Buildy Award winners announced at ConnectivityWeek 2011

by Shane Henson — June 8, 2011—The winners of the eighth annual Buildy Awards were announced recently during the ConnectivityWeek Conference in Santa Clara, California. Since 2004, the Buildy Awards have been presented at ConnectivityWeek to leaders, visionaries and implementers of smart devices and smart systems. The five award winners were:

• BuildingIQ, winner of the Smart Buildings award, for building energy optimization, which is helping to reduce energy consumption by more than 30 percent in commercial buildings in Australia. The technology is now available in North America.
  
• Heart Transverter, winner of the BuildingSmart Homes award, for efforts to build the Smart Grid from the bottom up, one house at a time, an innovative concept for driving home-to-grid connectivity with integrated energy storage, energy security, and more.
  
• Powerit Solutions, winner of the Smart Industrial award, for delivering integrated energy efficiency and automated demand response, yielding energy and demand savings for Four Star, a table grape producer in Delano, California.
  
• The Electric Power Research Institute, winner of the Smart Grid award, for the lectricit de France PREMIO Project, a collaborative, five-year demonstration project with 19 utility members to optimize integration of distributed energy resources, enabling load relief, network support, and CO2 reduction in the southeast of France.
  
• The GridWise Architecture Council, winner of the Connectivity Visionary award, for leadership in the following areas: focusing vendor, policymaker, utility, and media attention on interoperability; fostering cooperation among engineers and policymakers to effectively address technical issues in ways non-technical communities understand; raising interoperability capabilities; and educating all stakeholders about interoperability.