Case Study: City of Louvain-la-Neuve achieves 25–31% energy reduction and 80% faster energy accounting with Microsoft Azure

Belgian city leads the way in smart power consumption with energy monitoring solution

The City of Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, a Belgian municipality of 31,000 residents committed to becoming carbon-neutral by 2050, faced an unmanageable, error-prone process for tracking building energy use. Annual surveys produced too much disparate data that was entered manually into Excel, making it difficult to analyze consumption, account for weather and temperature variations, and act on inefficiencies.

To solve this, the city partnered with Opinum to pilot Opisense, a Microsoft Azure–based energy monitoring platform using smart meters, dashboards and a mobile app. The deployment automated data collection and reporting, cut energy accounting time by 80 percent, improved comfort in municipal buildings, and reduced energy use in monitored sites by 25–31 percent (equivalent to the annual power use of 66 houses); the solution has since been expanded and adopted by other organizations, including Microsoft Belgium.

City of Louvain-la-Neuve

Tanguy Boucquey

Energy Manager