Created as a land grant in 1634 by the King of England, James City Shire is the prospering James City County today. But 21st century realities were exposing cracks in the County’s energy foundation. The situation led the Department of General Services (DGS) with Dawn Oleksy, Environmental Coordinator for James City County, on a quest for an all-purpose energy management solution. The County found its solution in the EnergyCAP energy and sustainability ERP.
Oleksy, whose unofficial titles include “Energy Czar”, “Ice Princess”, and “Queen of Darkness” for her practices of banishing space heaters, lowering winter setpoints, and turning out lights everywhere she goes, was personally involved with the EnergyCAP UtilityManagement™ acquisition from start to finish. This case study describes the County’s energy management transition through the lens of her experience.
The County’s initial forays into energy management really began in 2008, spearheaded by DGS Director John Horne. At that time, energy management staff began compiling historical energy use data for the County’s real estate portfolio of 100+ buildings, and picking the “low hanging fruit” for energy efficiency gains. Excel was the primary database tool.
Prior to EnergyCAP UtilityManagement implementation, James City County was also relying primarily on quarterly reports generated by a third party vendor for energy reporting. But the available data was limited. Although Oleksy’s department was capturing monthly energy use and cost through a provided web portal, she was eager to dive more deeply into the County’s energy use. It was becoming increasingly important to provide meaningful data to internal and external stakeholders, including the County’s 15-member Energy Team. The vendor’s solution was unsatisfactory since data was frequently incomplete, requiring the use of estimated instead of actual values. The resulting lack of confidence in the completeness and accuracy of energy data hindered project planning and measurement & verification of savings.
The County had few options for data sharing, and compiling and verifying comparison data for longer periods of time was extremely time-consuming. An annual weather-normalized report demanded weeks of effort from limited staff to retrieve comprehensive energy data for the County and set up the necessary formulas to perform the normalization calculations.
While Oleksy was able to use Excel functions and pivot tables to analyze the available utility data, the process was often cumbersome, and it was difficult to monitor the accuracy of the energy database and to maintain consistency from month to month and year to year. The County needed to take its energy reporting to the next level.
Data verification was a significant problem prior to EnergyCAP implementation. “Because our historical energy usage was automatically compiled but not easily verified we would spend a lot of time making sure that our reporting was as accurate as possible with limited data and resources,” said Oleksy. Questionable data was undermining the County’s ability to manage precious energy resources.
The County’s energy information was also being managed with multiple systems and processes. These competing systems were actually creating obstacles by generating process inefficiencies. In addition to the third party quarterly reports and her internal spreadsheet system, Oleksy was using the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager online software to track Energy Use Index score fluctuations on a monthly basis so they could report on their ‘Energy Saver of the Month’ program results. But managing the same utility data manually in yet another software application was a time-consuming chore. James City County needed a single comprehensive energy tracking and reporting tool.
EnergyCAP UtilityManagement provided a single software solution to unify the County’s energy management program, providing short- and long-term efficiency gains.
For instance, the weather-normalized report that terrorized the County’s energy management staff annually can now be displayed on demand in EnergyCAP UtilityManagement with a couple of mouse clicks. “Now we are easily able to identify gaps between billing periods and our reporting confidence has increased exponentially,” said Oleksy.
Since EnergyCAP is a partner organization of ENERGY STAR, the software automatically maintains the County’s Portfolio Manager account. New billing data is uploaded monthly to ENERGY STAR, enabling Oleksy to track and trend the Energy Use Index and the 100-point ENERGY STAR energy efficiency building rating without ever leaving EnergyCAP UtilityManagement.
Along with the software implementation, the County also purchased EnergyCAP’s Bill CAPture service, which has transformed their utility bill processing protocol for the DGS.
That vision is turning into reality with EnergyCAP.
We wish to thank Dawn Oleksy, Environmental Coordinator (General Services), for her assistance in the completion of this Case Study.
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