Bell targets smart energy management with GridPoint partnership

With the Canadian government mandating that provinces implement a carbon tax by 2018 – or comply with the federal government’s price – reducing energy use is top of mind for Canadian businesses.

It’s one of the challenges Bell customers brought to Peter Wilcox, director of IoT mobility solutions for the largest Canadian telecom, and that a partnership to deliver a smart energy management solution with Washington, D.C.-based energy management software provider GridPoint aims to address.

“We’ve heard the challenges around energy and cost, and now we have a solution partner that can deliver against all of these needs,” Wilcox said.

The new product promises out-of-the-box smart energy management for Canadian businesses. It works like this: GridPoint hardware is installed to collect and transmit data from assets like HVAC, lighting and thermostats. That data is transmitted through Bell’s gateway for analysis in the GridPoint cloud, to allow the business to make decisions on energy management. Bell manages the SIM connectivity. Cloud architecture is what differentiates GridPoint, Wilcox said, as the software can be deployed in as little as a day and easily scale.

As such, GridPoint’s smart building technology aims to provide easy access to insight into equipment health and performance so that customers can automate the control of HVAC and lighting schedules and troubleshoot equipment issues remotely. It can collect and display data in real time on mobile applications, enabling customers to learn more about their energy patterns and adapt operations to maximize savings.

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“We wanted a solution that was as frictionless as possible,” Wilcox said.

The addition further augments a portfolio of IoT-enabled energy management solutions Bell launched about two years ago, now including software and services for restaurants, warehouses and industrial IoT use cases.

There are active proof of concepts of the new GridPoint partnership, Wilcox said, and there has been high demand for the solution in the retail space, a segment increasingly challenged to better manage physical space as shoppers increasingly turn to ecommerce. Wilcox expects to see high demand extend to the public sector as well.

“They’re looking at this as a strategic way to reduce costs,” Wilcox said.