Commercial, Demand Management, Energy Efficiency  -  February 15, 2017 - By Amy Poszywak

Petco targets enterprisewide savings with analytics-driven energy management program

^{Storefront photo provided by Petco.} 

On a path toward expected energy savings that will reach even higher, Petco Animal Supplies Inc. has been able to reduce energy use by 3% to 5% within a year of its deployment of a standardized, analytics-driven energy management program across its national store portfolio.

The pet supplies retailer in 2016 made the decision to embark on the five-year program with WiPro EcoEnergy with the goal of achieving enterprisewide operational energy savings without compromising Petco's guest experiences or the safety and comfort of animals in its stores.

Over the ten years prior, the company had deployed a series of initiatives aimed at improving the energy efficiency across its portfolio of stores and rolling out a building controls system, Petco energy manager David Peterson recently told Smart Energy Decisions. Through the years, Petco went having no controls, to having one that didn't achieve its ideal results, to finally implementing a fully functional system. At that point, Peterson said it became clear there the company had more building data coming in than it could make use of on its own.

"We knew that there was likely a really good opportunity out there to just leverage that data into strategies that would help us save energy, and savings to be had that we weren't capturing in the way we were doing monitoring and controls," Peterson said.

The first step of the program, which leveraged Petco's existing building management system, required an investment of about $100,000 associated with taking its IT systems, and thus all of the data and controls capabilities, in-house. Outside of being a requirement for the program, Peterson said that move, which granted Petco full control of all of its data, has resulted in a number of other benefits to Petco from a business continuity and risk standpoint.

"It's our data, we now own it and we house it," he said.

The program — which started with a 100-store pilot before being expanded to 1,400 Petco stores — has standardized the way Petco stores manage energy and implemented deep HVAC and lighting controls-based saving strategies. Data from each store's building management system is collected and centrally analyzed by EcoEnergy's energy management platform, which collects and carries out analytics on around 150-200 data points for every store. Those data points include the status of the HVAC system and its modes of operation, temperature values for zones in each store, return air temperature, outside air temperature, lighting status for internal and external lights, and store occupancy status from security alarm systems.

The platform also collects data from external sources like weather feeds, maintenance management and billing management systems.

Peterson said the biggest reason the program has already been so successful for Petco is the strong support it has gotten from within the company.

"I think that's one of the most critical elements [for a successful project implementation]: You need to have support in the senior ranks of your organization, and across your organization, from your energy team to facilities and maintenance," Peterson said. "And our folks have been incredible."