Cross-System Energy Management: Using Technology to Move Beyond Improving Components in Isolation

At university engineering labs, students learn to draw dotted lines around a problem schematic —a neat “system boundary” isolating just the components needed for a calculation. It’s a useful trick in classes like thermodynamics: focus on the chiller inside the box and ignore everything outside. 

But in real buildings, those tidy boundaries don’t exist. Heating, cooling, ventilation, and process systems all bleed into each other. And the waste energy leaving one box can often become the fuel that powers another. The simple but siloed approach of optimizing one system at a time misses huge opportunities lurking in the gaps between systems.

It’s time to move beyond improving components in isolation—tweaking a boiler here, upgrading a chiller there—and start examining how those systems interact. “A very future-forward, progressive energy manager should really be understanding that these are all systems of systems, and there is no isolation that you can truly create that is going to be totally independent of some other variable or mechanism,” says Mark Chung, CEO and founder of Verdigris, an electrical meter and energy management platform provider. 

Yet too many energy managers are stuck working very much at the equipment or system level, not at the whole building or whole campus level. They might replace a 25-year-old chiller because it’s in this year’s budget without considering that next year’s boiler replacement could be combined with it for a more holistic solution.

This article explores how a growing cadre of energy management pros are breaking out of that narrow mindset. By zooming out and treating buildings as ecosystems, they uncover hidden synergies—turning “waste” energy into value. We spoke with experts, including facilities directors, consulting energy engineers, and energy management software providers. Their stories and candid insights share a common theme: major efficiency wins are possible when you stop optimizing components in a vacuum and start optimizing the entire environment. 

For instance, leading universities are reinventing entire campus HVAC systems to share heat between buildings and reach carbon reduction goals. Industrial facilities are warming offices with waste heat from their processes. Data center operators are experimenting with repurposing server exhaust to heat neighboring buildings. 

Yet, despite the attraction of revolutionary waste conversion projects, it would be disingenuous of us to start the story there. The glamorous waste recovery projects don’t start glamorous; they start with meticulous and data-driven energy management teams that put in the work to effectively earn creative capital projects. We’ll delve into those inspiring examples later on, but first comes the groundwork that makes such breakthroughs possible.

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Crawl Before You Run: Fix and Optimize Before You Invest

Getting to the large, multi-system energy wins depends on winning the basics first. It starts with squeezing out the waste within a single building’s current systems as a springboard to more ambitious cross-system integrations. This means fixing operational issues and inefficiencies that hinder peak performance. Only then can you effectively layer on new technology or link systems together.

Matt Gelnett, Director of Engineering at InSite, an energy engineering consultant and analytics platform provider, emphasizes a “back to basics” approach when his team engages with a facility. InSite often comes in as a kind of engineering SWAT team with analytics tools. Gelnett finds that regardless of how advanced a building’s equipment is, there are usually easy gains from tuning up what’s already there.

Gelnett describes a three-phase methodology InSite uses with clients: remediate, optimize, and invest. The first phase is about getting the existing equipment to run as intended. “Believe it or not… the biggest thing we’re finding is operators who… are performing overrides on equipment that leave it running longer than it needs to,” Gelnett says. The result is equipment running 24/7 or even fighting against other systems. The first order of business is often to get scheduling under control and clear out improper overrides. It can be as simple as reprogramming start/stop times or educating staff on using the building automation system (BAS) properly.

The second major issue is a lack of optimization in control sequences. “They don’t have their economizer sequences programmed correctly, or they’re not doing any type of temperature or pressure resets in the building,” says Gelnett, referring to common energy-saving strategies like using outdoor air for cooling or limiting fan speeds when full flow isn’t needed.

After remediation, phase two focuses on implementing more advanced optimizations: repairing or replacing sensors and dampers, adjusting setpoints, and deploying updated sequences of operations. These optimizations are typically identified by fault detection and diagnostics software (FDD). It is at this point when controls vendors, often retained by the building under preventive maintenance service contracts, are utilized to make these changes to the building automation systems.

A recent InSite project at a 1-million-square-foot hospital is a good example of how this process is relevant to buildings of all ages. This state-of-the-art medical center was built in 2019 with what were supposed to be high-performance control sequences meeting ASHRAE Guideline 36. When InSite was brought in by the operations team to provide another layer of building optimization, the energy manager said they already had all the advanced sequences and expected the audit to find little room for improvement. 

“Honestly, I kind of like to hear that skepticism,” Gelnett says—because it means the basics should already be covered.

