Dean Lindstrom, EE’79, has seen the world and is ready to help cut its energy bills.

Dean Lindstrom. (Photo by Todd Bliss Photography)

“I’ve got the best job in the world because I love to travel,” says Lindstrom, president of Novar, Honeywell International’s global energy management company. “I spend a lot of time traveling internationally, and every CEO I meet wants to know what the United States is doing with energy management.”

Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, with offices in Mexico, Brazil, India and China, Novar provides energy solutions for companies that operate a large number of facilities over a large geographic basis. Novar’s clients include major retailers like Walmart and Staples, restaurants, banks, movie theaters and telecommunication sites. Lindstrom says that the United States is a leader in terms of managing the multi-site market and has an opportunity to set the pace for what the rest of the world does.

“If you stand on any street corner in the United States, you’ll see one of our customers.”

“If you stand on any street corner in the United States, you’ll see one of our customers,” says Lindstrom, who has been with Novar for 16 years. “We provide these companies with both the technology and the engineering services associated with the central nervous system that manages those buildings. And we help these businesses operate their portfolios as a single enterprise.”

The process begins with an energy audit to determine where a company’s current energy is being used across hundreds or thousands of sites. Then come building models to show how, using the right technology, the facilities could be operated more effectively. Companies then can choose whether to work as self-performers, monitoring the systems themselves, or have Novar monitor and manage their site’s energy consumption using Novar’s enterprise software tools provided from the operations center in Cleveland. Inside the NASA-looking command center, Novar touches 40,000 sites across the globe, measuring, monitoring and controlling in real time all the heating, ventilating, air-conditioning, lighting, refrigeration — anything that consumes energy.

“The financial returns are tremendous,” Lindstrom says. “The upfront costs typically have a 20-50 percent return on investment (ROI). Then the service that we provide out of Cleveland has an ROI of more than 100 percent. Once the CEO and CFO see these kinds of financial returns, their next question is how quickly can we start.”