The document discusses the importance of quality energy data for organizations implementing sustainability and energy management programs, highlighting common challenges, best practices, and the roles of various personnel in utilizing this data. It emphasizes the need for complete, accurate, and centralized data management strategies, and addresses methods for securing executive support and analyzing energy usage. Additionally, the document showcases Urjanet's cloud-based platform, which automates energy data collection and helps companies gain insights into energy consumption and costs.

1. Who can benefit from access to energy data in your company?
There are many factors that go into the planning and execution of sustainability and energy
management programs. The key ingredient that underlines all of these initiatives is good data.
However, from collecting data to managing and analyzing data, organizations across the globe have
run into challenges regarding good data management for their energy programs.
In this panel, we hear from leading energy management experts on several best practices for
securing good data and putting their energy reduction and sustainability plans to action.
THE PANEL:
Susan Clarke, Industry Analyst, Energy Practice
Bill Moir, Energy Program Manager
Robert Fairey, Senior Director, Energy Procurement & Waste Diversion
Paul Baier, VP, Sustainability Consulting & Research
Erik Becker, Vice President
RESOURCES
EXPERT Q&A:
DATA IS ESSENTIALTO YOUR
SUSTAINABILITY & ENERGY
MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS
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2. I work at a company with 1,000 different
facilities, and we’re just getting serious about
energy management. How should I start?
UPS: I would start by getting your hands on as much
of your billing data as you can, at least a year’s worth.
Ensure you understand your cost structure, how it
is that utilities in general charge for the delivered
product, and specifically relative to your own
situation by looking at your cost structure on the
tariff that you’re on. Finally, understand your process,
usage, and load profile by looking at the interval
data that you can get directly from the utility.
What steps should I take to implement a better
data management strategy?
VERDANTIX: The key part of a good data
management strategy is having complete data sets
– data across all domains within the organization.
It’s also important to collect accurate data sets. By
collecting bigger data sets on things like energy
and business operations, there’s more opportunity
for errors to cascade across the organization. So any
good data management strategy would be based on
accurate and complete data.
The next step would be centralizing this data.
This means aggregating and bringing together
all of these separate data management systems
to produce a centralized data resource where
you can start looking at energy trends across the
organization.
So these three areas – complete data, accurate data,
and centralized data – are challenging for firms to
implement. We typically suggest that firms break
their entire organization down into building blocks,
and that might be building a data management plan
around your data center, or around your commercial
office buildings. The next step would be taking these
building blocks of data and integrating them into a
centralized system.
What do companies do when they don’t have an
automated solution like Urjanet for collecting and
analyzing energy data?
GROOM ENERGY: That’s a good question. It’s
been a perennial problem. We’ve seen a couple
of different approaches. One is the do-it-yourself
approach. We’ll push down responsibility and try to
get local finance or accounts payable team members
to actually input not just the bill but also the other
information about cost and usage and demand
charges. That approach, historically, has not worked
well, although we still see some companies doing
that.
Secondly, we’ve seen some companies develop their
own teams to manually input the data. We don’t
recommend manual data entry but it’s certainly an
approach that some have taken.
Third, we’ve seen the approach of using traditional
utility bill payment vendors that provide a service of
manually inputting utility bill data. You’ll then get a
data feed from the bill payment vendor.
And the fourth scenario that we’ve seen out there
is that some companies have abandoned their
effort after awhile when they realize it’s actually too
costly to get utility bill data for 300 facilities or more
around the world. So, it is a perennial problem that
makes services, like those Urjanet can provide, a
welcome tool in the toolbox.
How do you secure executive support to fund
your sustainability and energy management
initiatives?
UPS: I think the increasing conversation over the
last 10 years on the sustainability front has certainly
added some additional ballast to the overall energy
conversation. It facilitates driving people at the
upper ends of organizations to care more about
these things. At the end of the day, you need to find
scenarios that show where and what the costs are,
and look for those situations where you can remove
cost and show the savings that folks at the upper
level of the organization are looking for.
Who are the typical users of all this energy data?
VERDANTIX: We have found that the typical
user will be the person within the organization
who is tasked with energy management. Large
organizations are likely to have their own dedicated
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“The key part of a good data
management strategy is having
complete data sets.”

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energy manager, while the energy managers of other
organizations may come under diverse job titles. It
might be facilities director, head of real estate, head
of operations – they may be picking up the energy
management responsibilities. So we typically see the
energy manager as the typical audience of energy
data.
