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Ento’s artificial intelligence fights energy waste at Salling Group

Salling Group has announced an ambitious plan to reduce energy consumption from the more than 1,700 stores in Denmark, Germany and Poland. But first, the group starts by optimising the operation of more than 700 Danish stores with Ento’s artificial intelligence – and the energy savings can already be measured and documented.

Ento’s artificial intelligence fights energy waste at Salling Group.

Salling Group has announced an ambitious plan to reduce energy consumption from the more than 1,700 stores in Denmark, Germany and Poland. But first, the group starts by optimising the operation of more than 700 Danish stores with Ento's artificial intelligence – and the energy savings can already be measured and documented.

Salling Group wants to invest DKK 2.5 billion in green technologies.

Salling Group’s ambitious energy and climate change plan includes investment of DKK 2.5 billion in, among other things, conversion of oil and gas-fired heat sources to electric heat pumps, installation of solar cells and reduction of energy consumption for cooling and lighting.

Now another item can be added to the list of measures to lower energy consumption: energy optimisation with artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence has initially identified buildings with energy waste across Salling’s more than 700 grocery stores in Denmark – an almost impossible task for the human eye, as consumption is affected by a lot of factors in every individual building.

Reducing energy waste is a quick and cost-effective way to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint, if you know where to focus. Here’s where the artificial intelligence comes in. The focus is then on optimizing the operation of existing technical installations. This is therefore not a major investment compared to the remaining part of Salling’s billion investment in green technologies.

With the group’s more than 700 grocery stores, Salling Group is one of Denmark’s largest building owners in terms of energy consumption.

The savings can already be documented on the platform and more are on the way

Although Salling Group has only used artificial intelligence for a short time, the first energy savings can already be documented.

The artificial intelligence keeps an eye on both consumption that can be optimised, and collects ongoing documentation of the savings achieved, so the Energy Manager have one overall place to document small and large savings.

“We are already collecting a lot of data from our buildings, which we use in our work to optimize energy consumption. Ento Labs’ tool helps us to analyze all this data and find the best cases where we can quickly achieve savings”.

Martin Kortegaard
Energy Manager, Salling Group

Often, technical plants can be operated more energy efficiently. If artificial intelligence is used to identify operational optimisations, other building owners have saved more than 15% of the total electricity consumption.