EnergyCAP Blog

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.”

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Today's blog highlights a new EnergyCAP webinar series.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus reportedly said that the only thing that is constant is change. He probably wasn’t talking about your real estate portfolio, but if you manage energy for multiple properties, you know that Heraclitus’ declaration has a ring of truth. Buildings and organizations change over time. Processes are revamped. Employees retire or transfer. Remodeling happens. Space is repurposed from one function to another. And systems struggle (often unsuccessfully) to keep up with the pace. Your energy management software is another system, and you may have been using it in the same way for years. But is your current approach the best approach? Have inevitable changes created an opportunity to do things differently and to do them better? Today’s blog on software retro commissioning may help you answer that question.

This blog is the second installment in a short series drawn from our September Energy Leader Webinar: Tips for Getting Buy-In for Your Energy Project. The webinar purpose was simple: to help participants get more projects approved and more energy saved. Webinar speakers were Steve Heinz, founder and CEO of EnergyCAP, Inc., and Dr. Eric Woodroof, founder and principal of Profitable Green Solutions. Today we’ll share some of the insights we gleaned from Steve’s portion of the presentation.

This blog is the first installment in a short series drawn from last week’s Energy Leader Webinar: Tips for Getting Buy-In for Your Energy Project. The webinar purpose was simple: to help participants get more projects approved and more energy saved. If you’re looking for tips on how to get your next energy project approved, read on!

“Data has a nasty way of representing the wrong idea when inaccurately reported.” —Tony Rovano, AssetWorks It’s your first year on the job as energy manager for a sizable regional real estate management firm. You’re proud of several new initiatives that you were able to implement, but as the summer drags on, you hear through the grapevine that the CEO has been receiving concerned memos from Accounting due to rising utility expenses. Now your supervisor has threatened to pull the plug on a major lighting retrofit that you know will pay for itself in savings over the next three years. It looks like the honeymoon is over, but you are scratching your head to try to figure out what went wrong. It just isn’t fair.

Oh, your aching feet! As an energy manager, your feet might ache because there's too much load on them. Your buildings may have abnormal load also, and we can measure that using a load factor calculation. EnergyCAP’s AN12 report will help you spot an abnormal load factor. It’s a tabular report that shows your load factor (from 0 to 100) for each electric bill.

It was spring break for Penn State students here in State College, PA, last week, but our team was hard at work producing a new webinar, How AccuWeather Data Provides Value to Energy Managers. Our CEO, Steve Heinz, teamed up with AccuWeather’s Director of Business Development Lou Seidel, to discuss how you can get the most up-to-date and accurate weather data, and turn that information into savings for the energy management program at your organization.

Today’s blog is a promotion for an upcoming live event webinar featuring EnergyCAP’s CEO Steve Heinz and Lou Seidel, Director of Business Development for AccuWeather. The webinar, sponsored by Energy Manager Today, is titled How AccuWeather Data Provides Value to Energy Managers, and will be held at 2:00 PM ET on Wednesday, March 9 (just one week from now).

Today we introduce a new energy management infographic available from EnergyCAP. And whether you are a customer or a first-time visitor, this resource may remind you why you would want to acquire or maintain a software tool for your energy program.

In hopes of brightening your bleak mid-winter, we offer a few nuggets of weather wisdom from our latest Energy Leader webinar. Here are Steve Heinz's written responses to chat questions submitted by attendees during the session, which has been recorded and is available online: Why not throw another Yule log on the fire and settle back in your chair for an interesting read about energy and weather?

Why rely on “guesstimates” when you can nail your annual utility budget with the right budget process? It’s all about accounting for variables, and weather is the biggest variable out there. But do you have a coherent and logical approach for correlating weather with your facility energy use? There’s a science to it. And like most sciences, it can be taught and learned. In this recorded webinar, EnergyCAP CEO Steve Heinz will be the teacher, and he will introduce a few guiding principles for utility budgeting.

John Lord is an Energy Education Specialist for Loudoun County (VA) Public Schools, one of the fastest-growing school districts in one of the nation's fastest growing counties. The district serves more than 70,000 students, and utilities are a big expense and an energy management opportunity. In the last two decades, the district has documented more than $60 million in cost avoidance attributable to energy management activities. In today’s guest blog, John shares the Top 10 “people factors” that have contributed to his organization's energy management excellence:

Probably at some point, someone has asked if you've seen the latest TED talk on so-and-so. The first time that happened to me, I was like, "Ted said what?" But since then, I've become a fan of the 18-minute talks that spread ideas on technology, entertainment, and design (that's where the name TED comes from). So if you're looking to be educated, challenged, or even inspired in your work, here's a countdown of the ten most popular TED talks on energy.

We recently presented a webinar with Lucid Design Group on the relationship between real-time metering and utility bill data–and the savings opportunities they deliver. The webinar produced some good questions from the audience, and we're sharing the answers in today's blog.

Ever since we started helping organizations track their utility bills 35 years ago, we've noticed two paths that organizations frequently travel on the road to energy management success. We focused on one of those paths in an earlier blog (the path of utility bill processing maturity). Today we’ll focus on the path of energy management maturity. Like any path, it has a starting point, and a destination, with landmarks along the way. We’ve captured that path in an infographic, and are sharing it in this blog.  

In a previous blog, we discussed the value of the national CBECS survey in assessing the energy efficiency of buildings in your property portfolio. Today, we are going to look at the process by which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) and other data and processes to develop its national ENERGY STAR building rating. And if you’re not yet tracking your building energy use with ENERGY STAR, here are five good reasons to get started!

Utility bills vs. interval data. Two very different types of information. The forest vs. the trees. The whole pie vs. a 'byte'. These two sources represent distinct value streams for the modern enterprise. The smart energy manager can realize and leverage the value of each, and added value accrues when you bring them together—a kind of energy management marriage made in heaven. That's the premise for the first of another round of monthly Energy Leader Webinars sponsored by EnergyCAP.

In our 35 years of helping organizations track their utility bills, we've seen all kinds of utility bill processes. Some have been complex, while some have been simple. Some have interfaced with external systems, while some have kept to themselves. Some have been free, while some have been paid. Drawing on our experience, we created the Utility Bill Processing infographic. Where does your organization fit in?

Many of our blog readers know that we launched our new website this month. As blog co-author Chris Heinz pointed out recently, the new site provides much better access to a wide variety of content resources. In today’s blog, we will briefly review the seven major content areas of our new online resource library. Nearly all of our primary content resources can be accessed from the Resources page of our website: www.energycap.com/resources.  We have divided up the resource library into seven major areas: