Imagine having the energy efficiency of your building assessed without an auditor ever setting foot in the place and getting the results -- along with customized recommendations on how your company can cut waste -- in a fraction of the standard turnaround time.
That vision of a "zero-touch" audit is what FirstFuel Software CEO Swapnil Shah and his colleagues are trying to deliver to the market with their Rapid Building Assessment Platform.
They announced Thursday that their startup landed $2.4 million in an initial round of financing led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power, which were joined by individual investors.
The money will be used to scale up the business and move it from pilots to broader distribution. The Massachusetts-based company has been conducting pilots with two of the largest utilities in the U.S. as well as government agencies and is looking to add a third utility to its list of pilot partners, said Shah.
The power of the system lies in its "ability to analyze the consumption patterns of a building remotely," said Shah, who gave me a rundown on how the platform works. Essentially, he said, it needs only two things from the customer -- the address of the building to be assessed and a year's worth of hourly electricity consumption data from the utility that serves the property.
The platform takes that information and applies hourly local weather data for the same year-long period and uses GIS mapping to capture building data about the structure. Then the platform's analytics take over to produce, in effect, a "CAT scan" of the building's energy performance, detecting pattern and anomalies. While that's happening, consumption areas -- such as heating, cooling, lighting, lighting, gas, ventilation, plugload and pumps -- are analyzed and compared to benchmarks that FirstFuel has developed for comparable buildings.
The result is a report that provides building owners with the big picture on their property's energy consumption and drill-down information on consumption in specific areas. Most important are the operational and retrofit recommendations that can increase efficiency and reduce costs.
That all sounds great, I told Shah, but it also seems a bit too good be true. I asked whether the platform works in real-world applications.
"We can prove it and have independent studies that show it works," he said.
Next page: The first real-world returns
I agree with the 3 previously
I agree with the 3 previously posted comments. Less than 6% improvement is not much. It would have to be very cheap to buy the service, and I see it only as a temporary measure, perhaps to satisfy for the moment a new code requirement that has crept up on a facility owner. To bill it as a real energy audit is far from truthful.
While 6% of a large building
While 6% of a large building or complex can add up, grabbing the low hanging fruit only makes any future efforts less productive. Believing 6% reductions will make long term impact is nonsense. I agree that submetering is required to make any significant impact beyond boiler plate rules of thumb. I would be very curious to see any FirstFuel's results from attempts to make a second pass at a building or complex.
I concure with Anonymous.
I concure with Anonymous. Without sending someone in to inspect exactly where and what is needed to be done how will they know what to fix?
Interesting but it sounds
Interesting but it sounds like nothing but utility bill analysis. Unless a facility has a decent level of sub metering, the analysis could pinpoint energy usage to specific activities. Furthermore, ignoring the humans in the building will limit the saving opportunities. Human factors impact well over 80% of all Energy Conservation Measures, whether they be O&M or Occupant related.