The University of Vermont Health Network – Central Vermont Medical Center (CVMC), in partnership with Efficiency Vermont, Liebert Engineering, Inc., and Control Technologies, Inc. (CTI), unveiled an interactive 49-inch LED touchscreen energy kiosk that graphically displays CVMC’s energy usage and costs in a real-time dashboard.

CVMC was ranked in the bottom 25 percent of nationwide hospital energy performance in 2010 when it teamed up with Efficiency Vermont, Liebert Engineering, Inc. and CTI “on a multi-faceted initiative to improve efficiency and reduce consumption. The efforts resulted in a 28 percent reduction in energy consumption, unprecedented for a Vermont hospital, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 6.3 million pounds of carbon dioxide per year, equivalent to taking 604 passenger vehicles off the road for a year.”

As Master System Integrators, CTI seamlessly integrated CVMC’s several different manufacturer controls, their BAS (Building Automation System), using Niagara 4, a universal software infrastructure.

Nick Rock, CTI’s Building Performance Engineer, was then able to leverage the data from CVMC’s BAS system using SkySpark analytical software to gather energy usage data for the hospital and serve it up to an energy dashboard webpage, designed by Signal Advertising and underwritten by Efficiency Vermont.  Nick used SkySpark to not only pass the raw utility data to the dashboard, but also to calculate accumulative energy usage in kBTU and kWh.

In order to allow CVMC to monitor their progress, Nick incorporated predictions of current and future usage goals based on weather by using a regression formula from SkySpark that was based on the previous year’s usage data.

Len Pattison, Chairman of CTI, explained, “We are very pleased to be a partner in this important project; we are always striving to find new ways to help our customers to use their own BAS data to reach energy efficiency goals, reduce their operational costs, and improve their environmental footprint.”

CTI can also design custom dashboards for their customers, pulling in any data, not just the data from their BAS system. These dashboards include custom charts that can turn mountains of data and complex calculations from that data into easy-to-understand, visually powerful representations.