Power wants to change that, one self-powered, circuit power sensor at a time. The Israel-based startup says its patent-pending technology allows each sensor to harvest enough energy from the circuit it measures to connect it and its fellow devices in a wireless mesh network, sending energy data every 10 seconds or so.
Those sensors create a wireless mesh network that connects to Panoramic’s P3E cloud-based analytics platform, which aligns the incoming flood of energy readings with the building systems using the energy, Safi Oranski, vice president of business development, said in an interview last week.
That’s useful to detect and alert existing building management systems (BMS) to anomalies in the way the system is working, to combat the common “drift” in well-tuned buildings back to inefficient status over time, he said. Or, in some cases, it can take the place of a BMS entirely, at a cost that’s five to ten times cheaper, he added.
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