This presentation shows you the key results your energy tracking system should be able to provide by demonstrating a sample energy report from Arctic Fox Energy Tracking. The goal: enabling you to focus on energy saving decision making instead of just managing data.

Video Presentation

We recommend watching in full-screen mode. If you prefer, you can view the short version (under 5 minutes) of the sample report demo.

Transcript

Hello, my name is Eric Hennessey and I’m going to show you the key results your energy tracking system should be able to provide by showing you a sample energy report from Arctic Fox Energy Tracking. The goal here is to make your energy data accessible so you can focus on making energy saving decisions instead of digging through millions of numbers of spreadsheet data.

First, I want to briefly cover the motivation for energy tracking in the first place. Most municipalities and organizations with at least a few facilities want to stay on top of the usage and cost picture of each of their facilities for these reasons:

* First, to detect costly equipment malfunctions early–a misconfigured or broken system can easily waste thousands of dollars for every month the malfunction goes undetected (this is the key reason facility managers love these reports)
* Second, to plan and measure energy savings. Energy Managers try to identify which facilities will benefit the most from a retrofit, and to answer this question they need good, usable data. And after the retrofit work has been completed, it’s important to do a quantitative return on investment analysis rather than rely on the hand waving estimates most often resorted to
* Thirdly, managers want to routinely track their energy to easily complete any reporting obligations you may have such as to city council, the province, or to apply for rebates or meet climate change obligations.

To introduce Arctic Fox Energy Tracking, we’ve been tracking the energy of many cities in BC for over a half dozen years. For example, we currently serve some of the largest cities in the province including the cities of Richmond, Burnaby, Delta, and the District of North Vancouver. We also serve municipalities in Alberta.

We call ourselves a full-service energy tracking service provider, which means we do all of the work for you to save you the most time possible. Each month, we access all of the latest data on your behalf directly from the utility company, import it into your database, and convert the database into an online report that has the exact graphs and summary tables that a manager needs to quickly know exactly what is happening with each building and with the municipality as a whole.

So let me show you what one of these webpage reports looks like.

Here it is. So each report is laid out in a cascading tree structure, where you can access the relevant graphs and data tables at the grand total level at the very top of the tree, which shows the total data for all of the meters of the city added together, and at various sublevels (such as all the buildings together, or all of the lighting or wastewater meters together, or for a certain collection of buildings, like all of the libraries), and finally at the other end of the tree at the facility level, and within each facility the meters themselves.

Let’s take a look at the Grand Total page first. This is the most frequently accessed page because high level reports to city council or the province can be completed just by copying and pasting several numbers, whether it be the total energy usage or cost breakdown or the total greenhouse gas emissions.

We’ve heard from so many energy managers that before they started receiving our reports, they spent so much time just trying to manipulate their data to get a clear picture of what was happening with each building and for the municipality as a whole, or sometimes even spending over $10,000 for a consultant to produce a one-off report once a year that only served one function. Now these numbers are available at their fingertips in an instant, whenever they want them, and can be used in a myriad of ways.

As we scroll down, we can see that total usage and cost by year is presented in several different graphical forms.

We’re going to head right to the Top Electricity Consumers Graphs.

Any energy tracking system should be able to make clear comparisons between your facilities to identify candidates for energy audits and energy efficiency retrofits . Here we can see which facilities are contributing the most to the total usage of the municipality, and how the cost breaks down within each facility. Clearly City Hall here is the major consumer. This provides the first clue of where to focus our energy reduction measures.

Now we scroll down to the “Gas Graphs” heading. These are essentially the same graphs as the Electricity Graphs above. Your energy tracking system should help you easily make comparisons to historical data, like the previous month, the previous year, and the average of the last few years, to help catch changes in usage that may indicate malfunctions and waste energy.

So this electricity graph shows the last 13 months of usage (this is the blue line) and the blue shading shows the minimum, maximum, and average usage of the last 3 years for comparison, so we can see at a glance how we are performing compared to previous years. If there is a spike in usage above the maximum usage of the last three years, as we see here for January 2014 and also for February, it’s obvious on this graph and indicates there may be an issue somewhere that may warrant an investigation.

