EnergyCAP and Energy Management in the New York Times

EnergyCAP is in the news again this week with a thoughtful article in the New York Times on measuring building energy efficiency, written by Saqib Rahim of ClimateWire.

Mixing personal biography and green technology with a journalist’s skill at storytelling, Rahim introduces the reader to Steve Heinz, a pioneer in the development of energy management software.

Rahim explains the genesis of computerized energy management, the challenges in energy conservation faced by building owners and managers, and the significance of Heinz’ most recent achievement: a weather-normalization module in his EnergyCAP software that uses degree day data from AccuWeather to interpret years or even decades of utility bill history.

The weather normalization technology enables the EnergyCAP software user to pick any calendar year as a ‘base year’ for energy use/cost comparisons. EnergyCAP then ‘calendarizes’ and crunches year after year of available utility bill data with a decades-tested regression analysis, yielding a comparative analysis in charts and tabular data that effectively mitigates any weather-induced differences. Or to put things another way–Heinz has made it possible to make year-to-year apples-to-apples energy use and cost comparisons.

All this information can take the building owner or manager a giant step closer to understanding how effective energy management efforts have been, and will be in the years to come.

Read the EnergyCAP article in the New York Times.