Plugging the Energy Sink

Commercial properties account for the largest proportion of energy consumption, but making buildings more efficient requires a significant investment.

By Dennis Law | May 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Illustration by Ken Orvidas

Hot Buildings Commercial office building owners and managers in the Puget Sound
region face a conundrum: Although everyone agrees that retrofitting a building
to reduce energy consumption substantially reduces operating costs while also
boosting green credentials, few owners have the money or the credit to make the
necessary investments.

Retrofitting a building, which typically involves upgrading
the heating/ventilation/air conditioning (HVAC) systems, can cost up to $1.5
million. The eventual savings can be substantial, but it’s not easy to justify
the spending required to get there during times of significant vacancy rates.

Nobody questions the importance of making the investment.
Commercial buildings account for about 40 percent of the nation’s energy
consumption and roughly a third of its greenhouse gas emissions, according to
MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions Inc., a Seattle-based mechanical
engineering firm that works with building owners and managers to improve energy
efficiency. The company says that some 96 percent of buildings have one or more
performance issues, with the largest being too much ventilation, which causes
the loss of heat. Another common difficulty is excessive temperature
fluctuation, which makes people in the offices uncomfortable.

Those problems represent an important market opportunity.
That’s because many building owners recognize that by boosting energy
efficiency and perhaps getting LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental
Design) certification, they can both raise the value of the building and give
the owner important green credentials.

Besides MacDonald-Miller, several other Seattle firms are
working in the retrofit market, including McKinstry, a national leader in the
sector, and Optimum Energy LLC, a relatively new player. Started in 2005 by
co-founders Nathan Rothman and Jim Hanna, Optimum Energy offers software that
helps make buildings more efficient. They market it to a variety of clients
including airports, casinos, office towers, medical labs, universities,
government buildings, corporate headquarters and data centers.

Gary Gigot, chief marketing officer for Optimum, says the
company’s software is targeted at commercial and public sector facilities
equipped with centrifugal chiller plants or variable-air-volume handling
systems. Chiller plants sometimes need to have variable frequency drives (VFDs)
installed on some or all of the motors within the HVAC system (chillers, pumps
and tower fans). Optimum works with building owners and contractors, such as
Johnson Controls, to install VFDs throughout the plant. The price, Gigot says,
ranges from $500,000 to $1.5 million, and includes any equipment that needs to
be installed in the plant (mostly VFDs), the license fee for OptimumHVAC and
all the contractor costs for installation. Customers buy the OptimumHVAC
software license and pay an annual fee for a web-based monitoring/measurement
and verification service.

But Gigot notes OptimumHVAC can help