City of Madison’s Playbook for Orchestrating Grid-Interactive Buildings Across Municipal Assets

In this presentation, Andrew Vavoulis, Controls Engineer at HGA Architects & Engineers, and Bill McGuire, Cofounder of ACE IoT Solutions, walk through how they put grid-interactive building strategies into practice with the City of Madison. The project sits inside a U.S. Department of Energy–funded Connected Communities initiative aimed at proving replicable value for both building owners and utilities.

Phase one spans seven municipal buildings, integrating BAS, lighting, EV charging, and DERs to support load shedding, shifting, and forecasting. Rather than a glossy case study, they focus on what actually happened once theory met real buildings.

Behind the paywall, you’ll hear what broke first: procurement friction, untested “digital” BAS assumptions, missing or disconnected meters, and underestimated IT dependencies. Andrew and Bill unpack how unclear system semantics, fragmented networks, and late IT involvement slowed progress—and what they’d do differently next time.

They also share how simple forecasting approaches failed, why electrical load prediction is harder than HVAC, and how they ultimately deployed an open, Python-based model inside a live energy management system. If you’re running—or considering—grid-interactive, EMS, or demand flexibility programs in public or private portfolios, this recording is a reality check worth watching.

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