Overview
Saint-Gobain North America — one of the largest manufacturers of building materials in the U.S. — partnered with Centrica Business Solutions to deploy low-cost wireless submetering across its manufacturing operations at scale. The program is frequently cited as a model for how large, multi-site industrial owners can move beyond a single instrumented "lighthouse plant" and reach portfolio-wide visibility.
The challenge
Saint-Gobain's North American footprint includes dozens of manufacturing facilities producing glass, insulation, gypsum, abrasives, and high-performance materials. Each plant has distinct processes, distinct energy profiles, and — historically — distinct levels of metering. Traditional wired submetering at this scale was prohibitively expensive: panel modifications, conduit runs, downtime to install CTs on energized buses, and long commissioning cycles per site.
The company needed a metering approach that could be deployed quickly, at low marginal cost per circuit, without taking production lines down.
The solution
Centrica's deployment used wireless, self-powered circuit-level sensors (Panoramic Power technology) installed directly on individual breakers and feeders. Key characteristics:
- No downtime — sensors clip onto live conductors and harvest power from the magnetic field of the cable.
- Minutes per sensor to install, versus hours for traditional wired CTs.
- Cloud-based data platform aggregating one-minute interval data across every site into a single view.
- Standardized templates for common loads — compressed air systems, chillers, dust collectors, ovens, lighting panels — so each new site rolled out faster than the last.
This combination let Saint-Gobain instrument far more circuits per site, and far more sites per year, than a traditional wired program would have allowed.
Outcomes
The published results emphasize three categories of value:
- Operational — identification of after-hours loads, leaking compressed air systems, inefficient run schedules, and equipment drift.
- Capital planning — measured load profiles that informed which sites and which systems to prioritize for retrofits and electrification.
- Sustainability reporting — granular Scope 2 data supporting corporate decarbonization commitments and customer-facing ESG disclosures.
The model has since been replicated across additional Saint-Gobain sites and cited by Centrica and DOE's Better Plants program as a reference for industrial wireless submetering at scale.
Why it matters
For other large manufacturers, the takeaway is straightforward: the technology and cost barriers that historically limited submetering to a handful of pilot sites no longer apply. Wireless, self-powered sensors paired with a centralized analytics platform make portfolio-wide circuit-level visibility a practical, near-term project rather than a multi-year capital program.
Takeaway
Saint-Gobain's partnership with Centrica is a working blueprint for industrial owners who want plant-level energy intelligence across an entire manufacturing footprint — quickly, affordably, and without disrupting production.
