Woolworths’ Energy Management Centre (EMC) is projected to save Woolworths around NZD three million per year in energy and maintenance costs through a data-driven, centralised approach.
As one of New Zealand's largest retailers, Woolworths operates a store network that consumes approximately one percent of the country’s total electricity.
Catherine Langabeer, Woolworths’ Head of Sustainability, said the group has partnered with Bueno Analytics to transform this energy footprint. By leveraging real-time controls verification, the EMC project has delivered sustained reductions in electricity consumption, refrigerant leaks, and carbon emissions.
“Over the last year, we have completed development of our Energy Management Centre - turning our traditional supermarkets into highly intelligent 'smart stores’,” said Langabeer.
“This digital transformation has established a scalable, gold-standard blueprint for New Zealand’s large energy users, proving that data-led innovation can drive significant decarbonisation at an industrial scale.”
Historically, store performance was managed through fragmented systems, with refrigeration, HVAC, lighting, and energy data often separated across different tools and vendor environments. This made it difficult to build a consistent picture of performance, validate changes after maintenance, or sustain improvements over time.
At a portfolio level, reactive monitoring can also create alert fatigue, inconsistent outcomes between sites, and chronic performance drift that remains undetected for long periods.
The key barrier, Langabeer said, was not the availability of data, but the ability to translate large volumes of operational data into verified, prioritised action across many sites, switching Woolworths’ model from reactive to proactive.
Read more in the latest issue here
