Building owners are being pushed towards “demand flexibility”—from utility demand response programs to grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB) to participating in a VPP—as a way to cut utility costs and support the grid.
The pitch assumes you can coordinate your building’s systems as if they were one and get paid by utilities for the flexibility. In reality, every building is a patchwork of siloed equipment, control systems, and vendors. What sounds like a simple coordination exercise turns into a messy integration project. Three conversations with people in the field revealed the same theme: everyone wants the benefits, but coordinating siloed systems under real-world conditions is harder than anyone expects.
When we spoke with Andrew Rodgers, Co-Founder of Ace IoT Solutions (a building systems integration company), he had just gotten off the phone with a building owner who learned about coordination complexity the expensive way. The client thought connecting a battery system with existing chillers would save money. Instead, the battery control software and building automation system operated independently—the chillers spiked online in the middle of the night, crossing a 75kW threshold that locked the building into a $25,000 annual penalty with PG&E until they can prove they won't exceed that limit for a full year.
Three thousand miles away, Josh Mullen from BrainBox AI (which provides building automation software for multi-site portfolios which provides autonomous optimization and AI virtual engineers for commercial buildings around the world) was working with a multi-site national retailer trying to coordinate demand response across thousands of stores. The current process: facility managers receive email notifications, manually log into building management systems, execute load reduction procedures, then remember to restore systems afterward—all while juggling comfort complaints and equipment failures.
When manual demand response programs meet the real world, events get missed, and responses are inconsistent. Utilities are increasingly layering programs with different notification windows—some still give a day’s notice, others just a few hours, and the newest ones require response in 30 minutes or less. That trend toward shorter-notice events is driven by grid stress and automation capabilities, but it also makes the old manual approach—checking emails, logging into the BMS, and executing playbooks—completely unworkable at scale.
In New York City, Nick Burgess, Building Intelligence Division Lead at MEP design and consulting firm Jaros, Baum & Bolles, described a similar approach. Chief engineers have established playbooks for demand response—such as pre-cooling spaces and temporarily shutting down non-critical equipment. The system works, but it's manual and dependent on busy people who already have full plates managing complex buildings.
Three separate interviews. Three different building types. One consistent theme: everyone wants the benefits of demand flexibility, but implementation is consistently harder than expected.
James Dice, who moderated these conversations, captured the disconnect: "The academics, when they talk about demand flexibility, they assume you could just control all these loads at once from one spot in the building. It's just not true in any building that anybody's ever been into."
The Operational Burden Problem
The fundamental challenge isn't technical—it's operational.
Facility managers are already overwhelmed. Energy managers see optimization opportunities while facility teams see another complex system to manage. Josh described the current manual reality: "Companies either have their own service team and their own HVAC team, or they outsource it, and they could outsource it to two or three or four different teams... Then they need to make sure that people are checking their emails... and then they need to log into the BMS, manually, to make sure it is activated."
Nick explained why this creates tension: manual demand response requires people to execute complex “playbooks” under time pressure while managing everything else that keeps buildings running.
The System Integration Problem
Andrew discovered a pattern across projects: building owners consistently don't understand what their systems can actually do until they try to implement advanced demand flexibility controls. A recent project at the city of Madison, Wisconsin became a case study in this gap.
"We were in these meetings with the city of Madison, doing due diligence," Andrew explained. "They're asking us questions, we're asking them questions, and it's like, okay, well, do you have a BACnet control system? Is your BACnet control system accessible...and they give us the answer that their vendor gave them, the control system is “100% BACnet, it's great.”"
The reality was different. "You get in there and it's not, and there's LON integrations that are present in BACnet, but the actual writeable points aren't available anywhere." The project took a six-month delay just to make the system that Madison was told was "100% BACnet system" actually controllable.
"That project generated a shift in our understanding of the need in the market," Andrew said. "The City of Madison is not an isolated example. We are finding that people do not know what their systems are capable of until they try to enable and support more complex actions–like building demand optimization– with those systems."
The Reality of Siloed Building Systems
Josh captured the scale problem perfectly: "If you have 20 different control systems, you need 20 different control vendors, you need 20 different sequences programmed."
