Consumers aren’t the only ones fretting about sky-high energy bills. Multiply their concerns by half a billion square feet of property and hundreds of millions of dollars in higher energy costs. That’s the challenge facing large national retailers and other corporations this year. RealWinWin, an energy demand reduction specialist, helps the Fortune 1000 address that challenge throughout the U.S., one well-deserved energy rebate at a time.
RealWinWin helps a wide variety of businesses maximize their energy efficiency, lowering annual operating costs and optimizing eligibility for energy efficiency-related rebates from utilities, governments, and other agencies. Last year, the company managed more than 10,000 projects, helping 27 national corporations–-including such household names as ING Clarion, Pier 1 Imports, JCPenney, Gander Mountain, AEW Capital Management, L.P., and Starwood Hotels & Resorts–save literally millions of dollars by optimizing energy consumption across a combined portfolio of over half a billion square feet of retail, office, hospitality, and industrial space.
“RealWinWin’s risk-free business model, coupled with national retailers’ year-round need to perform building renovations among their hundreds of locations, makes selecting more efficient building systems a true win-win proposition,” says Mark Jewell, founder and president of RealWinWin, Inc. “This is especially the case now that energy prices are so high–with no relief in sight.”
Here’s how RealWinWin works: The company’s expert energy engineers, financial analysts, and lease specialists analyze the various aspects of a client’s energy usage in each of its facilities—-heating, air conditioning, lighting, and more—-to determine that client’s eligibility to earn thousands of cash rebates from hundreds of electric and gas utilities and other funding sources across the nation. Then RealWinWin finds, negotiates, and applies for these rebates–usually between $0.25 and $0.50 per square foot of improved building space–on behalf of its client. Large, geographically dispersed organizations can receive rebates in dozens of states, and the total “free money” collected by a single large company could amount to hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars in a given year.
RealWinWin also offers recommendations for increasing energy efficiency, which can improve its clients’ eligibility for rebates, while at the same time lowering operating expenses for the life of that equipment. There are over two dozen categories of rebates available to help pay for lighting, HVAC, motors and drives, building envelope (cool roofs and insulated windows), energy management systems, and even consulting services, including engineering/design assistance for new projects, and commissioning to make sure that a building’s energy-consuming equipment is operating as designed.
For example, when a nationally recognized retailer wanted to upgrade the HVAC systems in all 1,000 of its locations across the U.S., RealWinWin helped it choose the most efficient equipment and coordinate purchases to get a better deal on HVAC equipment across the entire portfolio of properties, saving the retail chain significant dollars.
In another example, Starwood Hotels & Resorts recently turned to RealWinWin after attempting to file its own rebates for a 72-location retrofit project. After RealWinWin analyzed the project and made recommendations, Starwood qualified at all 72 locations.
RealWinWin has also worked extensively with ING Clarion, the U.S. investment arm of the world’s largest real estate investment manager, performing energy efficiency assessments and rebate-filing services for more than five dozen income-producing properties across the country.
Similarly, RealWinWin helped AEW Capital Management, L.P., a real estate investment management company, increase a single office building’s rebate from $150,000 to over $400,000 just by selecting a different program to file under. And then there’s RealWinWin’s work for JCPenney, another success story: since signing with RealWinWin, JCPenney has earned enough money from rebates to start tracking energy rebate monies as part of its budgeting process, highlighting the extra annual revenue received from energy rebates.
“Our job is to reduce clients’ energy bills. We help them make the right choices when they specify and purchase new equipment, which not only improves rebate eligibility, but also lowers energy costs over the life of that equipment,” says Jewell. “Our close relationships with utilities and government agencies across the country, and the volume and variety of filings that we expedite, make RealWinWin the most efficient route to maximizing the dollars that our clients collect from these programs. Our services just make sense–from both an economic and an environmental perspective.”
