"Cisco Energy Management has given us a great deal of visibility into our energy consumption and usage patterns and has shown us that energy management can be done easily and seamlessly to deliver a significant return on investment in both reducing our carbon footprint and cutting costs."

Mark Hennessee
Hammond School District Energy Manager

Technology fascinates me for a host of reasons. It improves lives and makes businesses more productive and efficient. It literally touches every facet of our lives, as does energy. In fact, the convergence of technology and energy is proving to be a pathway to smart and sustainable environments. The key is getting past the challenges.

Challenges to Energy Management

Let me ask you a question. Does your organization find itself spending more money on energy costs and not on initiatives that directly move its mission forward? If you answered yes, I would not be surprised. Rising energy use and increasing energy costs are factors that negatively impact budgets.

Energy costs can be cut, but the question iswhere? As you can imagine, it is not easy to determine where energy is being consumed and if it is being consumed efficiently. Without accurate consumption knowledge, it becomes difficult to develop and implement energy reduction policies that improve energy sustainability practices that save money and help prove compliance.

Apply Energy Intelligence

This is whereenergy intelligencecomes into the picture. It is the insight gathered fromCisco Energy Management Suite, an agentless on-premise software and cloud-based service that helps customers gather data points such as energy use, energy cost, and date and time of use. This information helps customers:

• For your IP connected devices and plugload, learn where energy is being used and identify where it is being wasted
• Gain complete visibility into their building facilities' plug load and energy costs
• Comply with corporate sustainability and government regulatory emission standards

It's Working

The school district in theCity of Hammond, Indianadid not have insight into how much energy was being consumed on its 24 campuses. Cisco Energy Management Suite was deployed in less than an hour and it wasn't long before the school district learned that as many as 1,800 IP connected devices were left on after hours during the school week and 1,200 IP connected devices were left on over the weekend. They also discovered that older PCs were using more power than newer ones.

With this newfound information, the district's energy manager was able to create policies to automatically power down network-connected devices at certain times as well as prioritize device upgrades. This led to anannual power consumption reduction of 35 percentand projectedannual savings of$31,500.

Be sure to come back next month where I'll continue this conversation and share with you what the City of Glasgow, Scotland and others are doing to curb energy consumption. If you want to automatically get future blog posts, register to receive RSS feeds. You'll find the registration box in the upper right-hand column on this page.

Until Next Month,

Guneet

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Learn More from My Colleagues

Check out the blogs of Mala Anand, Mike Flannagan, Bob Eve, Jim McDonnell and Nicola Villa to learn more.