Smart Building Monitoring: Optimizing Energy & Carbon Footprint with COMPAS

Context

Who is Alpha Innovations?

Alpha Innovations is a manufacturer of electronic smart cabinets serving the railway, telecom, and industrial sectors. Like most manufacturing facilities, the company relies on grid electricity to power its operations.

What Alpha Innovations did?

To reduce its carbon footprint and lower its energy costs, Alpha Innovations installed photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roof of its production facility and integrated an 80 kWh battery storage system. The energy management strategy aims to cut peak consumption from the grid by storing solar energy and dispatching it at high-demand moments, effectively smoothing the facility's load profile.

Challenges

Installing photovoltaic panels is the straightforward part. The key operational challenge begins once the system is live.

How do you ensure it continues to perform efficiently over time?

Effective management of an industrial solar installation requires continuous monitoring and control across multiple objectives:

Ensuring safe battery charging cycles to protect battery lifespan
Dispatching stored energy at the right moment to maximise self-consumption
Verifying that PV panels are actively producing energy
Monitoring solar inverter performance and detecting faults early
Tracking consumption trends and identifying reduction opportunities
Optimising ancillary systems (lighting, heating, EV charging) based on real-time data

Alpha Innovations Solution

COMPAS & Inview MESH

Alpha Innovations addressed these challenges using its own industrial IoT platform, COMPAS, combined with the Inview MESH dashboarding solution.

COMPAS — Open Local Monitoring & Control Gateway

COMPAS connects all standard sensors and industrial equipment to collect, visualise, and act on energy data. COMPAS is hardware-agnostic and runs on industrial gateways (DIN rail or rack-mount format) offering the following interfaces:

Communication protocols: CAN, RS485, RS232, Ethernet, USB
Industry standards: Modbus RTU/TCP, MQTT
Extensible via I/O and communication expansion boards

Since COMPAS is protocol-agnostic, it is compatible with virtually all standard sensors and equipment available on the market, regardless of manufacturer.

What Alpha Innovations Monitors

Going beyond simple solar production monitoring, COMPAS is used to measure:

PV panel energy output (per string and total)
Global electricity consumption of the entire facility
Zone-level consumption breakdown (laboratory, meeting rooms, stock area, etc.)
Gas and water consumption

What Alpha Innovations Controls (Bidirectional Communication)

COMPAS enables bidirectional communication, allowing the platform to actively control connected equipment:

Battery charge and discharge cycles, optimised against grid tariff peaks
Solar inverter operation and fault response
Factory lighting, adjusted dynamically based on ambient luminosity sensors
Stock area heating, controlled according to real-time temperature data to minimise gas consumption
Electric vehicle charging schedules, optimised against time-of-use electricity pricing

Inview MESH — Centralised Monitoring Platform

Inview MESH adds multi-site dashboarding to the solution. It aggregates data from all deployed COMPAS gateways across different locations and provides a single interface to monitor the entire business. Key features include:

Real-time and historical dashboards for energy KPIs
Multi-site data centralisation
Alerts and threshold notifications
Exportable reports for energy audits and regulatory compliance

Frequently asked questions

COMPAS is an open, protocol-agnostic industrial IoT gateway developed by Alpha Innovations. It connects sensors and equipment via standard protocols (Modbus, MQTT, RS485, CAN, Ethernet) to collect, monitor, and control energy data in real time, both on-site and remotely.

Alpha Innovations uses COMPAS to monitor real-time electricity consumption across the facility and to control the charge and discharge cycles of its 80 kWh battery. The system automatically dispatches stored energy when grid consumption exceeds a defined threshold, reducing peak demand charges.

Yes. COMPAS is designed to be hardware and vendor agnostic. It supports all major industrial communication protocols including Modbus RTU/TCP, MQTT, and can be extended with additional I/O and communication boards to match specific site requirements.

Inview MESH is a cloud-based monitoring and management platform that centralises data from multiple COMPAS deployed across different sites. It provides unified dashboards, alerts, and reporting for multi-site energy management.