A County’s EnergyCAP Tale

In 1634, England’s King Charles I signed legislation that created James City Shire within the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, that prosperous shire, now known as James City County, is home to approximately 70,000 residents and is an EnergyCAP success story.

Energy management got a bit of a slow start in the Shire. But 376 years after its founding, the county’s energy management staff, led by Department of General Services Director John Horne, began to compile and analyze historical energy consumption data in search of energy-reduction and cost-cutting opportunities. Since 2008, county staff have encountered a variety of energy management challenges with which many readers will identify:

Compiling complete, accurate data was very time-consuming.
The Excel-based analysis tools were complex and cumbersome.
Weather-normalizing the data required weeks of effort via complex calculations.
Lack of confidence in the data undermined the county’s ability to manage energy resources.
Energy information was managed by multiple systems, and data-sharing channels were limited.

Dawn Oleksy, the county’s Environmental Coordinator, knew they could do better, so in 2014, she began the search for a comprehensive energy tracking and reporting tool. EnergyCAP was implemented in 2015, along with our Bill CAPture utility bill processing service, and the results have been very positive:

Utilities for the county’s entire real estate portfolio of 105 buildings are now tracked in one location: EnergyCAP.
Weather normalization is done automatically.
Data is submitted directly to ENERGY STAR, eliminating the need for redundant data entry.
Bills for more than 250 meters are entered and audited every month by ECI’s Bill CAPture service, saving an estimated 34 hours of staff time per month.
All county Energy Team members can access EnergyCAP to generate reports and view data via personalized dashboards.

Oleksy summarized the county’s energy management vision this way:

“With EnergyCAP our goal was to accurately and consistently capture actual usage data on a monthly basis, have the ability to easily run our own reports and analysis, quickly access and provide usage data upon request, have all of our energy management tools in one place and provide a user-friendly dashboard that would allow interdepartmental Energy Team members to easily view and assess the usage in their own buildings.”

James City County is realizing its EnergyCAP vision, and you can learn more about their EnergyCAP tale by downloading the complete case study. And stay tuned for next week’s blog post, which will announce two new large government EnergyCAP implementations.

Do you have an EnergyCAP success story to share? Is your organization struggling with similar pre-EnergyCAP challenges? Either way, we and our readers would like to hear from you. Click on the “Leave a Comment” link below to share your perspective with this moderated forum.