CHICAGO, IL- The new downtown smart grid pilot program announced late last week by the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago could net large building owners more than $200,000 per year, Executive Vice President Michael Cornicelli exclusively told GlobeSt.com. The experiment, which will begin this year with 40 of the association's more than 260 buildings, will not only help cut energy usage and costs, it will eventually allow owners to renegotiate the agreements they sometimes make to curtail energy use at strategic times.

“Some of our buildings are already involved in these [agreements], but right now they don't pay very much,” Cornicelli said. In these transactions, called aggregated demand responses, the need for more electricity on one part of the grid, perhaps from New York City on a hot August day, will prompt a request to a large building owner to cut their energy use so the utility can route the saved power to an area with higher demand. “Sometimes you're asked to move a megawatt of load on 20 minutes notice and there are few buildings that can do it.”

Cornicelli estimates that a typical large downtown office building of 1 million SF can only gross about $26,000 per year from these agreements, and the middlemen needed for the deals usually take 50% of that.