Even simple requests become complex in practice. For example, consider the common demand flexibility strategy of relaxing HVAC temperature setpoints during peak hours. Andrew described the difficulty: "What's hard about demand management is a thermostat that you have to write eight set points to, to get it to shift zone temperature. That's hard." The challenge is getting "deterministic output on something as simple as target temperature for a room" when systems involve "weighted averages between a knob on the wall and occupied, unoccupied, and standby" modes.
This complexity multiplies across different building systems and vendors, making coordinated control far more difficult than theoretical models suggest. The academic assumption that you can coordinate all building loads from one central point breaks down when you discover that your HVAC system speaks BACnet, your lighting runs on a proprietary protocol, your battery has its own control software, and your EV chargers use yet another system. Each requires different expertise, different programming approaches, and different integration methods. What sounds like a simple coordination task becomes a custom engineering project.
The Competing Priorities Confusion
Even when demand management works technically, operational priorities often conflict. For example, what happens when sustainability goals compete with goals to save money via demand flexibility?
Nick explained how this plays out: "If you charge a battery before a grid event and then use that stored energy, you're using more energy overall because of efficiency losses. Typical building performance assessment metrics use total monthly or annual energy, so performance appears to decrease. In reality, you are decreasing carbon emissions because the grid is more carbon intensive during demand response events, but that's not captured in reporting metrics."
Incentives are often misaligned across a building’s complex ecosystem. Energy managers want to participate in utility programs that pay for demand flexibility. Facility managers need reliable building operations and don't want another system to troubleshoot. Sustainability teams focus on carbon reduction, which might require different strategies than cost savings. Property managers care about tenant satisfaction above all else. Meanwhile, utility programs are designed around grid needs, not building operational realities. These misaligned incentives create scenarios where doing the "right" thing for one stakeholder hurts another.
Aggregators Handle the Business Complexity
The most established solution comes from demand response aggregators like CPower, Nuenergen, Enersponse, and Voltus, who handle the utility coordination that individual building owners can't typically manage efficiently.
Josh explained how this works: "They coordinate with these ISO regions, the regional grid operators, where they buy a chunk of demand that they will shed, and then they are on the hook for shedding that demand somehow. So then they reach out to building owners or companies like us that then enroll the building owner."
These companies take the risk and manage regulatory complexity. As Josh put it, "They're doing the hard thing, of sending the signal, enrolling them, taking care of the paperwork and transactions."
Advanced Supervisory Control providers like BrainBox AI Automate Control Sequences at Scale
BrainBox had been working with their multi-site retail client for years when the client asked for help automating their demand response program. The resulting deployment demonstrates how focused solutions can work at scale.
Across thousands of sites with many different types of HVAC control systems, BrainBox will provide a uniform demand response sequence tailored to the local utility’s program specifics, such as whether pre-cooling is allowed or not allowed. The client’s remote operations team doesn’t need to do all the overrides manually.
The key insight: having an Advanced Supervisory Control cloud software provider enables the demand response strategy to be standardized across the portfolio. They abstract away the details of each site and then automate the sequence of operations that provides the demand flexibility. Once the vendor automates demand response for one multi-site retailer, the solution becomes repeatable across similar operations.
Digital infrastructure providers like Ace IoT assess whether buildings are ready for demand flexibility
On behalf of its partners, Ace IoT operates technology infrastructure that supports building demand optimization. Ace IoT also tackles the readiness question before implementation. Determining whether building systems are actually ready for advanced controls has become a necessary business in itself.
Ace IoT’s Sentinel tool helps validate what a building’s OT network is actually capable of before vendors make promises. The same integration issues that prevent advanced demand management also hinder other use cases and cause building management systems to be slow and unreliable.
The conversations revealed a market still finding its footing. While there are many ways to flex demand across all the systems in a building, there are still no comprehensive solutions for multi-system optimization. Success comes from focused solutions solving specific pieces of the puzzle.
Consider what "multi-system optimization" actually requires: coordinating HVAC systems, lighting controls, battery storage, EV charging, elevator operations, and possibly renewable generation, all while respecting different operational constraints and responding to utility signals in real time. Each system has different response times, different control protocols, and different operational priorities. No single vendor has deep expertise across all these domains.
The result is that building owners either get piecemeal solutions that don't coordinate with each other, or they embark on expensive custom integration projects that take months longer than expected. Success comes from focused solutions solving specific pieces of the puzzle.