When InSite started collecting data from the building automation system, a different story emerged. The team of energy engineers found a laundry list of systems that were not performing as expected. For example, air handling units were supposed to do supply-air temperature resets (a Guideline 36 energy strategy). Due to a handful of malfunctioning VAV boxes in the zones, those resets were often locked at extreme values. Essentially, one small fault—a broken damper actuator here, a failed sensor there—prevented the functioning of an entire advanced sequence, causing systemic energy loss and overriding any Guideline 36 planning and implementation work that was done during construction.

Guideline 36 economization and resets, while they may seem simple, are classic examples of sequences that span system boundaries to unlock further efficiencies. These sequences rely on a dynamic understanding of space usage, outside air temperature, cooling/heating capacities, and airflow requirements. Moreover, to work effectively, they require accurate operation of all the sensors, motors, and other electromechanical devices that tell you what’s happening within your building.

With their analytics platform, InSite pinpointed exactly which zones were experiencing the problem: “We can use the analytics to identify which zones are actually driving those resets. So now we can send a technician to go out and troubleshoot one or two VAVs that are causing the reset to go haywire,” Gelnett explains. 

With this pinpointed direction, controls contractors were able to fix a few damper motors and sensors—minor repairs, not capital replacements—and restore a high-value energy efficiency sequence to its design intent. 

“That’s a great example of you not having to spend any money… you dispatch a technician to go out and fix this one small VAV… then your resets [are] automatically going to kick in.”

By restoring the equipment to states that were compatible with the intended sequence of operations, the hospital realized the energy savings it should have been getting all along, without installing any new equipment. This kind of data-driven retro-commissioning is often the prerequisite to more creative cross-system measures. Investing in a fancy heat-recovery system is pointless if your existing controls are fighting themselves; you’ll never see the full benefit until the fundamentals are right.

After remediation and optimization, the “invest” phase identifies new capital projects to save energy further or meet sustainability goals. And those projects are where energy engineers can find hidden gems in efficiency by analyzing systems holistically.

This phased approach (fix, optimize, then invest) ensures that precious capital dollars go to the projects that will move the needle rather than prematurely throwing money at a problem that smarter operations could solve. Crucially, this method also builds credibility with financial decision-makers. 

When an energy manager can say, “We’ve tightened all the screws and implemented all the no-cost improvements, and here’s the data to prove it,” the ask for a capital budget is much more compelling. It’s a formula that saves energy in the short term and lays the groundwork (operationally and financially) for the bigger cross-system projects we’ll highlight later.

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Expanding Your Timeline and Befriending Finance

Assuming an energy manager can wrangle in the low-cost fixes and optimization, pursuing holistic, cross-system energy solutions becomes possible. But one thing is clear: you must plan beyond the next fiscal year. Several experts pointed out that the traditional budgeting process can be a barrier to integrated projects. “We live in this quarterly cycle of financing, especially in the private sector,” observes Sunny Devnani, CEO of kW Engineering, an energy management consultant and FDD platform provider. 

CFOs and accounting teams often focus on hitting short-term budget KPIs, which means the facilities group gets funds to replace one system at a time in isolation. “They’re working to their capital budget for 2026, which is, hey, we got a 25-year-old chiller, we need to replace it,” Devnani says, “and then they’re not looking at, oh, but in 2027, I’ve got to do a boiler replacement. So why not figure out how to blend those two together and do a heat recovery chiller?”

In many cases, the answer is simply that no one has considered and presented a combined plan. “No one is presenting these solutions to CFOs… to not look at the capital budget for the next 12 or 24 months, but to look at the capital budget for the next 60 months,” Devnani explains. The desire (and need) for a plan that combines short-term needs with longer-term investments requires a zoomed out perspective beyond the day-to-day, which is why many organizations make the case to hire a third-party consultant like kW Engineering to take an agnostic, holistic view that identifies cross-system opportunities.

To get the financial side of the organization on board, energy projects have to be sold in financial terms. For example, a heat-recovery system can be folded into a building expansion (and thus depreciated over time) rather than treated as a standalone expense hitting this year’s budget. Or maybe an expensive controls upgrade can be procured “as a service,” spreading the cost annually instead of a one-time capital hit. 

“The industry standard is simple payback,” Devnani adds. “We as engineers have to help the CFOs know where they can leverage [accounting strategies] a little bit more… is the solution a depreciable asset? Is it a SaaS? Where is it going to not impact their quarterly or annual KPI?” By bringing this kind of sophistication to their proposals, essentially translating engineering benefits into CFO-friendly terms, consulting firms and savvy energy managers are finding much more receptive audiences in the C-suite.

