Reducing energy costs across the workplace from offices to data centers

Smart Eco-energy rolled out in our biggest data centers worldwide

We are rolling out Smart Eco-energy, an energy monitoring solution combining IoT and data science, in nine of our particularly high-use sites in Europe, Asia and the United States.

This new large-scale project will support our energy management efforts in our buildings. The ambitious initiative will let us calculate the work needed to roll out such projects and share experience with our customers. It covers two axels of our Green Act program: “Green IT,” to reduce energy use and CO2 emissions, and “Solutions for green,” to help our customers meet these same goals.

An action plan for global energy saving

Our energy optimization process has 4 steps:

  1. Mapping Orange Business sites by energy use and organizing them by potential savings
  2. Collecting and centralizing data
  3. Drawing up expected savings and a short-, medium- and long-term plan
  4. Monitoring our energy optimization strategy

To achieve these goals, we will use the Smart Eco-energy IoT solution designed to meet the environmental ambitions of our Green Act program.

Smart Eco-energy is a one-stop platform to collect data from sensors and meters inside buildings for centralized monitoring of energy use and machine yields across a building, site or region. Indicators then help produce decision-supporting dashboards to fuel our energy action plans.

After a first positive experiment in three Orange Business buildings in 2019-2020, we are now rolling out the solution across nine data and network centers with particularly energy-hungry IT systems in the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong and United States. This is the solution’s first large-scale rollout.

An agile and progressive rollout to best manage human and financial resources

Automatic data collection and site assessments allow faster identification of ways to save and increase efficiency, such as optimizing the power in our contracts, reconfiguring systems, replacing equipment, etc.

The first savings will then fund our action plans for smart sensors to add to our energy measurements – like in our pilot offices in Rabat, where the new sensors let us precisely measure energy use by type (electricity, water, etc.) and area, cross-referenced with data on physical building usage.

With this system, we expect a reduction of 4%* on annual energy use across our nine sites, so it will have paid for itself within four years.

*with stable use

A stricter regulatory framework for energy use

In France, service sector buildings cover 940 million square meters, i.e., just a quarter of the buildings countrywide, and yet represent one-third of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. While building operators are already facing new challenges, such as rising energy costs and changing working methods, a stricter regulatory landscape is also complicating their work. The “service industry decree” promulgated in 2019 requires the sector to lower its energy use, ultimately by 40% by 2030. As reiterated by Julien Richter, Business Developer of the Orange Business Smart Eco-energy solution, “the first deadline to report usage data is 30 September 2022 for operators of service sector buildings above 1,000 square meters.” The clock is ticking.

Today we are also offering the Smart Eco-energy solution to our customers wishing to improve their energy footprint and align with a regulatory framework. We can support them with an agile approach, covering everything from setting up the smart devices to becoming familiar with the IT solutions.

Patrice Virissel
Patrice Virissel

As Scrum Master Smart Buildings and Data Analyst at Orange Business, I have been developing, rolling out and promoting a digital service solution for optimal building use for the last three years. This solution is a new step in our positive cycle of reducing our environmental impact by leveraging the data from our buildings.