“Providing for every contingency possible in a network like this, serving more than 65 million nodes, it’s a large and nasty problem. And it is one that has to be solved every ten minutes.”

That’s how Uday V. Shanbag, Associate Professor in Penn State University’s Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, described the challenge facing a team of Penn State researchers

EnergyCAP, Inc. (ECI) recently surveyed large government and public institutions to determine what makes an Energy Management Information System (EMIS) successful over many years. Survey participants included a mix of city and county governments, federal agencies, and the largest U.S. higher education systems. The results provide interesting insights into the objectives for implementing an EMIS and the keys to long-term program success.

On- and off-campus student housing facilities consume a lot of energy, and the cost of that energy directly impacts students, schools, and property owners. In a recent EnergyCAP-hosted webinar, Melissa Kline, Founder of environmental consulting firm IMPACTenergy, described the process her firm uses to achieve energy savings in student housing.

While the most easily quantifiable benefit of EnergyCAP’s utility bill accounting and energy management software might be its ability to help an organization save money, some of its other advantages are best explained anecdotally.

Can a wearable device generate its own power? Will we see a time when gas stations are scarce? What is a microgrid?

“Be a hero!”

That was the message from Steve Heinz, EnergyCAP, Inc. Founder & CEO, as he delivered the closing keynote address at the 2018 EnergyCAP Catalyst training conference. This year’s conference theme was “Change is Coming,” and Steve’s presentation armed the 200 conference attendees with five specific operational and organizational changes they could implement to deliver immediate and long-term energy and cost savings:

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that it will soon be updating performance metrics in its Portfolio Manager application, and per the EPA, “1–100 ENERGY STAR scores and other performance metrics will, on average, go down.”

Equipment retrofits are complicated, expensive, and can take months or years to implement, but behavioral changes produce immediate energy and monetary savings.

In a recent EnergyCAP-hosted webinar, Matthew Cherrin, Energy Conservation Educator at University of New Mexico (UNM) described the behavior-based process used by UNM to achieve energy conservation success over the past decade.

Okay, that’s fake news. He didn’t say exactly that. But he did issue an Executive Order mandating deeper efforts to achieve energy cost and usage reductions, built on a foundation of energy tracking and reporting. 

Dan Coogan, Utilities Superintendent at Miami-Dade County, has been analyzing the county’s 4,500 monthly electric bills in EnergyCAP since 2012. The county has documented many energy management successes over the past five-plus years, the latest of which came as the result of a team effort.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released its 2018 ENERGY STAR Top Cities list, and 12 of the top 25 cities are EnergyCAP users. In 2017, more than 9,400 properties received ENERGY STAR benchmark scores via EnergyCAP’s interface to Portfolio Manager, the EPA’s benchmarking application.

Energy management at Riverside County, CA is in very capable hands.

During her tenure at the county, Janet Purchase, County Energy Manager, and her team have realized more than $11.6 million in grants, rebates, energy savings, outside utility funding, and avoided costs. 

Editor’s Note: For this week’s blog, we are happy to share an article written by Dr. Eric Woodroof, Ph.D., founder of Profitable Green Solutions and past president of the Association of Energy Engineers. Dr. Woodroof is passionate about saving energy and reducing pollution, and he currently provides training on practical ways to do energy management in seminars/keynotes all over the world. The article was originally published by Buildings Magazine on January 11, 2018.

“The next generation of EnergyCAP—EnergyCAP Version 7—is now available.”

Editor’s Note: Chris Heinz, EnergyCAP’s Vice President for Human Resources, is this week’s blogger. He blogs regularly on topics like workplace purpose, engagement, strengths, and coaching at Munyay.com. If you don’t want to miss his blog posts, you can subscribe here.

This is a very special time of year for our family. We adopted our son, Asher, from the Philippines when he was four—four years ago—which means on this birthday, Asher will have lived with us longer than he has lived with anyone else.

Battery. Conductor. Condenser. Charge.