Another key is aligning energy initiatives with the organization’s long-term goals and infrastructure plans. Weber State University, located in Ogden, Utah, is a great example of master planning done right. Weber State didn’t just set a vague goal of carbon neutrality by 2040 and hope for the best—they mapped out exactly which projects need to happen each year to hit it. 

“What we’re doing at Weber is we’ve aligned our capital improvement and our capital development dollars with our energy goals,” says Justin Owen, Operations Director at Weber State. “When I say we’re getting to carbon neutral by 2040, that’s because that’s how long I think it will take us to renovate the rest of our buildings. And we’ve laid it out year by year by year.”

In practical terms, that meant securing leadership approval for a 15-year capital plan in which each major retrofit or new construction is judged not just on immediate needs but on how it contributes to the 2040 roadmap. For instance, if a science building was due for an HVAC overhaul in 2022, they committed to a solution aligned with the end-state vision (in Weber’s case, a hybrid VRF system with heat recovery and electrification) rather than opting for a cheaper like-for-like gas boiler replacement that would lock in emissions for another 20 years. (This brings us back to the importance of the term committed emissions…)

It’s worth acknowledging that not every organization has the freedom of a university to plan 15 years out or reinvest savings internally. Private companies often have to justify projects with strict payback thresholds and may be unable to “carry over” energy savings across budget years. But even in these contexts, the principles above still apply. 

It might involve convincing management to bundle two projects together for a better overall ROI or timing an energy upgrade to coincide with a major capital cycle. (For example, if a building is due for a tenant remodel, that’s the ideal time to install a high-efficiency HVAC or heat-recovery system—not five years later when the ceilings are closed up and work must be redone.)

The systems-thinking mindset means you’re always looking a few steps ahead: If I change this system today, how will it impact—or enable changes in—another system tomorrow? Devnani advises energy managers to cultivate this broader vision and educate their finance teams. It may take patience and persistence—“you have to cater to their KPI as much as [to] the building performance,” he notes—but the payoff is transformative. 

Organizations that align their financial planning with their energy and sustainability strategy (rather than treating them as separate worlds) create buildings with symbiotic systems that save money and energy while improving operational efficiency.

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Let Technology and Autonomy Do the Heavy Lifting

As energy managers expand their scope to “systems of systems” and longer time horizons, they quickly realize the value of trustworthy data. You can’t optimize what you don’t measure, and you can’t coordinate complex systems without knowing how they interact in real time. Getting more granular data and better analytics is essential to cross-system efficiency.

The good news is that modern technologies like IoT sensors, submeters, and cloud-based platforms make it easier than ever to collect and crunch the numbers. “You have to meter energy consumption to make educated energy decisions, and it doesn’t have to be that expensive,” notes Mark Chung, emphasizing how obtainable detailed energy data has become. Beyond just raw data, it’s about making information accessible and actionable. This is where software platforms come in.

When used correctly, energy management platforms elevate the role of the energy manager above just hunting for data. “Our platform really is the transparency and visibility engine for the energy manager,” adds Chelsea Davis, product manager for Atrius, a cloud-based provider of applications like energy management. Michael Johnson, the Global Solutions Architect at Atrius, elaborated, “The consolidation of data, the visualization, the automation… frees up time for the energy manager. They’re not spending time chasing down data as much or filling gaps in the data. With that visualization, They can take that time to focus on goals and targets and go after those action items.” 

For more on chasing down energy data, check out our last article The Dirty Jobs of Energy Management: How Software Frees Up Energy Managers.

Instead of spending days figuring out last month’s HVAC kWh or why a boiler’s consumption spiked, the software tools available today are built to surface those insights in minutes. The energy manager can then use the freed time to do something about the findings. “This ability to let go of manual data wrangling and routine control tasks is pivotal in elevating the role of the energy manager,” Johnson says. 

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Taking Energy Management Hands Off the Proverbial Steering Wheel

The concept of elevating the energy manager’s job brings us to a cultural shift underway in the industry: overcoming the fear of advanced supervisory control and automation of daily tasks in building operations. “There’s such a need to feel in control—a very human need to feel in control and to take these actions on your own,” says Chung, reflecting on how operators can be hesitant to let cloud-based platforms autonomously make HVAC sequence and setpoint adjustments. 

