Consulting Services
Energy Management
Consumption analysis, tariff and rate structure review, and control sequence assessment. The finding is frequently operational rather than capital, which is good news that vendors have little incentive to deliver.
Start with the bill, not the equipment
Energy conversations tend to begin with equipment, because equipment is what vendors sell. We begin with the tariff, because the tariff is free to analyze and sometimes changes the answer entirely.
Commercial and industrial energy accounts are commonly billed on a structure that includes a demand component based on peak draw within the billing period, not just total consumption. Operations that have never examined this are frequently paying a substantial premium driven by a small number of brief peaks, some of which are artifacts of how equipment is sequenced at startup rather than of any real load requirement. Staggering startup can move that number without buying anything.
The three layers
- Rate and tariff. Is the account on the correct rate class for its actual load profile? Rate classes are chosen once and rarely revisited, while load profiles change as buildings and occupancy change.
- Operation and control. What is the equipment actually doing, versus what the design intended? Control sequences drift. Overrides get applied to solve a comfort complaint and are never removed. Schedules reflect occupancy patterns from before a reorganization. This layer costs almost nothing to investigate and produces a disproportionate share of the savings.
- Capital. Equipment replacement and system upgrades. Real, sometimes necessary, and the layer to examine last, because a replacement installed into a bad control sequence inherits the bad control sequence and underperforms its projection.
Why the order matters
Projected savings on capital energy work are calculated against a baseline. If the baseline includes waste that operational changes would have eliminated anyway, the project gets credited with savings it did not cause, and the measured result comes in below the projection. This is the single most common reason energy retrofits disappoint, and it is an artifact of sequence rather than of the technology.
If a proposal quotes a payback period, ask what the baseline was, how long it was measured, and whether it was weather normalized. A payback calculated against a single unadjusted year is not a projection, it is an estimate wearing a projection's clothing.
Measurement and verification
Savings that are not measured tend to erode. Control settings revert, schedules get overridden, and without a monitoring routine nobody notices for a year or more. We recommend establishing the verification method before the work rather than after, when the baseline is still available and the incentive to define it favorably is lowest.
Environmental and sustainability overlap
Energy work and environmental consulting frequently arrive at the same recommendations from different directions. Where a client has reporting obligations, it is worth aligning the two so that a single measurement effort serves both rather than commissioning them separately.
Start with the numbers you already have
Send us a recent operating budget, a maintenance log or a vendor contract. We will tell you what it says about the way the site is being run.
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