If you have an energy conservation project that’s waiting for funding, the U.S. Department of Energy may soon be able to help.

Last month, the full House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved HR 2088, an important first step in the legislative process to renew and refund the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program. 

Utility bill auditing and processing just got a whole lot easier.

On November 9, 2016, I published a blog article titled, “Improving Utility Bill Auditing.” The article addressed a comment that we hear time and time again during initial conversations with prospective customers: “We know we should check our utility bills more closely, but we don’t have a system in place to do that.” I then outlined how our EnergyCAP software-based solution helps organizations overcome the challenges of utility bill processing and bill validation before they are paid.

Trade show season is approaching rapidly, and EnergyCAP will be an active participant. We have three major industry shows on our schedule, and we encourage you to visit with us at one or more of the venues:

Effective communication is a critical component of every energy management program. In a recent EnergyCAP-hosted webinar, James Bush, Program Manager of Energy Initiatives for Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG), described how EnergyCAP enables his staff to speak three languages: Facilities, Accounting, and Budgeting. 

State of Connecticut Executive Order

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont recently signed Executive Order No. 1 that, per the State’s website, “directs executive branch state office buildings and vehicle fleets to become greener and more energy efficient through an expanded ‘Lead By Example’ sustainability initiative aimed at reducing the state’s carbon footprint and reducing the cost of government operations.”

EnergyCAP’s inaugural Regional Training Conference (RTC) wrapped up yesterday in Irvine, CA. Feedback from those in attendance—EnergyCAP users from across the U.S.—was extremely positive, and EnergyCAP Version 7 received rave reviews.

Bithgroup Technologies, a consulting firm based in Baltimore, MD, has used EnergyCAP as the foundation of their Energy Information Services operation since 2007. They have processed hundreds of thousands of utility bills through the application. Corey Culbreath, Bithgroup’s hands-on Director of Energy Information Services, recently shared how he identified a major client billing problem without having to run a single EnergyCAP report.

So much data, so little time. An all-too-common scenario for energy managers.

Utility bills arrive like clockwork (you hope) every month by the dozens or hundreds. Each one contains numerous line items, providing useful details about facility energy consumption and cost. Ideally, that valuable information is being tracked in EnergyCAP, where it’s readily available for analysis. 

Chargebacks (aka, Allocations, Re-billings, Distributions): The process by which energy provided to one organization is then allocated across multiple other departments or facilities. In practice, the organization’s Accounting or Facilities Department acts as the internal energy “vendor” for the rest of the campus, which may be a college or university, or it could be a hospital, prison, resort, industrial complex, or any shared facility configuration.

“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: