Massachusetts has been named the Most Energy Efficient State in the USA, for 7 years in a row, by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. That means a litany of innovative incentive programs to keep ahead of other states. One of the latest programs is the Demand Demonstration Pilot administered by Eversource Energy —New England’s largest energy distributor. The goal of the program is to demonstrate the effectiveness of new technologies in reducing both the monthly 15 min peak —which determines delivery demand charges, and the annual peak utilized for determining the building’s Installed Capacity (iCAP) Tag. The iCAP Tag determines the Capacity Charge* —incurred by the building from ISO New England for the following year. Reductions of either of the monthly peak or Capacity Charge can result in significant savings for the customer —as well as load relief benefit for the grid as a whole. Translated, this means better management of a building’s demand is both good for the building owner and everyone that is served by, in this case, ISO New England.

The Demand Demonstration Pilot is designed to investigate several technologies for demand curtailment. BuildingIQ’s 5i Intelligent Energy Management platform has been selected as one of the technologies for this 24-month pilot program. BuildingIQ’s cloud-based platform, uses artificial intelligence to work with a Building Management System (BMS) to model the building’s consumption behavior and utilize this information —along with other factors such as occupancy, weather, tariff structure, use, etc. All this information gives the 5i platform the ability to optimize the building’s HVAC system. The expected result includes:

• Maintaining occupant comfort
• Smoothing out hot/cold zones
• Curtailing peak energy demand of the building

Fully funded by Eversource, there are no expected out of pocket expenses for participants. However, there are some qualifying parameters the building must meet —including the need for a functioning BMS that can be tethered to the BuildingIQ platform, and load factors that make sense for the pilot.

Interested? Contact us or Eversource to learn how to enroll in this pilot. Participating buildings need to be signed up and online by December 31, 2018.

** The Capacity Charge are based on the highest amount of energy you are estimated to use or consume during a month (or year in some locations). Essentially, you pay a fee to ensure that the electricity you might use is available for you when you need it.

Kevin Debasitis is Director of Sales at BuildingIQ, covering the Northeast.  Kevin has worked in commercial construction, EPC and development of renewable energy, distributed generation, and energy efficiency for over 25 years.