AEI Soft Start^®

Dollar for dollar, "EPO" and real-time main meter interval data deliver more insight about your building's energy use than any other investment you can make. Period.

With your signature on an Eversource or National Grid enrollment form, or an export of your building's gas and electric trend data from its BAS or submeters, AEI Soft Start delivers immediate insight into your building's current energy usage by presenting the interval data in ways that are impossible for your utility and your building automation system.

• Seamless 3rd Party Integrations for Utility Bill and Interval Meter data: AEI Soft Start is a hub that features ready-made integrations with popular data acquisition software to insure an onboarding process for your buildings that can take as little as a few hours. We'll import your utility bills from Urjanet, UtilityAPI and Glynt, or even configure a custom importer for your customers with a proprietary management system. For main meter or sub-metered interval data, we can import directly from many popular meters via FTP, HTTPS or the vendor's proprietary API and we can also deliver our low-cost Obvius DA solution for pulse meters that aren't yet Internet-ready.
  We also support:
• Integration with Genability Signal^® APIs for utility bill auditing and pricing out the effect of your energy conservation projects. Supply the energy savings promised by your project vendor, and see the result on your utility bills instantly.
• Integration with NREL PVWatts^® Solar Calculator lets you specify the parameters of a solar project and see the estimated savings and ROI for your facility - using real-world weather data from your location along with cost and production estimates developed by The National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
• Integration with WattTime.org^™ powers our GHG analytics. With the data feed of marginal emissions from the grid in your region, we natively help you calculate Scope 1 and 2 emissions for your facilities. Consistent with our other integrations, we can also assist you with your 2030 and 2050 net-zero goals by calculating the CO₂e reductions for your energy conservation projects.
• And of course we're able to help you with your ENERGYSTAR^® reporting. Call us for details - the process varies widely depending on the type of facilities you are managing. And of course you can also call us for integrations with your industry-specific metrics and reporting platforms. If the repeating chore of monthly energy and water reporting has got you down, we can certainly help.
• Weather correlation: Is your facility controlling to outside air temperatures during the heating and cooling seasons? Does the data suggest a better precooling strategy for summer? We retrieve and store 15-minute weather data for each of your buildings from OpenWeather for weather normalization and other weather-based analytics.
• Base load and setbacks: With 24-hour and 7-day profiles, you'll see how your building sets back during the unoccupied hours that can account for 70% of all usage. And whether the base load per square foot is in line with similar buildings.
• Plug Load: After accounting for weather, how do the projected plug and security light loads compare to the base load?
• Heating and Cooling Loads: Equipment makers love to target heating and cooling, but when it's time to make the financial decision, do you know how many hours are affected by the proposed ECM? Do you know the current conditioning loads to make the proper payback calculation?
• Year over year, period over period, seasonal comparisons: With two or more years of data normalized for weather, did your energy usage go up or down compared to previous years? What's the trend?
• Peak coincidence: What's your risk for a high ICAP tag that will drive your demand charges for the year?
• Demand Response: Measure the main meter effect of your last response to a DR call and validate the provider's estimate.
• Production and Process Scheduling: For manufacturers, energy costs may or may not be formally part of a product's bill of materials. But for products or processes with a known higher energy intensity per production unit, might it make sense to schedule your facilities to shape your energy curve in a way that avoids summer peaks and takes advantage of lower rates during off-peak hours?
• ECM Validation: When an energy conservation measure promises a main meter effect, compare the pre and post to validate the results (IPMVP Option C with support for A,B and D).
• Multiple buildings? By establishing Energy Usage Intensity (EUI) values by season and by building, quickly compare which buildings and modes have the highest energy savings potential.

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An AEI Soft Start can easily pay for itself in the first year by showing peak demand reduction opportunities.

A standard feature of an AEI Soft Start is to deliver a peak demand reduction schedule which - when combined with your utility billing parameters - can tell you the billing effect for small reductions in peak demands each month. Recognizing that building comfort is always a critical factor, our schedules show the affected number of hours for incremental reductions in demand.

An AEI Soft Start review is the most economic way to get started with building data analytics. It delivers broad insight across your portfolio, and is an excellent way to help decide where to look next on your quest for tuned buildings and lower energy costs.

Pricing for AEI Soft Start is per Utility account or submeter and includes monthly import of EPO data or import of your real-time data on a 15-minute schedule 24/7. Discounts for multi-building portfolios with large square footage will apply - the larger the portfolio, the faster the payback. Contact us for more information and our straightforward pricing.

Compatibility

An AEI Soft Start works with your existing utility "EPO" data available from Energy Profiler Online⁽¹⁾. If your facility is on a time-of-use ("TOU") rate schedule with National Grid or Eversource, this data is available to you on an annual basis at no cost. For best results, we recommend the monthly subscription fee paid to your utility so that an AEI Soft Start analytics stay updated and can show monthly changes in your usage patterns on a more timely basis.

For facilities that are not on a TOU schedule, it may be that your building automation system (BAS) is trending the main meter electric and gas or has other sensors that would be valid proxies for the main meter. An export of that trend data could be sufficient for our purposes as long as it contains time-stamped values that represent usage.

We can also recommend our AEI Soft Start Real-Time solution which goes beyond what EPO data can deliver. You'll get real-time main meter reporting that can be combined with AEI ISO Alerts to give you real-time insight into peak demand situations on the grid as well as your specific facility.

AEI Soft Start is also compatible with our AEI Energy Map. For portfolios of 10 or more facilities, an AEI Energy Map gives you a map-based overview of your portfolio, along with an entry point into the details for each building in your portfolio.

⁽¹⁾ The availability of interval data from your electric utility depends on the rate schedule for the facility. Only rate schedules with "time-of-use" billing will have this data. In the ISO New England service area, Eversource B-2 and B-7 schedules will have interval data. National Grid G-3 has interval data, but G-2 does not. To remedy the absence of interval data, please see our AEI Soft Start Real-Time solution.