In the age of energy crisis and climate goals Finland – and perhaps most other countries as well – have been obsessed with pursuit of perfection. No solution seems to be usable unless it alone solves the entire problem at hand. We keep on building new schools with inadequate indoor air quality, because there is no single method to prevent every single symptom children have. Investments on railroads are most likely on ice until there is enough money to build a third track between Helsinki and Tampere, City rail loop and Airport rail. It’s all or nothing!
The past generations used to say that many small streams make one big river. Small savings were made here and there, until these savings cumulated into big ones. We at Wapice remember the old proverbs and combine the age old wisdom with the latest technology. There is a way to reach financial savings and environmental goals by using smaller streams. An excellent start for a river is making the energy consumption figures understandable and enabling easy goal setting for consumers. Wapice’s EcoReaction product is a perfect tool for this. Many Finnish energy companies, including Fortum, Caruna, Helen, Loiste and Adven, share this opinion.
The deployment of Fingrid’s DataHub service (estimated to happen on February 21st 2022) gathers all electricity consumption data in Finland and hopefully enables comparison of one’s own electricity consumption to that of great many similar consumption sites. With DataHub, another more recent proverb comes in mind. How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. DataHub will store a massive amount of information and the full potential of analysing it will be reached during a longer period of time. We proceed to our goals one piece at a time. Wapice’s own data analysts have already developed machine learning methods to transform raw data into useful information. The shapes and sizes of data to be processed depends mostly of our imagination. The appetite tends to grow while eating an elephant.
If and when needed, the benefits of the national data mass can be supplemented with other data. In real estate management sensors can be installed to provide more accurate insight into energy consumption of different functions, what are the effects of improvements already made and what could still be done to reduce the energy bill. ”Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” said Niels Bohr once. Luckily there are small holes in the curtain covering the future through which we can see a tiny bit of the road ahead. Weather dependent electricity production and the all-embracing demand for real time solutions will bring us a 15 minutes imbalance settlement period affecting consumption metering and billing. At the same time predicting weather dependent electricity production will need clear view to forthcoming weather and monitoring the usage and production will need a versatile platform like Wapice IoT-TICKET®. This is the future we see and what we have already prepared for.
Collecting data, understanding information, learning and reacting together form a cogwheel transforming the present into the future. Small streams and pieces of elephant make great energy savings.