Plugging the Energy Sink

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

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