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.

But M&V waters can become muddied when on-site renewables such as PV solar and wind turbines are involved.

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?