Josh was candid about current limitations: "BrainBox signals that it is eager to optimize battery and solar alongside HVAC but acknowledges that most buildings are not there yet."
Ace IoT's business model shift toward readiness assessment reflects market reality: building owners need to validate their systems before implementing optimization strategies, not after.
The technology exists to solve coordination problems, but implementation remains complicated and custom. Simple requests become complex execution challenges in real building environments.
The Path Forward
Start with what works. Proven aggregators handle utility relationships and regulatory complexity. Focused automation solutions like BrainBox provide reliable HVAC control at scale. Readiness assessment services like Ace IoT's help validate capabilities before implementation.
Early on, assess your existing demand response participation and target low-hanging fruit, like expanding the playbook or automating complex tasks. Then conduct a study to see the ROI of implementing multi-system coordination, factoring in the cost of uplifting systems where needed.
Bring together stakeholders like Sustainability, Facilities Management, IT, and your existing aggregator to determine the project goals/KPIs and assess potential solutions. Then create design documents such as a Division 23 Sequence of Operations update or Division 25 Integration Automation Systems. These define the outcomes, prevent scope creep and protect the owner, as well as standardize the process using existing design and construction channels the owner knows how to manage. Design/Consulting firms like JB&B typically do the initial ROI study, lead stakeholder workshops, and create design documents.
Finally, issue an RFP for vendor and software solutions and project manage the implementation with expert help. After completion, evaluate the performance against defined KPIs and share success.
New buildings have an opportunity to build flexibility and multi-system coordination into the base building, which greatly reduces cost and complexity compared to retrofits. LEED v5 introduces a more ambitious Grid Interactive credit. Setting goals early in design phases ensures these capabilities are studied and executed effectively by the design team.
Expand carefully. Multi-system coordination remains experimental. Building owners need partners who understand both building operations and grid realities, not vendors promising comprehensive solutions that don't exist yet.
The demand flexibility opportunity is real, but success requires matching solution complexity to operational reality. The most effective approaches solve specific problems well rather than trying to optimize everything at once.
Building owners are being pushed towards “demand flexibility”—from utility demand response programs to grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB) to participating in a VPP—as a way to cut utility costs and support the grid.
The pitch assumes you can coordinate your building’s systems as if they were one and get paid by utilities for the flexibility. In reality, every building is a patchwork of siloed equipment, control systems, and vendors. What sounds like a simple coordination exercise turns into a messy integration project. Three conversations with people in the field revealed the same theme: everyone wants the benefits, but coordinating siloed systems under real-world conditions is harder than anyone expects.
When we spoke with Andrew Rodgers, Co-Founder of Ace IoT Solutions (a building systems integration company), he had just gotten off the phone with a building owner who learned about coordination complexity the expensive way. The client thought connecting a battery system with existing chillers would save money. Instead, the battery control software and building automation system operated independently—the chillers spiked online in the middle of the night, crossing a 75kW threshold that locked the building into a $25,000 annual penalty with PG&E until they can prove they won't exceed that limit for a full year.
Three thousand miles away, Josh Mullen from BrainBox AI (which provides building automation software for multi-site portfolios which provides autonomous optimization and AI virtual engineers for commercial buildings around the world) was working with a multi-site national retailer trying to coordinate demand response across thousands of stores. The current process: facility managers receive email notifications, manually log into building management systems, execute load reduction procedures, then remember to restore systems afterward—all while juggling comfort complaints and equipment failures.
When manual demand response programs meet the real world, events get missed, and responses are inconsistent. Utilities are increasingly layering programs with different notification windows—some still give a day’s notice, others just a few hours, and the newest ones require response in 30 minutes or less. That trend toward shorter-notice events is driven by grid stress and automation capabilities, but it also makes the old manual approach—checking emails, logging into the BMS, and executing playbooks—completely unworkable at scale.
In New York City, Nick Burgess, Building Intelligence Division Lead at MEP design and consulting firm Jaros, Baum & Bolles, described a similar approach. Chief engineers have established playbooks for demand response—such as pre-cooling spaces and temporarily shutting down non-critical equipment. The system works, but it's manual and dependent on busy people who already have full plates managing complex buildings.
