Challenge

77 West Wacker Drive, a 50-story, 959,000 square foot trophy Class A commercial office building in Chicago’s Central Loop, is managed by an ambitious team dedicated to advancing the building’s energy efficiency goals. Recognizing the need to modernize their energy management approach, the team sought to establish a robust data-driven baseline to evaluate existing systems and demonstrate the ROI for new equipment upgrades. They also aimed to gain granular tenant-level visibility into energy use, enabling targeted efficiency measures and behavioral insights across floors.

Solution

To achieve their ambitious energy efficiency goals, the Transwestern team at 77 West Wacker partnered with Cohesion to develop a data-driven strategy using the Savvy analytics platform. Together the teams planned to dedicate their efforts to a set of focused initiatives: establishing performance baselines for chiller equipment and building energy consumption, gaining tenant-level energy visibility, and enabling real-time demand management.

The team collected detailed electrical data from the building’s three operational chillers and modeled it against occupancy and weather to form a normalized performance baseline.

Results

This collaborative effort resulted in several powerful tools and capabilities built within the Savvy platform:

• A detailed energy performance baseline for both legacy and new chiller systems that provides clear, data-backed justification for capital investments and quantifies efficiency gains.
• Tenant-level energy profiling dashboards that enable behavior-driven energy reduction strategies and foster deeper tenant engagement with sustainability initiatives.
• Real-time power monitoring integrated with demand response workflows that empower facilities to proactively reduce peak load and manage energy costs through smart, AI-informed load shedding.
• Enhanced operational insights and technology adoption that position 77 West Wacker as a leader in sustainable building management and innovation.

After replacing the chillers, the Cohesion team began comparing new data to evaluate efficiency improvements and ROI. Simultaneously, phased installation of floor-level energy meters allowed tenant-specific energy profiling by correlating consumption with occupancy and equipment runtime. Real-time power data from demand response partner CPower was integrated to monitor live consumption versus baseline, triggering controlled load shedding to reduce peak demand and cost.

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