Utilities

Faced with increasingly aggressive efficiency targets, electric and gas utilities are continually expanding their commercial energy efficiency spending.

Commercial customers represent a significant opportunity, but are diverse and complex – unlike residential customers, mass marketing is not the optimal approach. Utilities must find innovative ways to identify the best building candidates, evaluate the most effective measures, and motivate these customers to take action.

Retroficiency enables utilities to target the right commercial customers with specific opportunities. Learn how you can:

Rapidly prioritize high potential buildings

With thousands of commercial customers and millions of square feet to cover, utilities and their energy efficiency program managers have no scalable way to determine which buildings offer the best potential for savings. Retroficiency’s Virtual Energy Assessment lets you cost-effectively prioritize a portfolio based on how much each site could save – in terms of dollars, kilowatt hours or electric and fuel energy units – without ever visiting a building.
Identify actionable no- and low-cost energy reduction opportunities

When utilities engage with commercial customers, they often have no visibility into the specific opportunities that exist within a building. This lack of knowledge limits success in driving customers to act, as utilities cannot explicitly demonstrate energy savings opportunities and customers are hesitant to dedicate the resources required to identify them. Virtual Energy Assessment empowers utilities by distilling thousands of energy interval data points into actionable recommendations, with no requirements for on-site visits or expensive hardware.
Automate the energy audit process

Retroficiency automates the energy auditing process and helps improve this time intensive and costly process by up to 80%. Retroficiency’s Automated Energy Audit streamlines data collection, makes complex ECM cost/benefit calculations, makes recommendations that are optimized for target goals, and builds customized audit reports.

Definitions

Energy consumption interval data is a record of a building's energy consumption levels, with readings made at regular intervals throughout the day, every day, over an extended period of time. Interval data can be obtained from utility company meters, building control systems or increasingly from energy service provider- or building owner-installed smart meters.

Building asset data is information related to general building characteristics and energy systems in the building. This could include basic information such as the year built or facility use type (e.g., office, warehouse, etc.), to more specifics, such as heating ventilation and air-conditioning systems, lighting and lighting controls, envelope and windows.

Fortune 100 Company

A well-known Fortune 100 finance company wanted to gain LEED status for all of its buildings. Three of their buildings presented a challenge as they were unable to get ENERGY STAR rated, a requirement for LEED certification. The company hired external engineering experts who identified 15 improvements for each building that would help them meet their goals. Retroficiency was engaged to demonstrate their technology to develop recommendations and help validate the external company's findings with a calibrated energy model.

Using proprietary technology with minimal information from on-site facility managers (and no site visits), Retroficiency was able to construct and calibrate energy models. By running these models against our database of thousands of energy conservation measures, we were able to offer recommendations that increased ENERGY STAR ratings by an average of 31% and had less than 2 year paybacks. In terms of annual savings, we found more than $85k in operational changes and $45k in physical retrofits. Once we had calibrated energy models we showed that 12 out of the 15 retrofits recommended by the external engineers (and almost $2M in spend) had paybacks greater than 67 years and were not necessary to meet the desired goals.

Leading Facility Management Company

Retroficiency was asked to evaluate 3 buildings totaling 1.2M square feet. The goal was to test the ability of our platform to do high-level quick evaluations of multiple buildings. In addition, they wanted to calibrate the energy models on all three buildings to test the depth of the analysis and performance of the models.

To start, the facility management company was given online access to the Retroficiency platform and spent about 30 minutes entering high-level information about the buildings. Within 3 hours of submitting this information, the energy managers were sent an email notifying them that their initial reports were available. These reports showed combined annual savings opportunities of $883k at the 3 buildings � all with less than 6 year paybacks.

Next, the energy managers were able to access, evaluate, and change the inferred data on all of their buildings. After submitting these changes, the energy models were updated. Retroficiency then used 12 months of utility data to calibrate the models to ensure accuracy. The ECM database was again run against these models and new savings and cost numbers were produced.

The process from start to detailed output took 5 days and did not require site visits. The software found more than $2.5M in annual savings with all paybacks less than 6 years.

Utilities

Rapidly prioritize high potential buildings

Identify actionable no- and low-cost energy reduction opportunities

Automate the energy audit process

Learn More

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Definitions

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Fortune 100 Company

Leading Facility Management Company