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Energy consumption, usage, and awareness are continuing to become the topics of business meetings, university programs, and even children’s shows. These children are growing up with a stronger awareness of energy saving than ever before. Students and professionals are using the growing knowledge base of energy awareness technologies to research and create new ways to reduce wastage and save costs.

The prevalence of costly and wasteful energy consumption is a national and international problem for almost all organizations. With the advent of information technology tools that allow for energy awareness within an organization, only the richest could previously afford ‘energy-dashboards.’ These dashboards allow for static or real-time visibility into a company’s energy data through greater insight into key performance indicators, outages, energy usage, and consumption. These traditional options for energy dashboards were not only expensive but also lacked agility. It was costly to integrate into various building automation systems, to license the dashboard software, or gain continued assistance from developers due to the proprietary nature of the dashboards.

The OpenEnergy project provides a solution to these historic gaps between energy consumption and information technology. OpenEnergy provides a free alternative to proprietary energy dashboards via open source technologies. Ultimately, companies that take advantage of the OpenEnergy Project can determine specific actions to identify operational and service gaps, see performance metrics across each enterprise, and change business processes to better operate with a changed energy understanding, all from a free, open source technology and community.

The OpenEnergy community is created from two large open source communities:

• ASHRAE – (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers) is a society that focuses on technology for the building industry and subsequent energy efficiency. BACnet, an ASHRAE standard protocol, that allows for communication between control systems and building automation, and its open community, directly provides the data needed for the energy dashboards; and
• Drupal – a free and open source content management framework, and its open source community, provide back-end framework for a range of websites including, but not limited: to personal blogs, political sites, government sites (including energy.gov), university sites, and even whiteshouse.gov Drupal provides the coding needed to link BACnet data to the users in these energy dashboards.  

Function1 sponsored the development of the Drupal module that populates this open source and free energy dashboard. Using this module, businesses will be able to provide users with 4 features, in any combination, to create an energy dashboard; these features are: texts, dials, charts, and graphs. This module can be further embedded into a Drupal site to allow all users to access energy information, as said before, that was too costly to retrieve, and thus restricted to a specific community.

International organizations, universities, and governments are implementing Drupal to modernize their websites, as well as energy saving tools and technologies to reduce consumption, usage, and ultimately increase awareness throughout their own communities. With the implementation of the OpenEnergy Project, through Drupal and the BACnet module, organizations will have an entirely modernized system that will communicate energy consumption, allowing for better business and energy decisions for the future. Drupal and the BACnet module are both free to download. Users can have a live view of energy consumption data, ready to share with consumers and staff within minutes after the implementation of these technologies.

Visit the ASHRAE website here: https://www.ashrae.org/

To download the Drupal BACnet module, click here: https://www.drupal.org/project/bacnet