NRG and Lucid Join Forces to Bring Smarter Building Management to Businesses

On Jul 10, 2015

NRG Renew LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Princeton-based NRG Energy, Inc., an independent power producer, and Lucid, a leader in cloud-based building management, have announced a channel partnership to accelerate the adoption of Lucid’s BuildingOS platform among NRG Renew’s client base. The goal of this partnership is to help organizations accelerate their path to clean and distributed energy by modernizing their portfolios of commercial buildings. To kick off the partnership, Lucid will onboard 2,500 buildings by the end of 2015 for select NRG clients to empower them to build and execute their path to greater efficiency and renewable energy.

By integrating and aggregating portfolio-wide metering and building systems, BuildingOS is expected to enable NRG Renew customers to unlock new value from their building data and chart their path toward a more efficient use of energy and conversion to clean energy sources. The powerful reporting engine in BuildingOS is intended to ensure that employees across an organization can instantly access and share that data in real-time, resulting in quick, measurable efficiency and productivity gains. NRG Renew will also use BuildingOS to help clients identify opportunities for clean energy, efficiency and smarter energy management practices.

To date, building management software has been limited to use by experts or specialists. NRG Renew and Lucid are dedicated to building a clean energy future where key data is readily accessible and employees across an organization have the power to make a difference. This new partnership marks the first step towards putting that power directly into the hands of the end-user.

“Our goal is to develop scalable, productized microgrid solutions that bring efficiency, renewable energy and intelligent control to our energy system,” said Robyn Beavers, senior vice president of innovation at NRG Renew. “Our partnership with Lucid will help us deliver on that goal by empowering organizations to use energy data to guide decisions that make those solutions a reality.”

“We are thrilled about our partnership with NRG Renew,” said Vladi Shunturov, co-founder and CEO of Lucid. “Our flexible, cloud-based platform is built for the enterprise: it allows multiple users across an organization to easily manage buildings and meters; and its suite of intuitive, purpose-specific applications enables each team member to solve their unique business problems while increasing cross-departmental visibility and collaboration.”

NRG Renew has already announced renewable energy partnerships with several leading companies, including Unilever, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Kaiser Permanente.

In addition to offering BuildingOS 2.0 to its customer-base, NRG also plans to bring its own offices across the United States onto the platform in order to monitor and reduce its energy use.

Partnership Delivers Benefits Across Organizations

The partnership between NRG Renew and Lucid provides businesses and their employees greater control of their building data and the tools to collaborate across departments to make the right decisions based on the right data and analysis. The partnership is designed to deliver a variety of benefits to different departments who touch energy data, for example:

Building Operations Teams

• Optimize building performance. By aggregating real-time, portfolio-wide data, BuildingOS allows users to see, in a glance, what’s happening in their buildings and then dig in further to identify low- and no-cost opportunities to save energy and money.
• Manage peak demand. More than 40 percent of utility bills are spent on peak demand charges. The BuildingOS Trend Analysis App helps by showing users in real-time when their buildings hit their peaks, empowering customers to better manage peak demand.
• Detect issues and abnormalities. The information provided by BuildingOS allows customers to analyze and review multiple meters at the same time for easy ad-hoc reporting over any timescale.

Sustainability Teams

• Drive behavioral efficiency. BuildingOS uses embeddable building blocks to showcase real-time building performance and green features in an engaging, user-friendly way so that people and teams across the organization can collaborate around shared sustainability goals.

Finance Teams

• Easily collect and analyze utility bill data. BuildingOS reduces the amount of time spent entering all of their utility bill data into spreadsheets. BuildingOS integrates directly with customers’ utility provider, automating the collection and analysis of meter-level data across their portfolio.
• Automate reporting and compliance. BuildingOS connects directly and pushes energy data to the Energy Star system to meet reporting requirements automatically.

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