UK retailer SAVES £2.3m thanks to electricity & gas reduction

Primark Achieves Significant Energy Savings with OPTIMISED Asset Management

25%

Reduction in gas usage in 18 months

13%

REDUCTION IN ELECTRICITY USAGE IN 18 MONTHS

ABOUT

PRIMARK

Primark is an international fashion retailer, across 16 countries in Europe and the US. Boasting 191 stores in the UK, as well as over 400 stores worldwide.

The stores have a mixture of Trend & Cylon BeMS (Building energy Management System) across their retail portfolio, that controls HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning), lighting and hot water. Half hourly meter data from both gas and electricity was available to baseline and manage the stores energy performance.

INDUSTRY

SERVICES DELIVERED

Challenge

MAXIMISING EFFICIENCY OF EXISTING BUILDING ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Optimised were commissioned to undertake a trial on 4 pilot stores to ‘optimise’ the BeMS and monitor the potential impact on energy savings that this would generate. This optimisation was to be undertaken through maximising the efficiency and operation of existing assets (specifically the BeMS/HVAC/Lighting controls), with no additional capital equipment installed. The trial was undertaken in 2020 for a period of 12 weeks where a saving of 65% on gas and 15% on electricity was achieved, compared with the same month of the previous year. 

solution

OPTIMISING BEMS CONTROL STRATEGIES TO STORE PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATION

The outcome of the trial led to Optimised being tasked with ‘optimising’ all of Primark’s UK stores over a 12-month period, and once completed, to deliver an ongoing, Remote Optimisation managed service, to ensure savings were maintained long term.

The first objective was to upload strategy from the Trend & Cylon BEMS system and ‘optimise’ the control strategies to the agreed Store Performance Specification. Over the 12-month period, we pulled together a project team of engineers, to meet both the aggressive technical goals and programme that had been set before us. Once the software had been optimised for a specific store, our commissioning team then moved in. They uploaded the software while on site at the specific store and recommissioned the BEMS controllers, addressing any faulty sensors, equipment in hand, wiring issues and much more. 

While the software was being optimised, along with the onsite commissioning, our team of office-based engineers were importing the 50,000 data points into the new Trend IQ Vision platform, setting up around 30,000 analytics points, 1,636 schedule, and pulling in 400 half-hourly fiscal meters into the aM&T platform. The fiscal meters were already available, which negated any integration requirements, this half-hourly data was logged and ‘pushed’ to our cloud-based Energy Analysis software. This created the transparency and baseline data to effectively monitor and measure the impact of the building optimisation deployed.