Boston – Advanced Energy Intelligence LLC (AEI) of Carlisle, has delivered an energy map explorer that shows energy and water usage in the city of Boston for over 450 buildings and 15 million sf in the Boston public schools, fire department, police department, public library, and public works. The explorer is available online at www.aeintelligence.com/
AEI developed this visualization as a demonstration of how it will deliver similar results for other cities, towns, and property portfolios so that administrators and facility managers can comprehensively explore their energy usage.
Working with its partner, Guardian Energy Management Solutions, AEI is developing this model for the specific towns covered by recently awarded Green Communities funding. Compatibility with a wide range of data sources including Green Button, MEI, and EPO, and building automation system data from Siemens, Honeywell, JCI, SkySpark, and many others, makes it easy to deploy for other towns, campuses ,and large property portfolios.
The map provides a comprehensive energy exploration tool that is vital for understanding portfoliowide usage and costs that can drive discussions with utilities, aggregators, and facility managers. Owners and facility managers can learn how their buildings stack up against the DOE and Energy Star national averages, by commodity, season, and facility type.
Ranking facilities by EUI, per sf, and costs helps target resources to the energy-efficiency opportunities with the best ROI. The energy map is a consistent entry point into facility details such as billing records, building automation system (BAS) data and analytics, utility interval data, and peak demand analytics. With daily and weekly updates, it’s an O&M view at the facility level that can help facility managers react to weather, occupancy, and variables at the HVAC level.
Support for widget integration with town websites can help drive awareness and social behavior at a high level, with trouble-ticket support at the individual facility level.
Working with its partner Guardian Energy Management Solutions, AEI is Chip Goudreau, Ddrector at Guardian. He said, “Teaming up with AEI puts us in position to offer our Green Communities customers something they haven’t had — a comprehensive and interactive view of their energy and water usage. With AEI’s forward-thinking work, it will be easier for us to demonstrate the savings from our energy projects and help them quantify those savings back to DOER. In the 2016 grant application, DOER made a specific request for energy data analytics as a way to measure sustainability goals and achievements, and we believe the work of AEI will go well beyond delivering on that objective.”
Carl Popolo, founding partner of AEI, adds, “Our core work focuses on building energy-efficiency, but we also realized that property managers need a better way to decide which projects should come first. By bringing together a wide range of data sources and purpose-driven analytics, we think those managers are better served when there’s a more comprehensive and standard way to quantify the baselines and the opportunities. This is a logical entry point into the more detailed work that we do at individual buildings.”
In the city of Boston map, over 700,000 utility records and the 5-minute electric interval data for many of the facilities allows a wide range of constituencies — from facility managers to the general public — to quickly understand how individual buildings compare to each other in terms of energy use. The integration of 5-minute electric utility interval data also helps a facility understand how their utility demand charges are calculated and how they might defend their facilities against the impending ISO peak hour that will determine their capacity charge for next year.
Adam Jacobs, energy manager for the city of Boston, was instrumental in helping AEI qualify the city’s data sets. He said, “We think Boston is on the cutting edge in terms of delivering open data to the public, and those in a position to add insight to the raw numbers can provide real value back to the community. Work like this by AEI is what we have in mind when we deliver the city’s data to a public forum as part of its Boston’s Open Government program.”
