If you’ve ever looked at an energy audit, you’ve probably seen a list of energy efficiency measures (EEMs) that looks something like the list above. What’s missing here?

The most important ingredient for energy efficiency: the people who operate and maintain the equipment. They’re the ones who make sure the lights are on when we come in to work in the morning, and they’re the first responders when something goes wrong. They keep buildings running smoothly, and they have a huge impact on how efficiently those buildings operate. They keep a lot of balls in the air with a shrinking share of the building staff budget. Keeping and incentivizing good facilities staff is EEM Zero.

Considering that in the US, buildings produce 40% of greenhouse gas emissions (and it’s much higher than that in our region), to avert climate disaster, we cannot do it without the buy-in and support of facilities staff. They’re the ones who have to deal with energy-saving upgrades like lighting retrofits and controls installations. And too often, they’re locked out of the decision-making process and away from the benefits of energy efficiency. This needs to change. Facilities staff need to be involved in energy efficiency projects from start to finish.

The roadmap to implementation of energy efficiency is not always as simple as the payback analysis. It can take a lot of coordination to make sure that the project is designed, installed, and operated correctly. Sometimes it can go wrong.

A recent example of an RCx hiccup may illustrate what I’m talking about. We finished an RCx study for a client, and their controls contractors had finished implementation. A couple of rounds of commissioning checks showed the system was running as specified. Wonderful. As a courtesy to our clients and as a gut-check for ourselves, when we finish a project, we like to set come back over a year later and check actual utility use and see if the savings we achieved hit our projected targets. In the case of this building, I downloaded the new utility data at the end of 2021, and sure enough, I could see the 26% drop in electricity – actually a bit more than we had projected. Excellent, 15 months showed a clear reduction in energy use. But then… the last 3 months showed that something had changed. Energy use had jumped back up as high as before. What had happened?

After some investigation, it turns out that building leadership had changed and facilities staff, responding to new demands, had put in a bypass of the new controls. They didn’t understand how to make changes to the schedule, didn’t have tools to communicate how to best operate the building, and they couldn’t figure out how to adjust the system when they needed to. So, they just turned everything off and went back to doing things the old way.

Energy efficiency projects need buy-in from facilities staff from day one. They need to be involved in the design process so that their needs are considered. And they need training on how to use the new equipment so that they can operate it effectively.

So how do we make facilities staff the natural allies of energy efficiency?

Four Steps to make Allies for Energy Efficiency

You start during the design process. Who knows the ins and outs of a building better than the people who work in it every day? When staff are involved in decision-making, they can provide insights that lead to more effective and efficient project implementation.

The second step is support. Facilities staff need training to properly operate and maintain new energy-saving equipment, and they need to understand the energy impacts of changes they make. Better tools for understanding these impacts, like energy management software, will also facilitate energy-saving decision making. Finally, access to energy engineers who can provide guidance and support is critical.

The third step is communication. First is the communication between energy efficiency experts and facilities staff. Too often, the people doing energy efficiency design are disconnected from the people who implement it. A continuous dialogue is needed so that facilities staff understand the proposed energy efficiency initiatives and so that they can provide feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

The second important communication is between facilities staff and building users. Energy efficiency solutions can have implications for occupants. They can impact building schedules and have clearly defined comfort parameters, so occupants must also understand the proposed changes and why they are needed. Occupants may complain about these changes, and facilities staff need preparation and support to handle those complaints with clear guidelines and authority. Management and facilities together must spell out how the building is designed to run efficiently. Ex: “This is the policy: 72 +/-2°F between the hours of 7am-7pm. Otherwise, dress appropriately.”

The last step is aligning incentives. The occupant’s building use does affect utilities costs, but operational choices that facilities staff make have a much bigger impact. Many events and responses in the daily life of facilities staff can work counter to energy efficiency goals. The quickest fixes to comfort problems can be ones that hurt the building health or the building energy profile the most: fan speeds set in over-ride, dampers in fixed positions, chillers left on into the winter. So, facilities staff need to viscerally (and financially) feel the results of their good work. Imagine if facilities staff got bonuses from the same budget that paid for utilities costs. An energy savings of 25% may be less than 1% of the organization’s total costs but can be huge compared to facilities staff costs. If attention to energy leads to a hefty bonus, facilities staff will make it happen. When they’re invested in energy efficiency, they’ll operate and maintain equipment to ensure long-term savings.

TLDR:

Energy efficiency is not a one-time event, it’s a continuous journey. And facilities staff are the most important partners on that journey. Give them a reason to care with these steps:

1. Benchmark building energy usage and involve facilities staff and experts in developing a realistic improvement target and timetable.
2. Value the professional growth of facilities staff by funding training and efficient diagnostic tools (data analytics).
3. Give the facilities department the communication assets they need, both for building occupants and with outside experts.
4. Define bonuses tied to improving building energy, or for maintaining high-performance.

The fight against climate change has to stop pitting sustainability advocates against facilities staff. When we make facilities staff the natural allies of energy efficiency, we create a powerful force for change that can help us achieve our energy savings goals. Everyone benefits: buildings use less energy, costs go down, comfort and productivity improve, and facilities staff earnings rise: a win-win-win-win situation.