ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Award Winner Webinar Series

Webinar Series: Learn from the Best. ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Award winners share their winning ideas.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program is excited to showcase best practices and innovations from this year’s commercial and industrial Partner of the Year award winners through an engaging webinar series. These partners have demonstrated leadership, innovation, and excellence in improving the energy performance of buildings and plants—and now they’re sharing their expertise and lessons learned.

Join this series to learn about best practices for managing your energy use, engaging your employees and tenants, and communicating your success.

2021 Award Winner Series:

Click on the links below to register for upcoming webinars or to watch recordings.

Past Webinar Series:

View past webinars to see best practices, innovative technologies, and communication and engagement strategies from energy management leaders, as well as sector-specific lessons learned and guidance.

Speaker Bios:

Read more about the energy management professionals behind these award-winning organizations.

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The Value of Benchmarking: A Business Case Approach and Engaging Stakeholders in Your ENERGY STAR Process

This webinar discusses strategies and best practices for creating the business case for benchmarking your buildings using ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager from two ENERGY STAR partners. Goby, a service and product provider, discusses how to build the business case by developing necessary support and buy-in and engaging stakeholders throughout the process. USAA Real Estate makes the business case for benchmarking and energy efficiency due to benchmarking ordinances and other regulations. In addition to monthly benchmarking energy, USAA Real Estate has been benchmarking water and waste since 2001, all while adding value to real estate investments

Topics covered include:

  • Understanding your portfolio’s current status
  • Building your business case for ENERGY STAR
  • Identifying & targeting relevant stakeholder groups
  • Tailoring communication strategies based on stakeholder interests & priorities

About the speakers:

Jason McIntyre, Director of Real Estate Operations and Sustainability, USAA Real Estate

Jason McIntyre is the Director of Real Estate Operations and Sustainability for USAA Real Estate. He joined the company in 2014 as a national property operations manager and now, as the sustainability director, is USAA Real Estate’s internal sustainability subject matter expert where he oversees sustainability initiatives from the asset level to the overall company level. This includes LEED certification and ENERGY STAR benchmarking and recognition at the asset level, company recognition such as ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year, and corporate/investor reporting such as GRESB, investor due diligence questionnaires, and ESG Strategy. Jason is a LEED Accredited Professional with a specialty in Operations and Maintenance (LEED AP O+M) and has a degree in Facilities and Property Management  from Brigham Young University.

Joshua Schubert, PE

Joshua Schubert, PE, is the Director of Energy Engineering at Goby, The ESG Platform, headquartered in Chicago. Josh has been with Goby since its founding in 2009 and actively involved with the EPA’s ENERGY STAR program for over a decade. Josh has been part of the Most Active Licensed Professionals group for many years and Goby works across all asset classes benchmarking commercial, industrial, and multifamily buildings in the US and Canada. Goby has been recognized by the US EPA as a 2021 ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year, Sustained Excellence for the 6th consecutive year, and has been a Partner of the Year since 2012.

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Benchmarking Energy Use and Assessing Energy and GHG Performance During A Pandemic

Are you wondering how to tackle the challenge of benchmarking your energy data during the pandemic due to atypical energy use and occupancy patterns? Curious how to assess your energy and GHG performance for 2020 and 2021? This webinar will give you perspectives from two ENERGY STAR partners.

Barry Abramson from Servidyne, an energy and sustainability consulting firm, discusses the complexity of benchmarking energy use through the pandemic and how to take into account changed occupancy patterns, building operational strategies implemented during low-occupancy periods, and the energy impact of COVID-related measures. He also walks through the thought process of how to assess energy and GHG performance for 2020 and 2021 in comparison to baseline years and targets. Rielle Green from CBRE, a commercial real estate company, shares their perspective including how COVID has changed their building operations, what has been successful, and what has posed challenges.

About the speakers:

Barry Abramson, Principal, Servidyne

Barry Abramson is Principal of Servidyne, an energy and sustainability consulting firm based in Atlanta, GA. Barry has led Servidyne’s partnership with ENERGY STAR over the past 20 years, with the company achieving ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Awards 18 times as a Service and Product Provider working with commercial and institutional building clients throughout the country.

Rielle Green Photo

Rielle Green, Energy & Sustainability Manager brings over 10 years of experience in the fields of energy and sustainability to her role at CBRE. Starting her career at the University of California, Rielle created a program to reduce campus emissions, energy, water, and waste. She then joined the San Francisco Department of the Environment working on energy disclosure policy in the commercial real estate sector. Now at CBRE, Rielle works across a national portfolio creating and implementing programs around energy and water conservation, conducting internal and investor reports including the GRESB (Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark), and oversees LEED®, ENERGY STAR®, WELL® and Fitwel® certifications. Rielle is also using her expertise to spearhead health and wellbeing initiatives and implementing a targeted approach to assessing climate risk and resilience.

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Virtually Proven: Technology-based Solutions for Remote Energy Management

From video calls to video goggles during the COVID-19 pandemic, ENERGY STAR partners have used technology to improve communication among the on-site staff and off-site experts working to improve the energy performance of buildings and plants. Join this webinar to learn from three ENERGY STAR partners how remote energy management strategies implemented during the pandemic have proven to be effective for ongoing use in building management.

Sustainable Investment Group, a building consulting firm, will describe their work with a live streaming audio/video tool that is helping to keep projects moving forward during this time of health risks and limited travel.

