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Washington State’s building performance standards forced Hudson Pacific Properties to move faster on an underperforming Seattle office building—or face roughly $0.30 per square foot in annual penalties.
They could have made an excuse. A single tenant data center accounted for 20–50% of the building’s total energy use, and Hudson couldn’t access reliable tenant PDU data. Rather than waiting for cooperation that might never come, the team focused on what they could control: the base building.
“This was the lone asset we had that wasn’t performing,” said Todd Sparrow, Director of Engineering at Hudson Pacific Properties. “We couldn’t get good utility data out of their PDU, so we focused on how we could operate the rest of the building to get our EUI (Energy Use Intensity) under the target.”
Earlier attempts at fault detection didn’t help. One platform generated too many generic alarms. Another delivered raw data without operational context. “There was no technical expertise to help us manage the rules,” Sparrow said. “It was just noise.”
The breakthrough came when a new FDD platform (Clockworks Analytics) was paired with technology-enabled services and monitoring-based commissioning (McDonald Miller). Instead of hunting for a single silver bullet, analysts worked through dozens of small operational issues—overridden equipment, failed dampers, bad sensors—that added up.
“There was no major smoking gun,” Sparrow said. “It’s dozens and dozens of little things that added up to a significant EUI drop.”
Local MBCx incentives helped fund the repeated tuning, easing internal resistance to an ongoing analytics program instead of a one-time retrofit. Once the building crossed the EUI threshold, the message to leadership was simple. “We got it under,” Sparrow said. “Now we don’t have to pay 30 cents a foot.”
If you’d like to learn more, here are some ways to stay updated on stories like this:
Washington State’s building performance standards forced Hudson Pacific Properties to move faster on an underperforming Seattle office building—or face roughly $0.30 per square foot in annual penalties.
They could have made an excuse. A single tenant data center accounted for 20–50% of the building’s total energy use, and Hudson couldn’t access reliable tenant PDU data. Rather than waiting for cooperation that might never come, the team focused on what they could control: the base building.
“This was the lone asset we had that wasn’t performing,” said Todd Sparrow, Director of Engineering at Hudson Pacific Properties. “We couldn’t get good utility data out of their PDU, so we focused on how we could operate the rest of the building to get our EUI (Energy Use Intensity) under the target.”
Earlier attempts at fault detection didn’t help. One platform generated too many generic alarms. Another delivered raw data without operational context. “There was no technical expertise to help us manage the rules,” Sparrow said. “It was just noise.”
The breakthrough came when a new FDD platform (Clockworks Analytics) was paired with technology-enabled services and monitoring-based commissioning (McDonald Miller). Instead of hunting for a single silver bullet, analysts worked through dozens of small operational issues—overridden equipment, failed dampers, bad sensors—that added up.
“There was no major smoking gun,” Sparrow said. “It’s dozens and dozens of little things that added up to a significant EUI drop.”
Local MBCx incentives helped fund the repeated tuning, easing internal resistance to an ongoing analytics program instead of a one-time retrofit. Once the building crossed the EUI threshold, the message to leadership was simple. “We got it under,” Sparrow said. “Now we don’t have to pay 30 cents a foot.”
If you’d like to learn more, here are some ways to stay updated on stories like this:
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This is a great piece!
I agree.