Our Approach
We act as a bridge that connects developers of energy efficiency improvement projects with sources of financing for these projects, including energy system regulators and/or organizations with a mandate to finance energy efficiency that want to steer energy efficiency interventions towards measures that are beneficial for both the building owners and the overall energy system.
Our main proposition is that the adoption of the right tools and the right transaction model can deliver counterparty diversity and can reduce the uncertainty about the magnitude and persistence of the achieved energy savings. This can make energy efficiency more attractive to investors, something that is highly important if we consider that energy efficiency improvement is a financing challenge rather than a technical challenge.
The right tools and the right transaction model can also help energy efficiency to be regarded as an exploitable resource for the energy system. While the most often discussed option for demand-side energy management is demand response – the adaptation of consumption to the variable generation, energy efficiency can play a significant role too, as long as the energy savings are reliable, verifiable, and the transaction costs for acquiring and monitoring them as a system resource are comparable to the alternatives. Our belief is that a grid management strategy that relies only on responsive demand misses a large potential for steering energy efficiency investments into technologies and measures that provide real, long term value to both energy consumers and the grid.
Our Technology
The core of our activities is aggregating energy efficiency projects even when not all of the projects in the resulting portfolio are designed and implemented by the same ESCO and through the same energy performance contact. For this, we rely on building screening infrastructure that:
Enables buildings to share data about their energy consumption, energy bills, envelope structure and installed systems;
Verifies baselines according to the whole facility approach of the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP);
Evaluates the uncertainty in the baseline estimation and identifies if there is a need for an onsite audit or sub-metering data;
Evaluates existing measure plans or proposes suitable measures for matching the expected savings profile with existing compensation opportunities.
Intelligent Control as a Service
We provide building owners, building operators and tenants with tools to control the operation of their in-building systems so that to optimize the value of their agreements for energy efficiency compensation. Our central concept is that the requirements of the agreements should be reflected both in the transaction model’s contracts and in the in-building system control strategies. For this, we have been developing tools that either act as a playground for developing tailor-made, highly efficient control strategies or are able to continuously generate bespoke controllers. These tools act as an extension to existing Building Management Systems (BMS): a BMS is responsible for communicating with the individual building systems – something that BMS is already optimized to do – and our tools communicate with the BMS through its API.
Our main premise is that technology integration requires more than the ability to share different data encodings between different systems. It requires primarily the ability to functionally compose different device or subsystem interfaces into an integrated model that can be monitored, continuously updated and controlled. Having such an integrated model in place, we can develop control policies that match co-optimize the value of the P4P agreements and the energy management goals of the involved buildings.