How class A office building saved $132,000 in HVAC and chiller energy costs

Executive Summary

• $132,000 in savings (30 cents / sq ft),
• Savings translate to $2.34M in added asset value
• 471% return on investment in Enertiv

Challenge

In March of 2020, ownership purchased an Amazon-leased Class A office in Bellevue, Washington that already had Enertiv installed.

Unfortunately, this coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial spread across the United States.

Enertiv onboarded the executive team and third party property management team in early April and helped navigate the operational challenges of a de-occupied building.

Operations were running smoothly until late 2020, when the utility bill for the building doubled in one month. The Enertiv team was tasked with finding out the root cause of this unexpected and costly development.

Asset Details

• 20 floors
• 435,000 square foot office
• Class A
• Built in 2008
• Modern Siemens BMS

Solution

Ownership inherited an equipment monitoring deployment that was more granular than usual. The previous owner had required that monitoring fulfill the requirements of the IECC 2015 Energy Conservation Code (Section C409: Energy Metering and Energy Consumption Management).

In addition, the on-site operators were onboarded onto the Enertiv App to digitize daily technical rounds and readings.

When the higher-than-expected utility bill came in, Enertiv was asked to diagnose the issue, something that could not be identified through the building management system.

Critical Equipment

• 2 Water Cooled Chillers
• 4 Condenser Water Pumps
• Cooling tower on roof
• 8 elevators
• Domestic Cooled Water Booster Pump

Results

Enertiv was able to diagnose the root cause of the problem in less than an hour. It turned out that there were issues with BMS programming as systems were transitioned into winter mode.

This is common with building management systems. Even expensive and modern systems are built primarily for equipment controls and automation. There is generally no analytics to determine if those instructions are optimal.

None of these issues fired alerts:

• Chiller system was shifted from scheduled to 24/7 operations
• HVAC equipment groups went from alternating runtimes to all operating simultaneously
• Chiller set point was changed and the system started cooling in cold weather

Combined, these issues would’ve wasted $132,000 over the course of the winter.

Not only was Enertiv able to diagnose the reasons for the high utility bill immediately, the client success team has implemented alerts to flag incorrect sequences of operation in the future.

Going forward, Enertiv can expand to both digitize more paper-based workflows as well as integrate with the BMS to expand analytical capabilities and identify deeper savings.