Energy efficiency is still one of the cleanest and cheapest forms of saving power, especially for commercial buildings. Finance & Commerce recently highlighted the advice of several Twin Cities business owners and building professionals on how to leverage data and technology to improve energy efficiency. EnergyPrint CEO Priscilla Koeckeritz was quoted in the article, offering insight on why utility bill analysis is key to helping building owners better manage their operating expenses.
The article also featured Wellington Management, one of the top commercial real estate firms in the Twin Cities. Wellington’s Chief Operating Officer David Bergstrom shared his company’s strategy for managing energy, and how he uses benchmarking data to detect high use properties and make changes to dramatically reduce costs. Here’s an excerpt with Wellington’s story.
The excerpt below was originally published in Finance & Commerce. Read the full article here.
One of EnergyPrint’s clients is St. Paul-based Wellington Management, which uses its services on 18 office buildings, according to David Bergstrom, Wellington’s chief operating officer. The cost is shared among tenants, who pay their own energy bills but benefit from improvements made by Wellington, he said.
EnergyPrint “weather-normalizes” data to account for unusually extreme temperatures in winter or summer, Bergstrom said, and presents information using charts and graphics that allow for greater understanding of where problems might exist. In the past two years Wellington detected high energy use at three properties and made changes to reduce costs dramatically.
One of those is the Court West Building at 2610 University Ave. in St. Paul. The 55,000-square-foot building was costing $2.29 per square foot for electricity, a sum greater than average for Wellington and other similar properties. Heating and cooling systems, including a boiler, were not operating correctly or efficiently, he said.
Just operating the building more efficiently dropped the [electricity] cost to $1.65 a square foot. “That’s a fair amount of money we saved,” Bergstrom said. “It’s a general rule of thumb that if you can really crack down on your buildings and try to make them as efficient as possible, you’re probably going to save 10 to 20 percent.”
Frank Jossi | Sustainable: Data, technology curb offices’ energy costs
EnergyPrint is a national utility data management and measurement services provider, based in St. Paul, Minn. Want to learn more about EnergyPrint’s clients and who we serve? Check out our Markets page.