Hakon Mattson
Director of Energy and Sustainability
Anthem, Inc.

Hakon Mattson takes a human approach to sustainability, looking to improve the ways that we use buildings to improve efficiency on a massive scale. Whether it’s looking to improve employee productivity through better IEQ or changing how buildings run by incentivizing the people running them, he knows that buildings are more than just brick and mortar.

Anthem employs over 37,000 people in over 5 million sf of office space across 33 states. To dramatically improve performance across Anthem’s portfolio, Hakon Mattson and his team devised a five-year road map for energy efficiency, water efficiency, waste diversion, carbon footprint, and stakeholder engagement.

To inform their plan, Anthem took the important step of researching which incentives were available to help fund upgrades up front, rather than planning work before seeing what was available to them. They also installed smart meters wherever possible, which allowed them gather data on how buildings were performing and, more importantly, to establish a “culture of competition” and transparency among buildings.

“Battles of the Buildings” and other incentives increased the scope of how much Anthem buildings could improve, ultimately reducing water usage by 18% in less than a year and cutting greenhouse gas emissions 5% through demand reduction. Some of the approaches with the biggest impacts included an ultrasonic humidification project for Anthem’s primary data center to cool more efficiently, and executing a 2.9 MW solar purchase agreement. Ultimately, Mattson says, they discovered that the human element “had a greater impact on the sustainability program than capital investment.”

WHAT THEY DID

• Invested heavily in smart meters for utilities, IT loads, and IT temperatures
• Created a centralized dashboard to aggregate portfolio-wide data
• Gamified performance by encouraging a “culture of competition” among buildings