Lucid Wins Two EPA and DOE Awards to Commercialize Building Performance Innovations
Oakland, CA (PRWEB) March 15, 2016 -- Lucid, a leader in data integration and analytics for managing building operations, today announced two competitive awards valued at over $495,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) for innovative ways to improve commercial building performance. These awards include: A $295,000 EPA Phase II SBIR contract for the development and commercialization of low cost approaches to balancing peak demand energy usage and occupant comfort; and a $200,000 DOE Small Business Voucher for collaboration between research scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lucid’s BuildingOS product development team to develop the first SaaS-based, at scale, building modeling and benchmarking capability to improve the performance of buildings.
“We’re honored to receive these awards and excited to partner with EPA and DOE to push the forefront of how technology is being used to improve building performance,” said Will Coleman, CEO of Lucid.
EPA Award
The Lucid EPA SBIR Phase II project award scope builds on a successful Phase I where Lucid identified key ways to increase the efficacy of behavioral approaches to reducing energy consumption in commercial buildings. In Phase II, the objective is an end-to-end proof of concept and real world field testing of using integrated energy consumption analyses for occupant engagement with innovative digital signage. The display of information will range from ambient energy feedback to other IoT-enabled data visualizations to better manage and predict peak demand while ensuring occupant comfort.
“This award will enable us to explore how to leverage the proliferation of low cost Internet of Things (IoT) technologies as well as our building data analytics platform, BuildingOS, to directly help occupants and owners of commercial buildings realize sustained energy savings while managing peak demand loads,” said Vladi Shunturov, President and Cofounder of Lucid.
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program funds cutting-edge, innovative technology that has potential to advance societal, economic and environmental goals. The focus of the SBIR Program is to see this technology commercialized and widely used so that it can support EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment," said April Richards, EPA SBIR Program Manager, “Lucid’s Digital Signage technology has the potential to address the important issue of climate change by reducing energy demand in buildings and therefore greenhouse gas emissions. The company has a strong track record in this field and their novel software-based technology platform shows promise to further curb energy usage in commercial buildings by providing occupants with feedback on their energy usage.”
DOE Award
The DOE Small Business Voucher project is a collaboration between advanced building research scientists and Lucid’s product research and development team. The DOE has pioneered sophisticated building optimization models that use physics-based modeling to better show the impact of energy and related resource changes. The project will accelerate the use of advanced performance modeling for more accurate benchmarking and better decision-making on building efficiency needs across large portfolios of buildings. As a result, BuildingOS users will be able to more quickly and reliably assess a building’s performance and even more easily do what-if analyses of potential efficiency projects like replacing HVAC systems, adding insulation, and other potential retrofits without the need for specialized data analytics work.
“Our customers will benefit from easy visualization based on the most sophisticated modeling tools available to optimize and benchmark building portfolio performance,” said Aaron DeYonker, Lucid’s VP of Product.
"We are very excited to see the integration of our world-class modeling applications and libraries with Lucid’s cloud-based BuildingOS building data platform which will make the use of our research accessible to many more people who are trying to make better financial decisions about efficiency and retrofit projects," said Mary Ann Piette, Staff Scientist and Director of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“The U.S. Department of Energy is firmly committed to maximizing the impact of the national lab system on the clean energy economy. The Small Business Vouchers pilot allows innovative entrepreneurs greater access to the world-class resources and brilliant minds in our labs. These partnerships can help small businesses solve their most pressing technical challenges - and help bring clean energy technologies to commercialization much faster,” said Dr. David Danielson, Assistant Secretary for Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
“Lucid has a long history of delivering technology advances via the small business programs of EPA and DOE and these latest awards continue our track record of using research to benefit our customers who are managing large, complex building portfolios with Lucid’s BuildingOS platform,” said Vladi Shunturov.
About Lucid
Lucid provides a data and analytics platform to make data-driven decisions to improve building efficiency and portfolio performance. A recognized pioneer in using data visualization to understand and quickly identify savings in energy, gas, water and other resources, today Lucid’s SaaS-based BuildingOS platform has over 500 customers, 11,000 buildings and one billion square feet under management and empowers teams across finance, operations and sustainability to collaborate to get the best from their buildings. For more information visit http://www.luciddg.com. You can also follow Lucid on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Alex Lorton, Lucid, http://www.luciddg.com, +1 (510) 907-0400, [email protected]
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