This instinct, while understandable, can become “a big barrier for optimizing things,” he adds. Take something like optimizing a chilled water plant: in theory, you could save a lot of energy by continuously tweaking chiller setpoints, pump speeds, and cooling tower fans to respond to weather and load changes. In practice, no human can (or should) do that all day—it’s too complex and time-consuming. 

“You don’t want to be… recalibrating setpoints every 15 minutes. That would just take all your time,” Chung says. This is where AI and advanced controls from leaders like Verdigris, Brainbox AI, and Facil.ai shine: they can make small adjustments every few minutes to keep a system at peak efficiency within safe bounds.

The role of the human shifts to supervisory: you set the bounds of acceptable operation and let the control software handle the minute-by-minute tuning. Chung advises energy managers to build trust in these systems by starting small and proving their reliability. “Figure out how to get trust with those systems that are doing that for you, and then let the technology do some of the heavy lifting,” he urges. He notes, “a lot of low-hanging fruit that we just leave because of this fear” of letting go of direct control.

We’re seeing building operators embrace autonomous solutions provided by their technology platforms. Michael Johnson notes that many Atrius customers use the platform purely for visibility, then gradually trust it to automate tasks like running reports or sending alerts. It’s the classic automation promise: Remove the drudgery to enable higher-value work. In cross-system energy management, higher-value work is about strategy, integration, and innovation.

The next-generation energy manager will be part engineer, part data analyst, and part diplomat (able to work with the CFO and across departments). They’ll use digital platforms to see the full picture and AI to act on it in real time. The end result is what we’ve been talking about all along – turning waste into value.

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals that are unlocking new opportunities for energy managers, let’s dive into some of the accomplishments we’re seeing by industry leaders who’ve arrived at cross-system solutions. 

We’ll cover Weber State’s transformation to hybrid VRF (an energy-saving accomplishment across multiple system boundaries), industrial plants turning waste heat into warm offices, and unlocking unlimited heat with data center co-location.

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Reclaiming Waste: Creative Cross-System Synergies

So, what does it look like when all these principles come together? Some of the most eye-opening examples of turning “waste” energy into value come from projects that cut across typical system boundaries.

Consider the case of Weber State University. Over the past 15 years, Weber State has reinvented its campus HVAC strategy from the ground up, moving toward an all-electric, interconnected approach. “A lot of it’s rooted in our environmental goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2040… we’ve spent the last 15 years trying to figure out what type of building makes sense on a carbon neutral campus,” explains Justin Owen, Operations Director at Weber State. The solution they landed on was a hybrid VRF (Variable Refrigerant Flow) system.

In a traditional campus HVAC setup, you might have huge chillers making cold water and boilers making hot water, with air handlers blowing that heating or cooling into rooms. Moving away from that conventional design had immediate carbon benefits: heat that was once produced by burning natural gas is now produced by electric compressors moving refrigerant through the hybrid VRF system. 

Beyond the direct emissions savings, using VRF heat pump networks allows Weber State to move heat intelligently. “Within the building, you have this energy recovery network,” Owen notes. One room’s waste heat becomes another room’s supply. And this exchange isn’t just within a single building, either. Weber connected their buildings with a campus loop (re-purposing the existing chilled-water piping as a two-way energy highway) so that if one building is cooling while another is heating, they can swap energy across the loop. Their central geothermal fields and chillers only need to handle the net heating or cooling load of the entire campus instead of each building operating as an island.

Buildings that used to guzzle steam now use none—yet occupant comfort is the same or better. “The electrical profile of the building is about the same [as before],” Owen says, “but we’re no longer utilizing steam or [centralized] chilled water, and so our energy use goes way down.” In other words, the campus dramatically cut its fossil fuel use and overall energy waste by sharing energy between buildings.

The hybrid in “hybrid VRF” indicates another important energy conversion from which Weber State benefits. While typical VRF systems run refrigerant lines all the way to each terminal unit, the hybrid VRF has a centralized refrigeration loop and then transfers heat into hot and cold water loops. This strategic conversion from refrigerant to water, further upstream than a typical VRF, minimizes the amount of refrigerant coursing through the buildings. That reduces the risk of refrigerant leaks (and if you’ve been keeping up with our series on refrigerant leak detection, you know how significant those leaks can be for cost, performance, and emissions). 

