The Energy Cost Problem Is Getting Worse

U.S. commercial electricity rates have risen by 13% since 2022 and are projected to climb another 3.5% through 2026, with rates expected to reach 17.6 cents per kWh nationally.

For all multi-site operators — retailers, QSRs, theaters, warehouses, financial institutions, fuel stations, etc. — energy is consistently one of the top three operating expenses. And the pressure is intensifying: wholesale electricity prices have surged year-over-year, driven by rising natural gas costs, grid infrastructure investments, and exploding demand from data centers.

What does that mean in practice? For a 50-store retail chain averaging $3,500 per month per location in utility costs, even a 15% reduction translates to over $300,000 in annual savings. For a 500-location portfolio, that number becomes $3 million or more. The math is clear: every percentage point of energy waste you eliminate goes directly to your bottom line.

The challenge is that most commercial buildings still lack the tools to achieve those savings. According to some industry analysts, 70% of medium-sized and 85% of small commercial buildings in the U.S. operate without any energy management system at all. And for those that do have one, the system is often a legacy installation.

Why Legacy EMS/BMS Systems Hold You Back

Traditional building and energy management systems were designed for a different era. They rely on hard-wired infrastructure, proprietary protocols, and centralized control panels that require specialized technicians for every installation, configuration change, and service call. This can create a cascade of problems for multi-site operators.

A Different Approach: The Nexus Platform

NexRev built the Nexus platform to solve the exact problems legacy systems create. Instead of centralized panels, proprietary wiring, and vendor lock-in, Nexus delivers intelligent, device-level connectivity that communicates over cellular networks directly to the cloud — with no dependency on customer Wi-Fi, local IT infrastructure, or specialized installation crews.

The platform consists of purpose-built hardware (Nexus IoT devices and wireless sensors), a cloud-based management platform (Freedom Enterprise), and an AI intelligence layer (NexiAI with Nexus Insights). Together, they give you everything you need to connect your devices and reduce energy costs across your entire portfolio — faster, simpler, and more cost-effectively than any legacy system can match.

The Right Device for Every Machine

Nexus includes purpose-built IoT devices and wireless sensors designed to cover every type of equipment in a commercial building. Each device connects one-to-one to a specific machine — whether it’s an HVAC rooftop unit, lighting system, ventilation hood, exhaust fan, refrigeration unit, generator, or power meter — delivering dedicated data and control directly to the cloud.

For traditional equipment, Nexus connects through direct electrical signals. For smart equipment with built-in intelligence, it communicates using the machine’s native protocols. Wireless battery-powered sensors extend the platform further, adding temperature and humidity monitoring throughout your spaces and ductwork without any additional wiring. The result is the same across the board: every piece of equipment gets its own dedicated cloud connection, managed from a single platform.

The entire device family shares a common architecture: Cellular connectivity that works independently of customer Wi-Fi or local networks, magnetic mounting for tool-free installation, QR code commissioning through the mobile app, and remote over-the-air firmware updates. Whether your portfolio includes traditional equipment, smart systems, or a mix of both — Nexus brings it all online.

Installation in Hours, Not Weeks

One of the most significant advantages of the Nexus platform is deployment speed. Every Nexus device features magnetic mounting for tool-free attachment to ferrous surfaces like RTU electrical sections. Power connects through simple 24V AC/DC terminal wiring. Commissioning happens through the NexRev mobile app: scan the QR code on the device, select the equipment type and configuration profile, name it, and submit. The cloud handles the rest.

There’s no centralized panel to install. No proprietary wiring to run between devices. No specialized contractors required. A typical site can be fully deployed in hours, not weeks. For a 50-store chain, that means complete portfolio coverage in weeks, not years — and savings start accruing from day one at every site you bring online.

Because Nexus communicates over cellular there’s no dependency on customer Wi-Fi or local network infrastructure. This eliminates the IT coordination, firewall configuration, and network security concerns that slow down traditional deployments. Each device connects independently to NexRev’s secure cloud backend.

Freedom Enterprise: See and Control Everything from Anywhere

Every connected Nexus device feeds data into Freedom Enterprise, NexRev’s cloud-based facility and energy management platform. Freedom easily scales giving you centralized, real-time visibility across your entire portfolio.

An interactive map view shows every site with weather overlays, ambient conditions, and equipment status at a glance. Drill into any location to see real-time HVAC performance, lighting status, power metering data, and sensor readings. Adjust setpoints, override schedules, and respond to anomalies from a single dashboard — or from the NexRev mobile app when you’re on the go.

Freedom’s scheduling engine supports primary, shifted, and standalone schedules with multiple periods per day and day-of-week granularity. Historical trending lets you visualize performance over time, export data for analysis, and identify inefficiencies. Everything is centralized, consistent, and accessible to your entire operations team.

NexiAI and Nexus Insights: From Data to Action

Raw data doesn’t reduce your energy bill. Intelligence does. NexiAI is NexRev’s AI engine, and Nexus Insights is the multi-agent analytics platform it powers. Unlike generic analytics tools, Nexus Insights deploys specialized AI agents with deep domain expertise in specific building systems.

