Environmental Software Briefing: Retroficiency, AlsoEnergy, Practically Green

Science Applications International, Optima Engineering and Linnean Solutions are among a series of new customer wins for Retroficiency, which has now evaluated more than 25 million square feet of commercial building space.

These companies use Retroficiency’s software with their own customers to evaluate and execute building retrofit projects aimed at reducing energy costs.

Retroficiency says its platform has proven to enable Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), facility management firms, large commercial property owners, and related professionals to increase productivity in data collection, load disaggregation, retrofit evaluation, and custom report development by more than 50 percent. The MIT-incubated, angel-funded company launched its software platform in March.

In other software news, Sustainability Dashboard Tools LLC has launched the Sustainability Dashboard (pictured), a web-based service for tracking and managing up to six categories of environmental programs: energy, waste/recycling, water, transportation, consumables (such as office supplies) and cleaning products.

The company says that owners, principals, managers and others can use the software to easily track measurements in one or many buildings, including resource consumption, associated costs against targets and greenhouse gas emissions.

Brandywine Realty Trust, a real investment estate trust that owns, develops and manages a portfolio primarily of Class-A suburban and urban offices in seven states, is an early adopter of the Sustainability Dashboard. The company has 16 major goals for resource use and cost reductions in 2011. These include piloting the Sustainability Dashboard in 86 facilities as part of its Green Cleaning goal of using more than 70 percent sustainable products.

AlsoEnergy has added multiple language support to its cloud-based Power Track software for solar plant monitoring. The platform is now available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

PowerTrack users can also select the preferred measurement units for their data, such as imperial or metric units. AlsoEnergy monitors more than 400 solar power project sites in the United States, Canada, Korea, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Slovakia, France, UAE, Australia, Spain and Greece.

Finally, Practically Green has launched Practically Green for Business, a game-based tool for improving employee and customer engagement in sustainability initiatives. The company also launched a mobile application, available on iPhone and Android smartphone devices.

Demand management company EnerNOC uses Practically Green’s web-based dashboards to help employees keep track of sustainability efforts.