Those words were coined by the City of Philadelphia’s most famous resident, Benjamin Franklin, as he established himself as the leader in the study of electricity in the mid-1700s. Franklin most likely never imagined that, more than 265 years later, the city he called home would still be an energy management leader. But, while Franklin sought to understand and harness the power of electricity, the city’s primary focus today is on energy conservation.

ENERGY STAR^® is the nation’s most widely used and recognized energy reporting and benchmarking system, but it is seldom considered to be a method of measurement and verification (M&V) of savings. EnergyCAP, Inc.’s CEO, Steve Heinz, recently led a study to determine if ENERGY STAR ratings can be used as a low-cost, simple M&V method when the cost of a more intensive analysis is not justified. Steve presented the results of his study at the most recent World Energy Engineering Congress in Atlanta, GA.

Editor’s Note: Chris Heinz, EnergyCAP’s Vice President for Human Resources, is this week’s blogger. He blogs regularly on topics like workplace engagement, strengths, and coaching at MunyayBlog.com. If you don’t want to miss his blog posts, you can subscribe here.

Over the past few weeks, we have all watched with trepidation the major weather events and natural disasters impacting the U.S. and other countries, and our wishes for safety and quick recovery go out to all who have been directly or indirectly impacted. 

Since 2009, EnergyCAP, Inc.’s non-profit organization, Global Capacity, has played an active role in helping the African country of Rwanda achieve its national education mission:

• To combat ignorance and illiteracy
• To provide human resources useful for socio-economic development of Rwanda through education & training

The energy industry’s trade show season is about to kick off, and EnergyCAP is an eager participant. We will be exhibiting at two major industry trade shows in August and September, and we encourage you to visit with us:

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) recently released its 2017 City Energy Efficiency Scorecard, and we are happy to report that nearly one third of the top-performing cities rely on EnergyCAP for utility bill and energy management. (i)

A large number of facilities with widely varied uses—administration, classroom, laboratories, athletics, parking, medical, etc.—a diverse group of occupants, long operating hours, multiple funding sources, and consistent growth combine to make energy management at a large public university a complex undertaking. Lalit Agarwal, Director of Facilities Systems at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), recently presented a webinar titled “The Ins and Outs of Campus Energy Data” to explain how UNL has integrated numerous systems—including EnergyCAP—and internal teams to establish a program that is successfully reducing energy consumption across campus, while maintaining occupant comfort.

On December 12, 2015, representatives of 196 parties within the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement. [i]  Article 2 of the UNFCC agreement outlined its objectives:

“Productivity Unleashed” was the theme of last month’s Catalyst Training for Savings Conference, and EnergyCAP, Inc. CEO Steve Heinz closed the conference with a keynote titled “10 Tips to Unleash Your Productivity.”  We shared tips 6–10 in our April 19^th blog, and now the suspense is over. The top five tips are presented below.

EnergyCAP is widely recognized as a powerful utility bill and energy management tool for facility operations. Did you know that some EnergyCAP customers are also leveraging the application’s features to better track and manage their vehicle fleets in response to emerging sustainability and compliance mandates?

That’s a wrap! 

The 2017 edition of EnergyCAP’s Catalyst Training for Savings Conference came to a successful conclusion Thursday, April 13. And 100 EnergyCAP users–representing a wide range of organization types and sizes–departed State College, PA with an expanded arsenal of utility bill and energy management skills.

The term “Software as a Service” and its more commonly used acronym, SaaS, were originally coined in 2001 in an article published by the Software & Information Industry Association’s eBusiness Division.[i]  SaaS is simply defined as software rental, with the licensee typically paying a monthly or annual fee for the right to use a vendor-hosted application.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced the ENERGY STAR program in 1992 and described it as “a voluntary labeling program designed to identify and promote energy-efficient products to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”[i] Over the past 25 years, the ENERGY STAR label – recognized by more than 90% of Americans – has progressed from computers and monitors to most major appliances and office equipment, lighting, homes, and commercial and industrial facilities. 

In October of 2016, the New York City Council approved changes to a 2009 energy benchmarking ordinance (Local Law 84) that added new benchmarking requirements for thousands of private and city-owned buildings. The goal was to extend the reach of NYC's energy benchmarking and audit program.