Success Story: Retail

I. CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT / PROJECT CONTEXT

Customer profile:

• The Carrefour group is present in 19 countries, owns 7,000 stores and employs more than 430,000 people. Every year, the Carrefour group meets the consumption needs of 2 billion people around the world. The group arrived in Brazil in 1975, and had 170 stores around the country in 2007.

Customer objective and constraints:

• In December 2003, Carrefour decided to implement a corporate solution for remote energy monitoring in all of its 86 stores in Brazil. Carrefour needed to monitor the use of diesel generators in several stores during the peak period, from 6 to 9 pm.

II. SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION

Duration:

• 4 Years: 2003 to 2007

Solution overview (services, products, systems, architectures...):

• Energy savings were achieved  using power generation , contract optimisation (with the energy utilities), and power factor correction. Complex projects became very simple thanks to the remote monitoring capability.
• The Web Energy system has exclusive features and uses gateways with cellular technology. In each store, Schneider Electric installed a data gateway next to the utility energy meter. This gateway collects all data from the meter, and sends it to the data server, using GSM/GPRS cellular technology. Hundreds of users, from all around the country, have access to the information from the system via Internet, 24 hours a day.

III. RESULTS / ACHIEVEMENT

Customer benefits:

• It was the first ever application in Brazil of gateways using cellular technology for end-user remote energy monitoring. Monitoring is carried out on a real-time basis during the whole peak period, and every three hours during the rest of the day.
• The savings made by Carrefour since 2004 are enough to pay all electricity bills for 100 stores during one full year , which represents savings of around 23% .

IV. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Other information

• The systems have been installed in all new Carrefour stores over the past four years. By September 2007, there were 170 stores with the Web Energy solution in Brazil. Two stores are already monitoring specific internal areas, such as illumination, chiller, compressors, elevators and some others. This submetering feature will be extended to all stores over the next 15 months.