Three separate interviews. Three different building types. One consistent theme: everyone wants the benefits of demand flexibility, but implementation is consistently harder than expected.
James Dice, who moderated these conversations, captured the disconnect: "The academics, when they talk about demand flexibility, they assume you could just control all these loads at once from one spot in the building. It's just not true in any building that anybody's ever been into."
The Operational Burden Problem
The fundamental challenge isn't technical—it's operational.
Facility managers are already overwhelmed. Energy managers see optimization opportunities while facility teams see another complex system to manage. Josh described the current manual reality: "Companies either have their own service team and their own HVAC team, or they outsource it, and they could outsource it to two or three or four different teams... Then they need to make sure that people are checking their emails... and then they need to log into the BMS, manually, to make sure it is activated."
Nick explained why this creates tension: manual demand response requires people to execute complex “playbooks” under time pressure while managing everything else that keeps buildings running.
The System Integration Problem
Andrew discovered a pattern across projects: building owners consistently don't understand what their systems can actually do until they try to implement advanced demand flexibility controls. A recent project at the city of Madison, Wisconsin became a case study in this gap.
"We were in these meetings with the city of Madison, doing due diligence," Andrew explained. "They're asking us questions, we're asking them questions, and it's like, okay, well, do you have a BACnet control system? Is your BACnet control system accessible...and they give us the answer that their vendor gave them, the control system is “100% BACnet, it's great.”"
The reality was different. "You get in there and it's not, and there's LON integrations that are present in BACnet, but the actual writeable points aren't available anywhere." The project took a six-month delay just to make the system that Madison was told was "100% BACnet system" actually controllable.
"That project generated a shift in our understanding of the need in the market," Andrew said. "The City of Madison is not an isolated example. We are finding that people do not know what their systems are capable of until they try to enable and support more complex actions–like building demand optimization– with those systems."
The Reality of Siloed Building Systems
Josh captured the scale problem perfectly: "If you have 20 different control systems, you need 20 different control vendors, you need 20 different sequences programmed."
Even simple requests become complex in practice. For example, consider the common demand flexibility strategy of relaxing HVAC temperature setpoints during peak hours. Andrew described the difficulty: "What's hard about demand management is a thermostat that you have to write eight set points to, to get it to shift zone temperature. That's hard." The challenge is getting "deterministic output on something as simple as target temperature for a room" when systems involve "weighted averages between a knob on the wall and occupied, unoccupied, and standby" modes.
This complexity multiplies across different building systems and vendors, making coordinated control far more difficult than theoretical models suggest. The academic assumption that you can coordinate all building loads from one central point breaks down when you discover that your HVAC system speaks BACnet, your lighting runs on a proprietary protocol, your battery has its own control software, and your EV chargers use yet another system. Each requires different expertise, different programming approaches, and different integration methods. What sounds like a simple coordination task becomes a custom engineering project.
The Competing Priorities Confusion
Even when demand management works technically, operational priorities often conflict. For example, what happens when sustainability goals compete with goals to save money via demand flexibility?
Nick explained how this plays out: "If you charge a battery before a grid event and then use that stored energy, you're using more energy overall because of efficiency losses. Typical building performance assessment metrics use total monthly or annual energy, so performance appears to decrease. In reality, you are decreasing carbon emissions because the grid is more carbon intensive during demand response events, but that's not captured in reporting metrics."
Incentives are often misaligned across a building’s complex ecosystem. Energy managers want to participate in utility programs that pay for demand flexibility. Facility managers need reliable building operations and don't want another system to troubleshoot. Sustainability teams focus on carbon reduction, which might require different strategies than cost savings. Property managers care about tenant satisfaction above all else. Meanwhile, utility programs are designed around grid needs, not building operational realities. These misaligned incentives create scenarios where doing the "right" thing for one stakeholder hurts another.
Aggregators Handle the Business Complexity
The most established solution comes from demand response aggregators like CPower, Nuenergen, Enersponse, and Voltus, who handle the utility coordination that individual building owners can't typically manage efficiently.
Josh explained how this works: "They coordinate with these ISO regions, the regional grid operators, where they buy a chunk of demand that they will shed, and then they are on the hook for shedding that demand somehow. So then they reach out to building owners or companies like us that then enroll the building owner."
