Clean Data for a Clean Planet: EMPEQ’s Pioneering Technology

EMPEQ, a pioneering software company founded by former energy auditors and an energy engineer, is revolutionizing the energy industry. Fueled by frustration over the inefficiencies in data collection during energy audits, CEO Herbert Dwyer and his co-founders Derek LaClair and Ed Wilson, P.E. developed the Fast Site Survey app, powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence. 

Who is EMPEQ and what are you doing to contribute to the energy industry?

EMPEQ is a software company founded by two former energy auditors and an energy engineer. Ultimately, we all got fed up with the inefficient status quo approach to collecting building data. Co-founder and CEO Herbert Dwyer went through the energy audit process over 300 times and after he and his co-founders, Derek LaClair and Ed Wilson P.E., had the incredibly awkward experience of revisiting a site four times to re-capture data that was either missed or incorrectly recorded they decided that something had to change.

Herbert, Derek, and Ed united with several world-class software talents to create the Fast Site Survey app in 2020. Using cutting-edge artificial intelligence, Fast Site Survey provides ability to perform rapid equipment inventories, digitize specifications, and instantly glean insights like remaining useful life with one click of a smartphone’s camera. We’ve experienced incredible success since launching the product including growing our customer base by almost 1,000% this past year alone. Additionally, along the way we’ve picked up customers such as Siemens, Johnson Controls, the US Department of Energy’s Industrial Assessment Centers, and the US Air Force.

Our most important contribution to the energy industry is that, by reducing time spent on building and equipment audits by 50-80%, we’re bringing critical additional bandwidth to our labor-starved beachhead market of energy engineers and their associated contractors.

What strategies and recommendations does your company offer to help clients reduce their carbon footprint and achieve sustainability goals through energy audits?

America needs to decarbonize over 7,000 buildings every day for the next 28 years if we are to reach our 2050 climate goals and the first step in each of these projects is to provide building owners actionable insights on existing equipment and other critical infrastructure in their buildings. The only way that we will ever achieve anything coming close to this pace of retrofit is if we introduce game-changing technologies to the equation. We believe that Fast Site Survey can be a part of the technology stack that will substantially increase the rapidity with which we reduce our clients’ carbon footprint and facilitate the achievement of sustainability goals.

How does being a part of AEE and AEE Events help you in your business?

We knew from the day that we set out to create Fast Site Survey that energy auditors and specifically Energy Engineers and were the group that would see the most value in our initial product; we were more in tune with identifying our target market than most entrepreneurs as we had the benefit of living the pain firsthand as energy auditors and energy engineers. That said, you can have the world’s best mousetrap but you’re not going to accomplish much if people don’t know about it. This is where AEE and AEE Events have been so helpful.

Having the opportunity to meet so many incredible professionals in one place has been outstanding for our company. We’ve been able to spread the word about Fast Site Survey faster than we’d ever imagined. Maybe the best way to say it is that we would never have achieved the 1,000% growth year-over-year mentioned above without AEE.

What are you most looking forward to for AEE World?

We’re probably a little biased, but we’re most looking forward to EMPEQ CEO Herbert Dwyer’s presentation at the Innovative Technology Breakfast leading into former Vice President Al Gore’s Keynote Address. We’ve had some very interesting findings over the past year about the importance of having uniform, centralized equipment and building data when performing energy audits and pitching building retrofits. EMPEQ is really excited to share just how crucial the cleanliness of data is to an efficient audit and retrofit process. Ultimately, we strongly believe that Clean Data = Clean Planet.

Contribution by Derek LaClair, COO of EMPEQ

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