The Building Advisor

So you hear about it in the news, online and on our blog. Green… It seems that the word is everywhere these days. The question is, are building owners getting on the bandwagon as well? According to a recent report released by Pike Research, the green movement is only getting bigger. In fact, according to their research, the amount of certified green buildings will increase by 780% in the next 10 years.

Now that is a big number. But how does that affect you if you are a mechanical services contractor?

Let’s do the math. Let’s say you have an average size service business with 500 service contractors. Now, let’s say that just 10 of your customers buildings are currently green certified. If the math holds true then in the next 10 years you would have 78 customers with certified green buildings.

Why is this important?

More and more mechanical service providers are getting into the Energy Game. If your customers are going “green” they will need someone to partner with to make that happen. What are the chances that their “partner” ends up being your competition?

Let’s face it, whether your customers want to go “green” or are just looking to save money, the energy movement is no longer a fad, it is a reality.
If you are not able to provide this service to your clients someone else will.

An executive summary of the report, “Green Building Certification Programs,” is available at www.pikeresearch.com/research/green-building-certification-programs.

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Energy. It’s what AirAdvice is all about: how buildings can most efficiently use this natural resource to operate, and how a focus on energy services can improve the bottom line of the businesses of our contractor channel partners while helping the building owners and managers they serve.

Starting July 22, we’ll be walking our talk in our next free webinar series, “Energize Your Service and Retrofit Sales.” This three-part series offers HVAC contractors concise sales strategy on using BuildingAdvice to build business. Topics include:

Part 1: Use Energy Services to Ensure Maintenance Agreement Renewals

Thursday, July 22, 2010 1:00pm Eastern (10:00am Pacific)

Understanding your service business metrics. What are energy services and how do they fit into a planned maintenance program? What to do in advance of your service renewal date. Meeting with your client prior to next service date anniversary. Qualifying your customers’ interest with automated ENERGY STAR™ benchmarking. Adding energy services to existing service agreements.

Part 2: Winning New Service Business With Energy as the Differentiator

Thursday, July 29, 2010 1:00pm Eastern (10:00am Pacific)

Sales management: getting your team ready. Targeting prospects who you can help with your energy services. Getting a meeting with the right person. Successful prospect meetings. Qualifying prospects up-front with energy benchmarking. Selling an energy assessment. Writing winning proposals.

Part 3: Use Energy Services to Drive Project Revenue

Thursday, August 5, 2010 1:00pm Eastern (10:00am Pacific)

Targeting the right accounts and the discovery meeting. How to ensure retrofits continue to drive savings. Monitoring and verification. Selling an energy audit, closing retrofits using the audit report and partnering with your local utility.

If you’re considering adding energy management to your company’s service offerings or are looking to improve an existing energy service offering, start with this educational series on starting an energy management conversation and building valuable client relationships through a focus on energy cost savings. Register for free here.

How has BuildingAdvice helped other contractors? Read MacDonald-Miller Finds BuildingAdvice Perfect Fit for Energy Efficiency in Small to Midsize Buildings.

Image by Whitney for Congress.

So, you want to increase your commercial building’s energy efficiency. You’re finally convinced that efficiency is the first fuel, that 40% is too much for commercial buildings to suck out of the US’ total energy production, and that the benefits of increasing efficiency reach not only the environment but to your business’ bottom line.

Maybe you’re not quite ready to ask your building’s mechanical, HVAC, or energy engineer about BuildingAdvice’s Energy Benchmarking, Assessment, or Audit Reports, but you want to know what a few things you can do right now are. Does The Building Advisor have a Top Five list for you!

Top Five Ways to Increase Energy Efficiency in Commercial Buildings

1. Curtail overventilation – The number one culprit in the fight against energy waste. Lucas Klesh wrote a comprehensive post on overventilation here, soon to be accessible on Sustainable Facility. He goes into detail on the value of a property functioning economizer and damper system.
2. Adjust lighting schedule – Does your lighting schedule match your tenant schedule? Matching the two more closely allows you to get the most out of the energy usage when you need it.
3. Eliminate competing HVAC systems – As crazy as it sounds, many buildings run heating and cooling systems simultaneously. What’s even richer is that mechanical service providers often aren’t aware that this is happening. Stop your building from fighting with itself and reap the benefits in your utility bills.
4. Re-evaluate HVAC when space configuration changes – Have you downsized your staff? Put up a wall or other internal partition in a large office area? If there are  unoccupied areas of your property or changes in your space configurations, most likely your HVAC systems aren’t up to par for the changes made. Re-assess the space’s needs by evaluating control points and air distribution locations.
5. Take weekends off – Unless your office or commercial building is in full swing seven days a week, make sure you’re not running air conditioning when there’s no one there to benefit from it.

Go a favorite energy efficiency tip for commercial buildings? Share it here!

Images courtesy anton khoff and Grant MacDonald.

CBRE continues to show leadership in the commercial real estate market in sustainability efforts .  WIth 50 projects in its U.S. management portfolio having obtained the LEED for Existing Buildings (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification through the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), CBRE is the largest third-party manager in the USGBC’s LEED program.  In addition, CBRE currently has engaged an additional 59 projects, representing 100 buildings and 40 million sq. ft., in the certification process, which are expected to be completed by the end of 2010.

LEED certification is just one of the ways that CBRE is helping clients to manage their commercial assets to reduce costs and improve asset performance.  Energy efficiency, in particular, is a large part of the effort.

Through a repeatable process of energy benchmarking, assessment, and improvement, commercial building owners can be assured that the performance of their buildings is being constantly improved and the operating costs lowered.  LEED may or may not be part of the overall effort.  If it is, even better.  But, any and every building should at the very least have its energy consumption measured and evaluated.

