Meet Todd Rossi, president of Field Diagnostic Services Inc. (FDIS), a small Philadelphia-based technology services company that’s working in a multi-billion-dollar industry nobody has heard of – yet. 

EnergyTechStocks.com is going to call this industry “Human Energy Efficiency.” The concept behind it is simple. With the standard energy management systems businesses use today, each time a building’s air conditioning or heating unit experiences a problem, a service technician goes out and fixes it. Since a big box retailer might have as many as 25 separate heating and cooling units per building, the number of service tech visits can really mount up. 

But with technology from a company like FDIS, one visit can result in maintenance and repair work being performed on several units at the same time. FDIS’s computer-controlled technology remotely monitors all of a building’s units, and provides a service tech with a handheld monitor that allows him to see which units have what problems. Rossi says that with FDIS technology, 20% can be saved on the combined maintenance, replacement, and energy costs of some nine million pieces of so-called commercial unitary equipment in use by thousands of U.S. businesses, big and small. That’s a saving of approximately $4 billion a year, Rossi told EnergyTechStocks.com, with the biggest potential savings accruing to large retailing establishments. 

It probably won’t be long before human energy efficiency gains prominence. Bank of America (NYSE: BAC, Stock Forum) recently made a strategic investment in FDIS. In announcing the transaction, Bank of America said FDIS’s new energy-saving technology can “truly” impact the environment as well as a company’s bottom line. 

Rossi said his firm also trains service technicians in the new technology. He said his company’s goal is simply to reduce the amount of money a company is paying for electricity.