Duke Energy teams up with Charlotte, NC to expand reach of smart energy solutions model

Published on October 03, 2017 by Liz Carey


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Over the course of five years, Duke Energy worked with Envision Charlotte to increase energy efficiency for businesses in Charlotte. Now cities from all over the world are asking them how to replicate their success.

What was once a program to help a southern city manage its growth by transforming into a “smart city” that uses technology to address sustainability issues, eventually grew into a national initiative, and now is an international collaboration.

Envision Charlotte started in 2011 when Duke Energy’s then-CEO Jim Rogers brought together Charlotte business leaders to move Charlotte toward becoming a Smart City. Rogers, said Sasha Weintraub, senior vice president of customer solutions for Duke Energy, wanted to put Charlotte on the map.

Weintraub said Rogers and other leaders worked to identify goals the group could accomplish and set its sights on reducing the energy use in the urban core of the city by 20 percent. The group focused on commercial buildings that were 10,000 square feet or larger.

From there, the group called the building owners and asked them to be a part of the program. Of the 64 buildings that met the criterion, nearly all signed on with the plan. Duke Energy installed shadow meters in the buildings and helped companies to identify where they could reduce waste.

By installing energy kiosks in buildings, tenants could see in real-time what the energy costs of the building were. The program allowed Duke to provide building engineers with data that showed when the buildings were least efficient, and how they could tighten up their usage.

The program furthered Duke Energy’s public policies on sustainability and efficiency.

“Some of this is that we have public policy to go after energy efficiency. In doing that, we’re able to reduce energy usage, but we’re also kept whole,” he said. “The goal is to use less energy without having to suffer. So the goal in energy efficiency is to do what you want to do, but to use less energy doing it,” Weintraub told Daily Energy Insider.

Eventually, the program expanded to 200 buildings. At the end of the five-year challenge, the city saw a reduction in energy use of 19 percent, saving companies more than $26 million. With energy programs firmly in place, Envision Charlotte has now moved on to address issues with water, air and greenhouse gases.

But those energy efficiencies from the original program remain today, Weintraub said, and that’s something to spread to other institutes and other cities.

Weintraub said Duke Energy was working to take the model and use it to create smart energy solutions in offices, hospitals and universities. Additionally, the energy company is reaching out to other cities – among them Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina – to start initiatives like Envision Charlotte in them.

Amy Aussieker, executive director of Envision Charlotte, attributed the program’s success to it having originated from the private sector. Because of the nature of the program, there was flexibility in how the organization was able to bring businesses into the program.

“One of the most successful programs we had was called ‘Crab it, You’re it!’ We went into buildings with these fake crabs. And because crabs go toward the light, when someone found a co-worker who had left their office light on, they’d leave a crab at their door,” she said. “They had to find someone else who’d left a light on before they could get rid of the crab.”

Another initiative within the program brought University of North Carolina students and faculty into buildings to do an audit.

“We were all getting inundated with calls from companies saying they had the solution to increase energy efficiency overnight,” she said. “But the building engineers didn’t know how to decide on what was the best solution – it was like comparing apples to oranges. By bringing in UNC, we were able to show them an unbiased view of what needed to be addressed in their buildings to increase their energy efficiency.”

In 2016, officials in cities across the country began to ask Envision Charlotte how they could replicate Charlotte’s success. That led to a boot camp, of sorts, with Charlotte hosting a conference that provided facilitated sessions with cities to help them come up with their own smart city initiatives.
Now, the organization is expanding its reach to incorporate cities across the globe. Called “By Cities, For Cities,” the next step is to bring together cities internationally to learn and compare notes.

“There is a lot to be learned from international cities,” Aussieker said in an interview. “They have to deal with things differently because they don’t have the same resources we have in our country. They don’t have acres of land that they can use as a dump, so they have to incorporate recycling into their infrastructure. There’s a lot we can learn from them.”

For Aussieker, the success of Envision Charlotte has been that ideas came from businesses instead of government mandates.

“When I talk about this I tell people when you can bring public entities, private businesses, universities and utility companies together, the public knows it’s something important,” she said. “While this may have saved businesses $26 million, there was also a reduction in energy usage. There is a win in it for everyone if you do it correctly.”