When Charles Rechtsteiner received an iPad from his company, Autodesk, in 2011 to control energy management systems throughout the firm's various buildings, he thought it was a joke. But he's not laughing these days.

"Now we're running systems in the building remotely on a routine basis," says Rechtsteiner, Autodesk's regional facilities manager. "At the end of this year, I'll be able to put my laptop away and use only my iPad to run performance analysis."

What Rechtsteiner describes is a far cry from days of yore. That was when, recalls Partner Energy president Tony Liou, energy management systems consisted of a thermostat and a mercury switch. If the mercury was pushed up, "you'd hear a clink, the boiler started going, and two hours later it would get warm," Liou says.

Today's EMS do more than turn boilers or chillers on and off. Such systems are computerized and in many cases, have become the brains of a building. Thanks to communications protocol such as BACnet and LonWorks, they automatically operate climate controls, lighting and security, in addition to collecting a ton of data that notifies humans if something is wrong. These protocols also permit electrical, lighting and other components to talk to one another in a building, sometimes even across a portfolio of buildings. In other words, thanks to advances in technology, these systems are doing the bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to controlling the built environment.

Or rather, they CAN do that heavy lifting. The fact is, even with these intelligent tools in place, many building owners and property managers still regard EMS as glorified time clocks: fancy on-and-off switches.

"More than half the buildings larger than 100,000 square feet in the United States have some kind of energy management system," explains Carlos Petty, vice president with Syska Energy Group. "Yet building owners and property managers may not be getting the best bang for their buck from these systems."

The definition of EMS today is pretty broad, ranging from that on-off mercury controlled thermostat all the way to an intelligent panel run by proprietary software that knows the correct time to start chillers on a hot July day to ensure the interior temperature will be 75 degrees by the time people arrive for work. Energy management systems are also known by other names, such as building automation systems.

Regardless of their name, these systems are intended to help owners and managers control buildings on a real-time basis, while providing data on how the building's systems are performing over time. Such systems have moved from pneumatic operations to software and computers.

"The energy management systems at our properties look at two major areas," explains J. Jeffery Johnson, vice president and national product manager, property management with Jones Lang LaSalle. "One is the comfort and control of the HVAC; the other is to provide a means to control the amount of energy being used in the building."

The goals within this dual framework are straightforward: First, saving money. Second, increasing building efficiencies. Third, reducing a building's carbon footprint, especially in this day of sustainability, not to mention satisfying tenant demands that their landlords embrace green practices.

Driving the cost point home, about three years ago, BOMA released a study noting that commercial real estate owners spend approximately $24 billion on energy costs alone. Furthermore, those buildings contribute approximately 18% of US carbon dioxide emissions. "Now you can see why we need these automation systems," Petty comments. "Energy represents the single largest controllable operating expense for buildings." Given that up to a third of variable expenses is dedicated to energy, an effective EMS can be a boon to a company's bottom line.

Systems that operate effectively can save an average of 10% of overall energy consumption. And that's only for the newer buildings specifically designed for these intelligent programs. "For older or poorly maintained buildings, the savings of installing a building automation system can be greater," Petty says. "They might also reduce the costs of building maintenance."

One such example of savings and efficiency is known as daylight harvesting. Through this method, an EMS takes advantage of natural daylight flowing through a building's windows and, through its sensors, dials down interior lights until the sun sets. "It works on the assumption that sunlight is free," explains Bob Freshman, marketing manager of Leviton's Lighting & Energy Systems business unit. "If your office is getting a certain amount of light, depending on the time of day, an installed photosensor can dim the office lights. As less light comes in, the indoor lights become brighter." The average savings of such systems comes in around 30% to 40%.

Freshman points out that the systems themselves are more intelligent than ever. In the lighting arena, it's possible to program the system--not to turn lights on or off at a certain time, but to direct it to, say, turn the lights on a half an hour before sunset. "If you tell the panel where you live, it knows when sunset is every day and makes the adjustments as necessary," Freshman says.

"You can use them to set trends," explains John Sutton, energy sustainability committee chair with BOMA Austin. "If, for example, the system knows you want to reach 72 degrees by opening time, it'll read the history of how it got to that temperature in the past, take into consideration the temperatures in the type and time of day, then examine how long it takes to get to that optimum level."

In short, "anything in a building that can be turned on and off can be implemented into a building's management system," Johnson points out.

But all of this is just scratching the surface. The real attraction of EMS is data, data that can do everything from provide historical usage information to determining when equipment might be ending its lifecycle. "To run a building more efficiently," explains Joseph Andronaco, senior vice president and regional engineering director with JLL, "we need to use this system partly as a diagnostic one: vibration diagnostics, to give you an idea if the equipment is straying from its parameters. If we can see that ahead of time, it's a way for us to get ahead before that pump or that fan or that piece of equipment fails, reducing maintenance and replacement costs."

