How Woolworths Optimised Refrigeration and Energy with Bueno
Refrigerant Loss down 37% and 1,900 Maintenance Callouts Avoided
Woolworths Group is ranked in the top 20 global grocery retailers, with revenues exceeding $42 billion annually. It is Australia’s largest Grocery chain operating over 1,100 stores nationally.
Their supermarkets occupy roughly 3.6 million square meters of real estate and employ over 115,000 team members and use roughly 1% of all the power generated in Australia – which is now managed by the Bueno Platform.
In 2016 Woolworths Australia embarked on the journey of building an energy management centre. The objective was to support Woolworths’ corporate sustainability targets of reducing CO2 emissions by 63% from their 2015 baseline by 2030, simultaneously combatting the continuous increase of energy costs in Australia. Woolworths chose Bueno as the partner who would help them deliver the modernisation and analytics portion of the project.
Project Summary
Bueno and Woolworths partnered to create a framework for gathering data and using the information to run stores more efficiently by making data driven decisions. In total, more than 4,000 IOT controllers were connected, feeding 1.3m data points with 375m point-in-time readings per day. Woolworths and Bueno also collaborated by installing 9,750 electricity submeters at 920 sites to enable detailed energy analytics, measurement and verification.
The analytics have underpinned a 27% reduction in carbon emissions from the 2015 baseline. There was an 18% reduction in electricity consumption nationally over 3 years which equates to more than $100 million in savings per year.
The Journey Begins
Together with Bueno’s platform, Woolworths began its journey toward Net-Zero. Utilising the Bueno’s platform across its 1,100+ stores, Woolworths created an in-house Energy Management Centre that utilises the key insights generated by Bueno’s Smart Building Analytics platform. The Centre proactively manages their energy usage, identifies issues and trends before they become problems, mitigate risks that arise and minimise equipment failure and stock shrinkage.
The Results
The average supermarket contributes 383 metric tonnes of CO2 per year from energy consumption alone and another 1,556 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent from leaked refrigerants according to the EPA. Given the tightening of regulatory demands and the growing scrutiny from an increasingly sustainability focused public, business as usual is not an option.
Woolworths and Bueno have shown that using a data driven approach to achieving sustainability targets is a viable and cost-effective option for the supermarket industry.
Conclusion
Woolworths have consistently maintained >95% uptime on nearly 10,000 electric submeters. The data from these energy meters were also used to generate energy savings certificates that help fund capex projects as well as providing measurement and verification for internal business cases.
In addition to the energy savings there were also:
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- a 37% reduction in refrigerant leaks
- 7,500 work orders raised for opportunities identified by the Energy Management Centre using Bueno analytics.
- Improved contractor and technician performance management through the availability of data to validate actions.
- Data driven capital decisions for energy efficiency projects.
- Data share for Greenstar building ratings.
- Water savings through visibility of water usage across the portfolio and proactive identification of water leaks.
Woolworths’ success demonstrates the tangible impact that structured, data-driven building analytics can deliver—across energy, refrigeration, and water systems. At Bueno, we work with each client to tailor a similar journey—starting with the fundamentals of energy management, then layering in fault detection, and ultimately achieving building optimisation at scale.
If you’re looking to enhance operational performance, reduce emissions, or simply gain greater visibility over your assets, we’d be happy to show you what’s possible with the right data foundations in place.
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