This is how you end up with energy silos: data that exists but remains separate, making it hard to understand how much each process costs, why consumption changes or where action is worth taking.

The Smart Energy Congress 2026, organised by enerTIC, will take place on 14 and 15 October at IFEMA Madrid. Its agenda covers digitalisation, IT/OT integration and the use of data to improve energy competitiveness. For industrial companies, that debate starts with a practical question: can we link the information we already have to manage our energy better?

What an energy silo is, with examples from the plant

An energy silo is a source of information on consumption, costs or operations that is difficult to relate to the others. The separation may be due to incompatible systems, access permissions, different formats or unclear responsibilities.

In an industrial plant, you may find side by side:

• The main meter, with the load curve available through the distribution company or Datadis (the Spanish distributors’ consumption-data platform), depending on the supply and the data accessible.
• The plant supervision and control system (SCADA), with temperatures, machine states and other operating variables.
• Power analysers and submeters, which record the consumption of distribution boards, lines or equipment.
• Gas, boiler and industrial refrigeration records, with their own control systems.
• Invoices, production and the operating calendar, spread across administration, production and other departments.

Each system may work properly. The problem arises when cross-referencing their data requires exports, emails and spreadsheets every time someone needs an answer.

With metering by machine and process we can identify what is consuming energy. To interpret that consumption, we also need to know what was being produced, for how long and under what conditions.

What energy silos cost

Their cost shows up in three places: the opportunities that go unnoticed, the work of rebuilding information and the time it takes to respond.

Decisions that are never even considered. If consumption and price remain separate, it becomes harder to calculate the real energy cost of each process. If production and energy are not linked, a line that manufactures more may look less efficient simply because it consumes more.

Work that keeps being repeated. Preparing information for senior management, an audit or a formal dossier may mean exporting from several systems, reconciling dates, checking units and finding gaps. When that process is not organised, it has to be rebuilt for every review.

Deviations spotted too late. Discovering a piece of equipment running outside operating hours when the bill arrives leaves less room to respond than identifying it during operation. To make the most of the data, you need a suitable update frequency, a threshold and someone responsible for taking action.

That is why industrial energy efficiency indicators need consistent information and context. A chart can show the change; explaining its cause requires relating the variables that drive it.

How to connect IT and OT without creating another silo

IT refers to the information technologies that run the business: applications, databases and corporate systems. OT refers to the technologies that monitor or control physical machines and processes.

Integrating both environments makes it possible to relate what happens on the plant floor to its energy and financial consequences. Doing it well means reviewing three aspects.

• Genuine compatibility. Industrial protocols, application programming interfaces (APIs) and gateways make connection easier. But sharing a protocol does not guarantee that all the data is accessible or that it means the same thing. You need to check equipment, versions, permissions, documentation and any licensing requirements.

• Data quality. A platform can receive information from several systems and still show incorrect comparisons if it mixes units, intervals or dates. Integration must identify gaps, duplicates and changes in measurement criteria.

• Security and operational continuity. The NIST OT security guide addresses the particular needs of these environments. Access to information must respect plant availability and security, with appropriate permissions and communications.

Local processing, known as edge computing, can help collect and transform data close to the equipment. Some solutions can also store data during a communications outage. How useful it is depends on the architecture and on the functions that have been planned.

The question when choosing a platform should be specific: which sources at our site can you integrate, how do you prove it and what limitations are there?

What companies can do before the Smart Energy Congress

The first step is to locate the information available and choose a decision worth resolving. That inventory lets you approach suppliers, production and maintenance with specific questions.

With that preparation, the conversation changes: these are our sources, this is the decision we need to make and these are the criteria for checking whether the integration works.

A well-defined first case also helps you assess what is worth extending to the rest of the plant.

The PowerCloud view

PowerCloud brings together energy and operational information so you can analyse consumption, costs and performance in a shared environment. Integration starts from the equipment, systems, access and communications available at each site.

By relating the overall load curve to process-level measurements and activity variables, a company can compare lines, pinpoint deviations and keep a history to review what happened before and after an intervention.

Update frequency and scope are tailored to the analysis you want to carry out. The aim is for production, maintenance and senior management to work with consistent information and be able to check the outcome of their decisions.

The Smart Energy Congress will put these connections between technology, operations and efficiency on the table. For each company, the practical step starts at its own site: identifying which information is still kept separate and which decision could improve by connecting it.

La entrada Energy silos: the challenge of connecting data at the Smart Energy Congress 2026 se publicó primero en Powercloud | Energy monitoring and management.

1. More efficient data handling: an automated energy management system greatly reduces the time spent collecting and analysing data. In Excel, data is entered and manipulated by hand; automation can cut that effort by 50% to 70% or more, depending on the complexity and volume of the data.
2. Fewer errors: manual data entry and analysis in spreadsheets are prone to human error. By automating data collection and processing, an energy management system can reduce errors by between 30% and 60%, depending on how effective the system is and how accurate the previous manual methods were.
3. Faster analysis and reporting: energy management systems usually include advanced analysis and reporting tools, which can cut the time spent on these tasks by 40% to 60% compared with Excel.
4. Real-time monitoring and alerts: monitoring consumption in real time and receiving automatic alerts about anomalies or excess consumption has no real equivalent in Excel, and is one of the biggest steps forward in energy management.

Want to see what this would mean for your organisation? Get in touch and we will show you Powercloud working with your own data.

La entrada Energy management system vs Excel se publicó primero en Powercloud | Energy monitoring and management.