Set within a site of more than 40 acres including a 32,000 seat stadium, 15,000 square meter exhibition and conference centre, a bar, hotel, casino and health club, the Ricoh Arena in Coventry is unlike any other development of its kind in the UK. Attracting over one million visitors every year, energy management quickly became a task for its facilities management team.
The requirement
The Ricoh Arena required an energy management system capable of capturing energy consumption data across all areas of the site, including over 200 water, gas, electricity and flow meters. The key aim was to monitor all energy usage across the site in order to effectively target and reduce energy consumption.
Another key aim of introducing energy management at the Ricoh Arena was to convey the entire site to the large number of public visitors as a “green” venue, while delivering its corporate social responsibility policy.
The Ricoh Arena was looking for specific tools to target energy usage including the ability to raise alarms to identify usage anomalies, utilizing dashboards to easily monitor energy, and automatic production and distribution of reports.
The facilities management department was keen to find a solution which was simple-to-use, in order to allow non-energy users to access relevant data across different departments. The Ricoh Arena also required a tenant billing system in order to accurately charge tenants for their energy usage.
The Ricoh facilities management team wanted to normalize energy data against changes in temperature, made possible through MRI Energy’s calorific and degree day data import services.
The solution
The Ricoh Arena chose MRI Energy to manage energy throughout their site specifically because of its compatibility with existing infrastructure, its ease-of-use and the specific product modules required.
Immediately after installation, auditing of the site’s consumption began, in order to accurately assess for energy-saving opportunities. Formation of an Energy Policy and a trained energy management team occurred to undertake reporting and targeting responsibilities.
Utilizing an energy management system quickly freed up time by removing the need for manual meter readings. The provision of accurate, up-to-date data and automatic reporting tools enabled weekly tasks such as board reporting to become more efficient.
Another key area MRI Energy assisted in was automatically billing tenants of the site based on energy consumption data.
Using MRI Energy, the Ricoh Arena was able to quickly identify and target areas requiring attention such as lighting and air conditioning which were contributing 73% to total energy usage. Once new, more efficient equipment was installed, energy savings data was recorded, and ROI could quickly be calculated.
The energy management team was also able to instantly identify, and rectify, anomalies in usage, and reduce energy loads in specific areas.
MRI Energy has been instrumental in allowing us to automatically monitor energy usage across our large, multi-use site. We’ve been able to quickly identify and dramatically reduce our energy usage & effectively convey this to staff & visitors.
Alan Pickering, Deputy Facilities/Energy Manager at Ricoh Arena
Benefits of using MRI Energy
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