More than half the world’s population live in urban areas and it’s expected that 2.5 billion people will migrate to cities by 2050 according to World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision. Alongside this, the smart cities market is expected to grow by 20% in five years and building owners and city planners will need to look at ways to create more energy and space efficient solutions.

Big Data has found four ways to reduce energy consumption in buildings for the present and the future including monitoring energy use, implementing an energy management system, planning future actions and making the most of the benefits.

1. Monitor the energy use in buildings

Future buildings will rely more on energy and asset management systems, which leverage digital solutions based on common architecture and IoT devices connected to dedicated networks and cloud.

The first step is to identify the building systems that use the most energy. Each building has its own energy use profile, so it’s simple to review and understand how much energy each building system is using.

For example, in industrial buildings, energy consumption is associated mostly with industrial equipment and infrastructures dedicated to production processes.

After monitoring parameters, such as peak power and power quality and analysing what energy the systems are using, users will understand the impact on energy consumption. The next step is to implement control strategies to save energy.

2. Implement an energy management system

The potential power savings can be realised by implementing a method of sorting and processing the data collected. From here, users can understand what’s needed to make improvements on energy usage.

Building owners, energy and facility managers will have a detailed visibility of the energy system thanks to the availability of historic data and real-time information through dashboards via desktop and mobile.

3. Plan your next actions

After gathering all the data about different components along the energy management system, users will need to use this information to decide what the next steps are for saving and managing energy.

Connected devices enable energy and operating cost savings of as much as 30%  according to Big Data. And for the last step:

4. Reap the benefits

Using information to monitor and manage energy consumption is a great opportunity for small and medium enterprises to drive down operational expenditures as well as an easy way to do so, given that a lot of this work can be done over the cloud.