Chances are that your organization has a “Mission-Critical Contracts Plan” to ensure that mission essential contracts have been identified and that the vendors responsible for those mission essential products and services are following CDC and other applicable health and safety guidelines and precautions.

Congratulations! Thanks to your effective energy management and building operations practices, you’ve achieved two months of “flatlining” your buildings. As proven by your smart meter data, effective shutdowns of high daily “occupied” electric loads have been flatlined, the only bumps being slightly higher nighttime security lighting loads.

It may be just the right time to put on your BudgetCAP.

In my last blog I showed how you can set expectations for a potential second quarter utilities budget surplus. In that real-world example,

Yes, very unfortunate budget cutbacks loom in the future, but for the next few months your utilities budget will be benefiting from an unexpected stimulus.

Welcome back to my blog series on Effective Energy Management from Home. If you haven’t read the five-blog series or last week’s wrap-up, give them a quick read first.

Welcome to the wrap-up of my blog series on Effective Energy Management from Home. If you haven’t read the five previous posts, give them a quick read first.

If you’ve kept up with the series and have had the time and EnergyCAP access ability

Welcome to my blog series, #5 of 5, on Effective Energy Management from Home. If you haven’t read Blogs #1, #2, #3, and #4, I recommend you give them a quick read first.

You’re a home-bound Energy Manager. How can you spend your time productively?

Welcome to my blog series, #4 of 5, on Effective Energy Management from Home. If you haven’t read Blogs #1, #2, and #3, I recommend you give them a quick read first.

Welcome to my blog series, #3 of 5, on Effective Energy Management from Home. If you haven’t read Blogs #1 & #2, I recommend you give them a quick read first.

You’re an Energy Manager working from home. Your buildings are mainly unoccupied and in shutdown mode, right? A bright side to the crisis is that you’re saving a lot of energy and water. 

Welcome to my blog series, #2 of 5, on Effective Energy Management from Home. If you haven’t read blog #1, I recommend you give it a quick read first.

Hello friends and colleagues, and welcome to a new COVID-19 reality unimaginable only a few weeks ago. It is the sincere desire of everyone here at EnergyCAP that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy.

Author and technology prophet George Gilder got me thinking when I read his recent book Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy. In writing about Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the most influential and accomplished scientist ever, he describes Newton’s lifelong fascination with alchemy.

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!

When I saw the green energy monitoring panel on the wall of my hotel room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. An energy monitoring panel here? I’d never seen anything like this! The building’s designers must have had some sustainability goal in mind, but drawing on my forty years of experience producing energy tracking software, all I could think was this is so…wrong!

An important aspect of energy management is the measurement and verification (M&V) of energy management initiatives, whether behavior/operational or hardware/retrofits.  Besides the obvious need to verify savings when the contract is based on performance, M&V also provides valuable feedback to participants and senior management.

EnergyCAP utility bill management software has about 300 “canned” reports, so new users often ask me, "How do I know which reports to run?”

Today’s blog highlights five reports that you might not even know exist. But I’m betting that when you see them, you will see real value for your organization.

I first shared these reports at our annual Catalyst Training for Savings conference last month. If you haven't attended a Catalyst training yet and you are using our software, I recommend that you set aside the time and funding for next April to take advantage of this valuable resource.

Today’s blog is on one of my favorite topics—accruals. Oh, no; I lied.

Let’s face it—accruals are rarely anyone’s favorite topic. As an engineer, I tend to look at accruals as an accounting exercise that really doesn’t add anything to the energy management picture, so why would anyone even bother?

The short answer is that for those in accounting departments and those dealing with budgets and Profit & Loss (P&L) statements, accruals are very important and very necessary. But there are also some tangible benefits on the energy management side.

Energy managers: you may not be as mature as you think you are.

No, I’m not talking about fighting on the playground, or slipping a grasshopper into Marie’s lunchbox. I’m referring to the current state of your energy information systems.

No, not your building control systems–although those can be very important. How mature are you when it comes to handling your energy data?