Riverside County’s Path to Energy Savings

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.

Janet outlined her path to energy management success in a recent webinar, and she noted that the approach is quite simple: Take it “one step at a time.”

EnergyCAP Enterprise has been at the core of Riverside County’s energy management program since 2012 and delivers value on multiple fronts:

Efficient Utility Bill Workflow. Riverside is California’s fourth largest county by population and receives approximately 1,800 bills per month from 57 different vendors. Fortunately, most of those utility bills are processed through EnergyCAP, Inc.’s (ECI) Bill CAPture℠ service and imported directly into EnergyCAP, greatly reducing manual data entry. As a result, utility bill processing costs have been reduced by more than $48,000 annually.
Effective Auditing. To date, EnergyCAP’s built-in utility bill audits have identified issues prior to bill payment, resulting in $442,376 in avoided costs. After the bills are auditing and approved in EnergyCAP, they are uploaded to the county’s A/P system electronically, eliminating manual data entry for the accounting staff.
Database Hosting. Allowing ECI to host the county’s EnergyCAP database ensures that the county receives software upgrades as soon as they’re released, provides access to additional functionality, and saves the county $6,700 per year versus in-house hosting.
Measurement & Verification (M&V). EnergyCAP’s Cost Avoidance functionality normalizes for weather and other changing conditions to accurately evaluate payback on energy efficiency projects.
Renewables Tracking. The county is wrapping up work on a 12.25 MW solar project and an EV charging station project. When those projects are completed, Riverside will have more EV charging stations than Disneyland. And the accounting for those renewable energy projects—rebates, net metering calculations, internal billing—is managed in EnergyCAP.

All told, Janet and her team, working closely with the county’s accounting staff, have documented more than $661,000 in savings over the past six years, and we’re pleased that EnergyCAP is an integral part of the team.

We greatly appreciate Janet’s time and willingness to share her team’s efforts and successes via the webinar. If you were not able to attend the live webinar, I encourage you to set aside some time to view the recorded version. I’m confident that you will find the information presented to be valuable to your energy management efforts.