Perhaps even less obvious is how hybrid VRF fundamentally changed the interplay of HVAC subsystems, unlocking further savings. “We separated the heating and cooling from the ventilation,” Owen says. “So now heating and cooling are performed by the variable refrigerant flow heat pumps, and ventilation is completely separate—which drastically downsizes your fan size.”

In a conventional setup, a central plant sends hot water to an air-handling unit (AHU) on the roof, where that heat transfers into air blown through the ducts. In Weber’s new design, that water-to-air heat transfer happens much closer to the occupied space (at terminal units), which significantly cuts down on the amount of fan energy needed to push air. 

Since embarking on these integrated solutions, Weber has slashed campus utility costs by 55% compared to a 2007 baseline – savings that get reinvested into further upgrades. It’s a prime example of how rethinking the boundaries between electricity, gas, refrigerant, water, and air can unlock value. Instead of one system’s waste heat drifting off a cooling tower, it’s heating the building next door.

The industrial sector offers its own twist on waste-to-value. Devnani recounts a manufacturing client of kW Engineering with large furnaces that ran 24/7, dumping heat into a cooling tower to keep the process lines at temperature. Just a hundred feet away, in the office portion of the facility, that same client was considering installing new electric heat pumps because the offices needed heating in winter. It didn’t occur to anyone at first that these two facts were connected. “They had all this process heat… and they were talking about their office area needing to put heat pumps,” Devnani says. “It’s like, here you go – here’s your heat sump. We’re going to take your waste process heat [for the offices].”

Instead of rejecting the plant’s excess heat to the atmosphere and buying new equipment to heat the offices, kW Engineering helped them use the former to do the latter. The free heat was piped into the office HVAC system via a heat exchanger, eliminating the need to install additional heating capacity for the offices and cutting overall energy use. The only “fuel” needed to warm the offices was the waste energy from next door.

The key was simply bridging two systems that had been viewed as separate. “They were just looking at manufacturing cooling as a separate lane from conditioning the admin offices,” Devnani notes—yet bringing them together was the obvious answer in hindsight.

Data centers might be the most extreme example of concentrated waste energy. A large data center can have megawatts of servers, all of which ultimately turn electricity into heat. It’s not uncommon to see these facilities use massive chillers or cooling towers to dump that heat outdoors. “These [data center servers] are producing so much heat, and they have to take it all out of that chip, right? Putting it somewhere – releasing it into the atmosphere—is kind of silly because you could use that energy,” remarks Verdigris’s Mark Chung.

The potential to reuse data center waste heat has caught the attention of some forward-thinking firms. “The very sustainably minded, hyper-scale guys—you know, the Metas, Microsofts – they’re experimenting with co-locating data centers next to a commercial building… where the rejected heat can then be reused to actually heat the building or do something else with it,” Chung explains. For example, a data center could be built adjacent to an office park, and instead of expelling heat via cooling towers, run the servers’ waste heat into a shared water loop to provide heating for the neighbors.

So, why isn’t this happening everywhere? Mostly logistics and economics. So far, these have been pilot projects—“I don’t see them rolling it out at scale,” Chung notes. It requires coordination (and cost-sharing agreements) between two different owners or business units – something that traditional budgeting and planning frameworks don’t readily accommodate. In places like Scandinavia, there are a few data centers successfully feeding heat into district heating systems, but in the U.S., such projects are still rare. 

Still, the co-location concept is gaining traction as sustainability pressures grow. Chung expects that as energy prices rise, the ROI of capturing data center heat will start to make sense: what’s experimental today could become best practice in the near future.

Even for facilities without such headline-grabbing opportunities, the takeaway is to broaden your view. Ask yourself: What large “waste” streams exist in or around my facility, and is there a way to use them? Breaking out of the usual silos and looking at the full ecosystem can reveal gold hiding in what you used to throw away.

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Conclusion

Getting your buildings to the point where revolutionary cross-system capital projects are possible is not easy. Institutional inertia, tight budgets, risk aversion, and skill gaps are real obstacles. But the trend is clear: leading organizations are moving beyond one-project-at-a-time thinking. They are planning holistically, knocking down walls between departments, and leveraging data and technology to run their facilities in a smarter way.

“Systems of systems” thinking is more than an academic concept—it’s becoming the new blueprint for high-performance buildings. The experts we spoke with are essentially systems integrators, not just energy managers: they integrate mechanical systems, connect finance with engineering, and marry human expertise with automation opportunities.

As these pioneers have shown, when you stop drawing arbitrary lines and instead connect the dots, the gains aren’t just incremental—they’re transformative. The entire ecosystem wins.