The ROI of an Energy and Sustainability Management Platform

Main Benefits

The main benefits of an energy and sustainability management platform include:

• Giving you the opportunity to identify efficiency opportunities
• Allowing you to track the energy and sustainability performance of your facilities as well as compare their performance to other facilities and national benchmarks
• Helping you manage electricity demand charges, particularly important as energy prices remain volatile
• Providing utility bill management and validation (more on this below)
• Allowing you to measure & verify project-specific savings, as well as energy efficiency projects, green energy procurement efforts, and more
• Giving you the information (i.e., quality, comprehensive data) you need to ground and set tangible energy and sustainability goals

Energy Savings

According to a report by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), users of an energy and sustainability management platform reported median savings of 17 percent (or $56,000) for 28 individual sites and 8 percent (or $1.3 million) for 9 portfolios.

The median five-year energy and sustainability management software procurement cost for a portfolio was $150,000, or $1,800 per monitored point, or $0.06 per square foot. In three out of four cases, the payback on the platform was two years or less.

To maximize the savings from your platform, you should follow these best practices:

• Install submetering
• Complete load profiling on a regular basis
• Use automated anomaly detection
• Monitor peak load and manage demand charges
• Use the platform regularly over time to accrue and deepen savings

Other Savings Opportunities

An energy and sustainability management platform monitors your data and audits it for errors. These audits often result in large error catches that ultimately save users substantial amounts of money. For example, here are just a few of the error catches that WatchWire has made for our clients recently:

WatchWire client Pompeian Olive Oil was refunded over $71,500 due to a sales tax error – their buildings were supposed to be tax exempt, but the state accidentally removed that status from their exemptions. Pompeian was ultimately refunded the sales tax they were charged over four years from 2012 to 2016.

One of the most common billing errors WatchWire encounters is invoices with the wrong monthly kWh consumption. For example, one of our clients saw a substantial increase in energy usage on their statement that did not match their historical usage profile. This catch resulted in a 5% lower bill for their Houston site and a 10% lower bill for their remaining accounts. Had they not been tracking their utility data in the platform, they would not have come to this realization.

Similarly, a university’s energy supplier significantly overbilled their usage for a billing period. The school was billed for 860,930 kWh while their typical usage is around half that amount. Through WatchWire’s invoice management audit process, that invoice was flagged and the university was notified. The supplier canceled the original invoice and rebilled, causing supply costs for that period to decrease from $77,690 to approximately $38,500.

 About WatchWire

WatchWire is a sustainability and energy management software-as-a-service (EMSaaS) provider. Across the globe, WatchWire helps commercial and corporate real estate portfolios, Fortune 500 industrial/manufacturing and big-box retail, government, healthcare, and educational facilities reduce emissions, meet their sustainability and net zero goals, and reduce energy expenses while simplifying sustainability and carbon reporting.

Additionally, through advanced, automated data auditing, the WatchWire platform can catch billing errors, saving users money and helping them actualize a superior ROI.