Better buildings: $10m ... Energy savings: priceless

The Texas city of San Antonio is on a $10-million quest to make its buildings smarter and more energy efficient.

That’s how much it was awarded in 2009 federal economic stimulus funds for an initiative originally called the Retrofit Ramp-Up program. Now known as the Better Buildings Program, the effort is aimed at reducing both the city’s electricity demands and greenhouse gas emissions and, officials hope, create an efficiency model that can be emulated by other communities across the US.

Since receiving the grant, San Antonio has moved forward with the mission with the help of Atlanta-based Servidyne, a company that provides energy efficiency and demand response services. (The firm also has what is possibly one of the best names we’ve ever encountered for a demand response system: Fifth Fuel Management … as in energy efficiency, the so-called “fifth fuel.”) It’s conducted more than 30 demand response audits for city buildings over the past two years, and has just won two contracts to provide retro-commissioning and energy audit services for commercial and institutional buildings in San Antonio.

“We believe that the City of San Antonio’s systematic bundling of demand response audits with energy audits and retro-commissioning services for commercial and industrial buildings is truly ground-breaking among major American cities,” said Jim Josephson, Servidyne’s vice president of sales of Fifth Fuel Management.

Servidyne describes Fifth Fuel Management as a “near real-time energy efficiency and demand response management service.” The web-enabled offering lets building operators manage demand response requests from utilities, enabling them to earn payments from the utility company for reducing electricity consumption during times of high demand.