How Copenhagen airport is going to realize its ambitious energy strategy
From 2013 to 2017, Copenhagen Airport implemented energy savings initiatives with an impact of almost 24 GWh. As a result, the airport specified a new target in 2018: by 2023, the energy consumption should only be 90 kWh/m2. In order to meet this target, the airport is, among other things, using a combination of KMD Energy Management Suite and Energy Projects to calculate, manage and analyze their energy optimization projects.
Copenhagen Airport in Kastrup is expanding. In a few years, the airport will almost double in size, allowing more and larger aircraft to travel to new destinations. As a result, the number of passengers using the airport each year is expected to grow from the current approximately 30 million to 40 million.
As an important part of Copenhagen Airport’s work with social responsibility, it is seeking to reduce its climate footprint while also realizing its growth ambitions.
Reducing our climate footprint is an important and integrated part of everything we do, and we are working every day with innovative solutions that optimize our energy consumption.
In Copenhagen Airport’s energy strategy, the objective for January 1, 2023, is to reduce the energy consumption per square meter from the current 109 kWh to 90 kWh. In other words, a reduction of 17 percent.
The reduction is to be achieved in part by replacing old equipment and materials with new energy-optimized solutions. But how does one measure whether the desired energy savings have been achieved? How does one replace ‘guesstimates’ with hard data?
Among other things, Copenhagen Airport uses KMD’s energy management solution called KMD Energy Management Suite to consolidate, validate and analyze the meter data on the consumption of heating, electricity, and water.
As something new, Copenhagen Airport has also supplemented KMD Energy Management Suite with the Energy Projects solution from Energy Systems. Energy Projects can, for example, be used for theoretical calculations on the energy efficiency gains from completing energy optimization projects used together with the actual numbers from KMD Energy Management Suite. These two solutions provide a comprehensive overview of what the energy potentials are from any given initiative and whether the potential was realized - and if relevant, why not.
Making energy data more visible and using it more efficiently
Nicolai Skovgaard Rasmussen is a Junior Energy Engineer in Copenhagen Airport’s Energy Department. Among other things, he is in charge of monitoring key figures and making comparisons across buildings, terminals, ventilation units, cooling units, etc.
Nicolai Skovgaard Rasmussen explains that the airport is still at a very early stage of using Energy Projects, and, therefore, they are as yet unable to report on specific effects.
“We chose to invest in Energy Projects first of all because it provides a good visual overview of the energy data that we work with. Secondly, Energy Projects has a really good project management tool. And the third reason is that we can plug in Excel data from our energy strategy directly into Energy Projects, extract the data from there and place it on our buildings. This provides us with a very tangible way of seeing what savings will be achieved if, for example, we change the lighting or a ventilation unit somewhere in the airport.”
If we can use energy optimization projects to achieve a better energy label, this has an impact on how everyone perceives us, but it also has an impact on the revenues we generate from renting or selling buildings.
Better energy labels and the bottom line
It is about taking on social responsibility when Copenhagen Airport focuses on energy efficiency. But it is also about the bottom line in the airport’s budget.
If the target of reducing energy consumption per square meter by 17 percent in 2023 is achieved, Copenhagen Airport can save millions of Danish kroner each year.
In addition, Copenhagen Airport is also working on improving the energy labelling reports prepared for the airport. Some of the reports are several years old and no longer contain the correct values.
“If we can use energy optimization projects to achieve a better energy label, this has an impact on how everyone perceives us, but it also has an impact on the revenues we generate from renting or selling buildings,” says Nicolai Skovgaard Rasmussen.
Lofty ambitions for the future
Rasmus Kjelmann Lundsbjerg works as Energy Engineer in Copenhagen Airport’s Energy Department. He explains that the airport has lofty ambitions for using both Energy Management Suite, Energy Projects and how the two solutions can work in tandem. Among other things, they expect to make increased use of the alarm functions in KMD Energy Management Suite to detect malfunctions or inappropriate consumption patterns sooner.
Right now, however, the main focus is on using Energy Management Suite for settlement of energy consumption and as an internal validation of the meter readings they receive.
“We have a CTS system that manages and regulates virtually all of our buildings, pumps, ventilation units and so forth. The challenge with our CTS system is that it is so advanced and capable of doing so many things that it is easy to make a mistake while setting it up. So, instead of, for example, registering a consumption of one cubic meter of water, the CTS might register a consumption of 1,000 cubic meters of water.
With Energy Management Suite, we can carry out internal quality control of our readings before sending invoices to our tenants. It puts us at ease knowing that everything is 100 percent in order. The tenants can also use the solution to visualize their consumption when they log in and check their energy consumption. This also helps to reassure them,” Rasmus Kjelmann Lundsbjerg concludes.
Read more about KMD Energy Management Suite
KMD Energy Management Suite is a complete web-based and mobile solution for managing energy and resource consumption. This cloud solution can be easily integrated with third-party solutions.
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