Hørsholm Municipality: Data-driven energy management unlocks substantial energy savings.

Significant energy savings: A new energy management system in Hørsholm Municipality shows that the combination of artificial intelligence and 100 % data-driven energy management is the key to significant carbon reductions, while unlocking substantial savings.

(Credit: This article was first published in Danish by Energiforumdanmark.dk.)

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Sustainable investments don't equal high costs.

The transition to a sustainable future is on everyone’s agenda in the Danish municipalities. But how do you get started when sustainable investments are often associated with high costs?

The answer is neither million-dollar investments in new technology nor a fundamental reorientation of our way of life. Instead, artificial intelligence and data-driven energy management are the keys to reducing CO2 emissions.

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Financial savings and reduced CO2 emissions thanks to AI.

Intelligent energy management can provide considerable financial savings and, at the same time, cut CO2 emissions enormously. This is what Dennis Sonne Mogensen, project manager in the property team at Hørsholm Municipality, says:

“Using artificial intelligence to analyse consumption data, we have documented large energy waste in our building portfolio. Therefore, we also know with certainty that there are large financial savings to be made, which simultaneously benefit the climate”.

The artificial intelligence measures the electricity consumption on 16 different parameters every hour, which can impact the individual property’s electricity consumption. For instance, wind speed, wind direction, day of the week, day of the year, a particular time of the day, solar radiation, etc.

Apart from the electricity consumption, Ento's solution is also used to monitor and analyse district heating, gas and water consumption across the municipality’s property portfolio.

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Ten months of work yielded substantial savings.

Hørsholm Municipality has worked purposefully with artificial intelligence and data-driven energy management to reduce the municipality’s CO2 emissions since 2021.

Dennis Sonne Mogensen says that sitting on your hands and doing nothing is not an option any longer.

“We want to be a good example and prove that we are a municipality that fights for the green transition. Therefore, we also must use energy the most appropriate way,” he says.

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The project is a collaboration between Hørsholm Municipality, 4B Consulting, and Ento.

By 2023, the partners must map consumption data from Hørsholm Municipality’s total building portfolio and adjust the municipality’s operation to 100 per cent data-driven energy management. And the preliminary results clearly show that the new digital work tools are not only good for the environment but also a healthy financial decision.

The experiences from Hørsholm Municipality are backed by a new report from the national interest organisation Synergi.

It shows that Denmark can save ten per cent of its total energy consumption in buildings by using artificial intelligence and data-driven energy management.

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The project has exceeded all expectations.

“The whole project has exceeded all expectations. Of course, working with the new digital tools has required some technological habituation. Still, everyone involved has responded very well to the initiatives,” says Dennis Sonne Mogensen, project manager in the property team at Hørsholm Municipality.

The work has already spawned other projects with data driven energy management in the municipality. Dennis Sonne Mogensen is looking forward to seeing what the future brings,

“I just think we have scraped the surface of the technology’s possibilities,” he says.

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