Under the heading “Energy Efficiency in Connected Buildings” Danfoss and Beckhoff Automation held a joint road show in February 2020 to highlight methods of planning, building and managing buildings to achieve optimized energy utilization.
More than 130 planning specialists, system integrators and building operators were in attendance at the road show venues in Germany – Hamburg, Verl, Gröbenzell near Munich, Offenbach – and in Antwerp, Belgium, to learn about the latest developments in energy management and discuss the opportunities and challenges of realizing energy efficiency strategies in buildings today.
Frank Schubert, from Marketing & Training Building Automation at Beckhoff Automation, delivered a presentation showing how IoT and cloud computing can be applied to find potential energy savings, in addition to identifying anomalies and high levels of energy consumption through monitoring technology. Beckhoff control systems, with functions from the TwinCAT TF67xx software product line, can be linked up to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services quickly and easily.
All IoT functions are ready for use right on the control platform itself. There is no need for an external edge device. In a presentation based on Microsoft Power BI, Christoph Peitz, representing the H11 company, demonstrated how the distribution network functions in the building which houses the Fraunhofer Institute IEM in Paderborn, Germany. Shortly after the system was put into operation in December 2019, facility managers discovered how electric power consumption could be dramatically reduced on weekends and holidays. This data is now being applied to optimize the system, and other analyses along with long-term evaluations are planned.