Detecting energy anomalies in buildings with AI to cut consumption

GELSENWASSER AG is a specialist in sustainable infrastructure - and a capable partner for private households, municipalities, industry and commerce. The company provides services for drinking water and energy supply, for wastewater and for every other aspect of public utility infrastructure. It is already apparent - Gelsenwasser is more than you might think.

Around 1,500 employees look after partner companies and customers. They are supplied with drinking water and service water as well as natural gas and green electricity. In partner municipalities, the company secures the networks and their operation.

GELSENWASSER AG also offers a wide range of utility-related services, some of them through subsidiaries. A large part of the “Team blau-grün” works at the head office in Gelsenkirchen. From there, the broad spectrum of services and forms of cooperation is managed: whether for supply networks and/or for plant and its operation. Alongside energy supply, Gelsenwasser acts as a competitive metering point operator and supports customers with infrastructure services that help them run and develop their plant and networks efficiently.

Throughout, the company places the highest value on sustainability - environmental and resource protection are always in focus. Its corporate culture is shaped by transparency, diversity, enthusiasm and team spirit. This is how the “Team blau-grün” develops innovative solutions. Energy, the AI-supported energy management software from CREM SOLUTIONS, will help the Gelsenwasser team and its customers position themselves even more sustainably in both ecological and economic terms.

But how? With Energy and targeted AI-supported energy management.

The starting point - an early start pays off

After around ten years of using EDM software (energy data management) for its own buildings to generate detailed statements about consumption, GELSENWASSER AG wanted to refine and expand what was possible in digital energy management.

Over those ten years, Gelsenwasser worked with several different providers of EDM solutions. The solutions available on the market, however, were aimed primarily at grid operators or at industry, and less at customers and municipalities. Gelsenwasser therefore started out with software that covered an extensive feature set for grid and metering point operators but offered few functions for actually saving energy.

An in-house development followed, intended to merge the wide range of data from market data exchange for electricity and gas with the LoRaWAN measurement data collected for water and heat. LoRaWAN stands for “Long Range Wide Area Network” and denotes an energy-efficient radio technology that transmits small volumes of data over very long distances. The idea was to create holistic energy consumption management of a kind not available on the market at the time. For the ambitious vision of collecting consumption data end to end, however, the result never became satisfactory.

After the project ended, GELSENWASSER AG therefore carried out fresh market research and arrived at CREM SOLUTIONS and Energy. The software offers everything the company needs. Energy can integrate any number of diverse data sources, capture all consumption figures and summarise and present them meaningfully so that they can be analysed and assessed.

Into the future with Energy

With the goal of optimising energy efficiency in its own occupied buildings - particularly at the Gelsenkirchen head office - and of being CO2-neutral from 2035 onwards, Gelsenwasser decided to adopt the AI-supported energy management software Energy and to implement it with support from CREM SOLUTIONS.

CO2 neutrality can only be reached with a clear overview of the company's own consumption points and generation assets. Energy provides everything needed to capture and analyse consumption data and CO2 emissions. The two integrated AI tools “Optimise” and “Detect” make anomalies and deviations quickly visible. Measures for sustainably optimising consumption can then be initiated without delay.

The software can be connected to any number of different consumption meters and data sources, and it offers a wide range of interfaces that make data transfer quick to set up. This allowed Gelsenwasser to build an integration into its own systems and achieve a scalable, fully automated capture of real-time data on electricity, water and gas consumption in the buildings it occupies. The photovoltaic systems installed on the roofs of Gelsenwasser buildings, for example, are also connected to the system and read out on the basis of the grid supply data that Energy can export.

General consumption analyses were possible before Energy was introduced, but never this easily or efficiently. A range of customisable dashboards gives the energy management team at GELSENWASSER AG a quick overview of energy consumption and CO2 emissions in individual buildings, or even of individual data points. Conspicuous consumption is picked up by the Optimise tool, which automatically raises an alert and informs the team.

This helps GELSENWASSER AG identify savings potential quickly and take efficient savings measures.

Thanks to the breadth of data collection and the analysis functions, Energy gives GELSENWASSER AG fundamentally deeper and more detailed insight into all load profile data without requiring more time. The goals of CO2 neutrality by 2035 and of generally more sustainable energy management within the company can be pursued optimally with Energy - if the analysis functions show that the savings needed to reach those goals are not being achieved, Gelsenwasser can counteract quickly and efficiently because the data is always current.

Why Energy and CREM SOLUTIONS?

The search for energy management software called for an extensive, high-quality feature set combined with openness towards other systems, and after many comparisons on the market only Energy delivered that. With its own properties, private households, large commercial and industrial customers and a strong focus on municipalities, Gelsenwasser serves a very heterogeneous customer base with widely differing requirements. GELSENWASSER AG is also a pioneer in digitalising metering in the water sector and intends to generate added value from this for itself and its customers in future. The aim is to cover all of these aspects with a single solution - the wide-ranging capabilities of Energy made and still make that possible.

Given corporate values such as transparency, diversity, enthusiasm and team spirit, the software alone was not the deciding factor for GELSENWASSER AG. Another important reason for choosing Energy and CREM SOLUTIONS was the provider's economic stability and long-term viability. The focus was on finding a partner who shares the vision and the enthusiasm, and with whom long-term, forward-looking planning is possible. As a subsidiary of the Nemetschek Group, one of the largest providers of digital solutions for the real estate industry, CREM SOLUTIONS met this important prerequisite too.

That mutual leap of faith was then borne out during the rollout of Energy. Collaboration between the GELSENWASSER AG team and CREM SOLUTIONS was on equal terms throughout. Any requests that came up while using Energy were passed on quickly to the Energy developers, discussed there and implemented promptly. Both teams pursued the goal of implementing Energy as fast as possible with genuine enthusiasm, in order to create lasting value for GELSENWASSER AG. A shared understanding soon emerged of how the two companies want to grow together in the market in future.

Conclusion

Thanks to the sheer range of functions in Energy, many manual tasks at GELSENWASSER AG have been automated. It is also becoming clear that considerably more savings potential is being identified, more easily and more quickly, using the Optimise tool.

The various dashboards and customisable energy reports give those responsible a quick overview of energy consumption and CO2 emissions in individual buildings, or specifically for integrated data points. Conspicuous consumption is detected quickly and the responsible staff are informed automatically.

These features help the GELSENWASSER AG team identify savings potential and make effective adjustments. The Energy functions - Optimise and Detect - take a great deal of work off users' hands so they can concentrate on what matters - measures that save energy.

GELSENWASSER AG has therefore seen the potential in Energy from the outset and offers customers ways to benefit from the software as well. Under the name “GELSENWASSER Monitor”, GELSENWASSER AG can also capture and analyse consumption data from customers so that they generate added value of their own. Given its internal and external experience with the software, combined with the development of the interfaces and automation, the company is confident that it will continue to achieve success with Energy both internally and externally and will grow significantly in the market over the coming years.