Energy and economic savings through a plant supervised management in large-scale commercial activities

In a commercial activity, the energy consumption is due to several nearly independent subsystems, which are potential targets for specific energy saving actions. One of the most promising technique consists in a supervised management of some of these subsystems. This approach leads to improve the energy utilization efficiency without invasive or costly interventions. To assess the potential of such technique, a preliminary analysis of the consumption components is needed. Since the energy consumption is strongly affected by several specific and highly variable parameters, the impact of the management cannot be estimated in a traditional way. Rather than formulating detailed and specific models, whose development is not always possible, a more simplified, yet accurate, approach can be followed. In this study, the yearly consumption of seven Italian supermarkets was analysed and divided into its main components to evaluate the potentiality of a grey-box approach to model the consumption of these commercial activities. With little modifications due to significant different systems layouts, not only the approach, but also the model parameters can be used to characterize several supermarkets. The consumptions before and after the supervised management implementation has been compared by calculating the savings achieved in each consumption component, and thus assessing the economic and energy potential of such techniques.