Building efficiency is a big problem and is going to get bigger

It is estimated that more than 1/3 of commercial real estate in the US is ripe for a major retrofit which could cost upwards of $400B. However, today the country as a whole is only spending $30-60B on energy efficiency upgrades which is a huge jump away from where we need to be.

The federal government, municipalities, and cities are already starting to take action to address this gap as evidenced by President Obama’s Better Buildings Initiative, New York City’s Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, San Francisco’s Energy Performance Ordinance, as well as many others. All of these initiatives serve one purpose – to put mandates in place to force more buildings to address energy efficiency at a massive scale in the near future.

These mandates combined with increasing adoption of benchmarks such as ENERGY STAR and LEED certification, corporate sustainability goals, and continued high and unstable energy prices are creating the right market dynamic to enable this change.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Commercial building energy efficiency evaluation is currently a slow, expensive, and non standard process. Building professionals spend countless hours walking around buildings, benchmarking and researching efficiency solutions, and generating detailed reports.

With more than 5 million buildings and 80 billion square feet, there aren’t enough auditors, consultants, and engineers to put a real dent in the problem. This is creating a huge bottleneck and preventing the problem from being tackled in a systematic and scalable way.

Retroficiency has the answer

Retroficiency’s market leading Building Efficiency Intelligence (BEI) platform enables energy service providers and utilities to systematically evaluate thousands of commercial building energy efficiency measures in minutes — regardless of what information is available.

Retroficiency’s solutions leverage powerful on-demand data analytics to limit the amount of human intervention required throughout the process. The platform can be used with energy interval^? or limited building asset^? data to quickly focus on the best opportunities, as well as incorporate more detailed specifics as they are collected.

Retroficiency has proven to help building professionals more rapidly, cost effectively, and accurately qualify energy opportunities in commercial properties. We make the people chartered with building efficiency reduction up to 80% more efficient.

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.

Why Retro