SeriousEnergy Manager Empowers Students to Get Serious About Energy

We get to meet and work with some seriously cool people at Serious Energy. But two of the coolest people would have to be Harker Upper School students, Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, who had the vision, passion and dedication to get their school to implement smart energy management tools.

With SeriousEnergy Manager enterprise building optimization platform, the Harker School was able to realize how its buildings were using, expending, and wasting energy. One of the big findings was that the air conditioning was switching on every night in the school’s gym, cooling large amounts of air for no one and for no reason at all. Such findings allowed the school to realize over 13% in electricity cost savings, with continuous energy savings forecasted to result in a payback of less than 2 years – an amazing way to convert wasted energy and money into educational necessities that benefit the students and school community.

Shreya and Daniela realized that visibility into buildings’ heating and cooling systems was absolutely essential to understanding how to better manage their school’s energy use. If you don’t know how energy is being used, you can’t control how energy is being used. With platforms such as SeriousEnergy Manager, students, school administrators, and facility teams are able to easily and more reliably monitor and analyze their school’s energy expenditure. Such monitoring enables optimization for savings – and ultimately enables the school’s resources to be used where most needed – for the students, teachers, and programs. Perhaps just as important, SeriousEnergy Manager empowers student participation and collaboration in creating a more energy efficient and optimized school community. And this is no small thing.

Recently back from Power Shift 2011 at the White House, where they went to talk with U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, and the Acting Under Secretary of Energy, Arun Majumdar about their school’s energy saving strategies, Shreya and Daniela are now on a mission to help other students at other high schools around the country implement smart energy management tools and practices at their schools too. Serious Energy will be supporting and reporting back on their efforts to build a movement of energy-smart students and schools.