Arconic implements best-in-class energy management with Arcadia

Arconic implements best-in-class energy management with Arcadia

Arconic implements best-in-class energy management with Arcadia

Use case

Establish a centralized system for comprehensive energy data management across a global portfolio to enable proactive decision-making, operational efficiency, and cost savings.

Challenge

Across Arconic's global operations, a small team oversees all energy management, handling electricity and natural gas company-wide. Previously, the team had developed an internal database system that relied heavily on invoice data collected after the fact, creating several obstacles:

• Lack of access to interval energy consumption data left them vulnerable to unexpected high costs
• Difficulty aligning newly acquired facilities with their energy strategy while maintaining value for legacy locations
• Complex regulatory environments and energy markets that varied dramatically across regions
• Time-consuming manual data collection processes, with site managers often recording meter data on clipboards
• No efficient way to integrate submeter data into their centralized system
• A service provider unable to deliver interval data alongside invoice data

Arconic needed timely energy management capabilities to implement best practices and avoid being caught off guard by high energy costs only after receiving invoices.

Solution

After evaluating multiple vendors, Arconic selected Arcadia to power their energy management system with on-demand data. Arcadia provides both whole-building interval data and utility invoice data from nearly 10,000 utilities worldwide, and came highly recommended by Arconic’s energy efficiency consultant. Arcadia's focus on data automation was another key factor in their decision.

Benefits

Arcadia integrated perfectly into Arconic's in-house system without extraneous costs, transforming their vision of comprehensive energy data management into reality.

• Centralized Energy Management: Built a single source of truth for invoice data and utility interval data, integrated into one central system.
• Proactive Decision-Making: Transformed from using lagging indicators to leading indicators, enabling strategic decisions and proactive planning for demand spikes.
• Significant Cost Savings: Saved $13,000 at one facility in just one month by setting up alerts to warn when the site was nearing its natural gas overage limit.
• Peak Demand Reduction: Identified sources of high demand charges by analyzing usage patterns and taking targeted action to reduce peak demand cost-effectively.
• Penalty Avoidance: "It saves us money by avoiding penalties and charges for going over the volumes that we've nominated earlier in the month," says Frank. "If we see that it's catching up to us, we have a much better outcome by being proactive."

With on-demand energy data, Arconic's team now operates according to industry best practices, with alerts notifying them of changes in energy usage levels within hours or even minutes, providing complete visibility into every aspect of their energy strategy.