Sean Finegan // UTMB

Tell us about yourself.

I am Sean Finnegan. I’m a business operations manager at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. We are an academic research medical institution here on the island. We own and operate three production plants that export steam, hot water, and chill water for all of the HVAC and sterile processing across around 10 million.

What was life like before EnergyCAP?

We were using estimated savings based on assumptions, based on how the building was performing in these massive spreadsheets, where we had to go in and go look at the weather data every single day and calculate the estimated potential savings. With EnergyCAP, we’ve been able to accomplish energy savings across the institution as a whole. We just purchased EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics (formerly Wattics) and CarbonHub. So we’re getting into that and we’re using those specifically for energy savings and reducing our carbon footprint.

What have been the benefits of using EnergyCAP?

The EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics and the EnergyCAP UtilityManagement pieces are just a huge time saver, for one. It’s really good at communicating, too, to our leadership: “Hey, these are our problems. They’re costing you X amount of dollars per year,” and that’s what speaks their language and helps us get the funding that we need. We had a building that was an institutional support building. It shouldn’t be a high user. It was based on this interval data we were looking at. One single line of code resulted in $26,000 worth of electric savings on this building. We’re hoping to continue to see those savings, and I know that we will. So having it calculated for us is a really big thing for us.

We have a lot of old buildings. It is really nice to be able to show the data and say, hey, we need to invest in these buildings. My vision for the future sure, is to be able to show, “hey, you’re going to save this amount of money if you invest X amount of dollars, and we’ll be able to give it back to you in ten years.” EnergyCAP is super helpful in communicating to our stakeholders, our leadership, and our building managers, and getting them on board with finding these energy savings opportunities.