Thought Leadership from Sieben Energy Associates

In a March 22nd article in The New York Times, three science writers—Mike McPhate, Derek Watkins, and Jim Wilson—described how this winter's accumulated snowpack in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range may prove to be an antidote to the state's drought crisis.

High-tech airborne mapping and other specialized instruments, they wrote, have provided scientists with an unprecedented understanding of the amount of water present in the snow, and the rate at which the snow is expected to melt.

On the evening of Tuesday, December 6, Sieben Energy Associates attended the Illinois Chapter of ASHRAE's annual holiday party. For the second year in a row, we left with brand new hardware recognizing our energy efficiency work. We were honored by our industry peers with two Excellence in Engineering Awards for projects completed in 2016. The Chapter hosted the party at the Metropolitan Club on the 66^th and 67^th floors of Willis Tower in downtown Chicago.

Joining us at the ceremony were representatives from the client organizations with whom we worked on the award-winning projects. Thanks to the esteemed judges for recognizing the innovative and cost-effective approaches to energy efficiency our engineers demonstrated in their work.

We use SkySpark, a software platform from SkyFoundry, to perform monitoring-based commissioning. In SkyFoundry's words, SkySpark is: "A Revolutionary New Technology for Transforming Smart Device Data Into Business Solutions."

​ The September 2016 issue of SkyFoundry Insider, their company newsletter, focuses on "how engineering firms are using SkySpark to deliver significant financial results and help owners and operators make energy and operational efficiency improvements permanent." Sieben Energy Associates is one of the specialty consultants featured in this issue. One of our recent monitoring-based commissioning project is described on pages 5 and 6. For this project, we were engaged by Transwestern, the building management company for 500 West Madison, formerly known as Citigroup Center Chicago

Jerry Burin and Phil Keuhn of Sieben Energy Associates discuss the benefits of accessing information about energy-consuming systems in an article titled "The Energy Doctor Is In" from the November 2012 issue of Facility Management Journal.

A building's "vital signs" (system performance and trending data) provide energy engineers the opportunity to identify and implement efficiency measures and verify energy savings.

​Energy data is collected and analyzed as never before. Nearly every industry has been revolutionized by the continuous processing of numbers at unprecedented speed and scale. Purposeful data analysis elicits new perspectives on how value is assigned to products and services. Data collection and handling is important, yet we find that the value is in the interpretation as well as the response. 

While there are costs associated with data management, if leveraged appropriately the advantages will produce significant ROI. The more accurate and in-depth the data analysis, the more value is derived from it. The same is true of data use: the more an organization uses data to inform day-to-day operations and to develop long-term goals, the greater the return.