Objective feedback on performance and progress is key to just about any change.

Losing weight while on a diet (the scales don’t lie).  Paying down your credit card balance (the monthly statement doesn’t lie).  Improving your golf handicap (the math doesn’t lie, assuming you accurately record your score!).  Measuring energy consumption reductions after you make changes to equipment, processes, or your lifestyle – well, actually this isn’t as easy as it sounds.  But technology is helping us improve our ability to do this.

Yes, feedback based on objectively measured data is king.  And the more immediate the feedback , the better.  A recent article by Carl Duivenvoorden provides some neat examples of how immediate feedback on personal energy consumption in our homes and our vehicles can drive highly positive behaviour to reduce consumption.

The same principle is true for the commercial and industrial sector.  A large part of the challenge in these two market segments, though, is translating a large stream of raw data into useful information that can then be used to drive performance.  The term “energy visualization” is an emerging field of academic study and usually requires a unique blend of engineering, information technology, and graphic design to come up with a solution that has impact with users of commercial and industrial facilities.

This is a challenge that we have been working on for the past couple of years at SHIFT Energy, and based on feedback from our customers, we are making progress.  But there is still a lot of work to do in order to provide feedback to different stakeholders who use commercial and industrial facilities – employees, tenants, the general public – to help them understand how their activities inside a building impact its energy consumption.  Visualizing energy consumption in real-time is a foundation.  The next step is using this information to drive immediate behavioural change and to objectively measure the results.