However, as energy becomes an increasingly
strategic issue for firms, and this trend is already
apparent in the energy intelligence sector, we
see the relevance of energy data rising up in the
organization. We’ve seen examples of the CFO
being interested in energy usage and cost data. In
those types of organizations, the CFO is starting to
view energy as a cost lever, where they can improve
profit margins and overall business performance.
Are there any issues regarding data quality with
big data?
VERDANTIX: In energy management, poor data
quality really limits a firm’s ability to leverage data for
improved outcomes, and it may also drive erroneous
decisions. Looking at utility bill data opens up the
possibilities of identifying inaccuracies in charges
you’re receiving from utilities. As organizations start
producing these larger data sets, it’s important to
focus to ensure data validation steps in all parts of
the process.
How does the energy data you’re collecting
today support other departments?
COX ENTERPRISES: We’ve found so many
ways that energy data really helped not only our
facilities managers but also our accounts payable
departments. They have access to the dashboard.
We can set it up, give them credentials to sign in,
and they can look at bills. There are PDF files that are
housed in the cloud which they can download and
print. The data is readily available to our facilities
managers who can review utility charges and bills for
their site that gives them a lot of information. We get
a lot of good feedback from our locations across the
country.
What types of analytics are firms applying to this
energy data?
VERDANTIX: Just to give some context, for the
past few years I’ve been tracking big energy data
software applications and the core functionality of
this class of software. It really seems to be about
data aggregation, and that’s processing data from
different energy systems and devices and trying
to translate it into a common data type. We’re
also seeing functions of these around energy data
visualization, performance analytics, forecasting, and
cost analytics.
It really seems to be enabling firms to get a better
insight into their future energy spend and future
energy usage to support budget planning. So
we’re definitely seeing different types of analytics
emerging. It seems to be a general trend, and it’s
about applying more advanced business intelligence
analytics to energy datasets. This is becoming a lot
more sophisticated than the more general energy
management software tools that date back to the
early 1990s.
Do you monitor facilities at the meter level or
down to the load centers?
UPS: In general, we monitor at the main meter
level, but it can depend on the facility vintage
and size. We began deploying single main smart
meters in the mid 1990s in new construction when
they first became readily available. In recent years,
in the construction of our larger facilities, we have
begun metering at the main and again at the larger
feeds out of our distribution panels for our process
equipment.
We are very interested in the increasing availability
of “day behind” data directly fed by Urjanet from
the utilities. To have access to data in a day behind
fashion without managing and supporting a
metering infrastructure is an area we are exploring.
“We’ve seen examples of the
CFO being interested in energy
usage and cost data. In those
types of organizations, the
CFO is starting to view energy
as a cost lever, where they can
improve profit margins and
overall business performance.”

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Has the Green Button initiative proven beneficial?
UPS: I think the concept has a lot of potential, but
it depends on what specific data is being made
available. Seeing aggregated billing data on the
web is fine, but it’s the availability of daily “interval”
data that I believe holds the most promise. Utility
invoices have been the traditional way to see what
you are using with energy. But the 30-day billing
cycle, obtaining energy data once every 30 days, is a
bit slow and a bit opaque.
Given how that data is aggregated – as a 30-day
data collection – you can really only see potential
waste if the aggregated amount strays far from the
norm. If utilities and data services, like Urjanet,
can deliver that data on a daily basis in an interval
format, you can begin to see beyond the “how
much,” and into the “how.” The aggregated cost is
still important because it’s tough to justify much if
you can’t see into the cost piece, but the availability
of the interval data will, in my view, generate the
most benefits on the energy front.
What programs have you implemented that had
the biggest positive impact on energy spend?
UPS: We’re coming at it from two sides. One, if we
can remove the load from the system through things
like lighting upgrades, etc., we’re going to do that if
it’s cost-effective. Our lighting program upgrade was
done in 1993. In the last six years we have probably
done about 120,000 fixture upgrades across the U.S.
So clearly anything you can do to get the actual load
out of the system is a good move.
