Energy bill and carbon footprint are becoming increasingly important topics for commercial buildings. This trend started with large buildings but nowadays also small and medium size buildings occupants and owners are eager to reduce their energy bill and carbon footprint... and to show it to all their stakeholders.

However, to quickly achieve the deployment of energy-efficient systems in most buildings of all sizes in a near future, and to ensure that these systems will bring the maximum savings along their life, there is the need to investigate and implement all kinds of new ideas and features.

We propose that you tell us in this debate what is your opinion on these possible evolutions and ideas.

A/ ON-SITE versus HOSTED energy management solution?

What is a "hosted solution"?

Well, just as a standard "on-site" solution, it requires the meters and the communication to centralize the data. But for a hosted solution, no server or management software are installed locally, just a basic low cost gateway which will "push" all energy consumption data to the service provider servers, through Internet. Then those data will be safely stored and processed by the service provider. The facility manager will access his dashboards and reports through his browser, from anywhere.

If you should select an energy management system in the near future, for small or medium size buildings, what would you choose:

1. a "hosted" solution through a service provider

2. an "on-site" solution

B/ A web community of Building Facility Managers? For which benefits?

What if we could gather building facility managers within web communities for sharing experience and getting tangible benefits from interacting with peers?

In your opinion, what are the benefits which will bring strong value to all Building Facility Managers participating to such communities (you may suggest other benefits, tell us about existing facility managers communities: just add a comment to the article):

1. Share energy savings good practices

2. Get tips on how to best use the system and solve issues

3. Download dashboards and widgets, from the library the community would have built (think of Wikipedia open source projects, ...)

4. Share information on energy regulation and standards

5. Create as a community an energy usage database and benchmark your own building

C/ As building occupant, you are a major contributor to the energy consumption optimization. What about tailoring your own energy dashboards?

It has become so easy to define your own page on iGoogle or equivalent, to collect automatically information on that page with chosen widgets (like news, meteo ... so why not energy measurement). And this information has become accessible at any time and from anywhere with iPhone or iPads ...

as an occupant of the building where you work, are you willing to customize your own energy dashboard?

1. yes

2. no