All the hard work that energy services firms and facilities managers put into an audit or retro-commissioning projects would pay off even more handsomely if someone would pony up the dough for the more capital-intensive measures.    The problems right now:

• The people with the money don’t understand the data.
• The people with the money don’t trust the data.
• The people with the money can’t compare the results of the data to other investments.

Our CEO, Colin Davis, is helping to fix all of this.    Earlier this week,  he participated as a member of the working group  for the Investor Confidence Project being conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).  The goal of the Group is to set guidelines for standardizing the data and processes employed to quantify the energy efficiency gains associated with large building retrofit projects.  The Group is comprised of the Department of Energy,  EDF personnel, a number of large banks and insurance companies, and a handful of technology companies.   See the following paper for more information on this topic:  http://tinyurl.com/7erh44y.

As a former energy auditor,  Colin is uniquely qualified to bring to this discussion the real-world perspective of those field professionals on the front lines who mine the “energy efficiency gold”.  Our hope is that the picks and shovels they use in the future aren’t the clipboards, cameras, and tape recorders from the past, but mobile technology with software that prompts the building professional to collect the data in a consistent, accurate manner.    If the data is high quality and standardized at the source,  building owners are more likely to see the financial rewards of major building system upgrade projects– and financial institutions will have the confidence to open their pocketbooks to fund them.