a few thousand dollars a month for larger projects.
Participants are anticipating 10 to 25 percent energy savings, and a return on investment in under two years, says Surratt, in the economic development office. He adds that the city intends to publicize the results of the project, good or bad.
“We’re hoping that other property owners see that there’s tremendous value in adopting some of these technologies” even without incentives, Surratt says, adding that IT-based approaches to energy efficiency compare favorably to capital-intensive physical retrofits.
A month ago, the city unveiled another pilot project designed to reinvent the business model for financing major energy efficiency upgrades, which often take longer to deliver an investment return than building owners are willing to accept.
Surratt also wants to find ways to assist the startup companies in the Seattle area at work on other aspects of IT-enabled energy efficiency. These include Verdiem, which makes software to manage IT equipment within businesses; Optimum Energy, maker of software for optimizing large-building HVAC equipment; and Powerit Solutions, which focuses on energy demand response for industrial facilities.
The barriers the city is trying to remove with this project “are very real,” Geller says, “because building owners are inherently conservative.”
They are hesitant to deploy new technology without seeing examples from local buildings similar to their own, he adds.
“Most building owners would love to be the second person to try something. Not that many of them really want to be the first,” he says.
While the Azure platform is certainly proven, Mitchel calls this pilot the first project of its kind to deploy the data analysis and fault detection technology in large commercial buildings beyond the Microsoft campus. Microsoft, through its CityNext initiative, is trying to win more business from municipal governments by providing a cloud platform to host similar data-driven approaches to health and social services, transportation, tourism, public safety, and education, Mitchel says.
As this sort of data gathering and analysis is deployed across more buildings, it could open other possibilities for utilities to better forecast and manage energy demand.
