Building Efficiency: Joulea Sees Opportunity in Tackling World’s Largest Source of Energy Usage 

When Ramtin Motahar looks at commercial buildings, he can’t help but notice their inflated appetites for energy. 

“You can’t outrun a bad diet, and we have a bad diet right now,” says the Atlanta entrepreneur behind Joulea, a local startup that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and proprietary hardware to help building owners get a handle on their assets’ energy data — and, more importantly, take action. 

“We see ourselves as an AI sidekick to the building engineer,” Mr. Motahar told Global Atlanta.

Buildings — both commercial spaces like factories and offices, as well as homes — suck up about 40 percent of energy and 74 percent of electricity in the United States. 

That means meeting the world’s sustainability goals — whether the United Nations’ target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius or significantly cutting carbon emissions — will inevitably require a tightening of the belt when it comes to the built environment.

And in the U.S., where the average office building is more than a half-century old, better new construction isn’t the solution. Something has to be done with the historical assets that will be in use for years to come, many of which are the worst energy offenders.

“Bleeding-edge owners — not cutting-edge, but bleeding-edge — know that the future is going to be the buildings that have the low MPGs — in our world, that’s called EUI: energy-use intensity. Because tenants are demanding it, cities are demanding it.”

Still, while Joulea might be considered a cleantech or climate company, it’s not overplaying its “green” hand— unless that’s referring to saving money. 

“If you’re over-engineering, building owners will not pay for it, because they’ve got to pay the bills. It has to be very practical.”

Joulea’s solution — which has won it support from the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech and $100,000 from the Cox Cleantech Accelerator — hinges on tying buildings’ real-world efficiency to the bottom lines of their owners, with an eye toward doing this at scale with ownership groups. 

It works like this: When an owner signs on with Joulea, the company starts by using an autonomous drone outfitted with a proprietary computer to take stock of air leakage, water damage, heat escape and structural problems around the outer envelope.

“It’s essentially a weather station in the sky looking for problems,” Mr. Motahar said of Joulea’s device. 

That data gets put into a model that allows the owner to forecast savings based on improvements. 

The second tier is where Joulea plugs another device, this one “like an onboard computer the size of two iPhones,” into the building’s management system, pairing real-time monitoring with historical data to provide actionable insights for owners. 

The top tier, CapX Planner, scales all of this up, providing predictive modeling, to the dollar, on how potential retrofits would benefit the owner, projecting that across multiple buildings, based on that owner’s professed spending parameters and goals shared during the onboarding process. 

“Everybody knows that if you get more energy-efficient equipment, you’re going to save money, but we tell them exactly which investments will give them the best lift and bang for their buck.” 

An Aerospace Approach for Grounded Assets

For a company focused on grounded assets, Joulea’s approach borrows from aerospace, part of Mr. Motahar’s quest to think differently about the problem as he saw it while working in real estate.

An industrial engineering and economics major from Georgia Tech, he watched bad practices being perpetuated as building owners failed to learn from the mistakes of the past. 

“It’s like copy and paste, and if you keep having the same nuanced error in your grammar, it’s always going to be there,” he said. 

What the system needed was someone to think like an aerospace engineer, with a holistic vision not only of the plane’s function, but also of its operations plan and maintenance schedule over the course of its life. 

Just for that “product life cycle” thinking, Mr. Motahar went back to Tech and earned an aerospace engineering master’s, which armed him with a lot of physics and a few of business takeaways: taking a comprehensive approach, and utilizing the “integrated product management method,” which deploys multidisciplinary teams in service of a common goal. 

That method is at work in Joulea, which has hired building engineers, data scientists, computer vision experts and other specialists to oversee the various aspects of its platform, ensuring the high-flying AI projects are grounded in reality. Mr. Motahar concedes that the approach is expensive, but he believes it will pay future dividends.

Global Interest and Opportunity 

So far, Joulea’s pilots and clientele are all in the United States, but Canada and Europe have been showing interest, given their relatively advanced climate consciousness versus the United States, along with older buildings and heavier regulation. 

“It’s very ingrained in the culture,” in Europe, said Mr. Motahar, who has been bidding for a project in Canada but has seen some hesitance for governments there to pick U.S. solutions amid the recent trade war. 

Eventually, Joulea believes its U.S. relationships will likely carry its services overseas, as ownership groups deploy it in their cross-border portfolios. 

“They’re looking across the globe, so if you make it work within their building that are here in the U.S., you can make it work across their buildings that might be in Germany or in France or in Toronto.”

The need, he said, is also global, with buildings remaining the single most promising category for greenhouse gas reduction, dwarfing even those, like vehicles, that get more attention. In the U.S. alone, about a third of buildings’ energy is wasted, at a cost of an estimated $150 billion a year, according to the Department of Energy. 

“If you can reduce buildings by 20 percent, that’s essentially the entire passenger car market,” Mr. Motahar said.