Case Study: City of Seattle achieves up to 25% downtown energy savings with Microsoft Azure

Seattle Aims to Reduce Downtown Energy Usage by 25 Percent with Smart Buildings

The City of Seattle partnered with Microsoft, Accenture, Seattle City Light and the Seattle 2030 District to launch a Smart Building program aimed at cutting downtown commercial energy use—targeting up to a 25% reduction—without building new generation. Faced with rapidly growing demand and fragmented building management systems that weren’t optimized for energy savings, the city sought an affordable, fast-to-deploy solution that could work with existing equipment.

Using Accenture’s Smart Building offering on Microsoft technologies (Windows Azure, SQL Server 2012, SharePoint 2013), the team applies predictive analytics to BMS, sensors and meters to monitor and optimize equipment in real time. The pilot in five downtown buildings (about 2 million sq ft) is expected to deliver 10–25% reductions in energy and maintenance costs, extend equipment life, improve comfort and reliability, and provide a scalable model for wider adoption.

City of Seattle

Brian Surratt

Deputy Director