In the realm of India’s extensive banking and financial services landscape, a pivotal challenge arose for a leading institution with over 7,800 branches and 17,000 ATMs: reigning in an annual electrical energy expense surpassing 70 million USD by 2015. The complexity lay in taming this expenditure while maintaining optimal customer and employee comfort across their diverse branch network.
Teaming up with EcoEnergy Insights, the bank embarked on a pioneering journey, leveraging IoT and analytics to reimagine their energy management paradigm. The strategic deployment of the CORTIX platform revolutionized their approach, amalgamating real-time data, weather insights, and machine learning algorithms.
This collaboration birthed remarkable results: a commendable 13% average energy savings, a noteworthy 2.3 million tons of CO2 emissions avoided annually, and substantial improvements in both customer (16%) and employee (18%) comfort over seven transformative years.
This case study encapsulates the transformation—an intricate blend of technology, strategic partnerships, and unwavering commitment to sustainability—that propelled this financial giant into the vanguard of energy-efficient practices, setting a benchmark for the industry.
The Client:
A leading banking and financial services company with a banking network of close to 7,800 branches and over 17,000 ATMs spread across India.
The Challenge:
Around the year 2015, the bank had an annual expense of over 70 million USD towards electrical energy consumption. Typically, 90% of this consumption was in the network of its retail branches. Their challenge was controlling and optimizing energy costs because of the varying sizes of the branches and their vast geographical spread. The bank partnered with EcoEnergy Insights to optimize energy consumption without compromising on customer and employee comfort.
The Solution:
The bank and EcoEnergy Insights (a Carrier company) entered a multi-year engagement to manage the energy consumption of the retail branches. EcoEnergy Insights carried out the system integration and connected the branches to the CORTIX platform. The platform collects daily energy and temperature data records from the branches and weather data feeds from local weather stations. Additionally, the static data like equipment details, branch size, and electricity spend was also fed into the platform which was analyzed using its machine learning algorithms.
The CORTIX platform utilizes the Service Window framework to analyze the energy consumption of the branches each day. The framework shows unique energy and business profiles that a typical branch goes through during its daily operations. Based on effective monitoring of energy consumption in these service windows, the platform highlighted higher energy consumption during non-business hours and holidays and enabled actions to control them. It also enabled enhanced control of the customer area, the ATM area & server rooms using its IoT controllers at each branch. Remote visibility and live key performance indicator tracking using intuitive dashboards provided relevant information about branch energy consumption patterns and variations during business and non-business hours along with Management Information System (MIS) reports.
The simple yet powerful interface ensured that the administration team could easily understand and monitor operational anomalies, energy profiles, and thermal compliances. This engagement also included support by a BluEdge Command Center of EcoEnergy Insights. The command center provides IoT-enabled remote services with remote commissioning, monitoring, and diagnostics. The command center team tracks persistent deviations weekly, for enhanced visibility of the health of critical cooling equipment, occupant comfort, demand optimization, and much more. The team also assists in minimizing security threats by reporting intrusions during non-banking hours and server health.
The center also proactively coordinated & enabled site-level corrections by ensuring rigorous worklist tracking and reporting. Weekly actionable worklists helped to improve compliance, energy efficiency and asset performance. The insights were also used by the leadership for prioritizing decisions such as the replacement of equipment.
The Result:
Service Window framework-based international performance measurement & verification protocol (IPMVP) methodology was being used to validate the enterprise-wide average energy savings. Over the 7 years since the program began in 2016, the following results were achieved:
- Average savings of over 13%
- 2.3 million tons of average CO2 emission avoided annually
- 16% improvement in customer comfort from baseline
- 18% improvement in employee comfort from baseline
This program won a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) ‘Best Energy Efficient Case Study’ award at the inaugural National Energy Efficiency Circle competition.
