The Big Picture
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ government is the largest energy user in the state, spending over $250 million and consuming more than 1 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year. Prior to the deployment of a software-based enterprise solution, its energy management team relied exclusively on 30-day-old utility bill data. In many cases, these bills were at an aggregated campus level (versus individual building level), which created further road blocks for strategic energy management. With aggressive energy reduction targets in place, in 2010, the Massachusetts Departmentof Energy Resources (DOER) kicked off a program to deploy a first-in-the-nation Enterprise Energy Management System (EEMS) to monitor real-time energy consumption across more than 25 million square feet of property at buildings as diverse as courthouses, college campuses, prisons and hospitals, some of which are brand new construction while others are 100+ year old facilities. In 2010, DOER selected Enel X’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based energy intelligence software platform as the foundation of its EEMS project. Today, Enel X collects and analyzes real-time data from more than 1,300 meters at 460 state buildings, providing visibility into energy consumption across multiple commodities, including electricity, natural gas, oil, propane, steam, condensate, and chilled and hot water. Enel X monitors more than $60 million of energy spend and has helped state agencies identify $2.6 million in low and no cost operational savings. Enel X has also provided the visibility required to prioritize capital projects and staff time against the biggest problem areas.
Delivering Value through Better Visibility
Enel X’s energy intelligence software gives state facility, project management, and finance personnel the software tools and analytics needed to identify cost-effective opportunities to make both short and long-term energy improvements. To date, the company has delivered value by focusing on five key areas:
1. Project planning
Effective energy management starts with visibility. Without it, it’s difficult to determine where that next dollar of investment will have the greatest impact. By collecting data across entire groups of buildings, like a college campus, users can compare like-facilities to identify which ones are using energy most or least efficiently. For example, by monitoring more than two dozen buildings at Fitchburg State College, facility personnel soon realized that the Mazzaferro Center, which primarily houses different campus offices, was using significantly more energy per square foot than other buildings with similar operating hours and uses. Upon further investigation, facility staff was able to pinpoint a conflict between the building’s HVAC system and building controls system. As a result, the Capital Planning and Maintenance Office incorporated funds into the budget to upgrade the building HVAC to the campus-widecontrols system. “The technology Enel X provides, I use personally on a dayto-day basis,” says Joseph LoBuono, Director of Operationsand Maintenance, Fitchburg State University. “It allows us to proactively see where our problems are, as well as where we can improve. That’s the first step in producing an energy efficient campus.”