How campuses can find savings using Utility Expense Management

My background is in physics, and I came to utility expense management by an unexpected route. A colleague who had founded an energy-audit business encouraged me to enter the field, and I pursued the certifications to become a commercial energy engineer and a commercial energy auditor.

Working as an auditor, I learned that sound analysis depends entirely on the quality of the underlying data. That focus on data quality is what led me into utility expense management and eventually to Sodexo, where I now work with colleges and universities to bring that same rigor to their campuses.

To most people, a utility bill is something you pay and forget. Pay it, or the lights go off. But what I see is a year-over-year story about where a building is quietly losing money. That's the work I do at Sodexo. I take the water, electric and gas bills that pile up across a college or university and turn them into something leaders can actually use: recovered dollars, benchmarked consumption and a clear plan to spend less, because almost every campus I work with is sitting on savings it can't yet see.

Most campuses treat utilities as a necessary evil. You have to pay the bill or you get shut off, so you pay it. And trying to dispute a charge is discouraging by design: You sit on hold, you finally reach someone, you explain the problem, they promise a credit on your next bill. When it doesn't appear, you're back on hold again. At some point you ask yourself how much your time is worth, and you decide to just pay it.

I understand that instinct completely. But it leaves campuses with almost no visibility into their own spend. Most have no idea where their highest areas of consumption are, or how they compare to other institutions in their area. There's no easy-to-use database where you can plug in your numbers and get a number back. It doesn't exist, so people assume there's nothing they can really do. That's the assumption I spend my days proving wrong. 

If a CFO or facilities director could do just one thing this quarter, it would be this: Know your numbers. How am I doing this year compared to last year? How am I doing compared to my peers? We answer that by benchmarking three different ways.

Against local peers: We pull CBECS data — the same dataset Energy Star uses — and match each campus to institutions as close as possible in size and type within their area. It's a very specific comparison, so they can see how they stack up.

Across the portfolio: For campuses with individually metered buildings or multiple campuses, I look at where consumption per square foot is highest, ask why and target it to bring the cost down.

Through Energy Star and compliance: Energy Star doesn't yet have enough campuses to produce a benchmark number, but 83 municipalities across the U.S. have benchmarking compliance requirements. We enroll campuses in Energy Star and keep them compliant wherever that's mandated.

A large commercial bill, which is what most of our campuses receive, can carry up to 92 individual data points. That's a tremendous amount of information just sitting there, and without a system to interpret it, it never gets used.

Here's an example: A K-12 private school came into our system in January. They knew something was wrong with their bills but couldn't figure out what. We ran a historic audit of their bills alongside their current ones, and we found five construction meters that had been physically pulled the previous May. The meters were gone, but the utility and the supplier had kept right on billing estimated charges.

They came to us in January. By February, we had a refund check in their hands for $258,000.