The Building Advisor

Final reminder that our next free webinar series, “Energize Your Service and Retrofit Sales,” starts tomorrow. This three-part series offers HVAC contractors concise sales strategy on using BuildingAdvice to build business. You can register in under 1 minute here.  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.

“We’ve been around for 90 years,” says Dave Stroh, co-owner of Wolin Mechanical Electrical in West Des Moines, Ia. “We know what affects operations.”

Dave’s a straight shooter. And what he’s talking about is the difference between a free energy assessment from a utility company, which might measure power usage and draw, versus BuildingAdvice’s ability to reduce energy costs in the commercial buildings he services by making specific recommendations for adjustments and improvements.

Dave, who added electrical services to Wolin Mechanical after purchasing the business in 1996, acquired the BuildingAdvice program seven months ago. By April, his BuildingAdvice sensors were booked out three months in advance. He told The Building Advisor, “Frankly, I’m having a hard time keeping up with customer demand for energy services as a result of running BuildingAdvice’s Energy Assessment Reports. It just sets the table for everything.”

As Dave says, the Energy Savings Assessment report says to his customers, “here’s how we can help you.” How does he know it’s working? “They can see it in energy bills. I see it in smiles, in dollars, and in repeat business.”

Preventive Maintenance services aren’t like a yard, Dave explains. You can’t see that it’s mowed when you’re done. “But, with BuildingAdvice, I’m able to quantify and show how beneficial these services are,” he explains. “It’s the ability to put a tangible into an intangible market.”

“None of my peers offer anything like this,” he adds. “Our building managers have been thrilled with the results.”

Another thing Dave’s happy about is the customer service he gets through the BuildingAdvice support team. Dave reports to always being able to reach a customer service representative on the phone, and most often gets the answer he needs while he has that person on the phone – not 24 hours or more later. “From the top down, the AirAdvice culture is really customer service oriented,” says Dave. “I’m really impressed with where the rubber meets the road.”

Dave Stroh is co-owner of Wolin Mechanical Electrical in West Des Moines, IA. Image courtesy Wolin Mechanical Electrical.

AirAdvice has recently released an update to its BuildingAdvice technology for providing energy services in commercial buildings.  On the surface, it may not sound like a major update – it is a new report, called an Energy Savings Assessment, that can be run using the system.  What makes this a giant step forward is how the new report now enables a cost-cutting, highly valuable service to be provided as part of a service agreement or service relationship.

In the tumultuous economic environment of the commercial real estate industry, cost savings are king.  Rent cannot be raised.  Occupancy cannot be increased.  And credit, which is so crucial to the industry, is extremely tight.  Cash must be conserved.  And one of the largest cash outflows month-to-month is the utility bill.  Mechanical service contractors can lower this cash outflow by making changes that result in lower energy consumption.   And this can be done as part of ongoing, regular maintenance agreements.

But don’t call them regular maintenance agreements.  These are Energy Service Agreements.  And the whole point is to go beyond what’s normally provided in a maintenance agreement and focus on ways to reduce the amount of wasted energy in the building.  This is the basis for the program that AirAdvice released recently and why the new Energy Savings Assessment report was created.  It fits into a process for providing energy services to buildings, including benchmarking and energy assessments.

Read the press release about the new product and program.

According to the 2009 PC Energy Report being published today by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy, US companies waste 2.8 Billion dollars and emit 20 Million Tons of Carbon Dioxide per year by not turing off their PCs and other electronic devices at night.  This is the equivelent of 4 Million cars on the road and reflects a significant conservation opportunitity.

On top of that, saving this money would drop to the bottom line of a companies operating costs and in these tough economic times this is where the focus should be.  The idea of energy reduction as an operational focus for an organization is the triple win win win.  You save money, you help the environment and everyone involved feels good about it!

Why doesn’t it happen more?  The report states the obvious that most of the energy field already knows,  that employee’s do not feel any pain or awareness of the cost of the energy bill.  There is very little ownership and responsibility to use the resource wisely.  Showing employee’s how much energy their work habits are consuming and costing the company is a first place to start.  Effective management starts with knowing where you are at, and ends with actions to reduce usage to needed levels.

Lawrence Berkeley National Labs threw out a statistic that stated data center energy costs can be 100 times higher than those of typical buildings.  Another statistic thrown around by EPA is that data centers accounted for 1.5% of overall US electrical spend in 2006 and it is expected to increase by 1% or more by 2011.  Poor energy efficiency can obviously have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, reduce the competitiveness of the data center and may even reduce up time which is so crucial to the data world.

Typically data centers have been reluctant to participate in Benchmarking of energy performance through EnergyStar because they do not want to document how costly poor data center management and design is, and they fear the looming carbon tax through cap and trade.  It is understandable that the industry is concerned about being an open book for criticism given some of the real constraints on server rooms in terms of temperature control, power reliability and particulate reduction.  Being from an industry that needs data and servers to work flawlessly every minute of every day, we understand this, but every one already knows you are typically a high energy user.