RE Tech Advisors will explain their successful Engineer in a Box™ (EiB) model, which involves sending a toolkit, including a smart phone and other engineering instruments, to a property to assist a RE Tech professional engineer conduct a virtual site assessment to help identify and implement energy efficiency strategies.

Georgia-Pacific will discuss how they’ve used video goggle technology at manufacturing plants to communicate with people such as engineers, electricians, and mechanics who are off-site for improved plant and energy management during the pandemic.

Speakers:

  • Jeff Stewart, Senior Energy Consultant at Sustainable Investment Group
  • Mat Lindquist, Principal Engineer at RE Tech Advisors
  • Jeff Kamenski, Technology Leader for Georgia-Pacific’s Corporate Engineering Group

About the speakers:

Jeff Stewart photo

Jeff Stewart is part of the technical services engineering team at Sustainable Investment Group (SIG). His responsibilities include managing the ENERGY STAR Service and Product Provider Department and consulting on the engineering aspects of buildings seeking LEED certification. These include indoor air quality calculations and measurements, ENERGY STAR labels, and retro commissioning services. Jeff has experience working on high rise office buildings, individual tenant spaces, and schools. Jeff holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also an accredited Professional Engineer (PE), ASHRAE Building Commissioning Professional (BCxP), and LEED AP O+M and ID+C.

Mat Lindquist headshot

Mat Lindquist, P.E., is a Mechanical and Computer Engineer with more than 16 years of experience in Building Systems Operations, Commissioning, and Recommissioning and has been working with the RE Tech Advisors team for many years. At RE Tech, Mat designs and performs RE Tech engineering services including building assessments, recommissioning, commissioning, training, and building automation system replacements as well as managing RE Tech’s engineering team. Past projects have included various work for hospitality, hospitals, clinics, research laboratories, production laboratories, office buildings, high and low density residential buildings, senior living, industrial production facilities and warehouses. Mat specializes in reducing building energy consumption by harnessing existing Building Automation and Control Systems and Lighting Control Systems to maximize the energy performance of HVAC systems without impacting occupant comfort.

Jeff Kamenski

Jeff Kamenski has worked in the corporate engineering group at Georgia-Pacific and it’s legacy companies for over 40 years. Over that time he’s primarily held leadership roles applying design tools like 3D CAD, laser scanning and Virtual Reality for use on large projects. 

However in recent years now as the Technology Leader, he is extending that impact by helping the entire Engineering department transform to more modern and agile business systems that produce superior results. 

One of his latest and smaller projects involves applying the use of live streaming audio/video, connecting employees from the manufacturing floor to Subject Matter Experts, engineers and equipment technicians located all around the world

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Dive into water and waste savings strategies from BOMA’s W2 Challenge Champions 

Tuesday, November 9, 1pm ET

Have you been searching for ways to save water and waste in your commercial buildings? Join us to hear best practices from two ENERGY STAR partners that were champions of The Building Owner and Manager’s Association’s (BOMA) W2 (water and waste) challenge. The W2 Challenge was a two-year program designed to encourage buildings to benchmark water usage and waste output and implement best practices to improve performance. Participants committed to enter water and/or waste data at least quarterly in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager® over the 2018 and 2019 calendar years. Nearly 2,000 buildings from more than 400 cities across the US participated, representing nearly half a billion square feet of space. Results from the challenge showed that office sector participants reduced their water-use intensity by 68% and retail and food service participants reduced their waste use intensity by 81%.

About the speakers:

Madeline O’Donnell

Madeline O’Donnell is an ESG Analyst at Principal Real Estate Investors.

Sormeh McCullough

Sormeh McCullough is a Sr. Manager, ESG at Digital Realty, a leading owner, developer and operator of global data centers, where she supports development of the company’s strategy and global targets and oversees the implementation of the company’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) programs. Sormeh manages the company’s annual ESG reporting and supports the company’s renewable energy, energy efficiency, water conservation, and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Prior to joining Digital Realty, Sormeh worked at Waypoint Energy providing energy efficiency services to utilities and the real estate industry, and prior to that she worked at GEI Consultants, providing sustainability services to a range of public and private sectors. Sormeh holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies and a B.A. in Global Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Working Together to Save Energy: Employee Engagement Strategies

Thursday, December 9, 1pm ET

Description: Bring your employees together to save energy! Join us to hear from two ENERGY STAR partners and how they have successfully engaged employees in their energy management plans. Nissan will share how they educated employees about savings at home and work through a phone app, a newsletter, and videos as part of their “Save at Home! Save at Work!” campaign. JCPenney will discuss how empowering their employees with the right information on energy and environmental management, along with fostering a culture that values energy conversation and environmental stewardship, has delivered long-term sustainable results.

About the speakers:

Chris Goddard

Chris Goddard is the Regional Energy & Environmental Manager for Nissan’s operations in the U.S. and Canada. He is responsible for the manufacturing and non-manufacturing facility’s environmental compliance and energy reduction initiatives as well as overseeing planning, forecasting, and measurement of performance improvements.

Chris also served as the Nissan Energy Team leader for the implementation of Enterprise-wide certification for ISO 50001 Energy Management System and Superior Energy Performance.

Chris holds a M.S. degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Tennessee Technological University. Prior to joining Nissan in 2004, Chris served as Vice President of a Nashville-based environmental consulting firm.

Kyle Wilkes is the Energy and Facility Maintenance Director at JCPenney.

Charley Haupt is the President of New Energy Technology.

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