These companies take the risk and manage regulatory complexity. As Josh put it, "They're doing the hard thing, of sending the signal, enrolling them, taking care of the paperwork and transactions."
Advanced Supervisory Control providers like BrainBox AI Automate Control Sequences at Scale
BrainBox had been working with their multi-site retail client for years when the client asked for help automating their demand response program. The resulting deployment demonstrates how focused solutions can work at scale.
Across thousands of sites with many different types of HVAC control systems, BrainBox will provide a uniform demand response sequence tailored to the local utility’s program specifics, such as whether pre-cooling is allowed or not allowed. The client’s remote operations team doesn’t need to do all the overrides manually.
The key insight: having an Advanced Supervisory Control cloud software provider enables the demand response strategy to be standardized across the portfolio. They abstract away the details of each site and then automate the sequence of operations that provides the demand flexibility. Once the vendor automates demand response for one multi-site retailer, the solution becomes repeatable across similar operations.
Digital infrastructure providers like Ace IoT assess whether buildings are ready for demand flexibility
On behalf of its partners, Ace IoT operates technology infrastructure that supports building demand optimization. Ace IoT also tackles the readiness question before implementation. Determining whether building systems are actually ready for advanced controls has become a necessary business in itself.
Ace IoT’s Sentinel tool helps validate what a building’s OT network is actually capable of before vendors make promises. The same integration issues that prevent advanced demand management also hinder other use cases and cause building management systems to be slow and unreliable.
The conversations revealed a market still finding its footing. While there are many ways to flex demand across all the systems in a building, there are still no comprehensive solutions for multi-system optimization. Success comes from focused solutions solving specific pieces of the puzzle.
Consider what "multi-system optimization" actually requires: coordinating HVAC systems, lighting controls, battery storage, EV charging, elevator operations, and possibly renewable generation, all while respecting different operational constraints and responding to utility signals in real time. Each system has different response times, different control protocols, and different operational priorities. No single vendor has deep expertise across all these domains.
The result is that building owners either get piecemeal solutions that don't coordinate with each other, or they embark on expensive custom integration projects that take months longer than expected. Success comes from focused solutions solving specific pieces of the puzzle.
Josh was candid about current limitations: "BrainBox signals that it is eager to optimize battery and solar alongside HVAC but acknowledges that most buildings are not there yet."
Ace IoT's business model shift toward readiness assessment reflects market reality: building owners need to validate their systems before implementing optimization strategies, not after.
The technology exists to solve coordination problems, but implementation remains complicated and custom. Simple requests become complex execution challenges in real building environments.
The Path Forward
Start with what works. Proven aggregators handle utility relationships and regulatory complexity. Focused automation solutions like BrainBox provide reliable HVAC control at scale. Readiness assessment services like Ace IoT's help validate capabilities before implementation.
Early on, assess your existing demand response participation and target low-hanging fruit, like expanding the playbook or automating complex tasks. Then conduct a study to see the ROI of implementing multi-system coordination, factoring in the cost of uplifting systems where needed.
Bring together stakeholders like Sustainability, Facilities Management, IT, and your existing aggregator to determine the project goals/KPIs and assess potential solutions. Then create design documents such as a Division 23 Sequence of Operations update or Division 25 Integration Automation Systems. These define the outcomes, prevent scope creep and protect the owner, as well as standardize the process using existing design and construction channels the owner knows how to manage. Design/Consulting firms like JB&B typically do the initial ROI study, lead stakeholder workshops, and create design documents.
Finally, issue an RFP for vendor and software solutions and project manage the implementation with expert help. After completion, evaluate the performance against defined KPIs and share success.
New buildings have an opportunity to build flexibility and multi-system coordination into the base building, which greatly reduces cost and complexity compared to retrofits. LEED v5 introduces a more ambitious Grid Interactive credit. Setting goals early in design phases ensures these capabilities are studied and executed effectively by the design team.
Expand carefully. Multi-system coordination remains experimental. Building owners need partners who understand both building operations and grid realities, not vendors promising comprehensive solutions that don't exist yet.
The demand flexibility opportunity is real, but success requires matching solution complexity to operational reality. The most effective approaches solve specific problems well rather than trying to optimize everything at once.
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This is a great piece!
I agree.