We do struggle with energy management systems
to be honest, getting paybacks on those, just
because of our profile. Putting the data in front of
people and trying to engage them is key. There are
lots of ways to do it, but we’re doing it through the
balanced scorecard. We’re basically telling them the
amount of energy at the district level they should be
using and when they get out of control, so to speak
being a controls engineer, it gives them something
to go look at and find. We also allow them to get
credit for energy savings solutions. We’re trying to
engage them through simple data and simple data
constructs that they can basically use to understand
how things are going. They do not have as much
time to become subject matter experts as I do.
Do you see your organization moving to interval
data in your facilities?
COX ENTERPRISES: Yes, we certainly do. We’ve
already done that in a lot of locations and one
example is demand response. If any of you have
been approached by some of the demand response
providers, you need to commit to some level that
you can reduce your demand when called upon.
What we like to do is take the interval data, look at
how we’re running our operations, sit down with
our facilities, and see exactly what we can commit
to do, if it’s a 50 horsepower air compressor or a 30
KW lighting. Interval data gives us a lot of visibility
by isolating energy usage by specific machines that
have submeters.
The other thing is capacity and transmission costs
continue to rise in many markets. We like to know
when we are hitting these levels, these capacity
obligations that we’re setting, and when it happens
Can we do anything to affect it and reduce it? So
I think interval data is really key to both of these
things.
So much information is made available on
individual invoices. How do you determine what
to focus on to calculate your carbon footprint?
COX ENTERPRISES: We just look at all of the
determinants that would go into calculating
carbon footprints such as kilowatt-hours, therms
or decatherms of gas consumed. Those are the
kinds of things that we pull off utility bills, and more
importantly, those are the kind of things we’re able
to pull off.
That’s one of the great things about the Urjanet
data. We have some bills which are extremely
complicated, have a lot of information like
shouldered kilowatt hour consumption, off peak, on
peak, different demand levels associated with each
of those, and all that information is important to us
and available to us. There are a lot of benefits by
being able to extract those multiple determinants off
of those bills.
How many utilities does Urjanet connect to?
URJANET: We’ve completed integrations with more
than 1,200 utilities throughout North America and

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in Europe. And we’re adding new utilities every day,
so our list is expanding rapidly to meet customer
requirements.
What if a utility provider isn’t one of the 1,200
Urjanet is connected to? Does Urjanet build a
new connection?
URJANET: Yes, we do. If customers have utility
providers they want us to integrate with, we simply
build a new connection. That’s just a natural part of
our business. Especially if it’s a key utility provider for
one of our customers.
I have different users who want energy data, and
all use different applications. Can Urjanet connect
to them?
URJANET: We have standard connectors into
many industry applications, so depending on which
applications you’re using we may have a connector
that can snap right in and deliver the data directly to
those applications. But if not, we have the ability to
develop a custom adapter for you.
The data feed that we provide is designed to be
used throughout the enterprise. So whether the
data is meant to get into accounting, or into energy
management, or sustainability or real estate, we
can deliver our data feed to you, which can be
consumed in whatever applications that you want.
Do all utility providers supply electronic data?
URJANET: The vast majority provide access to
electronic bill data, but there are still a few holdouts.
Soon all the providers will support electronic access.
They will have to. Interval data is a bit harder to get
access to electronically, but the trend there is also
favorable. There’s pressure on the utilities to make
their customer’s data more readily available.
How does Urjanet gather utility tax billing and late
payment information?
URJANET: It’s simple, we electronically gather all the
data elements on the bill - in some cases that might
include over 100 unique data elements, including
information like taxes, late fees, service addresses,
etc. Even bill stuffers! We collect it all, and make it
all available via our data feed.
We want to start using interval data but it’s
expensive to install meters at all of the locations.
Is there an alternative?
URJANET: With the Urjanet Interval Data product
we’re able to pull information back from utility
provided smart meters. People sometimes call
this smart meter data AMI or interval data. Urjanet
Interval Data is far more cost effective than other
alternatives. It doesn’t require the installation of
any type of on premise metering equipment. We
leverage the smart meter the utility has provided
and can deliver data from those meters to our
customers on a daily basis.
ABOUT URJANET
Urjanet’s mission is to provide the world with easy access to automated energy data. Our cloud-based platform seamlessly
extracts and normalizes disparate utility bill and interval data directly from the source, and delivers it into the business systems
and products that rely on it. Leading commercial enterprises and energy solutions providers use Urjanet data to gain deeper
insight into energy consumption and spend. Urjanet is a privately-held company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For more
information, visit www.urjanet.com.