Hartford Business Journal

10 Hartford Business Journal • March 25, 2019 • www.HartfordBusiness.com FOCUS: Green Business/Energy Highland Park Market's intelligent buildings shave $100K in energy costs Q&A talks to Patrick O'Neill, COO of JouleSmart, an Oregon-based provider of smart-build- ing energy technology, which recently installed its system at three Highland Park Market grocery stores in Glaston- bury, Manchester and Suffield. Branded as "Integrated Intelligence Gateway" or IIG, JouleSmart's system uses sensors to remotely monitor and control HVAC, lighting systems, air quality and freezer/cooler temperatures, with the aim of lowering energy costs. Q. As a result of using the IIG system, Highland Park Market expects to lop off $100,000 from its annual energy bill of nearly $300,000. How is it pos- sible to save that much? A. These stores have long operating hours. So, every kilowatt you save in lighting will save you something on the order of 5,000 kWh per year. There are a lot of lights in a grocery store. Similarly, the HVAC system operates long hours and moves millions of cubic feet of ventilation air. If you can lower the energy required to move that air, as well as reduce the amount of heating and cooling you need to do it, it adds up very quickly. Q. JouleSmart's target customer is the small or mid-size commercial building owner. In general, at what level of en- ergy use or building size does a smart- building system start to make sense? A. Generally when their total monthly spend on energy utilities (natural gas, electric, propane, oil, etc.) exceeds $2,500. Q. There was no upfront capital ex- pense for Highland Park's three local stores to install your system. What is JouleSmart's revenue model? How does JouleSmart get paid? A. JouleSmart takes over the pay- ment of the utility bills for the term of our contract, usually five to seven years, with the customer. The custom- er pays JouleSmart an amount equal to its old utility bills, while JouleSmart uses the savings from the retrofit to pay back the capital borrowed for the project as well as a monthly service fee. Of the savings that are left over after that, 70 percent goes to the cus- tomer. After the initial contract term, the savings increase, since there are no more capital costs to pay back. The Patrick O'Neill Chief Operating Officer, JouleSmart By Liese Klein Special to the Hartford Business Journal W hen you're making heat, why not also make electricity? That's the idea behind Enviro Power, a Hartford-based startup seeking to give a green upgrade to the billion-dollar heating industry. With a working prototype of its Smart- Watt boiler installed at its facility and a dozen purchase orders pending, Enviro Power is poised to grow and is currently planning a Series A funding round. "We can create a product that can actually make a difference," said En- viro Power Chief Technology Officer Mike Cocuzza. The SmartWatt boiler works by adding a second heat-exchanger and turbine to a conventional boiler to convert waste heat into steam and then electricity. Like a solar panel, the SmartWatt then channels the electric- ity it generates into an inverter that allows the power to be used inside a structure or fed into the electrical grid. The company estimates that Smart- Watt's electricity generates about half the CO2 emissions of electricity from the grid. In addition, the SmartWatt over time also can save a heating cus- tomer significant money, according to Enviro Power Chief Operating Officer John Hoffert. "From a business perspective, it's valuable to the customer because when you generate electricity on-site from natural gas, it's one-seventh the cost of buying from the grid," Hoffert said. "We see a large market potential here," said Patrick O'Neill, managing di- rector for venture capital investments at Connecticut Innovations, which invests in early stage companies. "We have a great technical team and there's a large market here, people who want to generate their own energy." Connecticut Innovations has in- vested $250,000 in Enviro Power so far and plans to be part of the next funding round, O'Neill said. "There's a strong economic case for it," he said of the technology. "It really is a win-win." The SmartWatt got its spark in the mind of Cocuzza, a Southington native who spent much of his childhood taking his toys apart and putting them back to- gether. He graduated from UConn with a mechanical engineering degree in 2010 and started searching for a green energy project to suit his skills. "Climate change is an issue of our time," Cocuzza said. "Efficiency in it- self is a way to address that. … I started to realize there's probably an opportu- nity to think different," Cocuzza said. From idea to startup The idea of using one fuel source to generate both heat and power is not new, but higher fuel costs and concerns about climate change have renewed interest in the process, called cogeneration. The first challenge for Cocuzza was to make his product affordable and easy to operate and maintain, a necessity in an especially cost-sensitive industry. By 2013, Cocuzza had a working pro- totype using off-the-shelf parts that he put to use in his Middletown home. His first reaction, he said, was "'Hey we made it, where's my million-dollar check?' Then I realized how much Green Upgrade Hartford startup's boiler aims to turn heat into electricity Enviro Power Chief Technology Officer Michael Cocuzza shows off the startup's SmartWatt boiler in the company's testing facility. PHOTOS | CONTRIBUTED

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