Montreal and Oakland, Calif., March 30th, 2021 – BrainBox AI, a pioneering leader in autonomous building technology, today announced a partnership with WattTime, an environmental tech nonprofit that empowers people and organizations to slash emissions and use cleaner energy. This partnership will drive increased energy savings and CO2 reductions in commercial real estate across North America. A flagship project with the Great Lakes Protection Fund will similarly leverage joint technology solutions to reduce mercury emissions throughout the Great Lakes watershed.
BrainBox AI is the world’s first fully autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) technology for Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. BrainBox AI’s technology continuously makes micro-adjustments to a building’s existing HVAC system, in real-time, based on the monitoring of a multitude of internal and external data points. This industry-defining technology generates up to a 25% reduction in total energy costs, a 20-40% decrease in carbon footprint and a 60% increase in occupant comfort.
Complementarily, WattTime invented Automated Emissions Reduction (AER), software that allows IoT devices such as smart thermostats and electric vehicles to effortlessly and automatically run on cleaner energy. The AER signal enables smart devices—including commercial building energy management systems—to shift the timing of flexible energy use to sync with times of cleaner energy (e.g., wind or solar) and avoid times of dirtier energy (e.g., coal).
BrainBox AI is integrating WattTime’s dynamic marginal emissions signal into its AI data toolkit, to improve its model’s insights into CO2 and mercury emissions-reduction opportunities and enable continuous optimization to further reduce a building’s environmental footprint. The WattTime technology ‘supercharges’ BrainBox AI’s eco benefits, with up to an additional 15% emissions-reduction potential above and beyond baseline.
“Buildings are the largest consumers of energy on our planet and this exciting partnership with WattTime will not only create significant energy savings, but also make a very meaningful impact on the GHG emissions of buildings,” said Sam Ramadori, President of BrainBox AI. “Combining WattTime’s emissions data and signal with BrainBox AI’s autonomous AI technology is the kind of game-changing, scalable innovation that we desperately need to battle climate change.”
Additionally, BrainBox AI, WattTime, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment are partnering on a project funded by the Great Lakes Protection Fund, to combine the power of BrainBox AI’s optimization engine and WattTime’s AER to help buildings located in and around the Great Lakes reduce their mercury emissions.
“This partnership with BrainBox AI speaks directly to WattTime’s mission of increasing environmental and social good through data-driven tools that empower anyone, including building owners and operators, to choose cleaner energy,” said Laura Corso, Managing Director of Partnerships at WattTime. “We’re excited about how this collaboration will enable BrainBox AI’s customers to make their buildings’ environmental footprint even lighter.”
If you are a building owner interested in the benefits of BrainBox AI and Automated Emissions Reduction at your building, please reach out to either WattTime or BrainBox AI.
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About BrainBox AI
BrainBox AI was created in 2017 with the goal of redefining building automation through AI to be at the forefront of a green building revolution. Headquartered in Montreal, a global AI hub, BrainBox AI has a workforce of over 80 employees and supports real estate clients in numerous sectors, including office buildings, airports, hotels, multi-residential, long-term care facilities, grocery stores and commercial retail.
BrainBox AI is one of TIME’ s Best Inventions of 2020 and works in collaboration with research partners including the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) as well as educational institutions including Montreal’s École de technologie supérieure (ETS) and McGill University. Learn more about BrainBox AI.
About WattTime
WattTime is an environmental tech nonprofit that empowers all people, companies, policymakers, and countries to slash emissions and choose cleaner energy. Founded by UC Berkeley researchers and now a subsidiary of RMI, we develop data-driven tools and policies that increase environmental and social good. We invented Automated Emissions Reduction (AER), software that allows IoT devices like smart thermostats and electric vehicles as well as entire buildings to effortlessly and automatically run on cleaner energy. We popularized emissionality, a technique to achieve greater avoided emissions through better siting of new renewable energy projects. And we co-founded the global Climate TRACE coalition, which harnesses remote sensing and software intelligence to monitor human-caused GHG emissions in near real time, bringing transparency and accessibility to global emissions. During the energy transition from a fossil-fueled past to a zero-carbon future, WattTime ‘bends the curve’ of emissions reductions to realize deeper, faster benefits for people and planet.
