Innovation Award Presented to Empower Energy Solutions
Boston, MA (PRWEB) July 02, 2015 -- The International District Energy Association (IDEA) awarded the third annual IDEA Innovation Award on Tuesday, June 30 at its 106th Annual Conference and Trade Show in Boston, MA to Empower Energy Solutions of Dubai for their “Centralized Metering Data Management System”. With over 950 people in attendance, former IDEA Chair Joseph Brillhart of Johnson Controls was proud to present the 2015 IDEA Innovation Award to Ahmad Bin Shafar, Chief Executive Officer of Empower Energy Solutions.
IDEA’s Innovation Award was established in 2013 with the goal of calling out and recognizing best practice improvements and technology innovations occurring among members of the association, ultimately to bring these emerging practices forward to help people learn from each other and capture savings and efficiency more quickly. Unlike other annual awards granted by the association, this award provides recognition of smaller scale applications and technologies and serves to demonstrate industry collaboration among technology providers, consultants and end user systems.
This year, the winning submission came from Empower Energy Solutions for their “Centralized Metering Data Management System.” The major challenges facing any district cooling company are to efficiently maintain their meters, to obtain regular and accurate meter readings for billing purposes, to use meters for early detection of faults and identification of operational problems, and to minimize human intervention while monitoring overall plant and system efficiency. When that district cooling system happens to be located in Dubai and is experiencing tremendous growth – building 67 plant rooms in 10 years to reach a total installed cooling capacity of nearly one million tons – managing the metering takes on enormous proportions and complexity.
At the core of the Empower business model, as demonstrated by this project, is an objective of optimum energy efficiency and reliability, achieving higher customer satisfaction, accurate and timely billings, improving financial savings and monitoring the optimum consumption of each building up to the end-users/ tenants of each apartment. Empower currently has 33,304 meters installed and operating, with a projected increase to 50,000 meters by end of 2015.
To manage this huge volume of 50,000 chilled water meters, Empower decided to deploy a Centralized Metering Data Management System located in their head office where all meters are connected, monitored, analyzed and controlled. It was an enormous two-year undertaking but a critical investment in the business infrastructure.
Upon acceptance of the award, Bin Shafar thanked IDEA and the Innovation Award Committee on behalf of Empower Energy Solutions. He stated “On behalf of the team here at Empower, we are proud to receive the 2015 IDEA Innovation Award and appreciate the recognition of our peers at IDEA. It is important as an industry that we advance best practices and maintain our focus on delivering efficient and environmentally-sound district cooling to our customers.”
The International District Energy Association (IDEA) was founded in 1909 with the mission to foster the success of its members as leaders in providing reliable, economical, efficient and environmentally-sound district energy services. The association’s membership consists of over 2000 representatives from utilities, municipalities, universities, hospitals, military bases, airports, industrial parks and other physical plant systems engaged in supplying thermal energy for heating, cooling and process uses. IDEA also represents engineers, architects, consultants, manufacturers and finance specialists who supply services and equipment for district energy systems.
Robert Thornton, International District Energy Association, http://www.districtenergy.org/, +1 (508) 366-9339, [email protected]
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