EnergyCAP Blog

  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. Janet outlined her path to energy management success in a recent webinar, and she noted that the approach is quite simple: Take it “one step at a time.”

“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 19th 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. And, according to the EPA, the ENERGY STAR program has resulted in utility bill savings of $362 billion and reduced GHG emissions by 2.4 billion metric tons.[ii]

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. The changes came on the heels of a report published by Crain's New York Business last August that documented carbon emission reductions of 8 percent and decreases in energy use of 6 percent for 3,000 NYC “consistently benchmarked properties.” This preliminary data was perhaps the first confirmation that the City's benchmarking program was making a real difference. The impact of the changes will be difficult to assess for some time, due to reporting timetables built into the law, but New York City is clearly doubling down on mandated energy benchmarking. Today’s blog highlights the recent changes, and the observed results to date.

 [Today’s blog is written by Matthew Heinz, EnergyCAP’s Vice President of Customer Service. His topic is our Customer Success program.] It’s challenging and intimidating to implement a new enterprise-level software application, especially one as full-featured as EnergyCAP. But failure is NOT inevitable! At EnergyCAP, we want you to be successful in understanding our software's functionality and with using it to meet your energy efficiency goals. We have an exciting service offering specifically aimed at this, and it’s called Customer Success. Before I tell you what Customer Success is, let me tell you what it is not.

City of Palm Springs, Riverside County, CA Success is commonly defined as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.” When setting about to purchase an energy management information system (EMIS), the publicly stated purpose is commonly to reduce energy consumption. It’s a realistic, positive aim and an objective that typically garners internal and external support. That said, what ultimately “sells” the EMIS project is cost savings. Fortunately, cost savings go hand-in-hand with lower energy consumption. But that’s only part of the story. A capable EMIS that is properly implemented provides benefits far beyond consistently lower utility bills, such as labor savings, streamlined processes, enhanced data sharing/integration, and technology-driven productivity gains. The County of Riverside, CA, is a great example.

In a perfect world, all of your utility meters would trip their odometer readings at 12:00 a.m. on the first day of every calendar month, all your utility bills would reflect the energy you used for precisely that period, and all planes and trains would run on time. Your relationship with your energy data would be perfect, and you wouldn’t need dating rules! In the real world, things are a bit messier. But how we handle that mess determines the accuracy and reliability of our energy metrics. Today’s blog explains a few EnergyCAP best practices for handling the available energy data to assure the most reliable outcome. Regardless of your energy management system or analytics practices, this topic should be relevant!

“A new year, a new me.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard numerous times over the past three weeks, and I witness vigorous attempts to live up to the cliché every January when I walk into my local fitness facility. Of course, by February, the traffic has gotten back to “normal.” But unlike most of those “resolutioners” at my gym, EnergyCAP’s corporate commitment to a 2017 makeover is a promise you can take to the bank. In today’s blog, I’d like to share some events that will become exciting reality in the next 12 months. But first, you can “rest” assured that product leadership and customer intimacy remain EnergyCAP hallmarks, and we’re not going to change that in 2017. We’re going to stick with what we do best: Continuing product innovation Expanding and enhancing our service offerings Adding and training customer-focused personnel Delivering a value-packed annual training conference Specifically, here is what you can look forward to in 2017.

[Editor’s Note: Chris Heinz, EnergyCAP’s Vice President for Human Resources, is this week’s blogger. He brings valuable insights into the black box of corporate hiring procedures, and suggests a current methodology for maximizing value in the hiring process. Please read and consider sharing internally in your organization!] Here at EnergyCAP, Inc., we’re always looking for ways to improve so that our customers receive the best services, products, and experiences possible. One of these innovations is the hiring process. We’ve introduced behavioral interviewing into employee selection, which so far, has yielded nine excellent new hires in the last four months. If you come to Catalyst this spring, you can meet them.

As we gear up for a productive New Year, we are taking this blog opportunity to highlight several resources of value to the community of readers we serve. New Case Study Toward the end of 2016, we completed a case study in collaboration with James City County, VA. Entitled One Ring to Rule Them All, the study shares the advantages of energy management software for a county government. It’s a fun read that will get you thinking about savings opportunities in your organization.

The dust has settled after the November elections, and the results are unchanged despite a flurry of protests. Now that we are in the final days of Obama’s presidency, one thing is certain on the energy management front: change is in the wind. Today’s blog takes a look at President-Elect Donald Trump’s ambitious energy plan, and speculates a bit on what it might mean for our industry in the months and years ahead.

Webster’s dictionary defines stewardship as, “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.” As an adoptive parent, I can understand stewardship. Bringing a child who once belonged to different parents into your home is an act of stewardship. In fact, before the adoption is finalized and before you become the legal parent of the child, you’re called the child’s “steward.” You’ve been entrusted to care for a person which is not yet your own.

The quest began in 2009 with the best of intentions: Provide home and small business owners with a free, easy-to-use online application to track and manage their energy use. Making money on the application was not a priority. Instead, it was largely a philanthropic pursuit intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save its users some money. It was a noble quest. But alas, what had begun with great fanfare in 2009 was over less than two years later.

EnergyCAP project managers will be travelling coast to coast to implement new clients on the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards this winter and spring. The State of Connecticut has purchased EnergyCAP utility bill management software for statewide energy management and utility bill tracking, and the City of Los Angeles has also acquired EnergyCAP through a General Services Administration (GSA) process for comprehensive tracking and reporting of the city’s electric, natural gas and water utilities.