By Joel Williams

Talk about green ROI.

On its first big eco-friendly project, contractor Novak Group LLC promised its potential client  — Trinity Church & Christian Academy — an annual savings of nearly $12,000 on its energy bill if the church made energy modifications.

As it turns out, the actual energy savings are now $20,470 per year — a 104 percent increase in savings for the 82,274 square-foot facility.

Those numbers serve as positive testimonials for Novak Group’s new Energy Services Division.

“The church now has a new source of revenue in their building that they don’t even know about,” says Lucas Novak, vice president, energy solutions for the San Antonio-based company. “It’s in their walls.”

Novak’s new division was launched In 2010 when Lucas Novak joined the company. Lucas is the son of Mike Novak, CEO and president of Novak Group.

The son arrived with valuable experience. He graduated in 2004 from Baylor University with a degree in business-finance-information systems, and then worked for six years for Schneider Electric, a France-based global specialist in energy management.

Novak offered a free energy audit to Trinity Church & Academy, located in northeastern San Antonio, that would quantify how much the church could save by making energy modifications.

The company estimated that the church and school — with seven main buildings and an off-site day care center and a total of 82,274 square feet — would save $11,474 annually on its energy bill, or 17 percent of the cost of the $67,470 project.

That meant that the work would pay for itself in about six years.

As it turned out, the energy efficiency retrofitting completed in March 2010, followed by training for the church staff on maximizing energy conservation, saved more money than projected.

Annual savings for Trinity totaled $20,470, or more than 30 percent of the project’s cost, meaning it would take a little more than three years for the church to recoup its investment and then continue to benefit from the lowered utility bills.

“The work that was done was exceptional and the communication was superb,” says Allen Randolph, Trinity’s senior pastor. “The savings was significantly more than they projected.”

The significant savings were achieved by installing more efficient lighting and heating and air conditioning system. Individual control systems for small sections of the buildings allow energy-saving thermostat adjustments for areas no longer in use for the day.

“We look at everything using energy and analyze it with our software,” Lucas Novak says. “Once that is started, I can go in and plug in different scenarios.”

In addition to the financial benefit for the church, Novak estimated that the environmental impact of this project in 12 months was equal to releasing 180 fewer tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, removing 36 cars from the road for a year and planting 49 acres of trees.

“You’ve got to get your clients to know that they are leaking energy,” says Mike Novak.

The Novak business model targets a middle market lying below the radar of larger contractors. That market includes churches, schools, commercial buildings and government entities. Their sweet spot is an organization whose annual energy bill is around $50,000.

“There’s a huge market for the average office building, the average church,” says Mike Novak.  “It’s hard for us to walk into a building any more without noticing how we could make the place more energy-efficient.”

JOEL WILLIAMS is a San Antonio freelance writer.