Industry Bigs Pilot Energy Program

NEW YORK CITY-In advance of its commercial availability, a smart power outlet that helps detect energy waste in offices is being piloted over the next three months. Dubbed the Eco Empowered Initiative, the pilot program from locally based ThinkEco Inc. has enrolled some major industry companies including Turner Construction, as well as corporate users including BlackRock and the Climate Group.

To date, more than 50 organizations have signed on to participate in a study of ThinkEco’s modlet (short for “modern outlet”), a smart outlet that monitors real-time equipment power consumption and helps create an automated savings program. The idea, ThinkEco says, is for office tenants to control energy consumption in the one area where they do have a direct say: plugged-in electronic equipment.

Testing of ThinkEco’s modlet started last November among certain companies and universities in the Northeast, Mei Shibata, chief business officer of the two-year-old startup firm, tells GlobeSt.com. “The results were very interesting and positive but one thing that seemed to be missing was a sense of community, of ‘how are we doing relative to other people?’ That’s when we said we couldn’t do these studies one-off,” Shibata says. “There has to be a methodology across all of them, and a way for every party to understand not only how well they’re doing in terms of savings but also how well that stacks up against the other folks who are participating.”

She says the Eco Empowered Initiative represents “our last push to get people involved where they don’t have to put up any money to do so, and for us to see where the technology works best, what types of features people want most.” As for involvement in the program by some major real estate players, including a leading tristate office landlord and a developer, “We cast a pretty wide net with regard to who might be interested.” While Shibata wouldn’t say real estate was the only sector that responded, “they were among the sectors that responded enthusiastically.”

As for that office landlord, “We actually got to them through one of their tenants,” says Shibata. “As a company, they really care about sustainability, and one of the things they were doing was to install sub-metering on different floors. The sub-metering data got to a certain level of granularity and the tenant was pretty happy, but they realized that even if they had multiple floors in the same sustainable building, they weren’t all equal in the way they draw power.”

For the tenant, “that was insight number one,” but then frustration set in, “because they didn’t know what was driving the difference,” she says. “That’s where our technology fit in very nicely, because they said, ‘okay, we get it, some floors are drawing more power than others. Now let’s get down to the source of what’s causing it.’ Is it some guy on the fifth floor who’s working longer hours, or is it that some people are more wasteful, or is it the specificity of the type of copier machine down there?”

The answer wasn’t clear, and the tenant began investigating. From the standpoint of the landlord, “it was very intriguing because it was a tenant taking the initiative to try to get to the bottom of it,” says Shibata.

The landlord will be piloting the modlet with other tenants as well as in its own offices, and Shibata says there are plans to bring other large owners into the program. The pilot period is a minimum of 30 days for each participant, and after the program is finished ThinkEco will make the data available to all of the participants. Commercial rollout is slated for late this year and early 2011.