'Vigilent' El Cerrito Startup Winning Awards for Energy Savings

A startup company tucked away in the second floor office space of El Cerrito Plaza is becoming an award-winning leader in the field of energy management.

Vigilent, co-founded in 2004 by El Cerrito resident and former UC Berkeley researcher Cliff Federspiel, focuses on self-adjusting energy management systems that control heating and air conditioning.

Combining artificial intelligence with networks of sensors, Vigilent has deployed its systems in more than 120 facilities in North America and Japan, and in the last six months has won five major awards for its work.

Last month, Vigilent HVAC systems at the San Diego State University’s 76,000-square-foot Aztec Recreation Center and UC San Diego’s 465,000 square-foot Geisel Library earned those two campuses Higher Education Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Best Practive Awards

Though its offices are strikingly small and underwhelming, Vigilent serves customers on a large scale.

According to Federspiel, the company’s chief technology officer and president, almost 90 percent of Vigilent’s customers are “mission critical facilities” like data centers and telecommunication central offices.

“They’re basically places where you have electronics equipment (whose) function is absolutely critical for certain organizations, that produces a ton of heat,” Federspeil said in his El Cerrito office. “We address the infrastructure that’s there for getting the heat out.”

These facilities can easily have more than 100 air conditioning units, each with several controls, creating a complex, multi-variable challenge, he said.

The problem with so many cooling units, said Federspiel, is that they are often uncoordinated, which results in inefficient energy use and inconsistent results.

Vigilent sums up its solution in three words: measure, model, manage.

Using simple Velcro, Vigilent installs wireless sensors, each only slightly bigger than an iPhone, throughout a facility to capture real-time data about the temperature.

“We can deploy several hundred of these in a mission critical facility that’s live without any kind of disruption to the operation at all, and that’s really something that nobody’s been able to do before,” Federspiel said.

These sensors are part of a network that feeds data into a computer, which then uses self-adjusting software to analyze the data and decide how to manage the air conditioning resources to achieve a specific result.

Vigilent’s key feature that separates it from other energy management companies is that its system learns, said Federspiel.

The system uses built-in models to predict how changes in the cooling resources will affect the temperature. It then compares its predictions to the actual results, and progressively learns to become better at predicting, and consequently manages the temperature better.

Chris Kryzan, the vice president of marketing, said that on average, Vigilent provides customers a 40 percent reduction in the cost of cooling and ventilation. With energy savings on that level, a Vigilent system can pay for itself within two years.

The system's hundreds of sensors and computer can easily fit into a small storage closet, and Federspiel said they take less than two weeks to install.

While Vigilent normally deploys its systems into data centers of large companies like Verizon and NTT Communications Corporation, it also has several systems in other kinds of large structures that pose extra energy-efficiency challenges, like the large library at UC San Diego.

“Our partnership with Vigilent and the performance of the Vigilent Energy Management system has been a great success story for the campus energy conservation program,” said Russell Thackston, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Auxiliary & Plant Services at UC San Diego. “The system has not only helped reduce our energy costs, but has also reduced our carbon footprint."

According to Thackston, the university will save almost $300,000 in annual energy costs. And with UCSD expecting over $1 million in rebates from the California Energy Commission and utilities companies, the Vigilent system will pay for itself within six months of installation.

These rebates from the state and utility companies are how Vigilent attracted early customers after releasing its first product in 2007.

At that time, it was still known as Federspiel Controls, a name given by Federspiel and his wife, Elisa, who is a co-founder and the vice president of corporate operations.

The name Vigilent came only last year, as part of Kryzan’s efforts to rebrand the company. Taking the words vigilance and intelligent, Kryzan came up with the new name.

“It really represented what we’d thought we’d do, which is to watch out for things that are going to endanger your operations,” he said.

From its early beginnings as a consulting and service-based company with only three or four people involved, Vigilent has evolved into an increasingly successful business with a unique product and a payroll closer to 100.

The nation’s economic recession has had little impact on Vigilent, especially since its product offers a way for companies to cut costs, the company says. According to Federspiel and Kryzan, company revenues more than doubled last year, and this year they are on track to do the same.

As Vigilent has grown, its award shelf has started filling up. The UC San Diego and San Diego State honors in June followed others.

In May, out of 2,100 applicants from over 30 countries, Vigilent was named one of the top 50 startups in the world as a winner of the TiE50 2012 awards, TiE Silicon Valley’s annual awards program for technology startup companies.

And in April, Vigilent announced it won the 2011 Green and Sustainability Supplier Award given by Verizon; and the 2012 Green Enterprise IT Award from the Uptime Institute.

And while the awards and balance sheet are gratifying, the company takes pride in its success at reducing energy use and consequently greenhouse gas emissions.

Federspiel has been studying the artificial intelligence and control engineering in the context of ventilation systems since receiving his PhD from MIT in 1992. Over the last 20 years, he said he has seen what an enormous problem energy management is, a problem Vigilent is aiming to tackle.

“We do well by doing good in a market that is gigantic and global in scope,” he said.