Managing Energy Information

Our previous blog post—Best Practices in Campus Energy Information Management, Chargebacks, and Internal Billings—provided tips to help campus-based organizations obtain accurate, detailed energy information for individual facilities. It’s fitting, then, to follow up with a real-life application of those best practices.

At the recent Big10 & Friends Mechanical and Energy Conference, Kirk Conger, Automation & Energy Management Project Manager, delivered a presentation that outlined how the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has streamlined chargeback calculations and overall energy data workflow. The “before” process was labor-intensive and primarily manual in nature. Auxiliary (i.e., chargeback) customers were maintained in a complex, color-coded spreadsheet and required 3–4 days per month to process. A single billing or energy report could require four hours to five days to generate, so they were done on an ad-hoc basis.

UNL implemented EnergyCAP in 2016, and the benefits have been substantial. Chargeback processing time has been reduced from 3–4 workdays to just four hours. Reports are now readily available systemwide, and live energy dashboards are accessible on demand.

Kirk emphasized the universal need for “good energy data”—data in which there is a high level of confidence—and outlined how EnergyCAP is meeting the need by providing UNL with a single, accessible system-of-record that is “secure, but widely available.”

We greatly appreciate Kirk telling UNL’s EnergyCAP story. You can download the Managing Energy Information presentation slide deck for a more detailed look at the university’s before-and-after processes and EnergyCAP’s industry-leading chargebacks management functionality.