IoT Analytics and AI Are Next for NYPA’s Energy Manager Program
As the New York Power Authority scales to accommodate more state buildings, the next iteration of its Energy Manager program will bring in more IoT analytics and AI.
May 11, 2018
As the vice president of the New York Energy Manager program, Emilie Bolduc gets a common response when talking with facilities and building managers across the state as they continue to work to achieve the aggressive energy reduction targets established by an executive order six years ago.
“When I talk to some of these customers, they have no idea how they’re going to hit these targets,” Bolduc said of goals to achieve 20 percent reduction in energy use in all state buildings by 2020. “And I say, ‘we can.’”
A big part of that “we can,” has been in building a system that pulls together energy data from some 11,000 buildings across the state. For 1,400 of those buildings, that data comes from building management systems, but for most, it comes from monthly utility bills. Building managers can view energy usage month over month by building, and when they spot trends, further drill into them by manually overlaying data on, for instance, the weather.
But as the program, a part of the New York Power Authority (NYPA), scales to accommodate more state buildings – potentially 30,000 – and customers want to bring in more sources of data, this sort of “eyeball analytics,” as Bolduc terms it, simply wasn’t enough. As such, in the next iteration of its Energy Manager project, Bolduc and her team will bring in more IoT data sources, IoT analysis and even artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with software from C3 IoT.