Hara lands massive Abu Dhabi energy deal; to yield $3B in savings
Just in time for the COP16 climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, energy management software firm Hara on Tuesday announced that it signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar agreement with the largest state-run utility in the United Arab Emirates.
It's the company's largest energy efficiency deployment deal to date.
Hara says it's promising the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority, or ADWEA, a savings of some $3 billion over 10 years.
The pitch:
- Peak demand reductions of more than 4 gigawatts in 2020.
- Deferred construction of more than several 500-megawatt conventional natural gas power plants.
- Total annual energy savings are projected to top 12,000 gigawatt-hours by 2020, or the equivalent of ten million tons of carbon dioxide, or taking 1.9 million cars off the road.
Hara's effectively serving as point partner for ADWEA’s sustainability initiative.
As for the actual deployment, it allows for:
- System-wide consumption monitoring (identification, prioritization and tracking).
- Conservation and efficiency investment modeling for some 200,000 commercial and residential facilities.
- Optimization of energy and electricity use.
- By extension, analytical support for regional smart grid and alternative energy implementation.
Despite high-profile clients in Akamai, Coca-Cola, Hasbro and Intuit (as well as the cities of Philadelphia, Las Vegas and Palo Alto), ADWEA remains a major client for Hara to land. The authority serves more than 1.4 million people -- that's about 39 percent of the entire population of the UAE, on 87 percent of its land.
When I spoke with CEO Amit Chatterjee last July, he told me he was seeing a shift in client demand from simple analytics to actual savings. Despite the large scale of some of his deals, he added:
My number one competitor at the end of the day is [Microsoft] Excel. We’ve replaced SAP at Intuit and others but the reality of the market is that 90 percent of my competition of true deals on closing is that I’m replacing Excel and competing with SAP for that contract. Getting organizations to realize that it’s not only about reporting but reductions is where my challenge is.
The three-year-old company is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, JAFCO and Nth Power.
Illustrations: Hara
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com