Greenbang announces 2011 Efficiency Awards winners

A company that prefabricates ultra-efficient green buildings, the CEO of a smart-grid company and an automated system for enabling safer, fuel-saving driving are among the 11 winners of Greenbang’s 2011 Efficiency Awards.

Greenbang also highly commended another four firms for their achievements in promoting greater efficiency.

Now in their second year, The Greenbang Awards highlight people, products and processes that create resource-saving efficiencies.

This year’s winners are:

• Best transport technology: GreenRoad’s service to enable more efficient, safer driving.
• Best communications technology: On-Ramp Wireless’ system for smart-grid device communication and control.
• Top energy technology: EnerNOC’s applications for efficiency and demand response.
• Best cloud computing solution: CloudApps’ suite of sustainability applications.
• Most efficient data centre technology: HP’s EcoPOD modular data centre with improved processing power and fresh air cooling.
• Best public sector project: 1E, for its PC energy management technology that helped Newham University Hospital NHS Trust to automatically and significantly reduce electricity use and carbon emissions.
• Best sustainable resource management programme: Cawleys, for its zero-waste-to-landfill work with the Adelie Food Group.
• Best efficient technology for buildings: Autodesk’s building information modeling (BIM) system for designing green, low-energy buildings.
• Best solution for home efficiency: Rexel’s sustainable home retrofit at the BRE Innovation Park.
• Person of the year: Ron Sege, Chairman and CEO of Echelon, for strong leadership that’s helped the firm keep innovating and growing globally despite a challenging economic environment.
• Company of the year: Project Frog, for its advanced modeling and design technology for new, energy-efficient buildings.

Highly commended awards also went to:

• IES, for its building efficiency modeling strategy (buildings category).
• GreenQloud, for its 100-percent renewably powered cloud service (cloud computing category).
• Tantalus, for its end-to-end smart-grid communications solution (communications/networking category).
• Cogenra, for its hybrid photovoltaic/solar-thermal technology (energy technologies category).

“All of these winners prove it’s possible to achieve impressive gains in efficiency today, rather than at some distant point in the future,”said Shirley Siluk, managing editor of Greenbang. “Many also show that these efficiencies can pay for themselves, often over a short period of time. Achieving that is more important than ever as organizations try to deal with both rising energy expenses and constrained finances.”

She added, “In short, our Greenbang 2011 Award winners are leaders in helping us to do more with less. On behalf of the entire editorial and research team, I’d like to congratulate each one of them for outstanding achievement.”