Saving Energy Goes Online with New Commercial App

Retroficiency, a start-up company from Boston, hopes the new Web-based energy performance application it launched earlier this month will make carrying out energy efficiency audits for commercial buildings more efficient.

The company’s namesake application, referred to by Retroficiency founder and CEO Bennett Fisher as an “identification and qualification platform,” is designed to quickly provide a profile of a commercial building’s energy use and offer suggestions for potential energy efficiency upgrades.

The application can be used by energy auditors to create reports faster, or by facility managers to prioritize energy efficiency projects and start saving money on energy costs.

According to Fisher, there are a lot of building owners or occupants out there who are interested in exploring energy efficiency upgrades but are dissuaded by the time-consuming prospect of having a human energy service professional take hours to manually inspect an entire facility on foot while writing up a minutely detailed report.

“There’s a huge bottleneck of finding efficiency opportunities and going after this,” Fisher said in an interview with CNET. “New York City wants to audit 20,000 buildings. How are they going to do this with a guy walking around with a clipboard counting light bulbs?”

Retroficiency gets rid of manual processes and spreadsheets and relies instead on a short survey, predictive analytics, and a huge database of tens of thousands of prior energy audits to infer specific things about the building, like probable electricity use. The application then makes suggestions for potential energy efficiency upgrades based on those inferences.

Sources

New Retroficiency App to Take Energy Efficiency Audits for Buildings Online, Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2011.

Retroficiency App Sizes Up Building Energy, CNET, March 9, 2011.

Local Firms Roll Out Energy Auditing Software, The Boston Globe, March 9, 2011.