Schneider, Cisco Launch Joint Building-IT Energy Platform; Canon Saves 2.7m kWh

by | Jul 13, 2011

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Schneider Electric and Cisco have unveiled a joint energy management solution that allows building managers to extend the reach of their existing building management system into the IT/IP domain.

The collaboration integrates Schneider’s EcoStruxure energy management architecture with the Cisco EnergyWise platform, allowing users to monitor and control all energy-consuming building assets, such as HVAC, lighting, security, along with energy waste generated from PCs, phones, catalyst switches, power-over-ethernet (PoE) endpoint devices and other IT devices.

The two companies say their combined solution can reduce IT operating costs by up to 30 percent and building costs by almost nine percent.

Two schools in Europe used the combined solution in a pilot project and are currently saving about 30 percent of their IT energy, resulting in an overall reduction of close to 6 percent of their overall energy spend, the companies said.

In other building management news, Canon USA has saved 2.7 million kWh and $300,000 in 2009 and 2010 through an energy savings program at five U.S. offices, the company has announced.

The company said the initiative saved enough energy to power its Lake Success, N.Y., headquarters for four months. The program covered the HQ along with four U.S. regional office locations at Itasca, Ill., Irving, Texas, Jamesburg, N.J., and Irvine, Calif.

Canon worked to uncover areas where energy consumption could be improved, and implemented strategies to reduce consumption. It also expanded the scope of its environmental training to cover energy and resource consumption in the office, and to increase awareness of techniques to reduce energy, paper, toner and other materials.

Canon installed high-efficiency, low-carbon lighting, replacing thousands of light bulbs throughout its U.S. offices. The company installed motion sensors to switch off lights not in use, and reduced or removed lighting in low-traffic areas and those near sources of natural light.

The company limited the hours that buildings are lit during the business week, requiring staff working late or on weekends to inform facilities if they needed lighting beyond the normal hours.

Canon replaced more than 4,000 cathode ray tube computer screens in its offices with energy efficient LCD monitors. It donated old monitors to schools and charities.

Canon also removed more than 550 personal printers from service, and replaced them with imageRUNNER and imageRUNNER ADVANCE multifunction devices. The company installed uniFLOW printing software to manage its fleet of document output devices, a strategy Canon recommends to its own customers.

UniFLOW can route print jobs to the most energy-efficient printer available, determined by establishing a baseline of energy consumption that measures paper, toner and power use of printers on the network.

Canon also said that in 2010, it saved more than 1.6 million sheets of paper by using duplex printing.

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