Powering Efficiency: How Business Managers can use our real-time electricity data to cut energy costs (Jun 17, 2024)
For a school business manager, keeping a close eye on energy consumption is paramount to maintaining operational efficiency and reducing costs. With Solar for School’s live energy data feature, managing energy consumption has never been easier or more effective.
Our online charts provide real-time insights into not only how much energy your solar panels are producing but also how much electricity your school is consuming in every 5-minute period since the system was commissioned. Here’s how you can leverage these insights to reduce your electricity consumption:
- Identify Wasted Electricity: By analysing the data, you can pinpoint when your school consumes the most electricity throughout the day and week. This allows you to identify periods of peak usage and potential areas of wasted electricity in the evening or weekends when the school is closed, enabling you to implement targeted strategies to reduce unnecessary electricity consumption and related costs.
- Achieve Significant Reductions: Schools utilising our live school’s data feature have reported impressive results, with many achieving up to a 20% reduction in overall electricity consumption. Aggregated data for all the schools we have done so far shows what they used to consume before and after going solar. The reduction in consumption is not because of solar, but rather because of lower overall consumption potentially driven by better insight into their consumption patterns.
- Seamless Integration: Our data can easily be integrated into your school or trust's own reporting tools, such as Power BI. This allows you to incorporate energy consumption data into your internal KPI reporting, facilitating informed decision-making and resource allocation. This is useful for not only improving monitoring and tracking but also for your school to be able to meet its net zero targets.
- Enhanced Communication: Share the insights gained from our live schools’ data with stakeholders by embedding the charts into your school's website. These charts update automatically each day, providing transparency and fostering community engagement around energy efficiency efforts. Alternatively, receive a weekly PowerPoint slide that you can incorporate into TV displays within your school, keeping staff and students informed and engaged.
To generate a powerpoint presentation like this for your school, simply click on ‘Download Monthly report’ on your school’s page and then ‘Download’ button again.
- Educate the next generation of sustainability leaders. According to a study done by the British Science Association in 2023, 72% of students aged 14-18 years old in the UK want to learn more about climate change in schools and a further 68% want it to be integrated across all subjects and not just Science or Geography. The live school’s data doubles up as an educational resource where students can begin to learn about energy generation and consumption and in turn think about how they use energy in their everyday lives and what they can to be more energy efficient. Mainstreaming climate education in classrooms is the first step towards inducing behavioural change amongst students and enabling them to have the knowledge and skills to be environmental stewards and leaders of tomorrow.
Once your school goes solar with us, the live schools data feature is updated to reflect all the details about your system and consumption over time. It is a powerful tool designed to maximise your solar investment by improving efficiency and driving sustainable energy practices. If you are not already using the electricity data and charts to reduce your electricity consumption and costs further, contact us and we can show you how.