One activity used to ensure that owners and managers stay ahead of potential equipment hiccups is commissioning. Commissioning is a fancy word for checking the performance of an EMS by running certain tests on it.

"When you commission a building and its system, you're getting a snapshot of how it will perform," says Autodesk's Rechtsteiner. "Many times, it'll be optimized in its design state. Then you start to add people to it, day-to-day operations, and the equipment that's new starts to come out of alignment and you get energy drift." The beauty of commissioning is that it will take a snapshot of that system each day and provide the information about what's out of alignment.

Petty is adamant that, for commissioning to work, it needs to be launched well before that system is designed and implemented, then it needs to move through installation, operation and maintenance. "If a system is designed through the commissioning process, it's verified throughout the process to ensure the performance is consistent," he says. Once the job is installed, re-commissioning should take place–in other words, the software and energy data need to be periodically verified to ensure that the EMS is, indeed, improving a building's operations. "This is something that should be done throughout the lifetime of the building," Petty added.

Commissioning also sounds the warning if something is wrong with the system. "Maybe you'll see that there is a stuck damper and it's costing you $17.70 per day," Rechtsteiner says. "Now you can take that information and integrate with the systems, and it can tell you what's coming out of alignment" as well as how to correct it.

"If a building maintenance system is supposed to maintain an interior temperature of 69 degrees, the software program should be running that," Petty adds. "If the program isn't doing that, it's time to correct whatever needs to be corrected."

Sutton provides an example of how EMS commissioning and data collection works. Structures like BOMA's Austin building have systems that pulse data in one-second intervals from about 400 different points through the property. This allows building managers to see where there might be an anomaly or a problem. "This is something we can address immediately," Sutton says, "rather than waiting until we get the electric bill and try to figure out who left the window open."

Even with such technical advances, the human element can complicate matters. Partner Energy's Liou shares a story concerning one of his company's clients and its ownership of four identical buildings, which were constructed at the same time, and maintained in the exact same way. Three of those buildings qualified for a high score under the Energy Star ratings system, while the remainder did not. "We were scratching our heads, wondering how this building that had the same engineers and materials, was so different," Liou says. After digging through data from the building's control system, the team found that, six months prior, someone had reset the EMS schedule to the manual setting to accommodate an event. This individual had then forgotten to restore the schedule's original settings.

Most EMS experts are adamant that training is essential to avoid scenarios similar to Liou's, and to ensure that the thousands of dollars invested such a program provides a good rate of return. "Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for energy systems in their buildings only so the system gets treated like a glorified time clock," Liou said. "Training is important, as is proper installation and commissioning."

In fact, it's essential to find vendors and consultants who understand that education is necessary and that EMS design, installation and maintenance is not treated as a do-it-yourself job. "You need to talk to professionals and engineers that specialize in building automation systems," says Petty.

But finding that right vendor or consultant might be difficult. Rechtsteiner points out that many vendors have great marketing packages and talk great games, but lack substance behind their claims.

"It's a confusing time right now, with so many different vendors chasing the same holy grail of optimizing existing buildings," Rechtsteiner says. "It's important that owners and managers research and take a look at who's doing what."

Furthermore, says JLL's Andronaco, don't be attracted to a consultant or vendor's promises. "It's important you hire the right consultant; one that has a feel not only for what the building needs, but also who is willing to listen to management and tenant needs," he says.

Liou adds that understanding what an owner wants from an energy management system is also critical to its efficiencies. "Certainly, increasing tenant comfort and reducing operating expenses are main goals," he adds. "But understand what equipment you currently have and the parameters for what more you want."

As such, building owners need to know that it may not be necessary to make wholesale changes to a current system. "It's a good idea to look at what your existing systems can tell you before moving ahead," Rechtsteiner notes.

But remember, in this day of software advances, "It's not just conversations between the engineering and property management teams," says Johnson. "Now there's the whole other layer of IT that is getting a large seat at the table."

The experts point out that a future EMS trend, in fact one that's already underway, is wireless automation. Freshman says wireless is becoming more popular, especially when it comes to retrofitting existing buildings. In addition to eliminating the need to tear apart walls and ceilings to run wires, it costs less to hire contractors, he says.

Another potential trend is the use of an actual dashboard to measure energy usage. Certainly systems these days are geared to provide data and plenty of it, but dashboards actually provide a visual to those logging onto the systems.

Even more important, Petty notes, is that dashboards can be used as a promotional tool to current and potential tenants. "The real question is how do you prove to tenants your building is more efficient than someone else's," he says. "If you have a dashboard in the lobby, people can actually see the efficiency and understand that the system is reducing the carbon footprint."

Also, look for tenants to become more involved with energy management systems and building operations, too. "Owners need to realize that, when they promote a building, they should be presenting technology greater than what the tenants and occupants can get at home," Petty explains. "Bringing information to the tenants and letting them know what's going on in the building brings more value to that building."