Smart Building Monitoring: Optimizing Energy & Carbon Footprint with COMPAS

Context

At Alpha Innovations, we design, manufacture and repair electronic cabinets for the railway, telecom, medical and many other sectors; and of course our factory runs on electricity from the grid.

To reduce our carbon footprint and our electricity bill, we added photovoltaic panels on the roof of the building. Furthermore we use a battery (80kWh) to save some energy and re-use it when our global consumption reaches a defined level. The idea is to cut off peak consumption from the grid and use the battery to smooth our global consumption from the grid.

Challenges

Installing the photovoltaic panels is the easy part. Once the system is working, the BIG question is how to keep it going well ?

To do so, we must control and monitor our complete installation :

to charge the battery safely,
to use the energy stored at the right moment
to make sure we produce energy from the photovoltaic panels
to monitor that our solar inverters are well working
to look at our consumption and make sure we decrease our consumption
…

Alpha innovations' solution

Indeed, COMPAS enables to connect all standard sensors and industrial equipment to gather data and visualize your consumption and production.

Our software tool COMPAS runs on different hardware (industrial rack size of RAIL DIN size gateway) offering CAN, USB, RS485, RS232, Ethernet and I/O connectivity to connect your devices. The hardware platform can be adapted to your needs with extension boards and feel free to connect with our team !

–> Since our tools are agnostic, we intent to be compatible with all standard sensors and equipment’s on the market!

Going further then monitoring our solar production, at Alpha Innovations we use our wonderful tools to measure :

the consumption of our PV cells,
the consumption global of electricity of the factory,
the consumption detailed per zone (lab, meeting room, stock zone, …),
the gaz and water consumption

but more importantly we control (= bidirectional communication allowed through COMPAS) :

the charge and use of our batteries,
the inverter for solar production
the lamp of the factory according to the luminosity to optimize our electricity consumption
the heaters of the stock according to temperature data to optimize our gaz consumption
the charge of electric vehicle to optimize the price
… and more is coming !

Our solution Inview MESH add dashboarding to visualize your data and centralize all the data from different COMPAS (installed on different site) to give you one unique access to monitor your entire business.