WRITTEN BY Kevin Stark

The custom-built software is now being rolled out to other building managers to help reduce energy consumption.

The Shedd Aquarium in downtown Chicago had invested in an impressive suite of clean energy solutions, from a 1 megawatt lithium-ion battery to automated energy management software.

“We had submeters. We were doing monitor-based commissioning. We had these powerful controls. We were doing LED lights, and we had the solar,” said Bob Wengel, Shedd Aquarium’s senior vice president for facilities. “And we were dropping our peak. At one time it was 3.5 megawatts. We got it down to 3, and then we got it down to about 2.9 megawatts.”

Shedd was cruising, Wengel said. Then came a summer thunderstorm.

Brenna Hernandez / Shedd Aquarium

Solar panels are installed at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium in October 2013.

It was 72 degrees and cloudy on a summer day in 2015. A weather system traveled west over Chicago before rolling across the rest of the PJM area to the east — terrific conditions for Shedd to save on its power costs. Mostly, people in PJM’s territory cranked on their air conditioning units, driving up the demand and cost of power, but with a storm overhead, Shedd could be powering down. “They’re still roasting away, and we’re cooling off,” Wengel said. “That’s huge potential for us to really take advantage.”

But, later, when Wengel was reviewing the energy data, he saw that Shedd power had actually surged on that day, pushing its usage above 3 megawatts again when it didn’t need the extra power.

“We blew it,” he said. “We didn’t have our eyes open.”

Wengel called it a lightbulb moment, and he made a key realization that would reshape how the aquarium managed its power altogether. “We didn’t really have anything to make a prediction. We were looking at the weather, but you know these thunderstorms roll in and 30 minutes later they are gone.”

The issue: Shedd could see how much energy it used in real time, but not where it should be adjusting power in order to improve the overall efficiency of the building. Wengel wanted to track his energy use against a baseline, and for that, he needed help. He reached out to Andrew Barbeau, president of the Accelerate Group, an energy consultancy firm.

‘When we look at our mission of conservation, this is our contribution to that.’

“They wanted a tool for their building operators to monitor and make sure things didn’t get out of hand,” Barbeau said. “And to be able to find new strategies for reducing energy from an operational side by being able to directly see the impact. Not just how much energy they were using, but how much better they were doing than they normally would be — every moment of every day of the year, and in real time.”

They searched for existing software, but nothing was right. So, the Accelerate Group, working with Wengel at Shedd, built its own tool — a dashboard to monitor efficiency. In the summer of 2016, it piloted successfully.

When we look at our mission of conservation, this is our contribution to that.