Green Tech – Shaping Sustainability together with Digital Technology

In an era where energy costs are on the rise and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting guidelines compel companies to disclose detailed information about their consumption, technology —particularly the Internet of Things (IoT) — plays a pivotal role in driving sustainability efforts. A key step in reducing energy costs is making consumption transparent, which requires a digital representation of your energy meters. This blog post outlines a straightforward approach to connecting energy meters to AWS, leveraging a lightweight data pipeline to enhance transparency and sustainability.

In today’s world, the conscious use of energy is more in demand than ever. In the first step, this requires knowledge about the use of energy in order to be able to initiate appropriate energy-saving measures. The consumption of electrical energy can be read, for example, at the meter cabinets of the tapping points.

The sustainable use of energy is becoming increasingly important in today’s world. Due to the energy transition and constantly rising prices, the conscious use of energy and energy costs for companies is becoming increasingly important. To monitor and control energy consumption, companies are introducing energy management with a specific software solution that helps to significantly reduce the challenges in this context. The motivation behind this is complex and ranges from a more positive public image and the reduction of operating costs all the way to compliance with legal regulations and standards (ISO 50001). This article briefly summarizes some of the tasks an energy management software performs and describes the required infrastructure using the example of our partner Optenda and our product Modbus Cloud Connect.

Imagine a world where your IoT devices could run indefinitely without the need to change batteries. This isn’t a distant dream, just a reality with Ambient IoT. At grandcentrix, we dedicate our work to make the Internet of Things (IoT) happen. However, IoT isn’t always a smooth ride and can sometimes give you serious headaches. Consider this scenario: You’ve meticulously developed a new IoT wireless sensor network. Every metric is visible in the cloud, ready for analysis. A wealth of data is available to business analysts. Processes that were once manual are now digital. Over the years, you’ve optimized your business, efficiency has grown, and so has profit. Everyone is happy. Fast-forward three years after deployment. The first few sensors start to show battery lifetime warnings as they reach 20 % capacity. Anxiety builds up among the people maintaining the platform. What’s the next step? You have hundreds of sensors deployed, each equipped with small battery cells to keep the footprint and cost of the devices low. These devices have been deployed in several hard-to-reach regions, for example in tanks filled with liquids. You start searching for solutions. Either a lot of people are just replacing the batteries, if the initial design made that possible, or worse, the whole device has to be swapped out because battery replacement wasn’t foreseen. Regardless of the solution, it will require a lot of effort and can weaken the business case of your IoT devices. But what if there was a way to make it easier? As we care for our customers, we’re always thriving to explore new and exciting technologies to improve our products, our solutions and to further satisfy our customers. One aspect of making IoT happen is ensuring it is easy and accessible. Power Consumption is one of the factors that needs special attention when building IoT devices. As the example above shows, there are many decisions to be made during the design phase, each with its own pros and cons. But there’s one thing that’s gaining more and more attention in the IoT community which can simplify design around power management: Ambient IoT.