Liberty Property Trust Cuts Energy 17.9% in Four Years

Liberty Property Trust has reduced energy use 17.9 percent, saving $4.6 million, since implementing its corporate sustainability project in 2008, goals achieved with help from eSight’s energy management system.

Liberty, a $6.2 billion real estate investment trust, owns 79 million square feet of office and industrial space in more than 20 markets throughout the US and UK. The company wanted to collect and measure the energy-related data across the sites, and bring that information together into a central database.

Liberty selected eSight’s energy management software and Exp US Services’ hardware to provide a system that could measure and verify data as well as identify areas of potential savings and reduce overall energy use across its buildings.

The software was installed at Liberty’s headquarters in Philadelphia. Data is collected via Tridium’s Java Application Control Energy (JACE) and automatically imported to eSight. Liberty is now able to analyze data across all buildings and can drill down into the information further using an easy-to-use energy dashboard, eSight said.

Liberty also is able to receive energy alarms, which might be triggered by sudden changes in consumption, and then distribute reports about the changes automatically.

Liberty Trust announced in September that it had pinpointed $2.3 million in energy savings potential across 110 buildings using an energy assessment tool from software company Retroficiency. The tool was able to remotely identify 25 million kWh savings potential, across lighting, heating, cooling, controls and plug loads, using a year’s worth of electric energy interval data and an address for each building. The Virtual Energy Assessment tool allows energy managers to identify potential savings without ever visiting a building or installing specialized hardware.

Liberty Trust won a 2012 Energy Star Partner of the Year award for its energy management approach and savings accomplished in 2011, including reducing its average weather-normalized source energy intensity by six percent, which equates to an estimated energy savings of $1.3 million, and earning Energy Star certification for 26 buildings, for a cumulative total of 78 certified buildings representing 10.8 million square feet of space. In 2011, the company also invested more than $4.2 million to complete more than 160 energy efficiency projects.

Photo of a Liberty Trust LEED building in Philadelphia