Duncan Cooper is an MBA Candidate at the Johnson School of Business at Cornell as well as an MBA Intern working for my Product Marketing Team at EnerNOC this summer. This post was originally published at the Johnson School Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise website. Please share any ideas you have for Duncan as he wraps up his project in the comments below.

What Would Sun Tzu Do? A summer spent analyzing the competition for EnerNOC

Did you know that buildings in the United States account for roughly 7% of global primary energy consumption?^[1]  This means that building efficiency, both in the US and abroad, is a vital part of any effort to reduce energy consumption and associated pollution.  It also means that making buildings more efficient is big business; more efficient buildings save their owners thousands of dollars per year in reduced energy bills without any decrease in occupant comfort.

As I write this, I am halfway through my summer internship at EnerNOC, a company at the forefront of building efficiency technology.  EnerNOC’s core business is demand response.  Utilities pay EnerNOC, who then contracts with commercial, institutional, and industrial energy users to reduce energy consumption during times of peak demand – typically anywhere from 0-100 hours a year.  In recent years, EnerNOC has been focused on diversifying its product suite and has made strong headway into the energy efficiency market – a fragmented and highly competitive market where vendors are competing not only for wallet-share, but also for mindshare.  Traditional service providers (ESCOs), building control hardware providers, and software start-ups are all competing for a share of the market, which Industry reports estimate will to triple to $6 billion by the year 2020.^[2] Continue reading →