Here’s an example of yet another type of organization that is working to improve the energy efficiency of an existing building stock.  The Downtown Development Authority of Ann Arbor, MI, is in the 2nd year of its Downtown Energy Saving Grant Program. In this program, participating companies receive a free energy audit from a city-approved contractor, worth anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.  The auditor will identify list of improvements that would boost energy efficiency, and after consultation with the DDA, landlords then pick which energy efficiency improvements to make.  After the improvements are made, the DDA rebates half of the landlord’s cost, up to $20,000.

Do you know about other programs like this?  We’d like to hear about them.  And whoever you are in the food chain, whether a contractor who does energy audits or a building owner or manager, you can push for programs like this in your area.

The July 14 Flex Your Power newsletter reveals the results of a study on energy efficiency messaging by Professor Wesely Schultz of California State University San Marcos.  According to Schultz, “individuals tend to base their environmental decisions more on what they think is normal, than on what they think is simply ‘the right thing to do.’”  In his study, doorhangers were distributed to 1,200 homes, each containing one of five messages.  Four of the messages were “traditional ideas such as saving energy saves money, is socially or environmentally responsible, or is easy to do.”

However, the fifth message was quite different.  Instead, “the fifth message compared the household’s energy use to average use in the neighborhood.”  After several weeks of monitoring electricity use, “researchers found that homes that received the fifth message achieved the greatest reductions in energy use, with high consumers using significantly less electricity after the campaign.”

The lesson is that consumers are highly motivated by their sense of being normal–how they stack up to others.  Alone, energy efficiency messaging is not enough…a means to measure and compare is also needed for maximum results.  GreenQuest provides both a platform for messaging and comparisons of actual energy use.

How do we get there?

MARKET TRANSFORMATION!

How do we do that?

1. Strengthen building codes and energy labeling for increased transparency.
2. Use subsidies and price signals to incentivize energy-efficient investments.
3. Encourage integrated design approaches and innovations.
4. Develop and use advanced technology to enable energy-saving behavior.
5. Develop workforce capacity for energy saving.
6. Mobilize for an energy-aware culture.

Why?

Worldwide buildings are the single greatest consumer of energy at 38% compared to Industry (33%) and Transportation (26%).  We cannot affect climate change until a coordinated worldwide effort to institute these six principles occurs.

What is your role?

Transforming the Market: Energy Efficiency in Buildings,” released April 27 by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)

Sitting on the panel of BOMA’s “Best Practices in Energy Efficiency of Existing Buildings” it is quite clear the opportunities for improvement are vast.  The four common problems this panel of venerable experts tackled were:

1. Outside Air Usage
2. Scheduling
3. Simultaneous Heating & Cooling
4. Sensor Calibration

The framework of the discussion was centered around building operations, training, and practical experience in how to diagnosis, fix, and maintain the efficiency in the face of the 4 common issues.  Operating an efficient building is about knowing the design constraints of the buildings equipment, having highly trained staff who understand how the energy-using components and daily decisions play into the consumption and cost of operating the building, and visibility up and down the operation’s chain that tracks the four key metrics of a building (EUI, EnergyStar score, $/sqft & lbsCO2/sqft).

The operation and energy efficiency of existing buildings is like a 2-year-old childd – every thing is going well until you take your eye off them and then when you look back its a mess, stuff is broken and you are going to be spending way to much money to fix it!

I just read an interesting article in this morning’s New York Times. A business writer was interviewing Microsoft President Steve Balmer.  When asked to fill in the blank to the question, “You want the culture of your company to be more____________”, Balmer responded, “efficient.”

Like executives around the world, we are faced with doing more with less.  Balmer goes on to explain that it is particularly challenging for a company that has grown each year for the past 30 years – operating in a constrained environment is new to most employees.

Working with commercial real estate owners, operators and their service providers, it is apparent that efficiency is on the minds of the entire value chain.  Commercial real estate owners and their employees are under extreme pressure to reduce their operating costs to offset increasing vacancy rates and decreasing rental rates.  Increasing energy efficiency to reduce operating costs has become a core strategy for building owners.  BOMA’s BEEP strategy is a great example of the industry’s acknowledgment of the critical role of energy efficiency.

The sheer number of existing buildings that could benefit from energy efficiency, in turn, drives the need for efficiency in delivering energy efficiency services.  At a time when demand for these services is growing, the industry does not have the manpower with the right expertise available to meet the demand, nor will it be able to train engineers quickly enough to meet that demand.

Automation is the key to efficiency in delivering energy services.  By automating many of the time consuming, repetitive processes, we can leverage the limited amount of energy expertise available.  We need to increase the number of buildings an energy engineer can support each year.  Automation of data capture, data crunching, analysis and reporting will be the key.  Not only will this help to increase the number of buildings analyzed, but it is likely to increase the percentage of owners that actually take action to improve their buildings’ performance.

Breakthroughs in wireless sensor technology, cellular communications, modeling software and report generation should significantly reduce the engineering time required to deliver an energy audit freeing up scarce engineers to focus on real value, analysis and recommendations.

Efficiency enables companies like Microsoft to do more with less in a challenging economic environment where demand for their products is problematic.  Energy efficiency is a potential source of operating cost reduction for building owners.  Delivering the services that drive energy efficiency must be delivered more efficiently in an environment of increasing demand.  Business as usual and doing things the same way will never get us there.

In 2007, we conducted a study of over 300 buildings to determine the frequency and nature of energy and comfort problems in commercial buildings in the U.S.  What we found was that over 90% of the buildings had at least one significant issue, but most had many more.  Read about the problems (i.e. opportunities):

State of Building Performance Report