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By Jared Anderson

AOL Energy

 

It is estimated that 40% of U.S. power consumption is attributed to buildings, and

companies large and small are focusing on ways to reduce wasted energy in the places we live and work. With technological advances come new options for streamlining energy efficiency programs.

 

"You have to look at a building as an organism that needs to be monitored consistently because conditions change – like weather or occupancy. A building is a dynamic entity, you can't just build it and walk away," Dave Bartlett, Vice President of IBM Smart Buildings, recently told AOL Energy.

IBM's smart building initiative was created because so many building systems now send out digital information, from things like lighting systems, CO2 sensors, security

systems that monitor which doors and windows are open when, and even badge readers that can illustrate which portions of a building are occupied most and least often and at what times.

IBM is able to capture this data, run analytics on it and design optimization solutions that have been very effective in terms of saving energy and money, said Bartlett. This approach also allows companies to look across portfolios of buildings to see which are using energy efficiently, which are not - and why.

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At the other end of the spectrum from a large company like IBM is a small startup that was founded out of MIT called Retroficiency. They are using computer software to improve the energy efficiency evaluation process remotely. Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher recently told AOL Energy that his company has been working to scale up energy analysis to evaluate multi-building portfolios and thus save considerable time and expense when compared to taking a building-by-building approach.

Retroficiency works with onsite building personnel with access to a facility's energy usage data and in some cases Retroficiency partners with utilities to get the required information. By teaming with building staff, they are able to "leverage their data and facilitate their [building representatives] data collection," said Mike Kaplan, Retroficiency's Vice President of Marketing.

Next page: LEED platinum buildings - energy hogs?

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