Energy utilization controller and control system and method

A method of controlling energy utilization at a plurality of buildings having respective heating, ventilating and air conditioning equipment, said method comprising steps of:

• (a) using, through a selected one of a plurality of control signal generation locations, a pre-existing communication infrastructure to communicate with a plurality of pagers respectively connected to a plurality of energy management systems respectively located at a plurality of buildings and respectively connected to heating, ventilating and air conditioning equipment thereat, for changing temperature setpoints used in the energy management systems, wherein the pre-existing communication infrastructure includes a paging network which generates a predetermined capcode and which transmits data with the predetermined capcode in response to data input into the paging network, wherein said step of using a pre-existing communication infrastructure includes transmitting through the paging network a frame synchronization code, one capcode and a stream of data, the stream of data including both energy management system address data and energy management system control data, said transmitting including inputting into the energy management system control data information defining a temperature setpoint change and whether the change is an incremental increase or decrease of, or a replacement of, a pre-existing temperature setpoint;
• (b) receiving the transmitted predetermined capcode and the stream of data with the plurality of pagers, wherein each pager is programmed to respond to the same predetermined capcode and each energy management system includes a respective microprocessor and respective data storage memory;
• (c) receiving the stream of data from a serial data port of a respective one of the pagers through an asynchronous data port of the microprocessor of the respective energy management system and storing the stream of data in the data storage memory of the respective energy management system in response to the pager connected to the respective energy management system receiving the predetermined capcode for which the pager is programmed, wherein the microprocessor operates at a faster speed than the transmission speed of the stream of data such that the microprocessor stores the data byte by byte in the data storage memory;
• (d) determining within each respective energy management system having the stream of data stored in the data storage memory thereof whether that respective energy management system is addressed by the energy management system address data of the stored stream of data;
• and
• (e) with each energy management system that determines it is addressed by the energy management system address data, automatically changing temperature setpoints in the respective energy management system in response to the energy management system control data of the stored stream of data so that the respective energy management system causes incremental temperature changes to occur in the respective building in response to the stored data.