Submetering for Businesses: How it Works and Why You Need It According to GridDuck’s CPO

Alex Jefferies, GridDuck’s CPO

As businesses are hit by rising energy costs, GridDuck is working with several new clients to offer submetering for total visibility on their energy spend across multiple sites remotely. 

By analysing data from meters, businesses will get strategic insights allowing them to make timely interventions and useful comparisons. Moreover, our dashboard is intuitive and easy to use. You can save money and become a more sustainable business by using our streamlined, low-cost submetering solution. 

How Does Submetering Work? 

Businesses are often intimidated by data because there is a lot of it and it takes time to make sense of it. Technology, however, is changing how data is processed and delivered. What’s more, data is increasingly being harnessed to provide energy consumers with useful insights that they can use to their advantage. 

If you install a smart meter in your home, for example, you can visualise how much energy you are using through a display screen. This at-a-glance information is particularly useful to drive behaviour change, even if the insight is simply to remember to turn off the lights in a certain room. 

We have taken this a step further by partnering with a national energy meter database to monitor and analyse electricity, water and gas consumption for businesses. When a company gives us access to their meter’s data, we are able to use our cloud-based software to provide real-time analytics on one screen, whether it’s for one site or several dozen. 

It allows us to provide readings at daily or hourly intervals; to see where energy is potentially being wasted; and to make like-for-like comparisons across properties. Clients can also get reports on a weekly or monthly basis. The larger your operations, the larger the potential savings. With energy prices as high as they currently are, the savings can be significant. 

What Businesses Can Benefit From Submetering? 

We are currently providing this new service to a chain of estate agents in London with about 100 sites, as well as for a chain of high street restaurants, a sports clothing manufacturer and a retail entertainment outlet. GridDuck works across sectors with many types of clients, from manufacturing to hospitality. 

Any business can potentially use this technology for estate management. We take care of the installation and give clients an energy dashboard to monitor the utilities in a range of different contexts. You can break the information down in a way that’s most useful to your business needs and make comparisons that will reveal how one site performs versus another.  

Energy Management Made Easy 

Alex Jefferies, our Chief Product Officer, says that site-level comparisons will allow clients to see how different properties rank in terms of energy use. “This will be a quick way of identifying troublesome sites that could be suitable for some sort of direct intervention, such as automated control, etc. The client can also have these ranks sent to each site manager with notes on how to improve their rankings,” he adds. 

Eventually, the plan is to introduce energy tariff data, to give clients data in a language that translates directly to money spent. We’ll also introduce custom metrics, so that customers can set ones that relate to their particular challenges. We expect these features to be available by the end of autumn 2022.

Further into the future, GridDuck will be using R&D and machine learning to help us intelligently identify trends and patterns. For example, the use of recognising equipment that is on its way out and identifying anomalous periods of usage. 

“I would say our USP at this point is that we do super-submetering,” explains Alex. “It’s not just at a meter level, but at the machine and appliance level. Additionally, we can then take the learnings and convert them into savings by directly controlling them with our IoT control hardware. So, it’s everything in one place.”

Software as a Service (SaaS)

There’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen this acronym before but there’s also a chance that you don’t know exactly what it means. Our new offering is more formally known as “software as a service” and is incredibly common. It essentially means that data is collected from any device that has an internet connection. It’s worth noting, however, that any meter is suitable for our new service, not just smart meters, but we’ll need to install on-site hardware with older meters. 

The Rise of ‘Servitisation’

Software as a Service is part of a larger strategy called servitisation, a means by which customers pay for a service as an outcome instead of buying products up front. One of the most well-known examples of this is Netflix, a company that sells content and media as a service to customers instead of a product such as a DVD. With the rise of internet-connected products, more and more people are able to offer these types of services to their customers. 

We recently spoke to one manufacturing company that is offering some of its supermarket clients refrigeration as a service. The company takes charge of the components and software, while the supermarket only pays a monthly heating or cooling bill. 

Many businesses are now implementing servitisation into their strategies and it has many interesting opportunities for the energy sector and decarbonisation. Already, offering cooling as a service has been hailed as a possible game changer for the environment.