Verdigris Technologies

Hospital sustainability policies and demand for environmentallyconscious healthcare supplies drove Vention to Verdigris. Vention was seeking energy data metrics, particularly validation of energy usage and insights for potential savings. With 13 facilities and a newly formed sustainability council, Vention needed a tool to easily identify and quantify hidden potential cost savings. They also needed a reliable system to track equipment malfunction to maintain sensitive environments which are critical to medical device manufacturing. Vention selected their Sunnyvale office, which has several clean rooms, for the proof-of-concept test. They wanted to learn how to best prevent downtime for important equipment such as HVAC, which could jeopardize FDA-approved clean room conditions, contaminate materials, and ultimately increase production costs. Vention approached Verdigris to get help going above and beyond their customers’ specific requirements for sustainability.

Modern buildings are required to run longer hours, support a variety of end uses, and contribute to higher levels of economic productivity, leaving a thin margin for error. However, even the most advanced building and environmental control systems have failed to adequately support facilities and operations management. Buildings are often inefficient and the people using them are underserved. To meet occupant comfort and maintain cost and energy efficiency, a dynamic, AI-assisted approach is needed.

Building owners and property managers face significant challenges in verifying the return on investment (ROI) from energy efficiency measures due to the dynamic nature of buildings. Factors such as shifting weather patterns, changes in occupancy, and varying equipment lifespans complicate the isolation of savings from energy efficiency investments. Traditional methods of verifying savings, such as hiring energy engineers to create predictive thermodynamic energy models, are often complicated and expensive. These methods involve intensive data collection and calibration processes, which can cost between $0.10 to $0.50 per square foot, making them cost-prohibitive for many building owners. Additionally, traditional methods have limited capability for tracking ongoing performance, which is crucial for identifying failures or below-average performance of energy efficiency measures.

Hospital sustainability policies and demand for environmentally conscious healthcare supplies drove Vention to Verdigris. Vention was seeking energy data metrics, particularly validation of energy usage and insights for potential savings. With 13 facilities and a newly formed sustainability council, Vention needed a tool to easily identify and quantify hidden potential cost savings. They also needed a reliable system to track equipment malfunction to maintain sensitive environments which are critical to medical device manufacturing. Vention selected their Sunnyvale office, which has several clean rooms, for the proof-of-concept test. They wanted to learn how to best prevent downtime for important equipment such as HVAC, which could jeopardize FDA-approved clean room conditions, contaminate materials, and ultimately increase production costs. Vention approached Verdigris to get help going above and beyond their customers’ specific requirements for sustainability.

Bill DeMartini, Chief Engineer of the W Hotel San Francisco, was searching for a way to identify the unseen problems in his building. He wanted to take energy efficiency beyond his hotel’s LEED Silver certification. To tackle this, he knew he must look at TRACE, the award-winning restaurant. Without a cost-effective way to monitor kitchen operations 24/7, Bill lacked the facts required to optimize his kitchen and improve W Hotel’s efficiency. Bill engaged with Verdigris to deliver the granularity he needed to identify ways to improve the kitchen operations.

Juan and the Orchard ownership group had reached the limit of their own capacity. Orchard faced two key challenges: Limited engineering capacity to proactively manage their properties in an effective manner. A rigorous method to measure success and return on investment, especially for new energy efficiency projects. Moreover, from his position overlooking two hotels, Juan wanted a better way to monitor usage and compare results between the two properties. Each 10 stories tall, with a roughly equal number of rooms and located just 500 yards apart, the energy consumption profile should be very similar. In fact, this wasn’t the case.

Advancements in connectivity, data storage, and cloud services are digitizing and connecting people to devices and their surroundings. Verdigris elevates these technologies with its smart energy meter and building data platform. The systems collect and analyze energy data to provide insights to make buildings intelligent and responsive. The industry is competitive and crowded with a variety of technology options and offerings. Navigating the range of value propositions with buzzwords like big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can be daunting and overwhelming. Smart buildings use data and connectivity to be predictive, preventative, and responsive. Verdigris systems support three pillars of enterprise smart buildings: environmental and cost savings, comfort, and business resilience.

JLL, a global leader in real estate services, manages over 4.6 billion square feet of property and facility management. They are committed to sustainability, recognizing that over 40% of total carbon emissions come from the built environment. In 2019, JLL announced plans to cut their carbon emissions by 70% and partner with clients on sustainability efforts. At JLL’s Block 300 property in downtown Portland, OR, the management team lacked visibility into the day-to-day operations of the building. Although the LEED Gold and Energy Star certified building had a building automation system (BAS), it did not provide much data on the building’s energy usage. JLL turned to Verdigris for help with the missing energy intelligence.

As one of the premier hotels in the heart of the city, Grand Hyatt San Francisco maintains a commitment to providing the best experience for its guests while being good stewards of the community and environment. In pursuit of this goal, Grand Hyatt San Francisco has established a reputation as a leader in smart-building and green technology. Grand Hyatt San Francisco has been a Verdigris customer since 2015, when the Director of Engineering came to us looking for an accurate and innovative solution to account for energy costs associated with the hotel’s retail tenant. Verdigris systems revealed that the tenant was responsible for a higher portion of the building’s energy costs than had been initially estimated. This was due to high energy usage during expensive peak-demand periods when many hotels typically have relatively low demand. This discovery was only possible through high-frequency circuit-level metering from Verdigris, and has allowed the hotel to avoid paying high costs for energy it isn’t using. Since then, our relationship has expanded beyond submetering to include whole-building metering, Intelligent Alerts, and Adaptive Automation to deliver thousands of dollars in energy savings for the hotel.

Katerra, a company focused on optimizing building design and construction, faced the challenge of measuring and reducing the energy impact and carbon footprint across their construction and manufacturing processes. Their Tracy, CA factory, equipped with advanced manufacturing equipment, aimed to produce 12,500 multifamily units a year. To offset energy use, a 1.117 MW solar array was installed. However, to further enhance energy efficiency and sustainability, Katerra sought a solution to monitor and manage energy consumption more effectively. The need was to identify energy usage anomalies, phase imbalances, and equipment inefficiencies to prevent energy waste and reduce operational costs.

Marina Mechanical, an energy service company in the San Francisco Bay Area, was tasked by the Orchard Hotel Group to identify opportunities to improve energy use. The traditional approach would involve installing numerous data loggers or IT/networking infrastructure, both of which are labor-intensive and require manual data entry and analysis. However, Orchard Hotel was already using Verdigris for energy intelligence, which provided visibility down to the individual circuit level. This allowed Marina to bypass the need for additional software installation or dealing with proprietary file formats, enabling them to start their analysis immediately.

Innovatus Capital Partners, a New York-based boutique specialty finance firm with $1.6 billion in assets under management, faced the challenge of integrating emerging technologies across its nationwide commercial building portfolio. With a focus on capitalizing on disruption and growth, Innovatus recognized the opportunity to use real-time data and AI to reduce energy costs. The firm turned to Verdigris to implement Adaptive Automation at three initial properties in Orlando, FL, Miami, FL, and San Rafael, CA. The challenge was to optimize energy usage and demand savings in these commercial office buildings, which ranged from 120,000 to 165,000 square feet.