The HVAC Specialist agent monitors every rooftop unit’s temperature differentials, runtime efficiency, setpoint compliance, and staging performance — scoring each unit from 0 to 100 so your team knows exactly which equipment is underperforming and why.

The Energy Management Specialist tracks energy use intensity across your portfolio, identifies baseload anomalies, and recommends load-shifting strategies to reduce peak demand charges. The Power Specialist watches for phase imbalance, harmonic distortion, and power quality issues that waste energy and damage equipment.

For food service and grocery operations, the FDA Refrigeration Specialist monitors walk-ins, reach-ins, and display cases against FDA Food Code requirements, catching temperature issues before they become food safety incidents. Additional specialist agents handle sensor calibration, alarm prioritization, building control scheduling, and bulk configuration changes across sites.

This isn’t a static dashboard. It’s an intelligence layer that continuously learns from your operations, surfaces insights you wouldn’t find manually, and helps you turn data into the decisions that actually reduce your energy spend.

What This Means for Your Business

For Facility and Energy Managers

You get the centralized visibility and control you’ve always wanted, without the legacy infrastructure baggage. Monitor every piece of equipment across every site from a single platform. Catch problems before they escalate. Optimize schedules and setpoints based on real performance data, not assumptions. Typical IoT-based energy management implementations achieve 15–25% reductions in energy consumption through operational improvements alone — before any capital equipment upgrades.

For Operations and Finance Leaders

Rapid deployment means fast time-to-value. Unlike legacy systems that require years of rollout across a large portfolio, Nexus can achieve complete coverage in weeks to months. Savings begin accruing at each site from the moment its connected. With energy costs rising at 3–5% annually, every month of delay is a month of preventable waste. Multi-site benchmarking through Freedom Enterprise lets you compare any location against your best performers, identifying underperformers and applying proven strategies across the chain.

For HVAC and Facilities Service Providers

The Nexus platform enables you to offer managed energy services as a new revenue stream. Deploy Nexus and provide ongoing monitoring and optimization through Freedom Enterprise, and build recurring subscription revenue. Your technicians arrive at sites with data-driven insights into what actually needs attention — improving first-time fix rates, reducing unnecessary truck rolls, and transforming your business from reactive repair to proactive partnership. In a field service management market projected to reach $9.68 billion by 2030, data-driven service is the competitive differentiator.

For Building Owners and Operators

Every Nexus device installed increases the intelligence and value of your building infrastructure. You protect and extend the life of capital assets through better monitoring and earlier intervention. You strengthen your position for reporting with continuous, auditable energy data. And because the Nexus integrates with your existing equipment, you modernize without replacing — preserving your prior investments while adding the cloud connectivity and AI analytics they were never designed to provide.

No Rip-and-Replace Required

One of the biggest barriers to energy management modernization is the perception that it requires ripping out everything you have and starting from scratch. With Nexus, that’s simply not the case.

Nexus devices connect directly to your traditional equipment — the RTUs, lighting loads, ventilation systems, and refrigeration units that have historically been managed through basic controls or manual operation. These are the machines that represent the bulk of your energy consumption, and Nexus brings them into the cloud for the first time. Nexus also connects to your existing smart equipment, communicating in the protocols they already speak — bringing them into the same platform without replacing a thing. Bluetooth sensors add a wireless monitoring layer without touching existing wiring.

The result is a layered approach that modernizes your entire building portfolio incrementally, delivering value at every step. Start with your highest-energy-cost sites, prove the ROI, and expand from there. The platform scales from a single location to every site in your portfolio.

The Bottom Line

Commercial energy costs are rising, and they’re not coming back down. HVAC and lighting alone represent 60–80% of your building energy spend, and most of that is either unmonitored or managed by legacy systems that lack the intelligence to optimize it. The gap between what you’re spending and what you should be spending is real, measurable, and growing every year.

NexRev’s Nexus platform closes that gap. Purpose-built IoT devices that install in hours. Cellular connectivity that works everywhere without IT dependencies. A cloud platform that gives you centralized control across your entire portfolio. And an AI intelligence layer that turns your operational data into the insights and actions that drive permanent cost reduction.

The technology exists. The ROI is proven. The question is, how much longer you can afford to wait?

About NexRev

NexRev is the leading provider of cloud-based, multi-site energy management systems, backed by AI and delivered by SaaS models, that help businesses eliminate energy waste and reduce costs.

Our innovative Freedom™ EMS/BMS solution brings process-driven intelligence and AI to facilities management, providing complete remote control and centralized visibility of your energy-consuming devices across complex, nationwide property portfolios for leading brands in retail, theaters, restaurants, commercial, and industrial facilities.

With NexRev Freedom, our customers reduce waste, optimize energy management, and generate permanent cost savings by making the right decisions.

To begin a discussion on how we can help you reduce energy costs and waste, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.