The red line and shading shows heating degree days, which represent cold weather based on temperature data from the nearest weather station, so we can compare trends in usage to how cold it’s been.

In another representation, we can see the last 6 years of usage for each month compared side by side–again we can see the higher than average January and February usage. We can also see how we’re using quite a bit less energy in the current year for July.

Next we have a historical chart that goes back as far as we have data. For many cities, we were able to obtain data back to the early 2000’s.

Scrolling further, we have some cost graphs. Finally, we have the data tables themselves. These are really the meat of the report. Here we can see the actual usage numbers, normalized to the month. Now this date normalization of the data is a really important concept so let me explain what’s happening here.

Since meters are read sporadically throughout the year, there generally won’t be consistency with when these reading dates are, or how many days they cover. To know what energy our buildings are using and to make meaningful comparisons, this data needs to be converted into monthly data. This is quite critical to obtain an accurate picture of usage, and the main reason people have such a hard time working with the raw data that most utility companies give them, since that data just gives the usage associated with a reading period, not the month.

Here’s how we do this conversion. [Example]

Now back to the report. We have a table for electricity data which shows how the costs break down, and if we export this data table down here, you’ll get a spreadsheet with all of the date normalized data going back all the years, including further cost breakdowns such as taxes. There’s another table for Gas, and a monthly summary table for both energy sources together, along with a yearly summary table. At the end of the year, these numbers here are of incredible value, since they represent the consolidation of millions of numbers from hundreds of meters and many different data files, all pulled together and unified.

Now I’m going to show you a facility page. If we go back and click on City Hall, we come to a page that looks very similar to the one we just saw. However, this is now just for the meters associated with one building or building complex. So in this example, we have two buildings being fed by a total of 3 meters, two electrical and one gas.

We have the same graphs and data tables as the grand total page, but at the facility level, but we also have weather normalization and CUSUM graphs, which attempt to subtract the effect of the environmental factors.

Your energy tracking system should be able to adjust your data for weather factors, since we expect to use more energy during a colder winter, for example, so that increased usage shouldn’t be flagged as a problem, nor take away credit from energy reduction measures.

So for example, if a building has been retrofitted and you want to measure the energy cost savings, we define a baseline period, such as the year preceding the retrofit, and then apply a least squares linear regression to get weather normalized usage, which ideally has removed the effect of external temperature changes. Now we can calculate a CUSUM, or cumulative sum graph, which represents the energy savings regardless of climate.

Scrolling to the bottom, we also calculate some different metrics like usage per unit area, which can be compared to benchmarks so you get a sense of how energy-efficient your building is overall.

There are two more short sections of the report that I want to show you. The first is this alert page, which shows any facility that has had a spike or drop in energy past a certain threshold like 15% compared to the previous month, to help you detect those waste energy scenarios.

And lastly, we have a summary page that has all of the date normalized and summarized data for all of the meters all together in one file, which depending on how you want to use your data, can be a massive time saver. Just to show you an example of what one of these exports looks like, here you can see all of the gas data for one facility by month, the electricity data, and the total data, and for the other facilities as well.

Back in the report, here you can also export your latest master account and facility lists. Let me show you what the account list looks like. In setting up a new client for energy tracking, this is the only thing that they need to do. After receiving authorization to access the utility data directly from the utility providers, we produce this spreadsheet that lists all of the utility meters and includes the identifier and address on file with the utility company. All you have to do is classify these meters by specifying which facility each meter is associated with, and what type of facility it is. This only needs to be done once, and then you simply anticipate an email from us each month letting you know that your energy report has been updated and is ready for use–no work, and no hassle.

That concludes this energy tracking demo–if you’d like to explore this sample report on your own, please feel free to do so at the web address shown here, or if you have any questions or are interested in obtaining a quote for energy tracking services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me and we can schedule a time to chat–bye for now.