Problem

Investment in retrofitting a building to improve energy efficiency is very risky. Upgrading your AC system, or improving insulation will save electricity and thus lower your bill. However, making such changes has an initial cost, and it's difficult to accurately estimate the payback time. Typically, to investigate potential savings for a business building, experts are called in to inspect each electrical system. This is time consuming and expensive.

Our tool aims to provide a quick, basically free assessment that lets the user (typically a building manager or chief engineer) understand how their actions affect their energy usage. Many actions are costly, such as upgrading a large electric system. Other, 'softer' actions also exist. For example, one can shut down some elevators during low-traffic times, adjust thermostats by a few degrees, or change automated lighting schedules.

The need for energy use reduction

Global warming, greenhouse emissions... these once technical terms are now part of our vocabulary. The long-term solution to these problems is transition to "green" energy sources such as wind, hydraulic or solar. These is not possible right now because we have no way to control nature and thus, we would have no way to control demand.

In the energy realm, supply must always be equal to demand. This would not matter if we had an efficient and cheap way to store electricity. Sadly, this is not yet a reality. There is a lot of research trying to develop the actual solution to the problem but, in the short-term something must be done to reduce our energy consumption.

Reducing energy use by retrofitting buildings

The heart of the matter is that buildings use too much energy. Some fun facts: half of the energy consumed in the US is used by buildings, this accounts for over 400 billion dollars and 20% of the nations greenhouse emissions. On top of that, buildings waste one third of the energy they use. The short-term solution that makes sense is to focus on buildings to achieve overall energy reductions.

US needs to lower energy consumption and their carbon footprint as part of international agreements. States are then required by federal law to reduce energy consumption. On one side you have public policy makers worried about lowering overall energy consumption. On the other, building managers are only concerned with lowering their bills.

Predicting energy savings is hard

We need building managers to retrofit their buildings. That is to say we want them to invest in upgrading their features and technology to lower their emissions. No investment in energy efficiency measures will be done by investors unless they can know how long it will take for these to pay off.

Currently there are two main ways to predicting energy savings:

1. The people approach: Hire a consultant that will audit your infrastructure and will use their expertise to assess your energy savings. The empire state building in NYC is an excellent example of this approach. It is costly but works.
2. Data approach: Find a building that is exactly as yours in everything but the feature that you want to upgrade and measure the difference in energy consumption. For example, say you are a 20 story office building in the loop: find a 20 story office building identical to yours in everything but the type of windows it uses and measure the impact this windows have in your energy usage. This is impossible.

The first one is both expensive and time intensive. The second, completely unfeasible.

A better way: energywise, an energy analytics tool

Our goal during this project was to provide a tool for building managers to better know where to look for energy savings. The tool consumes a building's energy dates and profiles its energy consumption.

Whenever a building is doing a fairly good job in their electric use, our report does not yields too much information. When, on the other hand, a building is performing very oddly and erratically, our tool shows you exactly where to look.

This is good in two ways:

1. We provide a quick-and-easy first pass on whether or not there are a lot of potential inefficiencies in a building using cheap and available data.
2. Building managers normally take care of multiple buildings. They need a first pass to decide whether it is worth their time to take a closer look into a particular building.

This tool can be used to decide which buildings to submit to the intensive and expensive method similar to the Empire State buildings'. It can also be used by policy makers to produce incentives and regulatory measures to reduce energy consumption in buildings because it can be used effectively to monitor changes in performance.

Hopefully that will make investments in retrofitting their building more likely. This would lower energy consumption and, if this is used on a large scale, maked the planet a little better in the short-term.