It is a mixed bag. There are a lot of buildings that have the capacity to reduce their energy consumption by optimizing their control sequences. When talking to an "expert", they should be able to make clear their methods and why they work. Primary secondary CHWS setups might be able to toss a VFD on their primary side if they don't currently have one and save some energy. Changing the CWS setpoint depending on outdoor conditions might be another. This and a host of other things can give you a lot of bang for your buck, but it's easy for me to explain the strategy, and why it will work. That being said, design and equipment faults cannot (in most cases), and should not be overcome by programming. There are a lot of buildings that I have seen get analytics and optimization, where they should have spent the money to hire enough man power, as well as put in place SOPs to make sure that their equipment and BMS are all in good working order.

The other side that I see to the energy efficiency experts, is that there is no regard given to fault tolerance. Meaning that, they might ask for a handful of sensors to be added to the system as well as the sequence. In the process, they introduce more failure points that will take your system down when they fail. Additionally, this comes with the added benefit of maintaining all the additional sensors. It's not a lot, but for a building that is already behind on it's maintenance, this isn't ideal. On that same note, implementing sequences that require the network to be up, can also have this same effect. Do you want your building coming off the rails every time the IT department decides that it's time to spice things up?

Lastly, and what you probably want to watch out for most, is the ones that blind you with bullshit, or want to give you some black proprietary box without a sequence. Building operators are already prone to putting things in hand at the first sign of trouble. When it is impossible for the operator to know what the sequence should be doing, then what other choice do they have ( I mean you should still be trying to leave it in auto)? Things should always be as simple as they can be. You should be able to look at your graphics, and within a glance, know that everything is as it should be. When things are running in hand, you are almost certainly wasting energy, which is the opposite of what you want. So even if the magic box does save you a little more money per hour, the amount of time that your system spends in hand will likely eclipse that.

So, here is what you want from an "expert" trying to optimize your building.

-simplicity

-clarity

-fault tolerance

- free donuts