Metering, Monitoring and Targeting

Energy metering, monitoring and targeting (MM&T) is the information management system that supports energy management. Sometimes known more simply as monitoring and targeting (M&T), it is central to good energy management: you can't manage what you don’t measure.

Effective MM&T helps you to reduce costs. Properly understanding your organisation’s energy consumption helps you to identify waste and target inefficiency.

The Monitoring and Targeting in-depth guide (CTG008) explores M&T techniques and shows how organisations can adopt an appropriate level of M&T. The Metering Technology Overview (CTV027) provides guidance on the metering element of MM&T.

Stages of Metering, monitoring and targeting (MM&T)

The stages of MM&T are:

collection of data on energy and on influencing factors, such as weather conditions or production volumes
analysis to convert data to information
communication to convert information to knowledge
follow-up actions to improve efficiency and eliminate waste.

This is a continuous process, and once established it should not be overly complex or time consuming. MM&T allows you to:

detect avoidable energy waste that might otherwise remain hidden
quantify savings achieved by energy projects and campaigns
identify fruitful lines of investigation for energy surveys
provide feedback for staff awareness, improve budget setting and undertake benchmarking
calculate energy and carbon targets rationally to reflect achievable performance – often, targets are set without consideration of practical application or achievability.

MM&T also helps with energy invoice checking and tariff negotiation. Sometimes the term is inaccurately used to mean bill validation alone; true MM&T provides much more.

Automatic meter reading (AMR) systems, which use meters that do not have to be read manually, are well developed and becoming more and more cost-effective. AMR simplifies meter reading considerably and makes it possible to collect energy data at a much more detailed level. This brings the risk of ‘data overload’ so you need to balance the practicality and cost of metering with the benefits it will help deliver.

Temporary metering, in the form of a portable electricity data logger, can be invaluable when it is not practical to convert existing meters to AMR or to add permanent sub-metering.