Photo Credit: Credit: brian1078, commons.wikimedia.org
EnerNOC, best known for demand response, has landed a contract with Southern California Edison to deliver its energy efficiency product, EfficiencySMART, to SCE’s business customers.
The contract allows for businesses to receive the metering and monitoring equipment for “persistent commissioning” -- essentially, software and hardware that continually adjusts lighting and HVAC loads -- with funds provided by SCE through the end of 2012. The rebates will make the product available at a significantly reduced price. Savings from the service should average about 10 percent on energy costs, according to EnerNOC. The win is the largest to date for EnerNOC’s relaunched platform and helps the demand response provider make itself known in the heavily trafficked space of commercial energy savings. It won a similar contract with Pacific Gas & Electric last year when the application was called SiteSMART.
“With our track record of successful deployments of data-driven energy efficiency programs, we’re seeing increasing interest from utilities to leverage the power of these applications to meet their energy efficiency goals and in many cases, state-mandated objectives,” Tim Healy, Chairman and CEO of EnerNOC, said in a statement.
Although the Boston-based company may be seeing more interest, it has some fierce competition. Building automation giants like Honeywell and Johnson Controls have been delving further into demand response while still focusing on their core business that includes efficiency controls.
Besides the big commercial controls companies, others like Scientific Conservation, Silver Spring Networks, Microsoft and IBM are all taking bites of the C+I energy efficiency market by diversifying their offerings. Silver Spring, for example, moved into demand response and residential power management last October; IBM announced this week that it would buy Tririga, a software company that specializes in commissioning and building management tools for large, commercial office buildings.
EnerNOC, which has more than 5 gigawatts under demand response management and relationships with utilities across the U.S., will use its position in DR to sell its efficiency products to companies, and for the companies that may start out with EfficiencySMART, they will have a natural relationship to try to also sell DR services. The firm already has some big-name customers, such as Sears and Morgan Stanley, using its energy efficiency platform.
In November, Gregg Dixon, head of marketing for EnerNOC, told Greentech Media that demand response, potentially, could be cannibalized by building management services. In most cases, however, buildings will be able to accommodate both.
Currently, EnerNOC gets about 5 percent of its revenue from non-DR services, and hopes to grow that figure to 20 percent in coming years. "Demand response is training wheels for energy management," Dixon said in November.
Looks like the training wheels are getting ready to come off.