The good news is that starting at Benchmarking and allocation of energy end uses within a building with data centers, we can understand how energy is used and begin to clean up the inefficiencies. Benchmarking is a tool for understanding across an organization and can serve these important purposes:

1. to establish a baseline of typical energy use
2. to provide comparison to similar facilities
3. to highlight improvement opportunities
4. to highlight maintenance and operating issues
5. to highlight best practices for future improvements

In this day and age it should be universally understand that awareness, i.e. know where you are at, always leads to a better place.  Energy cost reduction drops to the bottom line and in the case of data centers can reduce inefficient operation, provide more uptime and customer satisfaction, and positions you for the future where that energy savings translates to less carbon use and cash through trading on an open market.  Its almost like double-dipping on the profits from energy reduction.  How can that be bad?

Following up on the recent EnergyStar update last week, a couple of known changes are coming this summer that are very good news.  The EPA will be updating the EnergyStar service to include a rating for Worship Service halls, also known as churchs.  They will also be continuing the updates to the new 2003 Building Energy data known as CBECs, specifically for the building type Warehouse.

The Climate Change Congress 2009 in Coopenhagen Denmark came to an end on March 12th with some stinging messages for political leaders across the world in advance of their meeting in December in Coopenhagen to deal with the Kyoto Protocol expiration in 2012.

The group of almost 2000 scientists of world reknown are calling upon policy-makers to use all tools available to reduce dangerous emissions of greenhouse gases since these scientists have begun to observe their predictions of two years ago are coming true.

Temperatures, sea levels, acid levels in oceans and ice sheets were already moving “beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report released Thursday.

This is good news since we have an administration in place now that is dedicated to reducing green house gases while creating new “green” energy jobs in the process.  Hopefully Congress will get moving on the Carbon Dioxide Cap and Trade program so further incentives can be placed around reducing energy use in buildings.

On March 3rd, the EPA unveiled the top 25 cities in America that have the most EnergyStar Rated buildings. The list is headed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Washington, D.C., Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis-St Paul, Atlanta and Seattle.

“Energy Star buildings typically use 35 percent less energy and emit 35 percent less greenhouse gases than average buildings,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “EPA commends all of these cities and all of the others, as well as countless individuals, who are now using more energy efficient appliances and dwellings. They are saving energy, saving money and protecting our environment.”

To see the full list click here:  http://energystar.gov/buildinglist

In other EnergyStar news, they have made some changes to the choice of buildings that can have a rating by condensing the very confusing list of of hotels into one category and also sneaking in multi-family housing.  Once they update their documentation of default parameters and issue guidelines on these changes, we will let you know.

“Leaders among mechanical contractors can help their clients by becoming leaders in energy management, green building, and sustainable practices.”  That is the message from a recent article in ACHR News.

Contractors who are making the connection for their clients between their maintenance service and cost savings are going to be viewed as value-added partners.  Some call it their Green Program, others their Energy Saving Maintenance Plan.  The general idea is the same – “Since mechanical systems account for most of a building’s energy consumption, it’s not uncommon to find that the energy savings alone will sometimes pay for most, or even all, of the cost difference between a basic maintenance program and a green maintenance investment, says Ed Sokol of Grodsky Service (Massachusets, Connecticut.) That’s step 1 – adopting the proper mindset, a marketing mindset which speaks to the core benefits of services.

Step 2 is identifying and getting in front of the building’s decision makers, and learning the financial language they use when considering proposals for service or projects.  This is more important than ever.  Typically the right person is the owner, CFO or VP of finance, purchasing manager, or facility manager.

And step 3 is to make energy assessments, energy analysis, or building performance assessments part of every day business.  Building owners or managers need to have their contractor understand how their building uses energy and how it could use less of it through adjustments in operations and maintenance, as well as equipment upgrades and other measures.  Without a tool to guide this effort, you’re shooting in the dark.

Put these 3 together and you have a mechanical service department that is truly serving the needs of your clients.

A recent study conducted by The Economic Intelligence Unit found that out of the 538 corporate executives surveyed, 73% will make energy efficiency a high or moderate focus over the next 2 years.  They are doing this to reduce their cost base as they weather the economic crisis.  Interestingly enough, almost two thirds have already undertaken some amount of energy efficiency measures in the previous two years.

This is good news for energy service providers, because you can positively impact the bottom line for every building you assess.  How, you ask?  Well there are a great many low and no cost energy savings measures that can be found in nearly all buildings.

Here are the three best low/no cost energy savings opportunities that on average yield 5-20% savings depending on the building:

1. Verify set points meet ASHRAE’s Comfort Criteria, and set them to the edge of the ranges for heating and cooling.
2. Verify the building schedules are being met and look for opportunities to shave off time through optimal start/stop and getting the cleaning crew to shut the lights off when they are done.
3. Reduce the outside air ventilation rate to match the occupancy of the building. There is no good reason to have to condition the outside air if it is not needed.

The stimulus package making its way to the President’s desk in the next few days has some very good strategies to help kick start the economy and help energy services grow.  In a recent press briefing, President Obama had these words to pass along to those detractors of energy efficiency.

“When people suggest that, “What a waste of money to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.” Why would that be a waste of money?

We’re creating jobs immediately by retrofitting these buildings or weatherizing 2 million Americans’ homes, as was called for in the package, so that right there creates economic stimulus.

And we are saving taxpayers when it comes to federal buildings potentially $2 billion. In the case of homeowners, they will see more money in their pockets. And we’re reducing our dependence on foreign oil in the Middle East. Why wouldn’t we want to make that kind of investment?”

Exactly!  Anything we do to reduce energy consumption has a corresponding reduction in monthly costs and greenhouse gas emissions.  Why wouldn’t we do it?!