Wireless Solutions Revolutionize Building Energy Management
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PowerTag’s Journey to Energy Savings with EFR32 Wireless Gecko Technology
Our EFR32 Wireless Gecko Technology fit like the last piece in a puzzle for PowerTag’s requirements criteria, as it offers:
- Low power / High efficiency
- Compact design and rich feature set
- Reduced cost
- Accelerated development with robust software, SDKs and
- Development partnership and customer support
- Design reuse and multiprotocol connectivity
- Secures system from endnote to cloud
The Challenge
Provide customers with a simple, compact, low-power submetering solution that improves building energy monitoring and management, and subsequently, maximizes energy efficiency.
The Solution
Schneider Electric selected our EFR32MG13 wireless SoC to guarantee PowerTag’s low-power and avoid load interference. At Silicon Labs, we not only offer solutions – our team of engineers works hand in hand with our customers to help them build their systems: Our customer support helped Schneider port its Zigbee software stack onto our SoCs to ease the company’s development journey.
The Result
The global energy specialist Schneider Electric created PowerTag Energy®, onto a compact wireless device that can be simply latched on to conventional circuit breakers to accurately monitor their energy consumption. PowerTag uses our EFR32MG13 wireless SoC for energy tracking and wireless connectivity
The World’s Most Sustainable Company
Schneider Electric was recently ranked the world’s most sustainable company on the 2021 Global 100 Index – and it wasn’t for nothing. Take its wireless device PowerTag Energy®: a compact Class 1 communication sensor that monitors energy in real-time, the sensor takes metering to the next level by allowing data segmentation (commonly known as submetering).
While traditional metering measures total energy consumption, submeters are used by building facility managers to track consumption by usage (e.g., lighting, HVAC, pumps), by building structure (e.g., floors, wings, area, parking lots) or any other helpful criteria. The result? Thorough and actionable data.
This data then provides segmented measurements to better define building plans and promote sustainability.
Designed for new or existing buildings, PowerTag Energy also sends alerts in the event of an electrical anomaly so homeowners can enjoy peace of mind and business owners can count on operational efficiency and uptime. Alerts come through a phone application, providing users with vital energy information at the tip of their fingertips.
Segmentation and always-on monitoring are especially crucial nowadays as everyone – particularly building and facility managers – look for ways to optimize their energy efficiency, reduce their overall carbon footprint and reduce costs. PowerTag Energy certainly comes in handy, and demand for such efficient, wireless devices will only continue to grow.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Customers who go through the initial phases of digitizing a building are also looking to add wireless connectivity to enhance energy efficiency. Eventually, a building’s energy savings can fuel further investments and accelerate digitization and wireless adoption. Eventually, operators start looking at various value-added services that can be built and integrated on top of the wireless infrastructure that came with the initial phase. This could be retrofitting the entire building with smart lighting system or building an asset tracking system that can improve the operational efficiency of the building, to name a few possibilities.
Schneider Electric found in Silicon Labs a trusted partner that not only met its design and development needs, but also participated (with extensive technical support) in every step of the development journey. Silicon Labs’ broad and in-depth expertise in mesh technology empowers our customers to solve challenging problems in innovative ways.