Monitor Energy Consumption and Save Money with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Energy producers can struggle to meet their customers’ needs when they cannot accurately predict future energy consumption.
Embedded analytics helps energy companies analyze energy consumption and identify reoccurring energy waste, allowing them to make better decisions about energy production and understand deviations from established patterns. In this blog post, I am going to provide an overview of how embedded analytics helps monitor energy consumption by covering the following topics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in energy consumption monitoring.
- Bold BI’s Energy Consumption and Monitoring Dashboard.
- How to embed Bold BI’s Energy Consumption and Monitoring Dashboard into your application.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics integrates analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables non-technical people to monitor data sets with impressive dashboards and glean all the insights they need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedded analytics in energy consumption monitoring
Embedding an energy consumption and monitoring dashboard improves an energy producer’s efficiency, sustainability, reputation, and bottom line.
Embedded analytics helps improve energy companies through:
- Effective consumption analysis.
- Better selection of energy sources.
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Better financial management
Effective consumption analysis
Embedded analytics in energy consumption and monitoring helps energy company leaders track key metrics such as the consumption cost of production per month from different sources of power like coal, geothermal, solar, and biomass. This helps management perform proper energy consumption analysis and evaluate the amount of savings they could realize by implementing energy-efficient practices. This also lets them investigate the consumption costs of other power sources so that they can plan to supply more energy as their customer base grows.
Better energy sources
Embedded analytics illuminates detailed information about how much energy is produced per month from different sources such as coal, solar, biomass, nuclear, and geothermal. With this data, energy companies can upgrade their production plans for different sources to maximize energy output and minimize costs. For example, an analytical dashboard can help managers perform and investigate the benefits of implementing high storage capacities for solar power sources. Conducting such analysis could lead to more efficient energy production, which in turn increases investment returns.
Higher customer satisfaction
Embedded analytics helps energy company managers track key metrics such as production quality, power consumption, and more. This enables them to distribute power effectively by monitoring customer consumption rates and adjusting accordingly. Maintaining expected service levels improves customer satisfaction and increases brand value.
Better financial management
Embedded analytics in energy consumption and monitoring helps power company managers track key metrics such as consumption quantity by sectors like industrial, commercial, and residential. This allows the managers to identify inefficiencies in particular areas and mend them quickly, saving the power company money.
Bold BI’s Energy Consumption and Monitoring Dashboard
This Energy Consumption and Monitoring Dashboard visualizes energy consumption across various sectors for a given period. It also shows the total power generation in various categories and the production costs for them as well.
With this dashboard, you can learn about these key metrics and KPIs:
- Energy consumption
- Production cost
- Production quantity
- Average consumption by sector
- Monthly energy consumption and production cost
- Monthly production costs
Energy consumption
This card shows the total energy consumption in the selected date range.
Knowing this KPI helps energy company managers know the total amount of energy used for a given period of time. This also helps power regulatory managers keep tabs on raises or drops in the energy consumption to production ratio.
Production cost
This card shows the total production cost incurred in the selected date range. This helps energy managers predict the daily production amount.
Production quantity
Managers can use this chart to evaluate how different sectors consume energy from different sources.
Knowing this helps the production team improve the energy delivered to each sector as they each consume energy differently.
Average energy consumption by sector
This doughnut chart shows the average proportion of energy consumed by each sector.
With this KPI, the regulatory manager in the energy company is able to determine how to distribute energy efficiently to all users and improve energy delivery services.
Monthly energy consumption and production cost
This combination chart tracks the energy consumed and the production cost by month.
Knowing this KPI, energy executives can assemble a team to ensure the consumption and production costs are stabilized throughout the year for the company to have better returns.
Monthly production cost
This chart shows each energy source’s contribution to the total production cost by month. This helps the production manager see monthly expense trends and plan production budgets accordingly.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Energy Consumption and Monitoring Dashboard.
How to embed analytics tools into energy consumption and monitoring apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your energy consumption and monitoring web applications. Bold BI lets you embed your dashboards in 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node, Vue with Go, Vue with Core, and more. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your energy company has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Creating an ASP.NET MVC application.
First, you need to create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
RootUrl : Dashboard server BI URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi,http://dashboard.syncfusion.com/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1”. For the Bold BI Cloud Add-on, it should be an empty string.Environment : Bold BI application environment.For Bold BI Cloud Add-on, you can use “cloud”. For Bold BI, you should use “enterprise”.User Email : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication, and you can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log in to different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference the required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboards into your ASP.MVC application.
To learn more about energy dashboards in your applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code from this blog in our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards in your application, refer to this blog and our documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help energy producers monitor consumption and production costs and convert that knowledge into success. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on March 8, 2022.
